Somewhere along the way in developing the last area, I broke the explosions… This is what they’re looked before (some months ago): This is how they looked at the beginning of the evening: Terrible, especially in motion, in noticed every single “glob” of them, the ground was too dark… a mess altogether… The problem, turns […]
Finally finished the tentacle, including the death state! This is the last time I go beyond the “design document”… This was way more work than it was worth! Now I can start scripting again (and since I’m in the last scene of the game, it’s classified! Got to save something for the players!) Now listening […]
Next time I have the brilliant idea of adding a new enemy to the game, because “it’s simple, it’s just an extrusion of a Bezier”, shoot me… I had no idea that there isn’t a simple way to determine the distance between a point and a bezier (or the closest point on a ray and […]
The effect part of the tentacle attack is now done… I’ll probably revisit some of it during polish stage (drool on the tentacles, etc), but for now it’s good enough for my purposes… The fiery column of particles will deal damage to the player if he flies overhead… That’s my next stop: damage system for […]
The tentacle now attacks correctly (finally!)… I changed the gameplay mechanic (because this one was too easy if you kept moving), so now the tentacle leaves a patch on the ground which damages the player when stepped on: Not the final visuals, though… I also want to add a “column” to it, so that if […]
Not much going on, DayJob has been taking its toll and I haven’t had much time to work on the game… Tomorrow, I’m flying for the IBC in the Netherlands, so I won’t have any time to work on the game (I have some posts to cover that time, so you’ll have fresh updates, even […]
Still working on the tentacle animation… There are so many things that can wrong on planning the path, I’m getting really frustrated with it! Every time I think I’m close to a solution, I find some new fringe state which screws everything up! About 15% of the time, the tentacle overshoots the target position, and […]
Today I finished the tentacle animation… It took me a long time to get right, and it’s not exactly bullet proof, but I think that for the game it’s good enough: You can see it in movement here: Basically, for every control point in the bezier, I choose a random plane, and move the control […]
Finally! Had to give up on the idea of using a ray-marching style algorithm, or most of the algorithms that generated the texture on the fly… The amount of iterations most of them require would require a high-end machine, and then I’d need to have a fallback, etc… For such a low tech game, I […]
More experiences with the shaders… As you might have seen, I haven’t had much time to work on the game, so I’ve not been very productive… Besides, playing with shaders is fun and time-consuming… I’m trying a different approach to the effect… Now I’m trying a more “space travel/warp speed” kind of effect: It looks […]