Finished the lighting system I started yesterday… The results are rather good and easy to use (and no more silly crashes).
The light generation is fast enough that I can do it in runtime, when the level loads, which is easier to manage in terms of files (no need to keep an unlit file).
Now, back to level/area design!
Now listening to “Death and Legacy” by “Serenity”
Link of the Day: Indie game in early access, similar to Hotline Miami, but it doesn’t look like ass! It has a lot of interesting ideas, and I really like the art-style:
A plan is something that exists until the first contact with reality…
Tonight I was intending to start the level design for the corporate HQ, but when I started lighting the place I saw the flaw in my plan…
Most of the levels I’ve made so far have a very small number of lights… And since I’m using fake lighting (which is “baked” into the voxels themselves, which means that when it’s done, it’s done, can’t reverse it), I would have to redo all the lighting after each small change (and there’s lots that come in when you actually play the game versus the theory). And if you don’t have the lighting (in a limited visuals game like this), you don’t really get a feel for it, the combat, etc…
So, I decided to bite the bullet, and add a more robust solution to the lighting system on the editor. Now, you can treat lights as any prop, and you can bake/unbake the lighting at will, which allows for more experimentation, etc.
It will also let me add “half-lights” which only cover one hemisphere (which comes in handy when I want to light one side of a corridor, without lighting the other one).
But, editor stuff takes a lot of effort, so this is where I got today:
The sphres don’t do anything yet… That’s for tomorrow! 
Now listening to “Storm” by “Theatre of Tragedy”
Link of the Day: I’ve played WoW for some years, until I gave it up one year ago, for a lot of reasons… Don’t think I’m coming back, though… Anyway, I love the lore part of games, even one full of ret-con as the WoW lore… Here’s a 40 minute video with a chronological approach to the lore of the game:
Today I didn’t have much time to work on the game, but it was highly productive…
I was trying out different approaches to the visuals on the corporate facility, playing with tilesets and lighting to achieve a proper mood…
First, I tried just the classic red lighting:
It looks good, but it’s a bit cliché nowadays… Still, I really like it…
Next I went for a more sterile approach, with a blueish pale light:
A bit too bright to be moody, so I turned to a darker shade:
That’s a bit better… I also tried to combine both of them (red and blue):
But the result is almost negligible…
Finally, I went to a different experiment: green lighting… It was nice, but it really shone when I did a “"light-from-below” effect on a platform, and added some yellow river tinted with green:
This one is very moody, so I definitely need to use it!
End of the road, decided to probably use all three… I’ll divide the base in 3 separate maps, each with its theme and color. It will be more work and I need to find a story thread that makes sense of it and hire a video production company to market this game, by the way, check this site out to get roofing experts examine your home.
Link of the Day: Well, it seems I’m stuck in a loop… Another Assassin’s Creed Unity video, but this time it’s a story recounted by Rob Zombie (of metal band “White Zombie” and horror movie “House of a Thousand Corpses” fame), and drawn by Tony Moore (co-creator of “The Walking Dead”)… It’s cool and it’s shows that Ubisoft is really trying to break Assassin’s Creed from the game-only market…
Finally finished the cultist base… Small details were making life hard for me, but it’s done… The final cutscene was very big, and I had some difficulty getting the text right…
Also improved the machine gun fire, since it looked terrible in low light circumstances:
Next step: another base facility… This time I want to make a new tileset for it, let’s see how that goes… 
Now listening to “Lilith” by “Varien”
Link of the the Day: I’d totally play this: “The Avengers” video game, reinvented as a 16-bit title:
I was having some problems with silly pathfinding on the cultist base…
The problem was that the fiery sconces were too low, so the enemies could climb them, which would look silly. For props, I use invisible blocks to stop that from happening, but since the sconces are just pieces of level geometry, that doesn’t work…
Now I added the invisible block painting on the editor:
Now the enemies can’t traverse that part…
Tomorrow I’ll finish the cultist base scene and can move on to another starbase (where I hopefully will use the ambient lighting and the fake lightning to good effect).
Now listening to “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” by “Iron Maiden”
Link of the Day: Anybody that knows me know that I’m not very into sports, but this almost make me change my mind:
This is been very slow going lately… Writing decent dialogues is hard work, and even half-assed ones like mine take forever!
I’m drawing to a close in the cultist part of the game, missing four plot moments, and I’m done with the storyline… So, hopefully I’ll be able to finish this part of the development until the end of next week… Then I’m taking vacation time the best way possible: polishing effects and such! 
Now listening to “Of Wars In Osyrhia” by “Fairyland”
Link of the Day: This is stuff I’d like to do some development one of these days… Maybe I can play around with it for the glow effect I still want to put in this game: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/07/15/an-investigation-of-fast-real-time-gpu-based-image-blur-algorithms
Not much work today, just added and balanced the cultists in their base:
Getting ready for my vacations in a few days, preparing some blog entries in advance, because on some of the days I won’t even have laptop access, let alone code or blog about it…
Now listening to “Whoracle” by “In Flames”
Link of the Day: Found this very interesting article on data-oriented design… I’m a big fan of data-driven design, and although these concepts are more or less unrelated, it’s really another way to look on how you code. I’m not aligned on 100% of what he writes, but it raises several nice points: http://gamesfromwithin.com/data-oriented-design
Today I’ve worked mainly on the cultist’s base…
I wanted to make a different environment, but that still looked like a base, so I used the temple tileset and placed the “base” on top of a lava lake…
I’ve also played around with the fake lighting on some torches, to give it more ambient:
It’s already looking pretty good, but again I’m struggling with the fact that the lighting on this game is very flat, mostly due to the fact that the textures are low res, so it’s hard to see where the floor ends and the wall begins, etc… Ambient occlusion might solve this, but I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough…
I’ve been toying (in my head, haven’t tried implementing it yet) with the idea of adding “vertex position noise”, so that the walls are not so straight, which in turn would perturb the normals enough for the lighting to be more distinctive, but I’ll save that experiment for the polish phase… Also want to play with geometry shaders to generate the cubes themselves, instead of generating them on the CPU. This would make the generation process faster and simpler in terms of code, but I’ll probably only try that when I do the OpenGL port.
Now listening to “Few Against Many” by “Firewind”
Link of the Day: Everybody knows “Game of Thrones” nowadays, the juggernaut of geek turned mainstream, and its epic title theme… Here’s an interesting cover/remix of it:
A bit more work on the storyline, including a new boss fight…
This one takes the form of an arena fight with a lot of mobs spawning faster and faster.
The fight is pretty cool, but it’s very hard… I hope my current balancing strategy (being very low-powered compared to what I expect the players to be at this stage) pays off, or else the game is very hard! Of course, I have a tradition of that…
I’m starting to see the end of the tunnel in terms of development of the first phase… Still missing some crucial stuff (equipment screen, the life system, etc), and there are a series of bugs that still have to be addressed, but it’s shaping up nicely… Can’t wait to finish Alpha-1 and give it to some people to try it out and start the balancing effort…
Now listening to “300 OST” by “Tyler Bates”
Link of the Day: If you’re into graphics programming, the ray-marching family of algorithms are probably familiar to you… Here’s a very nice document explaining the basics of rendering distance fields with it… One of these days I’ll have to use up some hours to make some stuff with it… Think they could be awesome for stuff like volumetric fogs, etc, although it might be tricky to combine with the stuff that’s rendered normally: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/material/nvscene2008/rwwtt.pdf
As it’s becoming more usual, started the development day fixing some small bugs, in particular one that was driving me crazy… Sometimes, some parts of the world would not display… It wasn’t always all the same piece, and when I debugged, the piece was there with the correct data!
After a lot of time, I found the problem in a completely unrelated piece of code… Problem was that I was allocating a vertex buffer for 4000 stars (for the background)… And I was putting in the buffer 7000 stars… For some reason, this didn’t crash the system (as it would be expected), but was contaminating a buffer after it was written (that’s why I saw the correct data, it only got corrupted in the GPU)… Talk about stupid errors!
Anyway, I’ve progressed the story a bit more, now it’s time for one more boss encounter…
I’m at about 60% of the storyline progression… And I finally had to upgrade my weapons, I wasn’t able to pass the enemies before this area… I just upgraded to Level 2 armor, and a Level 1 machine gun (there’s about 5 levels in each), so it’s not that much of an edge… Obviously enough, only when I have the main storyline done I’ll do some alpha testing with some friends, see what they think about the difficulty…
Now listening to “Dark Matter Dimensions” by “Scar Symmetry”
Link of the Day: I’m a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, so these videos are quite interesting, specially the graphics part… Wish I could play with those types of advanced techniques, but it’s not just a matter of tech, it’s also a matter of having the right art assets, which for a small indie dev is impossible:
