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[marcgfx]

added some more trees to the winter-assets. also tuned the others I'm using for winter, to actually look like they are cold/have snow on them.


main focus is AI. I really did not want to get into that again, but... my old AI that was a good challenge, also challenged the pc too much. I could only have a few running at a time and had to split the AI calculation between frames. so now I'm trying to make a reduced version of the same thing. I've removed all vision from the AI for now, but the old one tended to bump into things and get stuck too, so I don't think thats much of a loss :D

I'm using a neural net and genetic algorithm, so I have no idea what will come out in the end. It might be just as good or terrible ... it will strongly depend on how good my input parameters, my neural net and my ga are... and to be honest I have no clue. there might be some things that are really bad, but I'm just hoping that life will find a way.

[ashen]

Your pre-rendered graphics are beautiful (trees/bushes in particular), almost too good for a racing game    They'd be great in an adventure or some other game where the scenery is even more central to the game. 

Did you use SpeedTree, I've heard thats quite expensive? I've been playing around with Blenders Sapling add-in to create pre-rendered trees/bushes.  It works quite well but requires a lot of tweaking to get what you're looking for.

I tried the demo in Opera and it worked great.  The controls were very responsive, I found myself over-steering a lot, but with more play I'm sure it would be easier.  Nice skidding/sliding effect too.

Haven't looked closely at it yet, does WebGL provide any 2D drawing facilities or is just the same as OpenGL, ie. do it yourself or use a library?

[marcgfx]

thanks ashen! I might just make a different game with the assets when I am done
I use XFrog, a very old version. they had to dig it out for me, so it would work with my other ancient software
It requires a lot of tweaking and most results are quite random. I rarely get exactly what I wanted, but I'm usually happy with what I get.

webGL is whatever you want it to be, its not specific 2d/3d. but it's very raw, so I do have quite a hard time with it. If you are familiar with openGL it will probably be a lot easier. I do it all myself, at least I kind of understand what is happening then

[marcgfx]

working a bit on AI stuff. havent had much time lately, so now I'm hoping my AI will develop itself


click for larger image

the different line colors represent the "sensors" for my new AI, that I hope will get trained well by my genetic algorithm... so far it mainly just wiggles around

[marcgfx]

this evening I joined zfx-action. the goal is to create a game based on mining+herd. so far I have achieved none of the goals, but I have made a hexagonal based pillar-forrest.


plus an animated robot. looks quite cool, but the gif was so large, so I uploaded it to imgur.
http://imgur.com/dZ37UXG

[marcgfx]

the zfx-action is over. it was a 3 day challenge, I used about 10h. but I did cheat a bit by using quite a few things I had previously done.

http://zfx.info/viewforum.php?f=42

my entry is AntiMiner (great title?). you have to protect the hexagonal structures from the spiders and try not to get killed. currently the game has no ending. so if you die, you get to see the spiders munch all the pillars.

it's missing title-screens/instructions too... so you will easily see what it's based on

wasd/arrows to move and the mouse is used for targeting/shooting
http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=HexMiner_1

[marcgfx]

AntiMiner, as mentioned in my previous post. It uses the same webgl-engine as the racing game.


http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=AntiMiner_1&view=1&shader=3

[marcgfx]

I have been working intensely on AntiMiner, but I still have lot to do.
- Dead spiders now leave somes splatter, so you can get a better understanding of how much you have already killed
- You get brought in by a spaceship. It also comes to collect you every 5 levels
- You can chose 2 out of 9 different updates every 5 levels

Balancing the upgrades is proving to be very difficult. I was hoping to be able to make all upgrades viable to max out, but that might be impossible.
Currently it seems best to build a lot of the turrets and upgrade them (placement is very important though).
But I would like to encourage players to also go the more offensive route. I have been thinking about not counting Turret-Kills fo the player. Then using the actual kills to maybe allow getting additional upgrades. At the moment it's not possible to identify the killer though and it gets very complicated as some spiders can explode killing even more spiders... chain reaction kills!

[marcgfx]

I've redone the loading screen. I think its a lot cleaner. The ground was bothering me on the previous screen and I just could not make it look good, so I scrapped it.

new:


old:


I've also fixed some bugs related to very low framerates (only one shot was fired per frame), this caused the games balancing to be completely off... so I've rebalanced, but it will probably need more work.

[marcgfx]

I'm currently trying to make the game more interesting. I'm thinking boss-fights, or at least a larger variety of enemies.

the centipede:

it's just a few spiders walking behind each other hidden by some armor. the effect is quite good though.

the tentacles:

I was playing around with the centipede. then started making something like a snake, which is really just a tentacle... so I decided to see what would happen if I added branching. many hours later this thing appeared.

both new creations are quite performance hungry as every element also collides with other elements. not quite sure how I will add them to the game yet, but I'm pretty sure I have to now :D

[marcgfx]

currently having a blast making these crazy creatures. you can actually play as one yourself in a little demo I've made


the tentacle creature now destroys everything it touches. the hexas now add a little dust when they get destroyed and also leave some rubble. I've never thought about kickstarter til now, but maybe I'm just enjoying this too much

demo:
http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=AntiMinerT_1&view=1&shader=3

[marcgfx]

made a gif for of the tentacle monster. unfortunately it was 63mb so I've uploaded it to gfycat
http://gfycat.com/UnhappyOpenKarakul

[marcgfx]

experimenting with potential boss-candidates


only the bottom element can be attacked. when you destroy it, the next one topples down and starts firing (more shots)


playing with a recursive enemy structure. everything rotates around the respective centers.

the visuals are not final, I just needed something to work with. maybe I need to go a bit more organic, so that it fits better with the other enemies.

[marcgfx]

added animated energy-connections. this was quite a pain, as it was the first time I connected multiple units with a visual. this forced me to design additional structures for the editor and loading process. but I think it was worth it. I'm just getting a little bit worried about all the new things I'm adding as they might bring down performance even more...

[marcgfx]

there are now "boss-fights"... or lets say special guests? you can see two leftovers from the tentacle-monsters and the boss that killed me. most of the destruction was caused by the tentacles, as I was not paying enough attention. I think I need some way to convey to the player that there is a large damage dealer on the field. balancing over all is terrible.

[marcgfx]

I was having a horrible time trying to get utf-8 symbols to work. on my macbook they all turned into colorfull emojis. not what I wanted  . I don't know how much time I wasted trying to fix that mess, but today I gave up on the idea and made my own symbols. should have done so from the start...
new:

old:

[marcgfx]

I'm continuing to work on bosses. the current one I'm working on is a big ball of energy that creates more balls of energy that are connected in a chain like fashion.

[marcgfx]

I've continued to work on bosses. I'm not really happy with anything yet, but at least some look quite cool by now.





I've worked on the controller use. It's amazingly challenging to make a game work nicely both with keyboard+mouse(pad) & gamepad in javascript. keyboard an mouse provide event handlers for down/up, so they are pretty much the same to handle. but the gamepad has nothing like that. you can only check on the current state (down or up) at any given time. I should probably have written my own wrapper for the gamepad and provided event-handlers myself. but thats not what I have done. I currently store 3 states for every button. 0: nothing, 2: pressed, 1: just released. 1 can be used as a clicked event.

but then I also want to support mouse-pad. with a mouse i can use the mouse-button to fire, place turrets and fire nukes. with the mouse-pad firing is not a good idea. it's also a bad idea to have to keep a button pressed with your left hand while steering the robot. so I added an auto-fire button. this has draw-backs but it's still the best solution I could find.

[marcgfx]

Bugs can sometimes produce the most interesting results I was trying to setup a sort of battle for the prologue. Instead of just setting it up once, I set it up again and again in every frame... the impact on the framerate was noticeable.


I'm also still working on bosses and tons of other little features. In the top right you can see what happened when I messed up a scale-property for the centipede boss. He did not look that scary anymore :D

[sbeast]

Hey, the game looks pretty interesting. Will you be needing any music for it? If so you can check out my portfolio here: http://sbeastmusic.com/portfolio/