I just completed the Alpha of my game.

List of changes since the last post:

  • GUI works (WIP)
  • Added markers below the player and enemies to show their position and health
  • Added a ‘finish line’, that is accessible once all enemies are destroyed (spawned enemies don’t count). Once the player reaches the finish line, the next level is loaded (currently the same level)

    The red barrier tape will disappear, once every enemy is killed, and the little red ticks turn green.

And here is a screenshot of the game in action.

Haven’t done much this weekend that can be shown in images. Mostly bugfixing and improving some algorithms. Had some nasty crashes that I needed to resolve. In terms of AI, the situations where an enemy would just stand still and do nothing are reduced. As a side effect, they now are even more aggressive, since they don’t interfere with each other so much anymore. Lastly I changed the shader for Player and enemies and now their silhouettes are rendered in front of other objects. This way the Player can see where the enemies are, even if they are behind obstacles.

One new object, though. A spawnpoint for Powerups. It will create a crate after a couple of turns, and ,once the Player has destroyed the crate and picked the item up, it will spawn a new one, again after some turns.

Here is a new video showing the current state of the game. The two bosses from the last post are not in this build.

This is not a real level, only the test scene where I put everything I create to see if it works and behaves correctly. I haven’t started designing levels, yet.

I added some more enemies to my game. From left to right these are a plasma-wielding walker, a flamethrower tower and two boss encounters. The first one is unarmed, but has plenty of health and spawns Spawners. The last one is more of a automatic defense mechanism. It spawns smaller copies of itself some tiles away and then shoots them with lasers. The small crystals scatter these lasers in all six directions. If one of the small crystals is destroyed, it will be replaced after some time. In the actual encounter I plan to place some additional small crystals that won’t be replaced after destroying them.

The Player will get his own laser weapon from destroying the crystal. Where he will get the other weapons (apart from the sword and blaster) is yet to be determined.

This is the world of Tehadon. At least the known part. Runthan is not really explored yet.

Some creatures I drew over the last couple of days. I might take one ore two of those and create finished concepts from them for the Double Happy Creature Design Contest at Game-Artist.net.

 

After a too long absence, I started working on my game again. I created some new enemy models (the spider is not yet rigged). The two on the right are Spawners for the Spider and the Disc from an earlier post respectively.

Also I created some buildings, for decoration and mainly to allow me to create different levels. They block all kinds of projectiles, the fence is destructible.

Lastly I also delved into scripting again. The buildings have their own behavior to control the blocking of projectiles and actors, as well as their destruction. Additionally I added a simple calculation to the enemies’ and other placeable objects’ scripts to make them find the closest tile to their world-position on start, so I can now place them directly in the Unity viewport instead of having to manually determine the tile number I want them to start on. Makes level-design easier. Having to dial in every tile by hand would have put me off level-designing entirely, to be honest.

This is the image I submitted to the contest. Nothing much changed since the last one.

I still have a hammer and an axe that I want to build, but I don’t think I get them done by tomorrow.

There is a contest running at Polycount, sponsored by Vigil Games, to create a weapon for Darksiders 2. The contestants have to create a heavy weapon, either an axe, a mace or a hammmer (or one of each) and the winning weapon in each category will be put into the game. Obviously I couldn’t resist.

So here is the current state of my mace:

Still needs some color, probably on the three bare areas on the shaft, but I have no idea (yet).

I first wanted to create an angelic axe, but my creation didn’t really fit the style of the game, so I aborted it.

We will continue with our scheduled program shortly.

My machine was showing signs of  complete breakdown for quite some time now, but lately it got worse. I think the HDD and the GPU are both dying. The HDD makes some noises no healthy HDD should make and the GPU gets very hot, even with the case open. I can’t work without it shutting down. I can’t even watch Youtube videos without it shutting down. Heck, I can’t even load them.

In any case, I think it is time for retirement. He was a brave little soldier and did his duty for longer than it was reasonable to expect. He will receive his honorable discharge when his successor arrives. I hope he will last that long.

The new machine I ordered is sadly not the workstation I wanted (because it would have cost me 23.500€), but still a vast improvement on my current PC. It should arrive in the next days, at most two weeks. Part of me is looking forward to it, part of me is afraid that I will not have any excuse to not do work anymore.