I’ve been toying around with some fur shader recently, not really sure if I have a use for it yet, still cool =) :
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early test |
| same set-up, quickly re-tinted |  |
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| same setup, no “length map” = long uniform furlength |  |
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in engine with several beefy upgrades |
A bunch of new progress:
- simplified wireframe UI placeholders
- mulitplayer + chat
- community map sharing
- hero character
- game rule + resource rules enforced
- heaps of stuff to help getting it ‘playable’
- unit upgrades
- new models – archer, enemy
And here is the first Tech Demo video, it never got a post of its own:
The Hex Engine project has finally emerged from getting a fresh splash of paint as:
Maker’s Tale gameplay takes place on a tabletop board game that has sprung to life in the imagination of young boy named Maker. It is currently Fantasy RTS like combat in an sandbox environment empowering the player to build up, tear down, and change the map/level in real time during play.
This video is from the “Tech Demo” – the most current version of the game engine, that I hope to have finished and ready to play really soon. It shows some of the new updates.
More details coming soon!
I was digging around some backups and found a bunch of models I made for a Flash project many years ago, then a Unity project, then a UDK project:
3 videos taken adventuring around the world.
It’s time to shelve this project for a while, I will come back to it later for sure though.
I put a bit of work into a mesh voxeliser, so I can turn existing 3D assets into voxel world objects :
In the proccess I changed the world random seed value by 1 to give a new background, and changed the terrain colour from brown to grey. I then had to have a quick look around to see what the new seed world looked like, and I found it to be a very interesting place to explore…
I’ve been really sick for a few weeks and to take a break from my HexEngine work I knocked out a quick terrain side project.
(watching at 1080p will give you a-happy-a-feelings)
The terrain I made:
I deliberately pushed the limits to see how complicated I could get the terrain before it started tearing apart and breaking off into the air.
I will probably shelve this for now, more important work is afoot.
watch at 1080p if you can =)
screen shot direct from the game
(full screen + HD if you can, the lower res versions have scaled poorly)
what’s new ::
I have been doing heaps of work on improving the UI, and on AI systems, so to take a break from all that I added a more comprehensive camera + screen shot system.
The 5 screen shots taken during that video can be viewed at http://imgur.com/a/GUDSn.
I really cranked the blur amounts in the video because I figured it would get washed out and lost, it works heaps better with more subtle values.
basic description of the ui :
Both can be enjoyed in 1080p.
A simple vertex shader water test :
Trialling new tile types and testing updated animation system:
… and a giant floating Oreo =)
Another week down, and another video.
I have been doing a lot of work on the AI and character systems, here is 10 minutes of setting up some basic AI for a level.
And a few select screen grabs from the video…
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| Paths | Spawn multiple characters |
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| ’Defence networks’ | Attacking |
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| Expansion | Caves |
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| Misc | Sneak attack |
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| Overview |
After just under a fortnights progress, I have finally got around to making a 720p video of my WIP Hex Engine, covering a few of the features that are in there right now (well 2 days ago)…
a few select screens from the footage:
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| Simple Building | Advanced Multi Threaded Pathfinding |
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| Patherfinder Debugging | ”Nifty” Debugging Panels |
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| ’Edges’ and Ladders | Building a Simple Castle |
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| Test Level | Lighting the Hex Mesh |
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| AI |
The music comes from a competition mix I did, you can grab a copy here : DJ Rojek – Silence Is Golden DJ Comp Mix
(29:57 320kbps 70.2mb)
The results are in and my game the Cove has won the jMonkeyEngine Beta 1 Game Contest!!!
But no time to celebrate, I’ve been feverishly working away for the past week on a Hex/Boxel engine to use in my next project, I will post about my progress in the next couple of days. Here is a little preview of what I’ve been up to :
I finally finished my contest entry the Cove, links to download and give it a try at the bottom of this post. I would have loved more time to work on it but the contest deadline was a nice way to ensure the project got completed.
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Overall I’m happy with the outcome, I had a few memory usage hiccups in the final weeks of the project that ate up a lot of time.
I recorded 27min walk through video of a play through I did a few days before submission, start to finish. This video is a massive spoiler, there are many parts of the game I don’t shown off as it ruins the magic of discovery, they are all in here, so if you plan on playing the game through, please dont spoil the experience by looking at the video, but for rest of you and those just curious, here ’tis:
Download and try the Cove :
| Windows | Mac | Linux |
(all at ~42MB)
NB: You will need a fairly recent graphics card to run this, if it crashes during loading, you could try the ‘netbook’ pre-set, or most people have luck by starting with ‘normal settings then setting ‘Variations: off’ and ‘Fish Count: low’ (this should bring the RAM requirement under 1gb which is where most crashes occur). I’m sorry if it doesn’t run for you, I did as much optimising and compatibility testing as the time allowed.
I’ve taken a break from the seemingly endless gameplay balancing to take a few screen shots to show where the Cove is at:
I’ve been making bags of progress on ‘the Cove’, the video shows where I’m up to as of this morning, notable changes include full physics integration and the levelling system with place holder screen.
and here are some screenshots from other aspects of the developement proccess:
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Over the last couple of days I have been doing a bunch of work on the Cove: adding a fair wack of core game play elements as well as integrating video recording, which I used to capture the first gameplay footage to come out of the Cove. Here is some of the media I produced the last couple of days:
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| tweaked Depth Of Field results | various progress update screen shots |
(best viewed in at 720p)
This afternoon I completely overhauled the lighting, textures and water effects, giving a much brighter and more vibrant look, I hope to push this feel firther over the next couple of days:
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For a full list of changes see my WIP thread on the jMonkeyEngine forums.
It’s been a fair while since my last post, mostly owing to two signifigant events :
But to the Cove… the guys over at jMonkeyEngine launched a competition to create a new game in the newly release jME3 Beta, which I hope enter ‘the Cove’, which has been inspired by my time scuba diving in Fiji, snorkling the Red Sea, watching Finding Nemo 1000 times and the breif work I did on the Reef a while back. As per the competition rules, I have started a WIP thread on the forums, which you could look at to see more indepth progress reports and discussions, however I will endevour to post updates here also.
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| some early progress screenshots taken from my WIP Thread | |
The competitions runs until the end of December, at which time I will shift focus back to mTheoryGame and possibly exploring the mobile platforms for income oportunities… I now need to start finding ways to make some coin to fund my game development career= )
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