Finally finished the tentacle, including the death state!
This is the last time I go beyond the “design document”… This was way more work than it was worth!
Now I can start scripting again (and since I’m in the last scene of the game, it’s classified! Got to save something for the players!)
Now listening to “Epilogue” by “To Die For”
Next time I have the brilliant idea of adding a new enemy to the game, because “it’s simple, it’s just an extrusion of a Bezier”, shoot me…
I had no idea that there isn’t a simple way to determine the distance between a point and a bezier (or the closest point on a ray and a bezier)… This really made it harder (and slower) to do the collision detection for the shot…
And I still have to make the death animation… That’s not fun…
So, I’m just missing the hit, the damage on the explosion (the damage from the puddles is done), and I have this enemy done and I can move on with the scripting of the last scenes, and finish building the last area!
Now listening to “Eternity” by “Anathema”
The effect part of the tentacle attack is now done… I’ll probably revisit some of it during polish stage (drool on the tentacles, etc), but for now it’s good enough for my purposes…
The fiery column of particles will deal damage to the player if he flies overhead… That’s my next stop: damage system for the tentacle and for the player hit by tentacular stuff!
Now listening to “Deggial” by “Therion”
Finished the hit/drip effect on the tentacle. When the tentacle hits, it will do a small explosion effect, and then a drip will stay in the ground, which will damage the player…
The damage part isn’t done yet, since I’m still missing the “column of light” effect necessary (to avoid the player using he jetpack to avoid damage on this), but the rest works like a charm:
There’s also a small camera shake when the tentacle hits the ground, which really adds to the effect!
Now listening to “Dead End Knights” by “Katatonia”
Link of the Day: Now exactly a link, but I found this “funny” tweet from thread involving someone with no idea on how game development works and Tim Schafer: http://twitter.com/SilverSam88/status/509645858066169856
The tentacle now attacks correctly (finally!)… I changed the gameplay mechanic (because this one was too easy if you kept moving), so now the tentacle leaves a patch on the ground which damages the player when stepped on:
Not the final visuals, though…
I also want to add a “column” to it, so that if you jetpack on top of it, you’ll also take damage… Yep, I’m that evil… 
This effect is still ongoing… I played with a lot of variations (radius, etc), but none of them looked nice (tended to build a kind of pointy edge, which looked terrible in motion).
Still have a lot to go on this one, but time has been at a premium, and my motivation hasn’t been soaring has it had in the last few months…
It seems the closer I get to the end of the game, the slower I get, and there’s still a lot of stuff to do:
So… Still a long way to go, and I’ve been having neat ideas for other games as well, which doesn’t help the motivation!
Not much going on, DayJob has been taking its toll and I haven’t had much time to work on the game…
Tomorrow, I’m flying for the IBC in the Netherlands, so I won’t have any time to work on the game (I have some posts to cover that time, so you’ll have fresh updates, even if not a link of the day).
Anyway, still working on the tentacle animation… I dropped everything I’ve done so far on it and started from scratch, adding a “before attack” position:
This way, the player has some warning before being ravaged by them!
Next step is to add the attack itself…
Now listening to “Thy Kingdom Gone” by “Flowing Tears”
Still working on the tentacle animation… There are so many things that can wrong on planning the path, I’m getting really frustrated with it!
Every time I think I’m close to a solution, I find some new fringe state which screws everything up!
About 15% of the time, the tentacle overshoots the target position, and I want to make the tentacle to have a “almost attacking” pose beforehand, so the player has a chance of avoiding it…
I’m almost giving up on the whole “attack by stabbing” thing, switching it up for a “here’s my beam, eat it”, approach! But even that wouldn’t solve the issue of making the curve really point towards the player!
I’ve been at it for 4 hours now, so I probably need a break…
Now listening to “Upon Haunted Battlefields” by “Thaurorod”
Link of the Day: Do you like math and nitpicking?! In that case, you’ll love this article on the space rendering of “Elite Dangerous”: http://www.thetenthplanet.de/archives/4062
Today I finished the tentacle animation… It took me a long time to get right, and it’s not exactly bullet proof, but I think that for the game it’s good enough:
You can see it in movement here:
Basically, for every control point in the bezier, I choose a random plane, and move the control point around an origin on that plane, at different speeds/directions.
There’s still a big piece of animation missing, but I’ll probably tackle it tomorrow or so…
Now listening to “Eyes of Darkness” by “Axxis”
Link of the Day: The visuals of this Kickstarter project look absolutely awesome! The concept behind the game also seems nice, although it seems a bit too hardcore for my personal taste… Still it’s totally worth a look (and maybe some coins!): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/351030998/noct
Finally!
Had to give up on the idea of using a ray-marching style algorithm, or most of the algorithms that generated the texture on the fly… The amount of iterations most of them require would require a high-end machine, and then I’d need to have a fallback, etc…
For such a low tech game, I think it would have been a waste of time, so I fell back into using a plane and some nifty animation effects in the UV mapping… The end result:
As usual, it’s much more interesting while moving! 
Next step, to animate this… Won’t be pretty, I think…
Now listening to “Magnisphyricon” by “Sons of Seasons”
Link of the Day: Most of the shaders I found while learning how to make raymarching shaders was GLSL, and since I’m currently still using D3D9 I went looking for something to convert from GLSL to HLSL… Didn’t find it (ended up not needing it, it’s similar enough to take the educational value), but found a HLSL to GLSL converter, which some might find useful: https://github.com/Thekla/hlslparser
More experiences with the shaders… As you might have seen, I haven’t had much time to work on the game, so I’ve not been very productive… Besides, playing with shaders is fun and time-consuming…
I’m trying a different approach to the effect… Now I’m trying a more “space travel/warp speed” kind of effect:
It looks neat in motion, but I’m afraid that most of these screen-space effects are too expensive from a performance perspective… This one uses more than 50 iteration in a loop per-pixel…
Now listening to “Kill’em All” by “Metallica”
Link of the Day: This was quite fun: a video showing how elders react to the Oculus Rift, it’s awesome!