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[Gregg Williams]

So yeah, stuff isn't right, and I'm going back to the dentist tomorrow morning =_=

Otherwise, been handling a bit of work on setting up a landing page for the game, mostly though things have been on pause.

[The_Observer]

So yeah, stuff isn't right, and I'm going back to the dentist tomorrow morning =_=

Otherwise, been handling a bit of work on setting up a landing page for the game, mostly though things have been on pause.

Good luck man, I've had a root canal done a few months ago. Before I didn't realize a tooth could hurt so much. Pain killers are your friend.

[lelex]

Ugh. Dentist flashbacks. G'luck.

[Gregg Williams]

So yeah super pissed off boss level tooth, complete with enrage infection attack bullshit. Now in the land of popping oxy, antibiotics, and steroids...

Sucky way to spend 3 weeks off work alas. :/ have a happy holiday guys! M.I.N.T will continue eventually here.

[Gregg Williams]

So oxy and steroids are fun....though not very productive.

Landing page, still being tweaked slightly but never the less.. http://mint-game.com

[ANtY]

Niiice, fitting to the game

[Gregg Williams]

Finished enough of the localization junk for now, really only needs variable replacement still, which isn't much work.

Some more website tweaks, some more pills...

[Conker534]

hey man its been a while since i said anything

last few gifs of yours were dope as fuck, keep up the epic work bro, good luck with all your complications ha!

[Gregg Williams]

hey man its been a while since i said anything

last few gifs of yours were dope as fuck, keep up the epic work bro, good luck with all your complications ha!

Haha cheers! Yeah complications by the boat loads :D

Anyways on another topic, finished localization support up for now, works with flag replacement now. So shit like "Collect <X> gold!" Can properly be localized.

[Gregg Williams]

Tooth is still trying to kill me, have to talk to dentist again tomorrow infection has resisted the antibiotics.. but managed to do a few more bits.

Unfortunately having problems with Lua require paths working nicely, and it seems I also need to write my own require / dofile functions to support reading lua scripts when they're in an archive.

[clockwrk_routine]

abscess?  I've had major teeth problems, if you leave some ice/cold spoon on the swelling/infection area, until it burns (I think this kills the bacteria)- apply repeatedly for a couple days, the swelling/pain will go away, probably won't show up for a while - still you should get anti-biotics for it or you can die forever.  hope that helps, teeths pains suck.

mint still looks great

[Gregg Williams]

abscess?  I've had major teeth problems, if you leave some ice/cold spoon on the swelling/infection area, until it burns (I think this kills the bacteria)- apply repeatedly for a couple days, the swelling/pain will go away, probably won't show up for a while - still you should get anti-biotics for it or you can die forever.  hope that helps, teeths pains suck.

mint still looks great

They don't know what it is, started out as a tooth needing a root canal. They did phase 1 of root canal, and it went to hell. Then they opened the tootn again to pack more meds, etc, followed with severe pain, oxy, steroids, antibiotics, etc.

Unfortunately I'm again out of pain pills, still in pain, and about out of antibiotics and can still taste the infection. Seems I likely need stronger antibiotics or something, fuck if I know. Has been 3 weeks of pain and drugs, and multiple visits.

I consider it a bad sign when I'm on some pretty serious pain meds yet this thing still hurts 24/7 and forget chewing at all on one side.

[Gregg Williams]

Tooth still hurts like a bitch RAWRRRR!! To be pulled next Monday now :/

Anyways some lovely WIP hud work arrived at my door.

A few usability and readability tweaks needed, but overall I think this looks pretty hot.
Bit more hud problems to conquer and will be at actual combat and expanded gameplay, then more unit animations no doubt to handle combat :D

[Gregg Williams]

Did a bunch of HUD and interface design and requirements, and sent that off to Kawe to hopefully turn into awesome arts.

Updated to the latest GLFW version which solved some cursor hiding problems, and implemented custom context aware mouse cursors, though need art and animation to really bring them to life.

Started looking into how want to do tool tips, as these are starting to look like they will be a huge part of the design.

[marvinhawkins]

I really like how this is shaping up. It reminds me of Front Mission. One of my favorite games of a few generations ago.

[Gregg Williams]

I really like how this is shaping up. It reminds me of Front Mission. One of my favorite games of a few generations ago.

Cheers.

Realized its been a few days since I updated this. My tooth is suppose to be coming out in about 14 hours which is awesome though

Anyways some more shots of things.

The values and stat names and such aren't right really, and the tool tip will likely loose the little arrow bit on the bottom left. Ultimately it needs 9 sliced so that it can be dynamically assembled to any size.

Finally the last few days I've been working on a dynamic outline/glow shader for units, to help with mouse overs and showing selected units. Its been really interesting to get working, and still needs to be integrated into the full render engine, but I'm pleased with the results, and learned stencil buffer tech doing it, which is awesome.

Also I realize its not pixel art, but to be honest we've rarely ever stayed 100% pixel art. (A.R.C.S might be the exception) Most likely M.I.N.T will be using non-pa for effects. Who knows we might even work in some bloom and distortion shaders for certain attacks or something :D

We might also go non-chiptunes for music to, although I honestly have no idea on that front. (Sorry awesome composers that email and message me all the time. We really haven't gotten around to thinking about music at all yet.) Just you know something like Command & Conquer or Mech Warrior 2 sound tracks could be really cool.  http://www.gamemusicjukebox.com/default.live.asp?id=5

[HughSJ]

shiiiiiit these mech warrior 2 tracks gets my blood pumping, esp the first one. A lot of good memories with that game (also part of the reason why I was chubby as a kid  )

Anyway, forgive me if this was mentioned earlier in the devlog, but what are you using for the UI? Have you guys written it yourself or are you using an outside option? I know this isn't your first rodeo so you've had time to build up a system. We haven't found any good solutions for UI-- web based stuff is really slow and also has issues with implementation, and the few outstanding options run 5 figures to use. If we can keep things simple enough we'll probably write it ourselves which no one is looking forward to.

Anyway, game is looking great-- the mechs have a nice weight to them. On the music side, I think chiptunes style is getting to be played out, though I know how difficult / expensive it can be to explore other options / styles. Personally I think a large variety of styles could possibly be used. What we're going to do to answer that question on our own project is just send out builds to prospective musicians and have them do a test track in whatever style they think would fit, then we'll go from there. Good luck with whatever you end up deciding, and good luck with the teeth; lord knows dev is hard enough without having to deal with body aches on top of it.

[Gregg Williams]

Yeah that first track... *sigh*

UI is my sworn enemy. Alas I haven't found any good solutions for it, so I guess most all of it will be just hand written. The hud stuff isn't that complex anyways. I worry more about all the customization screens, and stuff like multiplayer lobbies and game setup. This is where a good off the shelf UI that is easy to skin would shine.

I had some limited success early on with MyGUI when working on the map editor that got put on hold. The problem with MyGUI though is there is basically no documentation, and all the code/comments/info out there seem to be in russian.

With music, yeah chip tune does indeed seem to be seeing a lot of attention lately. Its been our general go to style, as we've been focused on games with 16bit/arcade level pixel art, and usually chip tunes just made sense to match with that. I love chip, just not sure its the best option here, especially with the scale of the project. I guess it will also depend on what our budget ends up looking like for that, as music/sound is one area that we normally contract out.

[Gregg Williams]

Also for anyone wondering how the outline/glow works I'll go ahead and detail it quick.

1. You need two FBO's or render textures.
2. Render a copy of the object to outlined/glowed to the first FBO, but as completely solid of the color you want for the outline/glow.
3. Then render the first FBO to the second, but using a Gaussian blur shader. This is normally a two step process. So really its render to second FBO with horizontal blur.
4. Clear first FBO, render from 2nd FBO to first, using the vertical blur shader.
5. When you go to render your object normally as part of the scene, enable the stencil buffer, and tell it to always pass, and to replace values with 1. This creates a mask of the drawn object in the stencil buffer. So its all 0 accept where you've drawn to. (Assuming you cleared the stencil buffer and haven't used it elsewhere.)
6. Now you change the stencil buffer to where it rejects any pixels that fall into a 1 in the stencil buffer. (You've created a mask of the original object)
7. You draw your FBO 2 to as a full size quad with normal or additive blending over the scene. Your outline/glow is now complete.

You would most likely want to streamline so that you do step 2 as part of your regular rendering pass, along with with step 5. This would give you a stencil buffer this is complete for all objects to outline, as well as a FBO that has all the base white versions. Then you would just do steps 3,4,6, and finally 7.

Note that doing it this way will cause the outlines to be foreground based, I suppose you would have to do a pass per object during rendering if you wanted to maintain proper depth sorting.

[HughSJ]

For the depth sorting are you guys basing it on the tiles alone or are you embedding some kind if depth information into the sprites? Since everything in Matador is made as a 3d model first then baked into sprites we're able to also render out zdepths that handle both our lighting and our depth sorting. Obviously that isn't really an option for you guys tho since you're doing the assets via traditional sprite animation method.

Just curious. When I'm conscious again tomorrow I'll take the time to properly run through the while devlog so I'm not asking any repeat questions.