tilesize change glitch hilarity
tilesize change glitch hilarity
I just switched the engine over from 16x16 to 24x24 to make the most of the wall masking stuff, I also thought it'd be a good way to find any of the stray hardcoded tile sizes.
Turns out I was correct
In The Games Of Madness: Unconventional Design Tips
Find some core mechanic of controlling and interacting with the game, be that sidescrolling shooter, point and click or whatnot and then focus on the big picture. What feelings should game create, what is the theme, what kind of message should the game get across? This means creating an overarching structure for the game first, and then when you start designing the mechanics, levels, etc you make sure that it goes along with this.
You down wit OPT (Other People’s Technology)
I'm trying to avoid overwhelming this blog with non-project related stuff, so I'm going to just link a few in one post occasionally.
CryEngine 3 - Soft Body Physics - YouTube. This one's lovely - I'm surprised it's taken us this long to get here. A friend of mine and I started a business together back in 2001 which was going to focus its energies on advancing the procedural capabilities of software tools, this particular video shows one of the things we felt needed addressing. Alas we both got contract work and the business closed with nothing more than a lot of interesting speculative design. (it's worth noting that we weren't aiming at the realtime market, this sort of tech should have been much better in 2001 than it was)
A few spritey inspirations, references and a tip from me
A quick method for antialiasing your sprites (timelapse)
More after the fold..
Silly logo diversions
Brain stopped working for a bit as I'm currently neck deep in some tricky rearranging. This means I'm saying "yargh!" a lot more than normal and also means I'm taking frequent breaks.
The last break resulted in me whipping this up in Blender:
A short video showing border tiles
Currently the engine automatically halves tiles that are on edges and then selects sections of a special edge tile. So these curved bits are done using only two tiles:
So the normal old tile is (A) here, we've added a second tile (B)
The engine then recombines sections of these tiles (only when necessary).
The next version will utilise the more common arrangement of 3x3, but I think this approach is neater than other ones I've seen which generally rely on there being a logical map of one size, which is then turned into one 3x size, or with smaller tiles.
Pretty good work, especially considering it’s his 2nd sprite!
also I threw money I don't really have at a screen recording program, here's a test output from that (I've yet to dig through the options, so this may not represent highest quality, but imho looks better already):
Hi-res looks a lot nicer.
I originally quite liked the idea of being pretty low-res, but this is still only 800x600 and stretched to 1024x768 (or fullscreen)
Old habits and managing complexity.
Posted by pentaphobe
Often when a project gets beyond a certain level of complexity I'll end up prototyping features in a new project instead of adding to the existing one just to avoid scrambling around fixing or un-breaking things.
This is really good in a lot of cases, as it reduces the fallout from getting carried away adding new stuff and potentially breaching certain contracts of neatness that you've been fulfilling up until then. Occasionally though, I have my doubts.