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Viewports

Treasures of the deep dwellers is not a triple A game. It's going to be pretty old fashioned, with a small viewport and a map on the same screen. Much of the rest of the screen is going to play host to the UI which will have a lot of the stuff you need all on one screen.

I love the great graphics of modern games like Legend of Grimrock, but the blender game engine isn't really up to the task of making games of that caliber. I also don't have that much time to devote to asset creations, meaning my game simply wouldn't look as good even if I was as talented as the guys from the major studios.

Anyway, after working on the viewports I found happily that it greatly increases the performance of the game. Rasterizer usage is way down, and the viewports mechanism also allows people with slower computers to reduce the resolution of the viewport without changing the main window. If you wanted you could ramp it way up too and enjoy my dated graphics.

After a few tries I managed to get the viewports to render without mipmapping, so the output is now nice and crisp. This will be great in my other games too since they were suffering a bit from blurry maps.

What you can see above is the base map colors. The colors will be fed in to a shader and replaced with wall and floor images. The result will be nice hand drawn style maps.

I like the idea of having both the first person view and a map view, so you can play it kind of like a roguelike and a dungeon crawler at the same time.

Generation of items is coming along nicely.


I need to make some changes to the code to make some of the attributes more meaningful, for example a 10% increase to weight is not a meaningful amount on something that weighs only 1kg, and a 5% increase in sharpness does nothing when the current sharpness value is 2.

Also the items need to be simplified. Right now they have too many stats, I really want this game to create complex from the interactions of simple elements, not by making everything complex.

I need to spend some more time developing this part, to make sure it does what it's supposed to be doing; making it important to have the right tool for the job so that you don't end up with one all purpose weapon and no real need to pick up any other loot.
   
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