Just updating the sketch section with some newer work, removing some older not so great stuff.

Over the past 3 1/2 or so weeks I’ve been working on an entry for Tigsource’s Action52 Remake Compo. It’s been a blast. I’ve got a lot more stuff in my engine now (like sound, lua scripting and proper text rendering), and after this I am NEVER going to touch the OpenGL fixed function pipeline ever again. YEAH.

For those who got here by means other than the Tigsource forums, a bunch of indie game developers are remaking all 52 games of the pretty horrid Action52 for the original NES, with the exception that we’re trying to make them fun and finished this time around. I redid Dedant, an arena shooter with ants and spiders and what I assume are rocks being thrown around. Yawn. Needs MOAR ZOMBIES. Oh, it’s got those now? Sweet.

Screenshots of the magic:

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Download this bad boy -here-.

Put the monster model in with a simple button firing attack. He’s a possessed puppet so he fires death buttons at you. It makes sense to me anyway…

Also, I made quite a few optimizations to the rendering code that yielded some pretty good speedups.

Next up, giving the Muse a staff so she can fight back!

Over the past few months I’ve gotten quite a bit done on my game. Since reworking the animation system, I’ve more or less completely rewritten the rendering backend. The old one worked okay, but I was starting to run into some real problems, not the least of which was the fact that the rendering commands weren’t really abstracted, and so there was no way for me to break away from my reliance on OpenGL. That’s all been fixed now, and the actual code for device access sits in a separate layer from the scene logic.

More art has been done as well. I’ve got textures in, final models for the protagonist, some attacks and the basic generic monster.

There are fifty billion excuses I could put up here to explain over half a year of silence. I’ve been busy at work. Aliens ate my work, and then my dog too. I’ve been catatonic since that awesome knife fight with an entire platoon of highly skilled ninjas, which I won, but then walked into a wall immediately afterwards and laid myself out flat. Etc.

…I’m really just lazy

I have been squeezing time in to work on my projects, though, even if I haven’t been writing about them much. The animation tool for my engine is now complete, and looks a little something like this:

As much as I would have liked to have just written a plugin for Blender, it’s API is kinda cumbersome on the animation side of things. So I whipped this together over a few weeks. It works quite well.

I’ve also been experimenting with photorealistic renders in Yafray. I don’t know that I will necessarily ever finish any of them, but it’s been been a nice relaxing break from work.