That sounds fantastic! (And ambitious.)

For my game, a lot that goes into the environments is loaded from xml files (I've made schemas, but no editor.) The XML describes things like textures to use for the blocks to give cosmetic differences. Ex: "This plant grows on top of this type of material." "This material represents the 'hard' blocks in this area." The map generation (where the blocks are, which ones are 'hard') is all hardcoded though. I'm not sure if I'll ever want to open any of it to modding. I love the concept, but the online competitive aspect of my game complicates things.

This is looking really cool! Would the mod support also allow people to plug-in new map generators/obstacles? It seems like those would give the game the most longevity. It would help ensure there are always new challenges and things to figure out.

Replaced the placeholders for the powerups. Powerups are genetically engineered aliens which hang on the ends of your arms. You find them in cage/capsules. This one lets you swing around from a fixed-length energy chain.

I've been working on the skybox lately:



The clouds and sea are flat quads with two textures of gray scale Perlin noise sliding across them. I multiply the values of from the two textures for each pixel, getting a "height factor", I combine that with the distance from the camera and get an index into my array of color bands. The "height factor" for the water is weighted much higher than it is for the clouds, so that's why the bands aren't so discrete.

(Also, anyone know a good program to exit animated gifs? I'd like to chop off the start and end of this.)

I'm really excited to see where this project goes. I love the art!

I think that's a great track. It reminded me of Zora's Domain, though I don't remember the actual music of Zora's Domain that well.

Welcome to TIGForums! You should make a post to introduce yourself on http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.0

I always associate any type of pipe game with Lucasarts' Pipe Dream. I think I even remember people referring to the hacking sections of Bioshock as "playing Pipe Dream." In other words, I think the name already means something to a lot of people. I think you should pick a different title, at least for search engines' sakes.

I hate it when I come up with a great name for a game only to find out it was already taken in the 80's.

Sounds like a cool project! Those textures might even be alright depending on what you do with lighting.

I think these places are fantastic, want to keep an eye on this thread.

I predict I'll be kickstarting another game in my future. 

This looks like a really cool idea. I think screen sharing and voice chat will be really important. Are the screens on those monitors live?

I'm a huge fan of one-word names and especially of wordplay so what came to mind for me... what about Cinister.

Sinistar might have some words with you. And those words would be "I HUNGER..."

A related idea I've been kicking around is to take advantage of game players' natural instincts and decision-making and working that into part of the character being played. This avoids ludo-narrative dissonance. It isn't the greatest game, but Postal 2 definitely does this. (It knows FPS players love to kill everything and don't treat NPCs as real people, so it makes the character a sociopath.) I could see an interesting game about a hoarder, since players always seem to love hoarding everything.

It is obviously easier to make some characters than others in this way, since the character is is really being defined by the expected player's actions.

Spec Ops: The Line's important part follows this principle I would say.

Looks very nice! The music sold me. Pledged!

I love the HD approach to the NES graphics

Thanks! It took a fair amount of work for me to get that look. I like the look of Starshock (I've considered sprite enemies myself), but man that demo is hard!

Haven't updated in a while. I got a bit distracted with Titanfall for a while, but it gave my batteries a chance to recharge.

Since the last update I continued playtesting with the help of people I meet at a game dev enthusiast meetup (http://www.meetup.com/SeattleGames/). Though that feedback I've been able to improve the ingame hints/tutorial.

I also wanted the next version to have more variation in the locations the game generates. A challenge with procedural generation can be uniqueness. Each snow flake is unique, but how many can you recognize? So far I think my results are promising, but maybe I just haven't seen enough rooms with the new techniques for them to start looking the same to me.

Here are some screenshots of what gets produced now:





You can test out this latest version at biodromegame.com. Please give me comments/feedback if you do!

Looks very cool! I'm surprised there is no mention of Blaster Master yet. The tank is very evocative.

I grew up on campy horror movies which are often collectively referred to as "Jaws rip-offs" from the 70s and 80s. These included such animal flicks as Alligator (1980), Piranha (1978), Barracuda (1978), Orca (1977), Grizzly (1976), Tentacles (1977) and Razorback (1984).

How settled are you on your title? If those are you inspirations why not go for a single word title generally naming the creature? I know you want a unique monster, but what about the real reptile it most closely resembles?

The generated story stuff looks cool, if a bit mad-libs. Will notes left around reference each other? Was there a note earlier about eating boots?

Tripled my framerate!

It had been a while since I'd run a profiler, and the game had seemed frameier than it used to, so I thought it was high time. I found PerfView which is a free .NET profiler that does memory and performance profiling. I noticed some ways I could save memory (haven't done it yet), but the real shocker was how my game was spending its time. Almost a quarter of the time was testing bounding box visibility in my render method!

I looked through the method that does the test--nothing out of the ordinary. Then I looked to the render method to see how I was calling it. I was looping over 190 bounding boxes testing visibility, not much I could do about that. Then I saw I was repeating the same test 6 times each frame (once for each side of a cube. That lead to 1140 tests instead of the 190 I actually needed! Then I noticed THAT loop was inside another for each wall texture. There are currently 20 wall textures. 22800 tests when I only needed 190! Moving the inner loop out to only be done once per frame ended up tripling my game rate.

Two take-aways: watch nested loops, and profile! At least no one can accuse me of premature optimization.