Skip navigation

Tag Archives: dreadline

AAA slagging! (Ooops.)

A cool new interview just popped up at Nightmare Mode. It’s great when an interviewer spends time reading other things we’ve said and coverage we’ve received to end up with a much stronger piece.

In this article Steven and I cover a number of our opinions about working at larger game studios, and this new indie world we’ve recently become part of.

In other news, a few of us got together in Providence yesterday and came up with a few new ideas for the game we’re really excited about.  Hopefully they won’t take long to get in the game so we can start playing with them.

-Bryn

Story/Boarding

While taking time off from surfing in Costa Rica, it appears that Steven is also working a bit on our cutscenes. Must be nice!

Working on the Effect System

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:

Sexy!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

Sketchy Math

Sometimes my math doesn’t quite do what I think it should do.  Sometimes that’s awesome.

- Bryn

Sketchy Tech

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.

Rendering from Mixamo.comNow, 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

New Game Engine Codename!

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!

Codename for our Game Engine