Here is the new entry in Nordenfelt‘s weekly development log.

I can sum up this week’s accomplishments in a single word:

Nada!

Booting my new job, moving to another city and making a website for some extra money left no time for the game. Today was the first day I could work on Nordenfelt again. At the moment I’m integrating animations into the particle engine. The cool thing about a given engine/framework is that adding one more is a breeze. In most cases, the devil never sleeps.

I’m looking forward to show you some explosions next week.

Cheers,
Thomas

I’ve just added a 3d product box to the upcoming sales page:

Drawing this box was really fun, more than drawing game assets. Am I in the wrong business? I don’t think so because coding is even more fun. Sadly the last line of code was several weeks ago. Those were the days … Sigh.

Cheers,
Thomas

The last update was exactly one month ago. And there is hardly any progress behind the scenes. What did I do during the last four weeks?

Well, I wasn’t lazy. As mentioned in this post I started some traffic gain experiments for www.blackgolem.com. One of these experiments is regular posting. I don’t know if that’s the reason why traffic raised but it nearly doubled within the last month. There are many more Google searchers which arrive at the site. That’s cool. More visitors are always welcome. I can’t figure out exactly what boosted the figures but it’s great.

On the other hand the experiments took also extra time. Therefore Nordenfelt’s progress dropped to 50%. Tweaking the editor for more fluent work took also some time. The rest went into coding new enemies (e.g. ships and new plane AI) and adding gameplay in level 1. Many changes under the hood, nothing to show.

I don’t promise anything at this point but the game’s worker thread priority should increase within the next few days. But first I have to do my tax declaration. That’s something I really hate. Useful statistics are great when they serve your needs. But our tax system is just a dated bureaucratic behemoth which must be fed with fine grained figures to keep officials busy. Thank god I’m a small indie without income. The less $$$ the less declaration work.

Cheers,
Thomas

This article was cross-posted on www.blackgolem.com.

Bad news for Nordenfelt’s feature list: the adventure mode has been cut today.

At the moment I’m working on the final version of the first level. Extrapolation of the content creation effort made it obvious that the adventure mode would delay Nordenfelt 1.0 too much. I’m going to finish the game first and maybe add the adventure mode later. It depends on how well Nordenfelt will be received and if the adventure mode fits into the game at all.

You never know how your project comes out in the end.

Cheers,
Thomas

I’m deep into GUI graphics these days. Get a brief glimpse over my sholder while I’m wearing my artist hat:

This is a partial screenshot of the options screen. IMO it’s a step closer to steampunk then everything else done before. My gut feeling tells me I’m on the right track.

That’s all. Blogger hat off, artist hat on.

>> Edit <<

Blogger hat on:

tehlexx pointed out that some details did not fit the overall quality. The problems were obvious but I could not see them from inside the Matrix. You lose the feeling for such stuff when you spend too much time at the backend of a game. Thanks to tehlexx mentioning the issues.

Fixing the issues was rather easy: simply turning off blur, touching up the “beauty spot” and replacing the polygonal pointer with a prerendered clock hand sprite inclusive shadow casting:

Blogger hat off, artist hat on. Changing hats starts to gall my temples…

Cheers,
Thomas

Version 0.4 is on the way. Only a few times left to go to sleep…

Yesterday I’ve added the initial score system, a simple accumulation of scores given by shot enemies. There are no lives anymore. You can replay each level as often as you want. You just have to pay with your score points. I’m wondering how this will effect gameplay in the future.

Today statistics found their way into the code. For the first impression I’ve implemented the enemy kill percentage which gets reported at the end of each level. Some people like perfect runs so the kill count will be their indicator.

There are several other additions like display options or drop shadows. Version 0.3 suffered from a bug in the particle engine which is fixed now. Nevertheless there are some other magic frame rate hiccups, e.g. coming from the input system (PeekMessage() stalls, very strange). Version 0.4 should give some answers if these problems are just on my machine or on yours to.

See you in a few days.

Cheers,
Thomas

You may have noticed that the download link for Nordenfelt 0.3 did not work. I have no clue how this could happen. I’ve checked everything twice before hitting the Publish button. But the devil never sleeps.

Here’s the fixed link, triple checked and sanctified to keep Luzifer away.

Working Link to Nordenfelt 0.3

It’s a horrible fact that a delivery chain is such a fragile thing. You can have the best product or service but it’s nothing worth when you can’t deliver it (or its message) to your customers.

Cheers,
Thomas