So when you use too many drugs, you'll end up with this little flashing skull on your derm bar to show that when you run out of drugs, you will die.
Yeah!
Anyway, here are some dead bodies. You'll note that some of the legs seem moved (this is intentional); it is sort of a rag-doll system that I will be working out since the damned thing is made of two sprites. I think the corpses look really nice, which rewards me for actually decent art.
So yeah. Tell me all about the reference that little skull has made for you, and win a prize. ArchWizard won the prize.
I also made tons of progress today on the commercial project. Hoorat!
It boosts your stats -- and your health, if it's a strength derm. But beware! If you don't have enough health left to pay back the debt you've taken by getting high, you're in for death.
For example, if I have 45/45 health, and I take a derm for 60/60 health, and I get hit down to 14/60 health, and then the derm wears off, I'm at -1/45 health and I'm fucking dead, okay?
The drugs provide a convenient stat boost for those tough situations, and gives me another opportunity to advance subversive drug literature through the use of my games. Not to mention it also fills up another couple of the 16 inventory slots!
I've been sitting down and re-evaluating the progress of Glow, and I think I have some time to add features to the game -- more if I don't participate in 4E5 (which I plan to do, so it's a moot point). It's more or less something exciting to add to the game to keep me from getting bored in the doldrums of AI and entity behaviours.
I'll add some new features tonight and you'll see them pretty soon. I kind of like the idea, and I think it makes the game more complex and yet easier to play.
Anyway, here's an interesting link for you since I'm not making a screenshot entry: Apple is looking for C/C++ games coders. It looks like they ganked some guy from LucasArts and now they're off to the races (probably working on making sure games run their best under the virtualization software that comes with OS X 10.5, although they're also hiring ARM7 guys like crazy so maybe some new iPod games are in the future -- who knows? Exciting times ahead for gamedevs).
Okay, new things today, but they're all on the graphics-whore front. First, I got new lightning in as HopeDagger wanted nicer looking lightning and stuff like that. The screenshot has the shader turned off so I could make sure it looked the same in both modes -- which it does.
Second, gore. This is the big benefit of the red/white/black shader -- the red. Gore splashes all over the place. It's totally awesome. And the "German mode" works to turn it off, in case your toddler is going to be traumatized by gore splashes instead of stacks of zombies.
I also fixed a depth-sorting bug with the alpha'd textures, so it should be a bit nicer now.
In any event, it's coming along even better now -- I'm probably going to modify the editor to add entities and other stuff.
I'm sure you're all used to Foobar the Int's graphical explorations by now, but just in case you aren't, take a gander at these two gorgeous screenshots in slow-motion blur mode. Blur has never looked so good. Except for that time they were in the UK and... oh.
Anyway, when I get a good thing going I tend to whore it out until everyone is really sick of it. Here's a picture of a modified VDG pistol that shoots in 360° in rapid fire mode, shooting eight particles per trigger squeeze.
So from the pre-alpha, I've encountered some issues with older ATI video cards (ATI sucks!) and had to try and find new ways to fix them for Windows. I've also done a few other things, like fix the conversation system to work properly on Windows and fix the console to do the same (as apparently SDL doesn't support Unicode on NT... which is confusing).
I've been spending time today adding the audio manager, which I hope everyone will enjoy. Right now I'm using the Freezer 2 sound effects, though I certainly need to find more... now where did I put that sound effect search engine?
In addition, I've put aside the money for a new Macbook Pro, but I'm going to force myself to finish Glow before I buy it. Well, I hope I can hold out that long.
Next up: Attacking the undead. Followed by dead undead, gore splashes and the undead attacking you. Then -- other classes of undead. Meaty.
Oh, and possibly ammo vending machines and spawn stations. We'll see.
Those of you not blessed with a Macintosh can now try out the super alpha version. Give me an IM before you get started with it so I can take you by the hand to see some of the features.
There are some faults that have been discovered with this version that are addressed in my current development branch. I'd like to see some reports from people running shader-less and slow computers (try enabling the "Slow PC" mode in the options menu if you have an abysmally slow PC).
Remarkably, my job has given me a wad of delightful programming projects to solve and ruminate upon. I've taken my home time and dedicated it almost entirely to Glow.
Tonight in Glow land, I implemented a new intro logo screen (it's skippable) that looks pretty damned awesome and polished, cleaned up the conversation UI (and I'll make it animate really soon now) and started cleaning up my project to get ready for an NT build.
I'd really like to release an NT build around next week so you guys can at least see where I am and help find bugs before I solidify the engine and go to content/AI.
I cleaned up a lot of the hack data from Glow's init procedure so now it actually starts when you pick "New Game" from the main menu and returns to the main menu when you quit the active game.
After I did this, I thought it was broken because "Quit" no longer went to the game and I was like "Oh shit I've broken it". I spent like 10 minutes looking over the stack trace until I remembered what I just spent the last hour doing! D'oh.
So I've been arranging to have some character portraits ready, and I plan to polish up the convo manager with some animation and style to make it more appealing to watch.
The E3 stuff I've been reading lately reminds me a lot of William Gibson's hypothetical media outlets, mostly Slitscan:
Quote:
Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.
Most of the Glow plot will reveal itself by means of delicious conversations. So it makes sense that I would implement a conversation manager, no?
Anyway, there's one in there now. Is that not excellent? It uses its own ludicrously simple scripting system, which includes avatar changes and multiple line text input. Fun.
This is what we, in the industry, call a "waterfall of bullets". Enjoy.
Basically I've been spending the last couple days getting up to gear at work, and coming home to work on little interface niceties in Glow to make it more like an actual computer program rather than a retarded console game.
I added cute little flavour text to the various items (in fact, ArchWizard complained about my cute little flavour text for his health kit) but I think they help fill out a very, very damaged background world and give you some perspective on what's going on.
Anyway, the screenshot is what happens when you tell a gun to use +/- 180 for its firing arc.
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