Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Art

Finished the trailer!

Now all that remains is to decide on when/how to launch it… The idea was to do it ASAP, but now I’m thinking if it’s smart, since all my development plans are a bit up in the wind… Anyway, back to map editing… Now listening to “Heaven Still Burns” by “Absentia” Link of the Day: […]

Still trailering…

So this is what I’m staring at for the last 3 hours… This sort of web video production services app is so slow, and my computer, while not AMAZING, it’s quite good… It takes forever to adjust stuff to the audio… Tomorrow I’ll do a final render on this, hopefully, and then I have to […]

Working the maps…

Today I’m mostly working on the game maps, adding the new props the artist has provided, and fixing some minor issues related to the latest updates on the game… I’m still working on finding a new job, so not much time to develop the game (even it might help me land a job)… Today I’m […]

New assets…

What should be just 15 minutes of my time ended up being a couple of hours today… The artist provided me some new props for the labs, and I was putting them into the game, but I couldn’t get them to display! After a lot of time of fruitless debugging, the issue ended up being […]

Welcome detour

Had a welcome detour today… My artist finally finished the diagonal movements of the main player, so I had to see how that looked… Before, I had only the 4 major directions, which translated in something like this: Now, the sprite has eight directions! It looks much better! This required me to add a new […]

New beam cannon

While playing around with the beam cannon, I found some visual glitches with the line drawing code, which ended up not being solvable by simple methods (they were basically a consequence of trying to use a line to draw what’s more accurately a cylinder). So, after trying to fix this still using the line code, […]

And moss becomes cracks…

Well, this was unexpected and shows the highly mutable nature of game development… When I started of on this asteroid polishing, I wanted to add alien moss… After a lot of experiments, tweaks, texturing, shader work, etc, I got to something that’s way simpler, but looks better: cracks on the ground! It’s better than the […]

Still moss…

This took a bit longer than expected… Had to implement a decent Perlin noise implementation, and had to do a million tweaks… First, I had to go back on the drawing board (thought I had an error), and build a decal that shows the ambient occlusion (which looks fairly cool!): Then I had to create […]

Spherical planets

I’ve been a bit demotivated in the last few days… No reason in particular, think I’m just tired from the DayJob™, but because of that I haven’t been very productive… Today I only managed to make the planets spherical when we’re in orbit, which should have taken me 10 minutes, and it took me over […]

I have such meager skills for art…

Today I mostly worked on the skybox, trying to get a good result, that works nicely with the ground planet (for the reflection) and for the skybox… This is the best I could do, glueing together several textures, etc: It’s not bad, but too sparse, because I have to guarantee a fade out so we […]