New Project: Basilisk

I've been working on a new project this month. It's a serial point and click adventure, set in a familiar universe. It's going to be a non-profit project, to stand as a showcase for everything I've leaned in game design and programming. The setting will help to make it more visible.

This was a tactic I used with some success in the past, when I made a battletech fan game. The number of views and downloads for that game were roughly ten to twenty times higher than for any of the games which I made based on my own ideas and settings.

I'm going to be able to reuse a lot of assets I originally designed for a previous sci-fi project, so that should save some time. There are going to be new assets, and I've already made some of the characters. There's a story, with an arc which covers a whole season of mini episodes.

Godot is a great game engine for this kind of project. Very light weight and easy to use, but with a full set of features. Godot 4 will include an advanced navigation server, but Godot 3 already has some nice tools for A* and so on.

After some playing around with the tools though, I wasn't quite satisfied. There were a few things that didn't quite fit for me, so I wrote my own navigation mesh and camera handler. It actually uses multiple nav meshes, joined together. I can designate some of them as "closed", for example if they lead through a locked door, and so exclude them from the graph. They also have attached camera dummies, so that when the player steps onto a certain set of tiles, the camera will change to follow.

There will be some sections of the game where the player is tasked with flying around a game map, from location to location. Those sections have a working prototype, but still require that they be fleshed out properly.

Generally though, I'm happy with how the project is rolling along. Learning more about Godot is great, and there are plenty of fun challenges. From writing new 2D GLSL shaders to practicing my hand at designing characters.

It's not the crew from the TV series, but I think these characters have a change to be quite interesting. And the dialog editor I designed should make it pretty easy to write their interactive scripts.

Finally, taking on the project as a set of small mini-episodes should make it easier to tackle in my spare time. In the past, I tried to make a whole, complete game in one go, and I always got bogged down by the huge scale of the task.

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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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