Still working on the special effect I mentioned yesterday…
Another part of the effect is that I want to look like the extruded volume is looking into another place… For now, I’m trying to figure out how to make a nifty effect based on screen position, although it might not be the right approach… Based on this shader (https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xdj3zV), I started playing with the concept:
The effect is not very good yet. One of the reasons is that it’s not happening enough on the shader (so a lot of it is just white, which looks great when you’re working fullscreen, but not if you’re peering through a window of sorts), and when the camera moves it looks a bit weird… Anyway, it’s a start, for experimental purposes it’s good enough…
Now listening to (and seeing) “Showtime, Storytime” by “Nightwish”
Link of the Day: I’ve been talking a lot for some time on making a cyberspace/hacking game… This game (playable on the link) takes it way further than I wanted and looks great: Containment Protocol: http://www.containmentprotocol.com
For the last boss, I need to make a special effect, and for that effect I need to extrude a bezier curve along a path, and to texture that bezier with pulsating colors…
This is the result so far:
I can just remember a vomit tentacle of sort… 
The texture was something I was using on other places, so I just used whatever came in handy… While it’s still far from what I want to achieve, it’s a start… now it’s just a matter of authoring and animating this properly, really…
But it’s curious that this looked completely different in my mind!
Here it is in all the GIF splendor:
Now listening to “7 Sinners” by “Helloween”
Link of the Day: An article about post-processing effects on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare popped up on my radar… I didn’t understand half of what I’ve read (I really need to brush up on my advanced shaders stuff), but some of you might find it interesting… It has diagrams and videos! http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2014/index.html#_NEXT_GENERATION_POST
Today I had a friend of mine coming by and seeing the game… He kindly offered to work on the UI of the game, which is awesome. He’s a very talented artist, so we here welcome his help!
I’m sure we will go from this:
to something that looks good! 
Now listening to “Universal Migrator, Part I” by “Ayreon”
Link of the Day: My friend’s been playing around with new posters for old sci-fi movies, and he came up with awesome stuff, which you can check out at http://pedrodanieldesign.com/mindinmotion/
Since today’s my birthday, no coding work, just played the intro sequence of the game to see if I’ve broken something with the latest changes… So far, so good! 
Link of the Day: Planetary Annihilation is one of those Kickstarter success stories that are almost coming out, and it looks great (and fun!)… Here’s the launch trailer…
I actually prefer the original KS one, but it’s a matter of taste:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts
Not much time today to work, my cat had surgery and I have to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t attack her stiches!
Today I started playing with the new enemy which will become the final boss on Chrome Hunter, but did no real progress… Oh well, hopefully tomorrow I’ll have more time to dedicate on this…
Link of the Day: Really love this one: a simulation system for smoke, etc, that really accounts for the space around it… It looks really cool, would be awesome in a space like game (yeah, I know smoke doesn’t propagate like this in space, but it’s a game, doesn’t need to be realistic!):
Today I started work on the last scene of the game, the final conflict!
I don’t want to give much away at this time, so this is the only viable screenshot:
Anyway, this last part will have an unique enemy, which will be very different from the previous ones, and visually will be mostly procedurally generated!
Link of the Day: This is something that popped on my regular websites the other day, since I visit from gaming websites to even some adult websites as zoomescorts.co.uk, and it’s very interesting for people that are interested in procedural generation… It would have come in handy when I was making the procedural pirate bases, it has some neat ideas: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/procedural-level-generation-for-a-2d-platformer-r3794
As the title indicates, I finally finished the cutscene I was working on… This one was very challenging…
First, the camera angles and the motion was a bit off… I couldn’t really tell what was wrong with it, but I needed a lot of trial and error to get it to feel right.
The problem with most of the camera work I do is that the you don’t want to distract the player from what’s happening on the screen, but at the same time you don’t want to be just static, you need to make the scene and the camera to work together, especially in low-budget cutscenes like I have in the game.
Anyway, next step is the last area of the game, which I won’t show screenshots of… 
Let the game have at least one surprise!
Now listening to “The Classical Conspiracy” by “Epica”
Link of the Day: Here’s something that might come in handy sometimes… For years, I’ve avoided having to use Excel files as data sources (for my DayJob or game dev), but with this article I’ve found that Excel files are just ZIP files with some other files, which made it way easier to understand and use… Maybe it’s useful for you guys sometime: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/208075/How-to-read-and-write-xlsx-Excel-file-Part-I
Today I’ve worked a bit more on the cutscene… This one is a lot more work than the previous ones, because it has more special effects and I’m trying to make it a bit more “movie-like”.
First, I had to build a new shader for the portal effect when it’s open… Because of some errors, I ended up doing something pretty cool (especially while moving):
That inner part circles around, it looks like an animated watercolor, it is neat, but it wasn’t what I wanted to build…
When the portal opens, I wanted something more like a… well, a portal, and less like a vortex. After playing around with the shader, I got what I wanted:
Then I continued with everything else on the cutscene, but I’m really not happy with the way it is chained together… It looks disconnected, like there’s two cutscenes in one, without relation between them…
So, I’m thinking on how to improve it… I have some ideas, but not sure they’ll work as well, and they suffer from the problem of extending an already relatively long cutscene… Guess I’ll have to try…
Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish this one tomorrow!
Now listening to “Secret of the Runes” by “Therion”
Link of the Day: I think I already linked this one in the past, but it’s looking pretty good… I used to love this sort of “construction/sandbox” games, but for years I haven’t been able to find something that really pulled me in in this genre. This one looks like it might change that:
Today I worked a bit more on the cutscene, took me forever to get the lightning effect to behave like I wanted it:
It doesn’t look like I want, but the behavior is there, the rest is just adjusting parameters…
These days are fun, but I got so little to show that it’s a bit frustrating when I blog about it! 
Now listening to “Valley of the Damned” by “Dragonforce”
Link of the Day: For years, both in my game development and in my day job, I’ve been very skeptic of software development methodologies, and (more importantly), how they’re implemented in the work place (like a religion of sorts, instead of something that helps you estimate and keep a project on track and with high quality). This article mirrors a bit my feelings on this, and there’s some cool stuff in the comments as well: http://typicalprogrammer.com/why-dont-software-development-methodologies-work/
Nothing much today, except for working on one of the last cutscenes of the game…
This one is kind of complicated, because I’m trying to make it a bit more dynamic through camera-work that the others in the game (if this works properly, I’ll probably review all the others with my “newfound” talents).
I’ve started to settle on a style of my own while “directing” my cutscenes… I’ve noticed I make all my camera work is very slow (and most of the cutscenes have this slow pace about them)… not sure if it is because the tech behind Chrome Hunter isn’t that good, or if it’s the style of cutscenes I actually like…
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m reaching that point that I’m not sure about anything anymore… I look at certain cutscenes/texts/gameplay moments and feel they’re great at one time, and terrible at another. Mostly, I think I’m too close to the game and a bit tired of it (it has been almost one year since I started this one, and 3 months of “one-hour development per day minimum”).
Now listening to “Absolute Dissent” by “Killing Joke”
Link of the Day: Cliff Harris of Positech Games has relaunched an indie game store, different from all others (Steam, etc), in the sense that his objective is to connect the developers to their audience, without any take from the store… They’re having a sale now, so it’s a good time to take a look at it: http://www.showmethegames.com/
