Author: simon

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Short update

Its been a bit of a slog to make much progress.  Tons of little ‘try this.. er.. hmm well how about that.. ooh that broke it… humm well then how about ….’

BUT the upside. 

The player now triggers doors when he/she walks across em. (yes the collision polygons need some tweaking but basically it works). This causes a recusive floodfill to determine all the tiles that are available inside the room.  There was an issue where it caused the game to stutter while the fill ran but with the use of some scheduling calls I actually wound up with a smooth and more even area determination.  

So.. why does that make me happy?  

Well, glad I asked.

So now I have a nice and easy way to get all the available tiles in a room, with just some minor tweaks the monster spawner (in the inital Alpha) will be able to find an open spot and start spawning critters.

Esentially  I’m just a few minor tweaks from having a playable core base to work off of.   

Then I can start going crazy with different monsters, powerups etc etc.

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Further Mapmaking Tools and Integration

Got some good progress done.  The online Map editor is coming along nicely with some new additions such as, saving to a database, generating exportable content files for integration into Torque.  Still I need to do a couple things to it, mainly bulletproofing the submitted maps to make sure I don’t forget to add doors, things are sealed properly etc etc. 

Continue reading Further Mapmaking Tools and Integration

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Mapmaking tools

Ok so pretty good weekend.  I decided to have the main game dungeon created from larger macro tiles. so instead of having to come up with a super complex dungeon generator, all I’ll need to do is to have an algorithem that just connects the larger tiles together.  

So Friday and Saturday morning I sat down and wrote this

It’s essentially a tile based map editor.  It doesn’t have any real fun features such as checking the validity of the map or verifying that the only open tiles on the outer edge are by the designated exit area.  

Spent some time Sunday getting the data exported from the page into the Torque Game Builder engine, which wasn’t hard at all.  So the game now can render macro tiles.  Problem is that the collisions don’t seem to be working properly.. so that’s the next task.

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TED – my favorites

Been spending a good bit of time on TED.com listening to the talks, there’s just so many facinating talks on so many cool topics, that I just had to jot down some of my favorites.

David Gallo: Underwater astonishments – incredible underwater critters  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_gallo_shows_underwater_astonishments.html

Barry Schwartz on virtue & wisdom http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html

Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread.html

JJ Abrams and the mystery box. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html

Tim Brown: The powerful link between creativity and play  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html

Scott McCloud on understanding comics and visual narratives.  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics.html

Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

 Jane Goodall:  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jane_goodall_on_what_separates_us_from_the_apes.html

Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures- he makes amazing kinetic sculptures.  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/theo_jansen_creates_new_creatures.html

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Painting update – day 8ish

So after a nice little hiatus with the game programmy project its back to work on the behemoth that’s been hogging up the kirchen for going on a month now. 

painting-day-8-002I really didn’t want to do this, which is why it probably took so long.  You see, I didn’t finish the background first… and you always start in the background and make your way closer to the viewer.   That way.. you don’t wind up having to paint over large swatches of the stuff you’ve already painted.  

Which I did.  Which sucks and isn’t a lot of fun knowing you’ve got to do something you were happy with all over again. 

I actually fudged over the planet area fairly well so there’s just a couple small things that are going to need reworking.. so in all reality it could have been much worse. 

So After that I started re-refining all the shade transitions on the gearwork and after I slopped a little shading on the planet guide beam thing I made up my mind to actually render out the gear works instead of the flat blue shapes.  

The base color for 2 of them done and some simple shading on the smaller one and a little detail and it’s a good stopping point.

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A good weekend’s worth of progress.

ss0Made a pretty hefty chunk of progress over the weekend and last two nights.

Some behind the scenes work with putting everything in the level controlled by a manager object that keeps track of what’s going on and what to spawn next.

 

 

 

 

 

ss1

Off the top of my head:

  • WSAD controls work.
  • Money powerup (yellow dots)
  • Magic powerup (blue Sigils)
  • monsters drop money and score interfaces.
  • New guis
  • Basic fundamentals of waves are in place. 
  • Object thresholds are in place so (in theory) it shouldnt crash due to too many simultanious spawns.

 

As always this is an alpha build, play with it at yer own risk.

 Graphics are primarily placeholders.. No there isn’t any sound yet. 

You can download it here www.swiftthought.com/BSDDoD/BSDD0D-alpha002.zip (3.94mb)

Feedback always appreciated.

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Short sharp turn in freetime utilization

Talking a couple days away from the biggo painting..  Kinda mentally stuck on what to do with the blues..

So I’m diving head first into another side project.  Which I spent the all of yesterday working on and plan on spending the evening on (after working out) to hopefully have a workable single level.

It’s all so much fun, it’s hard to pick just one project to focus on… Which, I guess, is why nothing ever gets ‘done’.

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Painting day 7 – Castle on the bottom

Well technically its day 8 but we’re not talking about the first attempt to paint the castle.   Next picture I do.. definatly no weird lighting.. standard 3 light..   Not 100% happy with it but Technically the blends on the castle are as good as they’re going to get until I get a bunch more practice.   I did a lot of blending and its still mostly luck wether I get the effect I want when I make a stroke..  sometimes the paint on the brush stays on the brush.. some times it decides to make a thick sharp stroke and sometimes it come out with this beautiful soft edged blend between what was already on the canvas and what’s on the brush..  

I guess that’s the whole ‘practice’ thing… 

Oh well here’s where things stand. 

painting day-7 castle-take-2

 

So Next up is the big blends on the sky.. that promises to be exciting.. but I need to buy some more pthalo blue and another tube of white and a thing of blending medium before I can tackle that.. 

So that means its Sunday at the earliest.. more likely i’m done til next week.

 

[Edit: almost forgot] 

Oh and here’s a picture of the palette at the end .. its actually kind of a fun texture and visual

painting-day-7-castle-take-2-plaette

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A little housecleaning

Thought it was time for a little house cleaning here on the site, so some older posts got tags, pictures got cleaned up, and switched back to the comicpress theme. It’s such a nice simple theme and makes adding pictures easy.

I would like to customize the theme in the moderate future but since I haven’t touched a computer in my free time for the last couple weeks for anything other than a game or 2, it might be a while.

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Painting – Day 5 Darkness falls.

It did waaay not flow easily today.  Not happy with it but its still an improvement so I guess that’s a plus.  

I’m going to need to buy some more blue paint before I start to play with the sunlit sky..   Gah  and I’ve used almost half a tube of white so far..  oh well.

Kinda weird tho.. I didn’t work on the parts I wanted to work on.. 

painting-day-4-darkness
Day 5 - The Darkening

{edit:  oops this was day 5}

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Painting- day 4

got a good 2 1/2 hours of slapping pigment around.. was nice but eventually aching feet and the palette told me it was time to call it a day.

 

when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.
when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.

I got 2 sides of the planet rendered… Not really happy about the empty hillside one… but not really sure what to add to it.  maybe something will come to me overnight.

painting-day-3-002

Kinda went totally ocd on the plantlife  (thanks wen) 

here’s a detail 

painting-day-3-005

Anyway.. it’s a good day’s progress i think.. tomorrow I’m seriously going to have to tackle the gears in the planet and figure out how to get things to work together.. oh well.