Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Tag Archives: polish

Glow and special effects

Continuing the saga of “let’s clean up all the art”! This week, we’ve been very busy with the new PS4 submission of Strikers Edge, so there wasn’t as much work done as we’d like. First of all, we kind of decided on the final model look: It has features of both the cube-based version and […]

Loads of work!

So today I took the day off so I could work on Gateway… Most of the work was small tweaks based on feedback I got at the Lisboa Games Week, to prepare an even better demo for the last round of Playstation Talents and for ComicCon Portugal next week. I noticed in the demo that […]

Organizing work

Today I spent my dev time looking at all the suggestions, comments and feedback I received from Game Dev Camp yesterday… There’s a ton of stuff to work through, but most of it is quite simple, just tweaks and adjustments… There’s just one I have no clue on how to address: the area transitions… Some […]

New game over!

Today I revamped the game over system… On the old “Chrome Hunter” code, after the player was dead, I’d open an image screen with Game Over: And then go to the main menu… Now, it opens directly on the game, and gives the player the option of continuing from the last save, or go back […]

I’m the worst at time-management…

How can someone spend 3 hours just fine tuning miniscule things on an intro screen?! I have no idea how, but I know I just did! First it was disabling the ambient occlusion with the distance (because it gets very noisy, especially with the density of voxels on the intro logo)… Then it was fine […]

Heightmap generation

Spellcaster Studios has a tradition of sorts: our logo introduction is slightly different in each game… For this one, I wanted to have the logo to go voxelized, so I built a system in which a voxel map is generated from an image, that gets treated as a heightmap… This was quite fast to implement, […]

Finished the flow merge…

Today I finished the merge of the flow… First I had to deal with a bug: This only happened with the OpenGL renderer… Ended up being quite simple, was just looking in the wrong place! I theorized the problem was with the generation of the flow map, since it was the only thing I changed […]

Merged flows…

Finished merging the custom flows of content coming from the editor with the generated flows on the map… It seems to be working fine, although I still have to test in planets that don’t have any “source flow”… Going to finish that part tomorrow, so I can add heightmap import on editor (which was the […]

Merging the flow…

Not much time for game development today, but still I started work on the merge of the flow maps… So now the editor-created content can have a flow map, and this flow map should be merged with one that is generated from rivers, lakes, etc… It’s a bit weird getting this to work, because the […]

Cracked lighting

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a small problem with the lighting of the cracks… What on paper seemed like a good idea, a decal that would illuminate the surrounding area, in practice it looks terrible when an enemy passes through it: The solution I found to this problem was to do some vertical attenuation… […]