Vinland 1936 refactoring.

As usual after finishing a game jam there's loads of stuff that I learned that can help me to make better games. Going back to a work in progress now feels really difficult because so much of the existing code looks ugly and inefficient.

I think I'm going to strip back a lot of the work I've done on V1936 so far and rework it.

Here's the new structure I want to implement:

Before, fog of war, level generation and agent management were all direct elements of the main loop. What this meant was that if I wanted to restart the game or load a new level it was best to reboot the main loop (restart the game), but this has quite high overheads all of its own.

During the making of "The Hole" I implemented a level manager, a container for the level and all agents etc... contained within it. I could pause the level, or reload it or do anything with it, without affecting the main loop. This made it great for adding cutscenes, or menus such as the inventory. It also mad transitioning from one area (level) to another almost instant. It also made transitions very clean. The player was destroyed and remade along with the level so no hangovers fro previous areas.

Another area I want to improve is agent states. In the past I've been putting a lot of the agent's behavior code in the states, but I've found it better just to put calls to agent behavior which is then stored in the agent. Then different states can be used with different agents, a single move state which calls move() on the agent, rather than a different move state being written for every agent type.

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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

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.

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

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