Skip to main content

Summer.

It's getting really hot here. I live in South Korea and the summer is almost tropical. Last year my video card burned out, hopefully it's not going to happen again. :)

Anyway, I've been working on some new monsters to take advantage of the new Giant Rat agent archetype. I've tried to keep the absolute number of archetypes to a minimum, as many monsters as possible share armatures and animations to help save development time.

The Giant Rat has spawned 7 different monsters.

One of my favorites is the Cockatrice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DOTHKKYpQc&feature=youtu.be
A dangerous monster from the lower levels.
Click for a video of the other monsters.

One of the places most associated with the original tale of the cockatrice, Wherewell near Andover, is just a few miles from my hometown in England. When I read about it I was quite homesick, I remember the many warm (but not tropical) summers I spent riding out to that small town where the cockatrice was said to have lived in a well. I used to swim in the stream with my friends and dry out in the sun with not a soul around for miles and miles.

I've also been working on the prefab editor which is up to version 6 now. I made some changes so map display is independent of indexes, but is rather gathered from a set of single letter strings in a look up dictionary. This means I can change the indexes as much as I want, adding or taking away different types of tiles as long as I keep the reference dictionary up to date.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us
3 comments
Read more

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho
Post a Comment
Read more