Our attachment system is now up and running, which means we can connect objects to other objects in the world. So, now Ghost can carry his knife around. God help us.
Here is a cool little effect I just cooked up in our FX editor. I just added a feature to allow particles to be pulled to another point for a “life sucking” ability I am working on in the game. All of our particle systems have an emitter type (how they are shot out), an updater type (how the particles change over time), and a renderer (how they look.) Interestingly enough, when I checked out how Unity did theirs, it was pretty much the same thing. Great minds?
Bryn spent a little time talking Brandon Foster from http://www.pixlglass.com about everything from why he started programming to Eerie Canal to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Check it out here!
I’ve been working on our new effect system this week. This will be for things like blood, explosions, and glowing monster eyes. Here is an example of a fire effect we quickly put together:
It uses a technique called Metaballs instead of the normal particle-based systems that most games use. It looks pretty cool when animating, so I’ll try to get a video captured before too long.
-Bryn
I was attempting to import a character model that Steve had been working on, but it was just showing up as a little dot. I assumed that there was some major problem on my end, so I dove in, feverishly working to find the problem. Eventually, I zoomed into the “dot”, and this is what I found.
Haha. I guess there were multiple meshes, one being some sweet teeth. Ridiculous.
-Bryn
Sometimes my math doesn’t quite do what I think it should do. Sometimes that’s awesome.
- Bryn
One of the cool things about writing your own game engine is that you have full control over how things render. So many games use the same basic rendering equations that a lot of them are starting to look the same. One thing I wanted to do with Dreadline is to mimic how Steven’s sketches look. They have a very innocent and hand sketched quality that I thought would be a great counterpoint to running around and killing people as monsters.
So, here is a test model that I picked up from Mixamo. It’s a pretty normal looking girl in a… yoga suit I think. Perfect for being killed.
Now, when you throw this through our renderer, you get a more hand-sketched looking image like this. (Sorry, some of what you’re seeing is programmer art. This by no means suggests how things will look in the final game. Sorry Steve!)
Quite a bit different! We’re pumped about the direction and that it looks quite a bit different than most games. In the future I’ll post some actual in-game screenshots with how the environment, characters, and lighting are all coming together.
-Bryn
Bryn wrote the game tech we’re using from the ground up. (Mostly.) We wanted a codename for it, but wanted to shy away from the normal testosterone infused names like “Infernal Engine”, or “RAGE.” So, we settled on shoe_gazer. We’ll mention the tech more in the future, but for now, check out the sweet Logo by Kim Nakamoto!
