I put in the chaingun into Fateless and it seems to have put new breath into the game. You no longer feel so small against the larger enemies out there. Maybe this is an important line to draw in the player's progression. There is the before-and-after. Before is cautious-taking, wall hugging and ca…
After 17 helpful Steam reviews and two brutally honest streamer videos (video #2), I was finally able to fix some of the easier problems the players mentioned. Here is what is new in release 1.0.6. Main menu and settings screens were added with ability to change:
- Difficulty: easy, medium, hard
- Mouse …
It's been over a week since the Steam release of Fateless. Considering the positive response (this guy enjoyed it) I decided to start working on a new game along similar lines. It will be tentatively called Fateless 2 and will be a premium game. It will be a major challenge to create an experience …
I finally found a voxel size for Fateless levels that is just small enough to produce interesting results, but large enough to keep level production at a good pace and still make decent-size maps. It's exactly double the voxel size that I started with in the beginning and exactly half what I was…
Both episodes 1 and 2 are now available in Fateless for Windows. Episode 2, along with the usual run-and-gun FPS play, has collectible floppies and cassette tapes. Right now they have no purpose, other than giving you a satisfying "gulp" sound effect and a flash of color, but maybe in the future…
Fateless for Windows is out! I have spent the last week wrestling with Windows Installer ensuring the right DLL's were included, but the build now installs and runs perfectly on a fresh installation of Windows 10. The current build includes episode 1, supports game pads, and has a brand new endi…
According to this GDC video, selling new levels is not a good idea because only a small fraction of the users ever finish the free linear content. Average paying player makes their first purchase on the 22nd play session, and it's best to keep reminding the player often about the possibility of …
Another five levels are done, which make up episode 2, and that is because of the new efficient philosophy of placing enemies, spawn/exit points and doors as blocks and then spawning them as actual objects in Lua. This probably cut down level design time by a factor of 10 or more. It took a good…
I'm interested in augmenting rendering on mobile device with a 360 video that's streamed from the server for skybox and far away objects. Objects that appear close in the game that tend to move fast, such as the weapon, nearby monsters, furniture, etc, could be rendered on-device. But far away b…
I have 7 players and I get 3-4 installs per week, and 3-4 uninstalls per week. I keep losing players. My game probably looks cool from screenshots, but it's clear that when people download it and run it, they do not feel like it's what they expected. How to stop people from uninstalling the game…
I found that I can create levels much faster if I just keep everything as tiles, even the object spawn points. Instead of navigating in 3D, pointing to a place and clicking "Add Model", it's much faster to just use the 2D editor to place special voxel values and then have a Lua script spawn the …
Fixed timestep works when there is nothing loading or not much going on, but as soon as I start switching scenes, the counters go out of control and curTime can never catch up with updatedTime. The editor with the grid launches with this algorithm just fine, and as I add random cubes it works as…
Enemies now follow waypoints from the mesh editor. Each vertex is a waypoint now but it would be straightforward to connect them into triangles and animate them. The mesh editor now provides three orthographic views from three different angles. The prototype is now available as a sample in Voxyc…
I'm working on a new character modeling tool. It will work like this: to start, there are two modes, vertex mode and triangle mode. In vertex mode, you tap on the device screen to create vertices, tap-and-drag to move them around and tap-and-drag outside the edit area to delete them (all this al…
This would be great for the subway crowd. The game would be playable with one hand in both portrait and landscape (like UFO Shooter). I made several mistakes with UFO shooter that this game will fix. The buildings were very detailed, but you could avoid them by just flying high. The scenery used…
I'm starting work on a new game prototype. It will be a first person catcher (as opposed to shooter), family-friendly and re-use typical FPS mechanics, but with an opposite goal: instead of avoiding projectiles, you must catch them. Summary: a sad girl walks around a green field with pink castle…
New 2-star review is in and it's spot-on. It's been a rough weekend getting dynamic lighting ready for release, but now that it's out, not even this review could break my spirit. Here we go.
"colision des not work"
- It does not. It only works if any of the four corners of the object's b…
Dynamic lighting now works in Fateless. There are still no normals and no shadows, but hopefully this will be the necessary breakthrough to make it look from "whack" to "not that bad." Directional spotlights are the next goal. The overall mesh of the buildings and terrain should reflec…
Punishers now inhabit several areas of Fateless. Heavy mechs guard area 5. Good thing you now have two new weapons to help you get through all those merciless techno-alien enemies.
A few days ago I remembered an old concept called the gray box. I made an area with nothing but gray concrete, …
Punisher can walk, shoot and die now and he's having a heck of a time hanging around just outside area 2. The boss for episode 1 will be a mech-warrior that you will encounter in area 5. It's when you go into the underground and suddenly you enter a great hall.
He's a little too tall and wide to fit into the existing Fateless structures, so I put him outside. He's doing fine hanging around out and about area 2 so far. He is always equipped with some kind of rotating chaingun-type weapon, or at least one that needs cooling. So far, his mission is to mak…
Under the GPL license, the source code is GPL, but the original assets are not. Let's develop an FPS game in which we will reuse Doom, Descent, Build, and any other engine source code we need, and release the source as required, but keep the assets proprietary. I already have a C++ OpenGL engine …
Turns out that most of the frame-rate bottleneck wasn't even anything graphics-related. It was checking for screen width and height on Android on every mesh draw which is much slower than checking GLSurfaceView dimensions for aspect ratio. Vertex lighting by expanding from room center until you …
I re-implemented the old orthographic voxel / pixel editor that worked in Java 5 years ago in C++. The new editor works with both pixel art and voxel chunks, using the same file format for both. It exports pixel art as PNG's again and turns them into sprites and wall textures. As you increase th…
I finally found a way to light voxel buildings with per-vertex lighting that looks decent. They key is to have a RGB values for each voxel, and set them in the following way:
- Start from an empty point somewhere in the room
- Expand on all three axes as far as you can until you hit a vox…
I got lucky. This wasn't supposed to work so quickly. The vertex lights are functioning. Completely random and crazy and wrong, but functioning. I hear that Unreal gave up on vertex light mapping years ago. Probably for a good reason. Texture memory is cheap now. No time to integrate lightmapper…
I'm considering using my existing custom C++/Lua engine for development, but rolling out final builds to Unreal or Unity. I develop mostly on an Android tablet and the U engines can't do that, but I'd like to keep my development workflow. I simply do not have the time to fix the shadow map and de…
There is clearly something wrong with the images below. The shadows are not supposed to be this far away from the surfaces they are cast from. Can I correct this with bias or should I fix the scale? The shadows used to look real, but all this floating point multiplication must have got in the wa…
The Engine
The engine for this project, tentatively, will be Voxyc. Links to the Android editor app, Github source and existing games are on the Voxyc project page. The editor and the games it produces also run on Windows and iOS (the Visual Studio…
Apparently I made some people mad by criticizing Unity. I will not do so anymore. I did not know that Unity was a religion around here. Sorry. For the past 5 years I've been working on a C++ engine. The engine is now done and I've made 3 games with it. I started working on the 4th one, and I wan…
