Shadow Covenant

…not nearly enough time to do everything I still wanted, as usual!

Anyway, got loads of stuff done (including time manipulation stuff)… I even implemented a portal system using only the scripting engine I built in the game! Of course, this kind of stuff costs time, so I’m guessing that I need to be better at doing it, or preroll it as part of my framework, need to think about that…

Anyway, got some ideas on how to make the game over, main menu, etc, while saving some time, so I don’t have much stuff to do, although it’s stuff that takes some time:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• End of level (portal thing)
• Main menu
• Title screen
• Game over screen (?)
• Sound
• Music
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Level 4
• Level 5
• Load/Save
• ….

Got the leve logic done, and finished level 2, complete with lava pits and the Orb of the Sun!

9 hours to go and millions of things still to make (and a WoW raid in the meantime)… So I got about 4 hours of real work ahead of me… :\

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• End of level (portal thing)
• Main menu
• Title screen
• Game over screen (?)
• Sound
• Music
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Level 4
• Level 5
• Load/Save
• ….

Dinner was great:

And after, well, I started by drawing some imps, but the end result was that they looked more like hell-rabbits than imps, so I decided to change the story…

They have a particle system to be more hellish…

Anyway, they already wander around (they don’t give chase yet), and all is script driven (which is quite nice)…

Anyway, I’m calling it for today… 24 hours still to go, and I have most of the actual game to make (including the object management, etc). Anyway, I should be able to finish this one, at least enough for the compo…

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• ….

And the speech system is in-place… Was a bitch getting right: getting the projected position of the 3d position of the speaker so I could write the text there, center the text, script binds, etc…

Was hard making it visible in all circumstances aswell… Finished writing the text twice, one in black and offset and then in the normal color… Worked quite well…

This is finally shaping up, although it’s not even close to being a game… Next step is probably to draw and animate the imps, making them spawn in their proper positions and giving them AI… Probably will call it then…

Task list:

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• ….

This has been slow going, but on the bright side, my character doesn’t look like total puke (just like semi-puke)! 🙂

After a great lunch, courtesy of my awesome wife:

got the character moving through the level, with collision detection (my old nemesis… I always get stuck on this and end up with ugly code!)… Even have a small shadow on his feet (helps the visuals, not looking like he’s floating)… The ground texture now seems terrible, so I probably need to work on that (think I just need to tweak the contrast a bit)…

Now I need to take a step back and think what I want to do with the game from here on… Current task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• ….

Hey all! So the theme was kind of unexpected (“It’s dangerous to go alone… Take this!”), although it won with a big margin!

Saw the theme at 3am (local time) and after discussing it with my wife, she gave me a good idea and I just built on that… On my game, the player will have an item given at the start that modifies in some way the “game world” and he has to pass through the level using it… The cool thing is the item has usually a “bad thing” associated with it, so it really makes the level more dangerous, not less! Should be able to pull this off…

Desk shot: 

Alread loads of cool stuff lying around… Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• ….