Aug 19
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
Jul 27
Here is the new Nordenfelt dev log.
During the last few days I was working on the new homepage. Most of the time was spent on fleshing out different logo ideas. Here are some of them:
Way too many hours went into these drafts. But I think I’ve finally found the right style. I won’t show it here just to be a little secretive. 
Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed or @black_golem for further dev log entries.
See you next week.
Cheers,
Thomas
Jun 1
This Wednesday I have just two points: a new enemy model and a really nasty bug.
This is the first nautical vehicle in Nordenfelt:
Adding exhaust particle effects to the cannon boat unveiled a curious bug. Check out the following two screenshots:
The upper image shows a boat heading from left to right. In this case the unit has no rotation as the debug display “native rot = 0″ tells. The lower image shows the same boat pointing in the opposite direction, the unit has a 180 degrees rotation. Now compare the orientations of the exhaust particles relative to the boat orientations. Can you see the failure?
Today is the fifth day I’m chasing this damned bug. It’s a really tough beast. Hopefully it will be squashed soon to go on with more interesting stuff to show next Wednesday.
In the meantime feel free to subscribe to Nordenfelt’s RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @black_golem.
Cheers,
Thomas
May 18
Let’s have a look on what happened during the last 7 days.
The equipment screen is still in experimental phase and therefore has just functional graphics. This is the second version I’ve made so far:
The list of available equipment is listed on the right panel. Buying and equipping the ship is done on the left panel. Everything works but it’s not as intuitive and fluent as it should be. More tweaking needed.
GUI part positions are hard-coded in Nordenfelt. This is quite bothersome when trying out different layouts. Therefore I’ve added the possibility to drag around GUI parts using the right mouse button.
This was an interesting one, only visible at low frame rates. E.g. the player ship and its shield where out of sync when it was moved vertically.
As mentioned here I’m working on replacing test graphics. The “first” model in progress, top to bottom:
More to come.
Due to the steampunk setting there will be many exhausts blowing out steam and smoke. Their definition is data-driven now and can be set in the corresponding XML files.
That’s it for the first regular entry in the dev log series. See you next Wednesday for dev log 2.
In the meantime feel free to subscribe to Nordenfelt’s RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @black_golem.
Cheers,
Thomas
Aug 20
After six days of fiddling around with the player ship I’m sick of it. It’s time for something new to work on.
This is the ship as it will be used in the arcade mode of Nordenfelt:
The small wings were mounted recently. This was done for one simple purpose: the birds-view shape did not look like a flying object. The wings are rather useless but provide a decorative hint at the vehicle’s flying nature.
Upcoming tasks on my todo list are making the playable level easier, adding some increments to the available weapon (upgrading) and many small tweaks like faster scroll speed or additional animations. I’m wondering when version 0.2 will be out. Hm…
Cheers,
Thomas
Aug 16
After some feedback I’ve changed the shape of the player ship. The engines became reduced in size and semi-covered by the ship hull, the outward-pointing guns are parallel know. Finalizing details like construction seams and rivets were attached:
I’m not really satisfied with the hull’s birds-view shape. The old hull was rougher:
I’m pondering if the engine covers should be reduced a little bit for restoring the “small hip” of the old hull shape.
What is your opinion?
Cheers,
Thomas
Aug 12
After collecting all feedback from version 0.1 the first point on the todo list became including upgrades in the arcade mode. That sounded simple. I added a new upgrade object type and integrated it into the collision detection system. Here the first problem popped up: Physical shapes were still represented as polygons, upgrade icons were going to be circular. There was a big “TODO: replace polygons with circles” in the code. OK, let’s replace the polygons with circles. I will have to do it anyway. The avalanche started sliding.
While refactoring the collision code and adapting file formats the latter became painful work. The data formats were simple sequences of numeric values. E.g. a 2D vector was just a pair of numbers and a circle was a 2D vector followed by the circle its radius. The lack of meta data within the files, declaring the meanings of the values, forced me to always reference the corresponding loading source code. That was cumbersome so it was time for the next refactoring step: replacing the old file formats with XML. Next job in the refactoring queue.
The newly integrated upgrades had to load their data from files. They needed sprites, animations and body shapes. The third refactoring job accelerated the avalanche. Hey, I just wanted to upgrade my guns! Oh, wait a minute… equipment needs new upgrade definitions, weapons will have different shoot layouts. Dammit! Next job enqueued!
After two weeks refactoring the hell out of the game all viral tasks were finished. It’s a good feeling that the Nordenfelt engine now has proper data formats, a faster collision detection and upgradable equipment. Now I can go on with the funnier things.
For example modelling the player ship.
The poll for your favourite player ship design sketches elected concept G as winner:
Today I’ve made this 3D model from the sketch above. It is not finished yet. Details like plates, frames or rivets are still missing:
Basic 3D model of winner concept
IMO concept G is a good choice. It meets the shmup guidelines (AFAIK them), looks steampunky enough and has two Gatling guns! What would our world be without Gatling guns? 
Thanks four your votes!
Cheers,
Thomas
