Timelog
Nov 8, 20:22 PST Starting Out
The topic has been announced, and I made it home from work okay with all the rain. My concept is complete: Trans-Icelandic Express. You are a highway engineer, the only in the world foolish enough to build a highway across a bunch of ice-floes! And on top of that, the local sheep have contracted a rare disease that makes them crazy and exploding.
Nov 8, 20:59 PST Underway
Here is a picture of my fabulous design document. Complete in it's entirety. Some game companies have "design bibles" spanning hundreds of pages, I figured 3/4 of a page is enough.
There was a forum thread about posting your desk, so here is mine:
As far as progress goes, since the levels will be kind of simple but hard to make I have started writing a level editor in python. Don't expect WorldCraft.
Nov 8, 23:51 PST Level Editing
Well, the level editor is getting nearly done. Not all of the controls are hooked up yet, though. You can draw floes (chunks of ice) and set their strength. Bright floes are pretty strong, red ones are about to break.
But now it's time to go get some dinner.
Nov 9, 04:20 PST More Level Editing
Now the level editor is really almost done. It might be silly to spend so much time on the level editor, but it's also kind of a way to design the game in a roundabout way. Anyways, just a few things left, but I'm off to sleep for now.
Nov 9, 11:35 PST Awake
Ok, well, I'm awake now after dreaming about ice floes and exploding sheep. Just make a pot of coffee and an ready to go.
Nov 9, 13:46 PST Level Editor Complete
Yay, the level editor is complete. Might have to add a few things, but it's pretty much completly done. A labeled screenshot is above! Now to start on the engine, and loading the levels into the engine.
Nov 9, 15:44 PST Engine underway
Okay, now I've got a cube floating in the ocean with a GL light source. Not too fancy, but it's a start. This time I promise to focus on gameplay (and level editing) first, and do the fancy stuff later.
Nov 9, 17:08 PST Starting to load the levels
The engine can kind of load the levels now. the grey cubes are sheep, the yellow cubes are crates, and the red cube is you. I think before I add any more stuff to the level loader Im going to get the camera model and player movement going.
Nov 9, 18:54 PST Camera and movement
I've got the camera control and movement in now. It's not very well-tuned, but it works. It's your standard quake-style mouselook, w/s moves foward/back, a/d moves left/right, and you change what direction you're looking with the mouse.
I had a funny moment, for a while I had 's' assigned to both 'screenshot' and 'move backwards'. It moved backwards very slowly, and I couldn't figure out why until I noticed my project dir had 38MB of screenshot in it. :)
Nov 9, 20:19 PST Physics tweaking
I just spent way too long tweaking the movement pseudo-physics. I guess it's important because this has a lot of platform-jumper elements, but still it's annoying. The graph shows the player's current velocity over the last 100 simulation steps. It didn't feel right (well, it was physically right, but hard to control), so I added a friction fudge that decreases friction as velocity increases, so you can get crazy sliding (it's ice, after all) but it's still playable if you don't move too fast.
Nov 9, 21:00 PST lighting
Some more messing with the ice floe geometry, and the lighting a little. Looks pretty.
Nov 9, 22:04 PST collision
The player can finally tell if he is standing on an ice-floe or not. Very important for gameplay (even though right now all he does is change color).
Nov 9, 23:10 PST Roads
The engine can finally load roads and pylons in. Here is a screenshot with a view of the level from the level editor screenshots above (with a slightly different roadway).
Nov 10, 00:51 PST gluTesselator BAD
Well, I just wasted the last hour and a half trying to get gluTesselator to work. It seemed pretty straighforward, I just had to set up a bunch of callbacks. It worked, so I was happy, but then when I tried more polygons, it didn't work and I was mad. Even on simple polygons. If its a problem in my code, I can't find it, it crashes even if I do nothing but print hello in the callbacks.
Anyways, I am going to write my own tesselator, its not very hard and I should have done that in the first place.
Nov 10, 02:21 PST Tesselation, Baby.
Hell yeah! I don't need no stinking gluTesselator! My homegrown tesselator is working, even on really insane cases like the one above. Even if the last 3 hours were wasted on tesselating, I don't mind because this was a fun challenge. I used the 'ear-trimming' algorithm.
I have to add a note: My wife is great, not only does she let me do this contest all weekend, but she brought me beer and sandwiches from the store, at this hour!
Nov 10, 04:38 PST Playable, dammit!
It's actually playable. And it's sort of fun! You can move around, you can jump, you can fall into the ocean and die. And there is some temporary textures on the ice so it looks better. My controls are working out really well, controls are pretty good.
Nov 10, 05:37 PST On the road again
Okay, final screenshot before I go take a nap. The player (small red box) is currently taking the service elevator up to the road surface, where he may leisurely stroll around the roadway, or hop down to the surface.
Nov 10, 11:00 PST morning
Good morning... just got up, made coffee. Time to finish the game.
Nov 10, 12:02 PST crates
Added bouncing off the side of walls, and you can pick up crates.
Nov 10, 14:07 PST frantic
It's getting frantic right now, so I'm not going to update as much. But I've got in-game construction completely working.
Nov 10, 18:00 PST the end
It's horribly incomplete. The biggest irony is after spending all that time on the level editor i had no time to make levels. MAKE YOUR OWN LEVELS, it's part of the fun!
Had to re-upload because I left the music in, and it was still using the old music from last week.
Post constest update
Nov 12 Control update
Ok, I finally realized what people were talking about with the control. I guess I don't look up and down a lot, or I had just gotten used to the broken mouselook or something. I though people were saying that the movement control was bad, which is the part I like. Anyways, I fixed the controls, and added mousewheel support, too.
I also fixed it so pylons collapse when the ice beneath them collapses.
Nov 23 Art update
A few days ago I started making some textures for the ice, earth and the grass. Here is the level with the dirt texture applied to everything (even ice).
Tonight, I made a character for the game. I don't like him, I want to have something more cartoony looking like mario, or an animal character. But it's a start, and I can use the model as test data to get model and animation loading into the game. I made a quick and dirty run cycle for him, too.