Here is the new entry in Nordenfelt‘s weekly development log. This week I was busy researching and testing explosion effects.

You can help getting this project done, test Nordenfelt’s latest versions and discuss the game in the secret development forum with other preorderers by preordering Nordenfelt. If you like to stay in touch, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, email newsletter or listen to my tweets at @black_golem.

To get an idea how I should create stunning explosions I’ve investigated games like Gratuitous Space Battles or Crimzon Clover in motion. For this I ripped some of their gameplay videos from YouTube with UnPlug. IMO it’s hardly possible to research a game while you’re playing it. Therefore it’s better to investigate videos. YouTube is a game researcher’s best friend.

The most impressive fact about explosions and particle effects in general is that they are made from just a few sprites:

Check out the sprites in the top left corner. This masterpiece of smoke, fire, debris and glares was made from 6 simple sprites. The trick is the procedural arrangement of the graphics. Such an explosion would look great in Nordenfelt but it would also bring the game’s frame rate to its knees. Therefore it’s necessary to bake smaller explosions and reuse them as prefabs.

For this reason I’ve integrated animations into the particle engine. This new feature allows combining several smaller effects into a prerendered sprite sheet. The good news is that there are some good explosion sprite sheets available on the internet. Have a look at this free one from TurboSquid:

At the moment I’m testing a few explosion animations with some extra particles for debris, glares, shockwaves and smoke. I’m curious how these SFX will evolve.

That’s it for this week. As mentioned before, feel free to support the project by preordering Nordenfelt. See you next week.

Cheers,
Thomas

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

You can help getting this project done, test Nordenfelt’s latest versions and discuss the game in the secret development forum with other preorderers by preordering Nordenfelt. If you like to stay in touch, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, email newsletter or listen to my tweets at @black_golem.

OK, enough calls to action. Let’s see what happened since last Wednesday.

Released 0.5.2

The draft version of level 2 and the revised ingame shop where installed in Nordenfelt’s new version 0.5.2. I’ve already showed you some screenshots from the second level last week. Here is a screenshot of the new shop:

It looks a little empty at the moment. That’s because there are just three pieces of equipment to buy yet. More will come along with gameplay refinement.

Your Project Can Die Any Day

This Monday I was happily working away when my virus scanner started its regular update. Suddenly it bleeped, showed me a virus and the fun started: the shortcuts on my desktop, in my quick launch bar and my programs started to disappear. Dozens of dialogs popped up, telling me that my harddisk is massively corrupted. As you can imagine I was shocked. What if this beast deletes my project files? I backup my Subversion repositories regularly but there are always some development files not included, e.g. large Gimp or Blender files.

Rebooting in Windows’ Safe Mode stopped my cold sweat. At least there was a way to access the machine without triggering the virus again. Two hours of forum search (on my dad’s prehistoric PC which loves to crash randomly) made it clear: it’s all right, just easily fixable malware. One hour later everything was repaired and I headed to the city for a new 2TB external backup storage. No more fiddling around with partial backups due to lack of disk space. From now on I’m backing up ALL DRIVES as they are. Making images would be an even better solution but I did not investigate image software yet.

To make a long story short:

A virus can kill your project IMMEDIATELY. When was YOUR last backup?

That’s it for this week.

As mentioned before, feel free to support the project by preordering Nordenfelt. Many thanks to all the people who already bought the game. You’re awesome!

Cheers,
Thomas

Here is the new entry in Nordenfelt‘s weekly development log. There was much grey this week… You’ll understand when you see the screenshots.

But first:

You can help getting this project done, test Nordenfelt’s latest versions and discuss the game in the secret development forum with other preorderers by preordering Nordenfelt. If you like to stay in touch, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, email newsletter or listen to my tweets at @black_golem.

Now, what changed since last time?

Drafting Level 2

Drafting, drafting, drafting – all day long. Here are some wordless screenshots:

Shop Improvement

Today I’ve started improving the ingame shop. Its current version has a rather clumsy function flow. E.g. buying and equipping a weapon needs three mouse clicks. That may not sound that much but it is. The optimal click count for any functionality IS … *drum roll*:

ZERO!

Brain-reading devices are not available by now so I have to aim for the suboptimal single click. Or worse.

Win Nordenfelt!

I have decided to make subscribing to Nordenfelt’s email newsletter more attractive. From now on subscribers can win access to the secret development forum each time a new version rolls out.

So, in case you haven’t done it yet:

Subscribe and Win Nordenfelt!

That’s it for this week.

As mentioned before, feel free to support the project by preordering Nordenfelt. Many thanks to all the people who already bought the game. You’re awesome!

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

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

Here is the new Nordenfelt dev log entry for this week.

Final Level Segment: Dam

I’m working on the last segment of level 1 at the moment. It’s a huge dam where turrets will align and gun boats will cruise. It’s current 3d model revision looks like this:

Preparing Nordenfelt Presales

I’ve set myself a goal:

Presales will start early in September!

Therefore I did some research and design work for the new landing page of www.nordenfelt-thegame.com. It’s quite a prickly affair because look and feel will have impact on sales. Aside this there is much more to do before presales can start …

Goal-Driven Schedule

I’ve updated the time schedule and made it goal-driven and the features more prunable. Up to now too many of them could hardly be omitted. Further the features themselves became more scalable. Imagine sub-features of features, recursive so to speak.

I think the presales start in September is the most interesting point in this list. Nordenfelt 0.4 is quite dated now (February 2011). Presales will start with the new version 0.5.

Stay tuned for further details about the presales via RSS feed or Twitter at @black_golem.

Cheers,
Thomas

Another Wednesday, another dev log entry.

I’m quite busy fabricating background graphics at the moment. Everything gets modeled in 3D first …

… and rendered from above afterwards:

The development focus was on ground textures so far. Therefore other models like the hangar or the pier are still in their grey-box versions. But their paleness will fade within the next days.

As ever feel free to subscribe to Nordenfelt’s RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @black_golem. New insights every Wednesday.

Cheers,
Thomas