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[brynsane]

Coding stuff I've been busy with lately:

- AIs now stay in an inactive state by default until the first time they are seen. This has saved a ton of CPU. (If they are doing something besides idling, they can be active, but will only animate their root bone.)

- finally added the debug renderer for Bullet Physics so I could see what was going on. Turns out I had the rotation matrices transposed. OOPS. So physics controlled objects are working better now.

- Made it easier to place particle systems with the level editor

- added some more SIMD optimizations to the particle systems.

Design:

I've been thinking about how to make ARPG/RTS combat more fun than just clicking on enemies and letting the numbers/simulation take over. An idea I had was say you're controlling a mummy, and he has a sweet move to twist people's heads off. You could tell him to go to a human, at which point he would walk over to him. Once there, you would have to shake the cursor back and forth over them in order for him to twist their head off.

The problem I see is having to control a group of monsters while also doing these extra tasks for the attacks. It could definitely be overwhelming.

Art:

We're working on releasing a teaser soon. Steve, Aaron, and Arthur have been working hard on that. It's pretty funny. Can't wait to release it.

[brynsane]

I had a component system (a bit like Unity's) where my main base class was ComponentObject. You could then add different components like a mesh, a skeleton, an animation set, etc. Accessing the component would be done something like:

pObject->pComponent<Skeleton>("Skeleton");

Unfortunately, the hashing of the components was slow and was become a bottleneck. I also realized I wasn't creating new components as often as I thought I would. So, I got rid of some of the C++ elegance, and just made an enum of the current components. So, now the same code would look something like:

pObject->pComponent<Skeleton>(kSkeleton);

This allowed a bunch of optimizations and moved the opening scene in our first level from about 45 fps to a solid 60 on my laptop. Sweet! The issues of cache misses due to all of the components being in different parts of memory would probably make Mike Acton's head explode, but we're also not trying to create the next Crysis, so I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

[brynsane]

Our teaser goes out in a few hours. We'll see if anyone cares. If it works out well, I can post some of our ideas for how we're promoting the game. I guess I can post a "how not to promote" if it doesn't. Ha.

[brynsane]

Here is our trailer, if you're interested.

Unfortunately, it only show about 2 seconds of actual in-game stuff, but the rest cracks me up.

[Quarry]

OMFG DAY 1 BUY GOTYAY


Totally serious

[Franklin's Ghost]

That looks great really awesome job and the little tease of in-game looks nice. Definitely looking forward to seeing more. Also really like the atmosphere you've gone for.

[IndieGamesDig]

Yea, a pretty damn cool trailer, alot of teasers have 0 seconds of gameplay footage. I made alittle post about it incase you're interested http://www.indiegamesdig.com/?p=365.

[brynsane]

Thanks for the comments, and thanks for the shoutout IndieGamesDig!

[brynsane]

Well, that went pretty well. I was hoping to get some press, but didn't expect that! So, I spent most of today answering interview questions instead of coding.

One thing I'm worried about is we got a lot of mainstream press, and not a lot of indie game press. I have a feeling that people are going to expect a lot more content than my little company can put out. I'll have to work on that.

I'm going to start working on our combat system more next. It works pretty well as a straight up ARPG system right now, but I have some ideas how to start making it a bit crazier and more "team" oriented.

[brynsane]

Has anyone used librocket for UI?

I wrote my own UI system, but would be more than happy to drop it and integrate something more full-featured.

[brynsane]

Working on getting librocket integrated without destroying the game right now. I guess I'll just have 2 UI systems running before I phase out the old one. I am generally nervous about using other people's libraries in case I need to add functionality, but librocket seems really good, and my UI system kind of sucks.

Anyway, here's a screenshot that shows off our sketchy renderer.

[brynsane]

Some more screenshots went up on rock paper shotgun.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/23/monstrous-murders-eerie-canal-talk-dreadline/

This UI change is taking a while...

[MrDodo]

Last screenshot is really cool. I love the art work and how are you implementing it... I'm still not 100% sure about story/gameplay, but I feel on the end I will like it haha

[brynsane]

Thanks MrDodo! We'll start showing up more gameplay after a bit more polishing.

[brynsane]

Oops, haven't posted in a while.

My friend Morgan has jumped in to help out with design, which is awesome. So, now we're working on some cool new gameplay ideas. So, we'll be adding some powerups, doors, switches, triggers, and some simple quest logic into the game soon. Of course I'm probably the bottleneck because I have to write all the code soon, but hopefully it won't take very long.