Yeah! The "chunky" shotshells moving through the air are poetry in motion, especially with the dust clouds that spray off when they hit the wall. I just wish I had a nicer GPU than my Go5200 to develop it on, but I suppose laptop GPUs can't be upgraded.
Also notice that in the second shot I'm lugging around two guns. Yes, it works! This almost seems like a real game. Except I'm all alone.
So I found a unicorn in Oblivion, and opened up the mod tools and renamed him.
In Glow news, I have made some progress on the game-init and item loading stage. You can now reliably change maps and have the junk lying on the floor exchanged for all new junk.
It has some great little movie-like set-pieces, and the AI works pretty well together. It's a lot of fun to watch them. I just wish the stores posted their hours so I wouldn't be tempted to indulge my thievery skills.
Anyone who's interested in more complex and adaptive game plots should take a look at what Craig Perko has invented. It's an interesting system that's easily mappable to a strict system (perhaps a genetic algorithm) and can be upgraded in complexity by adding more challenges or constraints.
The challenge, as always, is working this into the game world and making it seem uniform without disrupting the flow of suspension of disbelief. But I think this is actually a really interesting approach to something that is never covered in game design topics: how to produce a plotline system that doesn't just operate on "left path or right path" decisions that end up in the same spot.
I finished my final (kind of hard ) and then came home and worked on Glow. You can now make a definitions file that instantiates NPCs from a unique-definition file.
For example, you can create a new type of NPC, let's say HamSandwichVendor, and make a file named HamSandwichVendor in data/npcs/, which explains his default health, alliances and stats.
Then go, in your level definition file:
data/npcs/HamSandwichVendor 100 100
To spawn him at 10.0, 10.0. And it even works from the console. Properly designed code is the booyah. I also added in a hack to take additional arguments, should you need to create a very special type of NPC that processes some additional arguments.
Final exam for computability in < 3 hours. One exam remains, next Tuesday, which is the really hard one.
Glow: I added some new textures and performance-tweaking options. It should run much better on different classes of machines now (other than my Powerbook).
Glow: MapChange entity coming quite soon. I was recently enlightened by playing with the Deus Ex mod tools: There is a whole world of scriptability that I have missed by being a procedural retard rather than an object-oriented limp wrist.
Glow: Guns now respond to reload-time properly so you can't burp out rounds as fast as your screen can update.
Glow: I'm also working on the Pause screen. In a throwback to Alien Breed, your Pause Screen (and Shop Screen) UI is made by Intex Corp.
Glow: Works on Intel Macs, and quite quickly too. Glee!
Glow: Other entities draw properly! I have a couple NPCs milling randomly about, but will add zombie NPCs pretty soon. Arguing with myself about how to do the alliance system so your friendly psychopath robot buddy can follow you around.
I'm really, really hoping I can get these exams out of the way in a clean and calm manner, and then get back to Glowing it up.
I think I'll start a new Monday thing: Every Monday, I'll pimp a new independent game. Here's the first one.
I have no idea how this managed to sneak under my collective radar, but Scarfy, a guy who I have known for awhile on various message boards, has released his latest magnum opus: Blob and Conquer, a sequel to the previous game Metal Blob Solid.
You can get it here, though I think it's only source at this time. It's worth the compile: it's a lot of fun and surprisingly polished for a GPL'd game.
Finished Deus Ex for like the 30th time and cracked open the mod tools.
Finished Jade Empire for the first time. I'm sad to see it's over. That game filled me with a kind of joy I feel rarely with videogames.
Started working on the actor mass-loader for Glow: step one in The Quest To Get Zombies™, and ended up writing a nice parser and a test suite for it (thanks to CxxTest)
Fiddled around with my commercial project for awhile (I can tell you nothing, sorry)
Worked on some art for a new RPG game. It's not by me so don't get the horn up.
Thought some more about how to do RavCA and make it generate procedural content by hooking in with Propane Injector.
Rolled the inline-colour modification into the main Propane Injector tree.
I slightly modified RavBitmapFont to write a horrible ugly hack into it to let me change to one of 10 colours (will probably change this to use the byte number later but SO WHAT? OKAY? ALL RIGHT? 10 COLOURS IS FINE FOR ME.).
So yeah. Also note that the player looks more badass because he's shadowier.
While I was waiting for someone to get back to me regarding a homework assignment I took the time to go into Gimp and do some sprites for an SMG.
So yeah. Not that impressive of an update. I suppose there is a new player sprite, but he isn't staying since he's hard to pick out in black and white (he is supposed to have a browner skin tone, but that doesn't appear to work in my shader ).
Just for reference, here's what he looks like without the shader:
Why must my attempts at diversity be met with failure due to a monochromatic shader? Why?
Just some advance warning: I won't be getting much at all done.
This week: Two final tests, some homework. Might get a post in on Friday.
Next week: One final exam, studying for my super-hard final exam.
Week after: Final final exam (redundant?) in my worst course. I need to study with absolute concentration for this one. Don't expect me to even be online
After that: I have a week before I start with my job, and I'll try to pull at least six hours per day on Glow during this week. After that, I'll be using the "10 minutes a day" iterative design process during my job. Feel free to IM me (AIM:ravuya, MSN:ravuya@gmail, YIM:mr_seigen) and bug me to see if I've done my 10 minutes a day. Please do! I need some focus during the summer.
I have started thinking about my next games: they are going to be much smaller and rely on procedurally generated content primarily (rather than human-generated, which slows me down greatly). Those of you who remember my research into genetic algorithms and procedural content generation a few months ago will be pleased to see that it is all based around my cellular automata scripting language (RavCA). Expect a sequel to Phoenix and possibly a mini-Sunrise and Death Rally clone.
I'd also like to update Propane Injector so it is more object-oriented and amicable to network transparency; I've been rather inspired by Cow_In_The_Well's engine designs.
Posted - 4/29/2006 12:14:01 AM
Posted - 4/28/2006 11:15:27 PM
Posted - 4/27/2006 4:45:18 AM
Posted - 4/25/2006 11:48:26 PM
Posted - 4/25/2006 7:14:05 PM
Properly designed code is the booyah. I also added in a hack to take additional arguments, should you need to create a very special type of NPC that processes some additional arguments.
Posted - 4/19/2006 2:43:57 PM
Posted - 4/11/2006 1:35:07 AM
Posted - 4/10/2006 4:10:23 PM