Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Tag Archives: isr

Chrome Hunter: Postmortem

Well, as you might have noticed, we stopped blogging in the middle of the project… And that’s the symptoms of “not-enough-time-itis”… Anyway, we’ve finished the game, and I wanted to do a short postmortem on it… What went right Scope wasn’t as bad as it’s usually on 48-hour competitions… We set realistic goals, and we […]

Trees and rocks!

I’ve just improved the terrain generator with trees and rocks… These can be different (in quantity and image) depending on the type of planet… It really improves the overall look, and although they’re just cosmetic (no collision detection for now, at least), it also has gameplay impact (for example, jungle planet becomes harder because you […]

Little sleep…

…but great progress! After 5 hours of sleep, I’m back to work! I was so “in-the-zone” yesterday that I didn’t even stop to blog! After the setback with the robot procedural generation, I thought that there was no way I could make up for lost time, but actually I burned code at a pretty fast […]

Bad robots!

Robots are running… or more precisely, they’re standing still… Rincewind used the pieces he already built for the procedural robots to make these really fast… Now, to hit them with my shots and test explosion (before they start running all over the place with the AI)…

Defeated…

but not out! I just lost about 4 hours building a procedural system to make the enemy robots, but the results were terrible and very buggy: I call abomination!! Anyway, decided to change the game design slightly so we don’t depend on procedural robots… We’re going to use artist-made images for the robots, which will […]

Shotgun is in… more or less…

Ok, got shooting to work… First weapon is the shotgun: It won’t be able to fire so fast (it’s a slow weapon, with a lot of damage), but this is just a test anyway… I’ve also fine tuned the movement and camera a bit, so the game feels a bit smoother; still don’t have a […]

And it moves!

Rincewind finished his first character (very nice result!), and it now can move through the landscape! I even added a silly shadow… Only 2 frames of animation, but it still looks much better than I expected at this point… Still need to work on collision detection with environmental stuff (trees, rocks, etc), smooth out the […]

Terrain tests

Playing around with the terrain system… Basically, I did a system with adds sine-waves of different amplitudes/wavelengths, depending on the roughtness… It generates some fun stuff, but it runs the risk of building impassible situations… Of course, this might be part of the gameplay (blowing stuff up to pass through, maybe?!), but I’d prefer not […]

First terrain render…

Here’s the first terrain rendering… This is a single area, and a planet can have multiple areas… This area is supposed to be 128x128x128 meters (although this can be easily increased)… Currently, the heightmap is just pure noise with an external boundary… Next step is adding a sine-addition based map (roughness is random as well). […]