As the title indicates, today I was working on the grenades… First, I added a shockwave to the flash grenade (or else the explosion looked a bit silly), then I fixed a problem with the grenade path (wasn’t taking in account the difference in height between who threw it and the target position, so it […]
After all the work yesterday on the raycasting system, today I fine-tuned the shooting some more, and it feels way better! After this, I balanced the beam cannon and found some errors on the damage levels, so I had to retune all the rest of the weapons, while playing around with some plasma burns: Because […]
While playing around with the beam cannon, I found some visual glitches with the line drawing code, which ended up not being solvable by simple methods (they were basically a consequence of trying to use a line to draw what’s more accurately a cylinder). So, after trying to fix this still using the line code, […]
Today I mostly worked in balancing the weapons… Not much to say about it, I basically just spawn an enemy with different weapons and different levels, and see how does it feel… Then I adjust it and try it again, over and over again… The game so far was “mathematically balanced”, which means I had […]
Carried on the work from yesterday, fine tuning the shooting mechanisms… It’s now working properly, with two easily adjusted parameters, and I even have a new parameter for the accuracy of the weapon (a machine gun shouldn’t hit as often as a pistol). The high-level enemies may still have too much accuracy, but on the […]
Working on a new AI shooting system… The current system uses a sine-wave altered by the danger level of the enemy and some parameters (frequency and threshold)… This is hard to control, and the fact that enemies shoot or not against you is dependent on where in the curve you’re at the moment… So, I […]
Well, this was unexpected and shows the highly mutable nature of game development… When I started of on this asteroid polishing, I wanted to add alien moss… After a lot of experiments, tweaks, texturing, shader work, etc, I got to something that’s way simpler, but looks better: cracks on the ground! It’s better than the […]
This took a bit longer than expected… Had to implement a decent Perlin noise implementation, and had to do a million tweaks… First, I had to go back on the drawing board (thought I had an error), and build a decal that shows the ambient occlusion (which looks fairly cool!): Then I had to create […]
I’m trying to add a glowy alien moss to the asteroids, based on the decal code, but using a kind of spherical projection instead of the planar one… The first run, I tried using a cube map… If I’d thought about this for a bit, instead of going straight for implementation, I’d reached the conclusion […]
Today I worked with the savegames, adding descriptions and fixing bugs introduced with the jump to multithreading… Most of the work was mainly finding out what the problem were! Lately I feel I’ve been working mostly with bug fixing, which is boring, so I think my next step is to add something new/fun… I got […]