ame Jam
05 Feb 2009
Last weekend I attended the Dutch edition of the Global Gamejam. For those you unfamiliar with it. It's an event where a small group of people have to create a videogame within 48 hours. It's been an interesting experience overall. A lot of work, very little sleep and a couple energy drinks do get you a long way. Dont ask me how I felt on monday morning when I had to get back to work though
The events of last weekend have left me thinking. With so many teams creating cool stuff in just 48 hours, I'm sort of second quessing whether or not I'm on the right track here...
Anyway, while I'm getting my head straight about VD, I have agreed to help a member of PGD out with some graphics for his game. He's been working on it for at least two years now iirc, and he desperately needed someone to finish up some graphics.
Well, that nearly sums it up for today. I'm leaving with a new screenshot of the game, featuring the first enemy: a rat!
ack in action
16 Jan 2009
Ok, it's official now. I suck at maintaining an active diary. I keep trying, but before I know it, two, three or even more weeks have gone by without an update. Despite this, I was very pleased to see people posting comments. Very cool,.. thanks for that guys!
Anyway, while the site had gone silent for some time, I can't really say the same for the game. I must be honest though and admit that I haven't used all that time on Village Defense. With WoW:Wrath of the Lich King released a few months back, I just had to play it of course. But, I'm proud to admit that my playing hours are substantially lower than what they used to be. In fact I haven't even logged in for almost two weeks now.
So whats been done then? Well, for one thing, there's a new character. The other one had all kinds of flaws, which kind of bugged me a lot. This new model can be animated a lot easier, has a nicer texture and overall just looks a lot better.
As far as graphics go that was pretty much it. I've put aside any other graphics work for the moment, and instead focused on the engine. I was quite unhappy with the way objects were handled in the game and so I made a lot of code changes in that area.
For example, the old system could not easily deal with animated objects or specifically, objects that had more than one animation. Another thing I more or less rewrote was the part that handled the movement of objects, specifically when they were following a path. While the previous solution worked reasonably well, there still were some problems, especially noticable during lag.
Anyway, I wanted to end the first post of 2009 properly and so I prepared a new video. (click on the icon to watch)
Because I did not want to lose too much detail I captured the movie in a 480x360 window. Unfortunately that meant a big portion of the screen would be used by the object bar. I do hope you still see what's going on.
Ok,...that's it for now.
Have a good weekend!
hen is it good (enough)?
03 Nov 2008
You know what I like about programming? It's when you've written something, and it does exactly what you had in mind before you started writing it.
Why can't this be the case with graphics? For example, I have something in mind that I want to create. Somehow though, after I have 'completed' it, it's not even close to what I had in mind. This is incredibly annoying because I tend to be a perfectionist who keeps on going until I have it right. No matter how long it takes. So I tweak and add and redo etc, but no matter what there's always something missing or wrong.
Some day I'd really like to see this game finished. But for that to happen I seriously need to reconsider my work flow, because at this rate it wont even be done in 2010. I'm not sure if I can live up to this, but I'm going to try to not to revisit every graphic over and over again, but to use what I've made. Hopefully I can continue a bit faster and at least have something that plays like a TD game, by the end of this year.
bout roads and grass
27 Oct 2008
Man, I really should take this writing a bit more seriously. Nearly 7 weeks of a total, has-he-left-again silence is not cool. Well, I'm not gone, I'm still very much on the project
The past couple of weeks have been a mix of programming and graphics. I started with what I said I was going to do in my previous post, namely roads. I figured they'd be easy to put in my editor and then in the game. Turned out, I was right about the editor, but not about the game.
Because of the way my editor works, I had a very hard time to create isometric based roads that would align perfectly with eachother. After several attempts, I found a solution that sort of worked, but required way too much time to create the graphics. I then realized I had to change the way placement of objects worked, so I created a second, square map on top of the isometric map, that is only used for objects such as roads. It's not entirely 100% ready, but the stuff that does work looks promissing.
And now this is in place I'm also thinking about the option to add pixelperfect placement for towers and trees, because they dont really need to align like tiles do, and it would make the game a lot more flexible.
Next to roads I've been very busy trying out all sorts of methods for creating good looking grass. Some time ago there was a new upgrade for Lightwave, version 9.5. I tell this because with the upgrade came a long awaited feature, called FiberFX. This feature allows you to create reallooking 3D hair. Along with countless others, I too hoped that it would also work with grass. Unfortunately, while it sort of does, after a couple evenings trying settings, waiting for renders, browsing forums for help, I returned to an old but proven method. I guess the moral of the story is, if a method works dont change it, unless you're absolutely sure the new one is better.
While it was fun to try out this new feature, if I had put all that time in the old method, probably all the grass textures for the antire game would have been ready.
While there's more to talk about, this post is getting too long. I'll continue next week and leave you with this picture, that among other things is displaying the new grass.
See you next week..... (yes really)!
