Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Today I was reading Blender Artist's Game Engine Forum when I came across a post about very high logic overheads. Of course slow game performance is a real problem with a lot of indie games, and low frame rate can easily be enough to turn someone off your game before they even really get started. It's an important issue for indie game-devs and hobbyists alike. [LAG=game over] So I decided to write a blog post about it. First of all I should point out there are lots of areas of overhead in a game. One area that often causes lag is graphics, a game engine like Blender is still using quite old methods of rendering and lighting so you can't expect too much from it. There are easy ways to reduce rasterizer overhead which I think I've talked about before many times over at Blender Artists. The problem the BA poster was having though was specifically with Logic, i.e python scripting and the Game engine logic bricks. With games developed by hobbyists it's comm...

I've been thinking of how the game should start, even at this early stage of development, I need some eye candy. If I want to get people involved in the project there has to be something which grabs their attention from first opening the game. So I made the adventuress. She's not quite as I first conceived her, She was going to be a lot more medieval, but I ended up taking the base character I was working on and using it for a pirate based art competition with sketchfab and Blender artists forum. After that i adjusted the character slightly using some of the props i created for the still life which will serve as a submenu background. I think she shows the idea of mismatched armor, jewels, interesting equipment and toughness which I want to show in my project. I didn't want to make a girl in a chainmail bikini. This is a tough adventurer, ready to go further in to the deadly labyrinth. I haven't posted for a while because I'm kind of stuck. There's...

I did a little housework on the project today, I finally decided to go with the legacy texture mode because I can fake nearly all the things I can do with the advanced render mode, get a better framerate and be sure that almost anyone can run the game, even if they're using windows XP on a 5 year old laptop. I went through all the currently added monsters and optimized them for the single texture rendering environment. That means they're not going to have any flashy stuff like normal maps, but to be honest, the characters are so small you couldn't see the results anyway. Here's a shot of some of the monsters, the Undead: The green guys are specters, they can walk through walls. The zombies and skeletons are parts, I'll be mixing and matching heads, bodies, skeletal limbs and armor to create a whole bunch of different possible undead creations. As you can see, they look fine, with just a diffuse texture, anything else would be overkill. Here's wh...