Much silence on this site during the last few weeks. Man, I hate not having new stuff to show. There are enough changes under the hood. Nothing fancy but there is work going on all the time. So why don’t tell you about that?

Simply because there is nothing tangible to show. Just words.

Starting the Development Log

There are these great guys over at Wolfire logging every little detail to the public. They use videos to illustrate the changes which often are marginal. They don’t wait until they finished a level or completed a character model. Everything they do leaks to their audience regardless of importance. That’s not bothering people as I thought initially. It’s steady information. When you fire up your feed reader and don’t want to check out Wolfire’s changelog simply filter or delete each of their posts ending with “video changelog”. Information noise stopped.

Following Wolfire’s example I’m starting Nordenfelt’s regular development log. Wednesday becomes Nordenfelt dev log day! Don’t expect many videos and screenshots. Most entries will just be textual. When there is something new going on visually you’ll be the first to know.

Dev Log 0

A short summary what happened during the four weeks:

Automation of Power-Up Distribution

Why doing something by hand when you can automate it? Many shmups use fixed patterns for power-up distribution. Now there is a data-driven system which decides if a destroyed object leaves a power-up. No longer placing them via editor.

Flight Height Graph

Drop shadows of flying objects depend on flight height and position. The higher a plane flies the smaller and more transparent its shadow has to be. So the new flight height graph defines how drop shadows will look like.

Equipment Screen

Nordenfelt excludes equipment decisions from the battle field. Weapons, shields or bombs can be bought and equipped between levels. If you have earned enough cash throughout the levels so far.

Redesign Level 1

According to new equipment all levels have to be adapted accordingly. Nothing more to say at this point.

That’s it for the first entry in this dev log series. See you next Wednesday for dev log 1.

In the meantime feel free to subscribe to Nordenfelt’s RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @black_golem.

Cheers,
Thomas