Shadow Covenant

This was the second time in a row I gave up on a 48-hour compo… This time I couldn’t think of a game for the theme, last time I just wasn’t having fun making the game I thought up…

I’m wondering if the joy of doing 48-Hour compos has faded for me…

Before, the 48-Hour compo was a learning experience (mostly time management), then it became about finishing a game…

But now, I think my feeling about them evolved… Now it’s the thought of creating something actually good… The last 3 games I’ve done in the compos that were finished (“Cursed”, “Conquest” and “An Old Man And His Quest”) came out really nice (for my standards in this sort of thing), and I think that kind of made me raise the bar…

So now, each time I don’t have a “great idea” (“Conquest”) or some “great 48-hour tech” (“Cursed” and “An Old Man And His Quest”) to work on, I get demotivated, start thinking about my awesome couch+tv+computer combo, and I loose interest…

Is this a flaw on my part? Or is it just a sign that I’ve made enough compos to have transcended the need for them, for purposes of self-validation? The compos for me were never about the competition itself, as I said above, it was about learning and finishing something, but nowadays I just don’t have the will for it, unless the idea I have really appeals to me…

No answer for any of these questions, but I just wanted to share, ‘cos that’s the kind of person I am!

Hopefully the next compo I’ll be more motivated and can actually think of something good… and finish it for good measure!

I’m ashamed to say that for the second time in a row, I’m giving up…

There’s 15 hours to go, and all I have is a voxel engine and no idea on what to do with it… And because I have that voxel engine, I’m having even more difficulty having ideas that fit the theme…

I’m more of a “huge thinker”, not a “tiny thinker”… And just making a normal game but set it on a tiny world doesn’t appeal to me, since my idea is that a game with the theme “Tiny World” couldn’t be done in a big world (the “Tiny World” has to be part of the gameplay, not just a setting).

Why couldn’t “procedural generated” have won?!

Anyway, good luck everyone!

Contrary to my expectations, I got raycasting working… It’s not perfect, and I still need to identify which face the cursor intersected with, but it works nevertheless!

Next step, finding which face it has intersected, and actually create blocks (updating the voxel representation)…

I might have to call it a day in an hour or so, since there’s a concert tonight that I wanted to see… Ah, the difficulties of juggling game development and a real life!

Finished the material system for the voxel world and added some camera controls…

Not that happy with the camera controls; they don’t seem that intuitive, but they’re the same as the editor on my out-of-hours project, and while it works fine with an editor tool, it doesn’t seem suitable for a game… But after I get some game in this I’ll revisit it….

Anyway, now for the harder part in this project: finding out in which cube the player clicked and in which face, so I can build a new block there…

Just finished implementing a simple voxel engine…

Was complicated getting all the conditions working properly, specially because I was trying to get some subdivision code working properly in the process, as you can see below… For the record, the image below should only be a plane at the bottom…

The full rebuild process is a bit slow yet (at least in debug mode), but I’ll optimize it later if it warrants.

Anyway, it works now:

That’s just a random “height-field”.

Now I need to add different materials…

Still hoping inspiration hits me…