Oh, of course. If you can make it look good (which I'm sure you can with some particles and such), it would look awesome. And you're right - with an online game, especially that features building and destroying, every millisecond counts.

While all this nonsense is amusing. You haven't shown any in game footage. I would like to see that, or at least a prototype.

I agree. How is the game actually shaping up?

Also, what's an NPC? 

NPC = Non Player Character / Non-Playable Character = civilians or whoever you talk to and help out in your game.

30 times as fast, huh? If you wanted to implement 4x4 blocks instead of 16x4 'planks':

16x4 planks = baseline (30x faster at this point)
4x4 blocks = 4 blocks in each plank (30x / 4 = 7.5x faster)

If you implemented 4x4 blocks instead of 16x4 planks, it seems like it would run 7.5x faster than it ran before you took the debug logs out. I may be wrong, though. That may or may not be in your budget, but it's worth considering.

@Bones - I love puzzle games like that where you can control a character. Wario's Woods comes to mind. You should continue with that - of course, I'm not aware of what Walled Garden is... Yet.

I'm personally working in C++ in the Blender Game Engine. I managed to implement a UI to take advantage of the two other kinds of OpenGL mist (EXP and EXP2). It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

[better]

It's always better to have readable code, but if you're never going back to it, there's not really any reason to fix it. If it works, leave it alone. If you need to update it, then you might want to fix the bad code, but I probably wouldn't otherwise.

However, it also depends on your development environment. It's a lot harder to make reusable code in Game Maker than when just using Python, for example, since you can easily configure the script path to point to your game module set.

So, in other words, if you're planning on building on it and you know you can make it better (faster, easier to deal with, etc), you might want to fix the code. If you're planning on building on it and you know you can make it differently, you might just want to alter your style to fit the file.

@Boris - I took your advice and am managing to build the source of Blender. I've done this before, but it wasn't without a little difficulty. Fortunately, there is a developement IRC on freenode at #bgecoders and #blendercoders for people who want to work with it. Right now, I'm trying to add a button to the Blender UI to link to an internal variable.

I also am going to try to document my progress on this thread as well as my blog. Thanks for the advice.

EDIT: And while the things on the list to be added are complex, one wouldn't have to work on that, but simply try exposing and upgrading already implemented features - generally attempting to make things more simple, efficient, and easier to use.

The first feature I'm thinking about adding / working on right now is exposing the type and density (not start and end; that's already implemented) of the 3D fog to the Blender UI via buttons. It's not too difficult, and I will need to see how to add a button for my personal project that I want to try out anyway.

Definitely weird, but it definitely also was interesting to look at and seemed worth investing time into. You should make something with that...

Nice pillar. Very good normal map. So, I see the game will be in 3D, and will use GLSL or HLSL, right? It's looking good.

80% = 19 hours 12 minutes

 4:00am - start work (5 minute break within each hour: stretch, sittups, etc )
11:30pm - ends work day after 19 and a half hours
12:00am - Sleep


if a person does this atleast twice, they'd be surprised how much gets done.
if they could actually live fulltime like that, then they're what I'd call "pure" or "true" devs. a developer in the realest sense.  

You could do that, but I wouldn't really expect anyone to. Generally, people need more than 4 hours of sleep. I'm pretty sure I would just end up sleeping past 4AM straight to at least 7 anyway, and I'm also sure that you would spend more time than 5 minutes doing things in which you are away from your computer. In addition, most people have other things to do than develop, so it's a bit unrealistic to expect anyone to be able to develop for 19 hours straight, even if they wanted to, and neglect any kind of interaction with anyone else.

In other words, I wouldn't really call people who follow this schedule 'real game developers' any more than I would call the guy who works on his game in his spare time a couple of hours a week a 'real game developer'. A game developer is a person who makes games. There aren't any qualifications.

I was reminded of The Underside, as well, which apparently, will never come out.

Going back on topic, I played The Understory, Pirate, and I liked it quite a bit! It was very well made, and it had quite a bit of style to it, particularly the bending on the screen, and the general simple color feel.

@Geti - Pretty good! I like how you can change how fast the sand falls. I'm guessing you're going to optimize the sand to only fall when on-screen to help make things run faster right? I'm not sure, but could you split the sand blocks up into individual squares and move those, rather than large planks of them? Anyway, nice sand physics!

Okay, so I think I'm definitely suffering from a broken graphics card, which is hindering production. I'm not too sure what I can do other than physically look at the card for remnants of tiny explosions or try different driver versions. Hopefully I can either use another computer, or fix the graphics card on the one I'm using.

@Crissy - Nice dude on the moon, indeed!
@namragog - I like the cityscape. Very nice - it looks really grimy.
@Sheep - Well, his arms should be longer - arms should reach about the knees, if I recall. He should probably be essentially straight up and down - the shirt goes in at his hips, which looks like it's a sweater. If it's for a platformer, try going for more square proportions, like 16x16 or 32x32. If it's for a point-and-click, then that size should be fine.

Looked like the Frankenstein-styled brow to me, too. Now that I've read it, it does look like a bandanna. I think that maybe the bandanna should spread out more so in front of his face, or his eyes need to rise higher. In any case, it's very well animated.

Yep, I am. I'm using GIMP for the tileset and animation, and (obviously) Blender for the models. Nothing is very complex, so I can put things together fairly easily.

Yeah that made me laugh out loud Miguelito

Thanks for the nice comments about the anim. After a couple of attempts I've got a run anim, which is basically a copy of one I made a while ago anyway:



The framerate's much higher than the walk so I'm not really sure if it fits. And comparing them here, her hair looks way too flimsy in the run so I'll redo it. Anyway, the plan is to work towards a full set of movements to do a platformer controls test with walk, run, jump, crouch, crawl, wall jumping, hanging off ledges, etc.

I also messed around with some scenery briefly:

I love the animation and your art on the background.

@Ninto - I don't see anything...?

Interesting. You might want to make the sub move a bit faster - it's kind of slow. But pretty good work so far.

Pretty interesting. So, what's the game actually about? I looked around on your blog, but didn't see exactly an explanation of what the game was about? I did see, though, that it involved solving door puzzles and navigating around the tundra as that green alien.

I totally agree with you, I mean who wants to play something without collecting stuff? Which is why we had this conversation two pages back I believe. I'm going to (hopefully) integrate a sticker system, where you get a nice little colorful sticker to stick on your wall in your (customizable? not sure, yet.) house. Of course that's still pretty bland, so we're adding achievements and fun stuff like that.

Oh, and badges. Lots and lots of badges. ALSO HATS.

Take care!  

Yeah, the sticker idea was interesting. More stuff would be nice. Wait. Could you make it so that you could wear the badges you earn? Or better yet, pick a sticker to wear on your player? I don't know how that would work, actually...

EDIT: Maybe the stickers could double as hats? Perhaps you could even change the hat depending on which sticker you use, and the game doesn't tell what sticker looks like which hat? That would make it a total surprise when you equip the 'Saved Cat From Tree' sticker and it looked like cat ears or something.