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 can’t see the enemies as clearly).
Still need to tweak the AI a bit (and add the robot spawning as part of the generation of the planet), and then I can move on to the Starmap screen!
…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 pace…
Most of gameplay mechanisms are implemented (enemy AI, loot grabbing, UI, etc), at least in the planet view…
Rincewind is way ahead in content production (so far, I’ll catch up!), and a friend of mine is making the music (which already sounds amazing!)
Today I have a fairly large list of things to do, but I don’t think there’s anything too complicated at this stage (and I have about 23 hours to go, if I don’t sleep)…
Now, to finish the basic gameplay systems (moving from area to area/crossfade) and then I can start work on the galaxy menu…
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)…
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 have different abilities, etc… Some of them carry pieces of equipment we need to win the game, instead of the objective being the robots themselves…
It’s not perfect, but the AI issues become simpler and we streamline the production, since Rincewind proved he’s much better at pixel art than I expected! 
Don’t think I’m having much sleep today…
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 solution to the camera occlusion, but I’ll wait for it to be a big problem.
There’s also a problem with the rendering of the shots, since they’re being affected by the lighting of the scene, which is not what I intend (have to add some kind of rendering pipeline for “glowy” stuff).
Now, the hardest part of the game (I think): creating the procedural robots!
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 camera (a feedback loop of some type), and do some collision detection with the camera (so it moves forward when the player is behind a hill or something)…
I’m advancing much slower than I’d like, but there’s progress!
We’ve even discussed some ideas to solve the issue of the blocking landscape (a possibility with random areas)… We’ll probably add a teleport capability or a big gun that can blow holes in the scenario…
Anyway, back to work!
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 to go there just now…
Anyway, I’ll work on it some more…
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). Textures can also be defined in a per-area/per-planet basis (which leads to different types of terrain). That will have impact on the gameplay (snow areas have more drift, etc).
There were a lot of ideas (good and bad)… We played around with concepts like “being hunted”, but decided on “being the hunter”…
The final concept was between the winner below, and a game where the player fought Dr. Who-esque “angels” using a flashlight to immobilize them and a shotgun to kill them…
The idea of the game is of an interplanetary hunter, trying to win some sort of cup by collecting some pieces of enemies.
These enemies are robots (procedurally generated from parts), with different capabilities and AI stances. The hunt takes place in different planets (also procedurally generated with a voxel-based landscape).
It’s an ambitious idea, but I think we can pull it off!
For tech, I’m going to use my Ludum Dare framework, since it’s simple and I’ve used it a lot of times (so I know what to expect)… It even has a voxel rendering system already, let’s see if I can twist it to suit my needs on this one…
Wish us luck!
Well, we’re will start our participation on the Indie Speed Run in a few minutes…
You can follow the development here or on twitter (@shadowcovenant).
Since I like pictures, here’s a picture of what we did last year, before we tapped out!
Let’s see what we get as a topic:
*drum roll*
HUNTING / SILVERWARE…
Now to think of a cool idea…
