Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Yearly Archives: 2014

VBO and Alpha

Spent sometime today working with interleaved VBOs and indexed primitives in OpenGL… The way OpenGL seems to handle the VBOs is weird for me… For example, in D3D, I can say when I create a vertex buffer that I don’t care about the actual contents of the data I’m loading… That means I can write […]

Textures

OpenGL tests didn’t progress as much as I wanted, because I had to code a DDS loader for OpenGL (something that D3D provides with the D3DX library… OpenGLs way is better, in my opinion, that shouldn’t be part of the graphics API, but it saves time!). This is complex because DDS is a patchwork format […]

Transforms and colors

Doing some progress… There’s a fun part in this OpenGL nonsense… figuring out an API and getting stuff to work with it is like rediscovering 3d graphics and fast forwarding 10 years of learning! First of all, got transforms to work: First with glm, then I wanted to bring in my own matrix library, since […]

Starting on the porting…

That title might be an overstatement… I want to make “Gateway” available in multiple platforms, more precisely Windows, Linux and Mac. Problem is that it was created on top of Cantrip, my small-scale engine for jams and 48-hour compos, which isn’t exactly “cross-platform”… It couldn’t be further from that… Number one, it’s built using a […]

Yet more writing…

More writing… Also did some balancing of the time-warp gear (which is quite cool in effect, to be honest), and started doing some research on OpenGL… Now listening to “The New Mythology Suite” by “Symphony X” Link of the Day: Quite an interesting read, from an historic and development perspective, regarding the 10 years of […]

Finished the arenas

Today I finished the gameplay arenas, that the beta-testers will use to (hopefully) provide me with more information about the balancing of the game. Balancing is something very tricky, and something I fear a lot… I have the theory that people will play a crap game with great balancing, but never a good game with […]

More progress on the arena

Today I created the arenas where the testing will take place, as most of the logic behind it… Now I just need to add the “queries” at the end of a fight, so that the beta-tester can give feedback like how hard it was, and why did he think that in a category way, so […]

Test arena

Besides writing, I’ve started the arena system. The idea of the arena system is to have a mode that I can give the beta testers to test different situations and rate them appropriately, so I have a more objective set of measures to balance the game. In arena mode, the game starts in an easy […]

More writing, and a dash of pirate lairs!

More writing done today, still plowing through the gear/weapon texts, but also added the pirate lairs to the generation of the game galaxy. Also needed a way to remove all that type of structures from planets where storyline events will take place, to avoid overlaps. Now listening to “Sunset of the Golden Age” by “Alestorm”