Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Right now I'm working on the game's effects. Explosions, physical reactions, sounds etc... It's not easy to add really great effects without putting a drain on the Blender Game engine, so things will be as good as I can make them, but not at the expense of frame rate. Here's an enemy tank being bombarded by rockets. Hits by enemy weapons cause a vehicle to shake and rock. Later there will be more effects, such as rocket trails and a big explosion when the vehicle is destroyed. Here some infantry are getting hit by small arms fire. You can see the red section of their status bar increasing. This shows they are heavily shocked. When that happens their rate of fire and accuracy is decreased and they also can't move quickly. Finally here are some PBIs getting hit by automatic 40mm cannon fire. Machine guns and auto-cannons are very effective against enemy troops out in the open. The large caliber model also does splash damage, increasing the damage ...

I've started work adding trees back in to the game. They look nice already with the mipmaps turned off. I think I've got the color match with the ground for summer trees. The trees have a "shadow only" object which helps reduce rasterizer usage and match the shadow with the lamp. I'm not 100% happy with the trees right now, but I hope they will get better as I make more of them and refine the textures a little. I really don't want to waste any more time just fiddling with them. In a few days I'll take another look and see if I can see where the problem is. I think maybe the ground color is too uniformly light. It needs some more dark areas and contrasting sections. I decided to go with the hollow health bars, I like the effect. More than the black bars. I've also finished adding recoil and other physical effects to the vehicles. Even the guns move, with the main gun swiveling to track the enemies. It also tilts for range if it is a suppo...

It's been a while since i posted any updates. It's not tat I haven't been busy, only that the work hadn't reached a point where it was worth showing. It's been a lot of small incremental changes, building a modular menu system with widgets and buttons, porting over some of my old code for displaying vehicle models etc... This is just a dummy menu at the moment. From here I can set the active profile, manage vehicles for testing and jump right in to an in game testing environment. Each chunk of screen space like this is a widget. It can have a number of buttons. The buttons react to being moused over and clicked. They send a message to the widget to decide how to deal with that interaction. The widget then executes some code and might reset the menu page or load a different one. Clicking manage vehicles loads this menu: I've moved some of the structural elements of vehicles away from components mounted in the vehicle and in to a system of options w...