These first hours have been very productive, but progress is slower than I wanted…
At least, we already have some character movement (with placeholder art while Rincewind finishes off his stuff). Character can be controlled with the mouse (for heading) and walk around with WASD (or arrow keys)… He can also jump around.
Collision detection is a bit dodgy, since I had to use OBBs instead of cylinders or capsules (would have much better results, but I don’t have time to derive the math for that), but works well enough for a 48 hour game, I think…
Had some issues with the particle systems, they were changing size depending on the orientation of the camera (which was super-weird), but in the end it was just an out-of-date shader…
Anyway, hopefully in the next hours we’ll start development of the actual game… We have the outline for the story (since this is a story-based game), but we need to flesh it out before we actually start on the game… I’m afraid that (yet again), we bit more than we could chew…
(character is jumping, that’s why the shadow is so far from his feet)
And the themes that was allocated to us was “Forgiveness” and “Message in a Bottle”… And I was feeling like doing a space game! 
Anyway, we’re already bouncing around… We’re going to do a 3rd person adventure game (hard in 48 hours…), in which the player will have to right some wrongs in the past and get forgiveness for his sins…
We’ll keep you posted! 
Since I haven’t been able to work in games lately (been too tired to get home and program), me and Rincewind decided to take part of of the Indie Speed Run to get rid of the no-game-dev jitters I’ve been feeling…
It’s a competition for a team of 1 to 4 people to develop a game in 48 hours from scratch that has to incorporate some variable (which we have no idea what they are; they’re only given when we start the actual development, and we have 48 hours from then to deliver a game).
Jury includes some illustrious members of the indie game industry, so it’s a good opportunity to maybe get some professional evaluation of our skills.
Anyway, since I was very rusty in terms of programming games, I’ve decided to just build a small test scene to see if I still remember how things work… This is the result:
That’s a skybox, some cubes with shadowing and a bump-mapped transparent sphere, all animated…
The frame rate is low because I’m running in debug mode on this test…
We have no idea on what we’re going to build, although I’m hoping that the variables will allow for some sort of abstract turn-based game, since I think they’re easier to build in a limited timeframe.
I tried recruiting a friend to make the music, but apparently he’s not that good of a friend (passive-aggressive statement) 
, so I’ll have to think of something…
Anyway, I’ll post the progress here, see if we have some life back into this blog!
Just a quick blog post to say that we’re not dead! Work has been progressing, albeit at a very slow pace…
On the technical side, most of the things done were behind-the-scenes coding when I have some spare time, which isn’t much (since I’m usually too tired to work on Grey, with the kind of weeks I’ve been having).
On the artistic side, progress has been slow as well, since motivation is hard to come by when you don’t see any of your hard work in practice and don’t see any progress in the game as a whole… Anyway, Rincewind’s been modeling the Bloodfiend. I have some ideas on shading on this one, but I need time to do the appropriate tests with shaders, etc…
Anyway, sorry for the short update, let’s hope the future will bring more updates!
Hi everyone!
As you might have noticed, we have a new blog template… Not 100% happy about it yet, but we’ll see if we keep it or not… At least it doesn’t seem to have the image problems of the previous theme.
Anyway, there’s not been much work on Grey, mainly because I haven’t had any time to code new features (still working, extremely slowly, on the refactoring of the resource system on SurgeEd), work has been killing us and a series of personal problems and life-changing events has prevented us from really focusing and working on the game.
We were never happy with the end-version of the main player character, as we saw a series of issues with it, although on concept it looked pretty nice; so we decided to rework the main character (we’re going to reuse the model done for another character or something… we’re indie, we need to really use everything we produce unless it’s really terrible!).
The previous version was this:
Now, Rincewind has come up with these new concepts:
We’re probably going to use the one that’s colored… it’s the one we like the most…
Hopefully, this mad period of our lives will end soon and we’ll be back to regular progress!
Found yesterday that this blog’s theme has some sort of issue with the links to images… When you click on an image, which I expected to expand the image, it just pops up a progress bar and doesn’t budge…
I’ve been trying to figure out what the problem is, but honestly, I’m using WordPress+premade themes so I don’t have to figure out this sort of thing, so I’m probably just going to change the theme, as soon as I find a pleasant one… So if the blog is different from the last time you saw it, I made up my mind! 
Anyway, nobody complained so far, which just means we don’t have any readers, so I think I need to start investing in getting some attention to the game (although I’ve been delaying that for ages now, since I don’t feel we have anything worth showing and we’re ages until the game is complete!)…
Anyway, these are the news for today!
In our opinion, the worse enemy for hobbyist/independent game development is lack of motivation…
It’s sometimes hard to have a hard day at work and get home and still have the energy to go program/draw/model/etc…
Lately, work for us has been very hard, loads of projects that have to be ready in the next month, and we’re a very small team… Add to that the fact that we live in Portugal, where the economic conditions are very harsh at the moment, leading to big worries in responsible adults (such as ourselves, *cough*), and the fact that we’re doing boring stuff in the game (for example, I’m doing the refactoring on the editor to comply with the recent wide-sweeping changes of the resource manager of Spellbook).
The end result is that our motivation has sunk very low indeed, and we’ve been struggling to find ways to get it back…
One of the ideas we had internally was to make another game, a short form game, in which we could focus on just making something quickly, in about two weeks or so. We would then use that game to get some attention to Grey (so the effort wasn’t wasted in terms of our pet project).
Another idea was to try to make another parts of the game, which are more enjoyable (like rendering work, etc), but in the current state of the editor (broken due to the resource manager changes I’ve talked about) won’t allow us to go for that easily…
Yet another idea (but quickly discarded) was to just put Grey on standby while we recollect ourselves, get this phase of our jobs out of the way… Problem with this is that my experience tells me that if we put something to the side, it will be harder to get back into the mood to get back to it…
So, we’re still thinking on what we can do to boost our motivation, so if you have any ideas, just let us know! 
One of the main problems in my games is the GUI (Graphic User Interface)… I never really found a good way to build controls and iterate different GUIs, which led me to hating GUI work and usually doing a terrible job at it!
On Grey, the GUI is very important, and as such I don’t want to mess it up, and so I decided to build a new way to define UIs: using a HTML-like syntax…
I already described this in a previous post.
I finished the refactoring, which means I have a better formatted text control:
It seems like the same as before, but it has some more functionality and the code is more powerful…
Continue reading →
Rincewind and me are working on a new concept for the main character; it’s not been easy trying to find something that we really feel that hits the spot…
Without revealing too much about the plot, there’s 4 schools of magic in the world of Grey (plus other magical paths, but that’s not important for now):
- Elementalists: the guys that do fireballs and frost spells… Very showy type of magic, and they’re usually a flamboyant crowd
- Clairvoyants: This type of magic is more related to meditation. Most of them are introspects that like to wander around and spend a lot of time in silent contemplation
- Life-Mages: These mages are healers, and they tend to wander from town to town, helping those in need. Although much more discreet than Elementalists, their magic is also quite showy
- Necromancers: These are not “bad” mages. They are just focused on rituals that involve death, although they seldom cause it. They’re studious of the inherent flows of life, and find great pleasure in dissecting magic.
Grey was a necromancer, and as such, we feel that he should dress as one… this led us to think on how a necromancer dresses, and we’re still tinkering with those concepts, although we mostly agree that they are discreet dressers, with none of the glam of the Elementalists.
For now, looking for some nice silhouette to use, Rincewind has wiped up some concepts using a program called “Alchemy” and playing around with blends on Photoshop:
Some of the silhouettes are quite interesting. I’m specially leaning towards the ones that have him wearing pants, instead of the classic “mage robe”…
Due to story reasons, his clothes have to be a bit tattered from the John Henric UK collection, which means that they have to be some that will work nicely with that in mind, and of course some comfortable shoes as some waterproof sneakers that are broadly sold online…
Anyway, short blog entry, but there’s more next week for sure!
A long time without updates, we know…
We were on vacations (away from PCs and civilization in general), and then when we got back, we had a million things on DayJob™ that have to be done in the next month or so, which leaves almost no time to work on Grey (well, lack of time and too tired/stressed to actually work on the game).
Anyway, just wanted you all to know we’ll still working on it, but progress has slowed down to a crawl…
I’m refactoring the formatted text system (basic functionality is in place, now I just need to add the stuff that motivated the refactoring), and Rincewind is working on a new concept for the main character of the game, since we’re not happy with what we currently have… Hopefully we’ll be able to reuse that model somewhere else, and get a more interesting model for the main character… after all, the player will spend a lot of time looking at it…
Anyway, work is still very intensive at the moment, so I don’t expect I’ll have that much time to work on the game, but we’ll do our best to get back to our regular schedule!
