Download it!

An Appeal

Version 0.4 has two major improvements: a new GUI and frame rate issue fixes. Now I’m interested in your feedback for them.

Firstly I’m interested if the GUI works for you, what you like about it and what should be cut. I’m aware that it’s consistency is far from complete. This happened by accident but constitutes branches in style. So there is a degree of choice.

Secondly I’m not sure if the frame rate issues are completely fixed. Therefore I need some profiling data from other machines than mine. I’ve added a profiling system which creates a file named profile.csv beside Nordenfelt.exe. It would be great if you could send this file to improve@nordenfelt-thegame.com. Don’t worry, I don’t spy you out. You can inspect the file with any text editor, MS Excel or Open Office to see what’s in there.

I’m looking forward to your replies.

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

Shadows Finished

I’m always pretty lazy during Yuletide. There is hardly time left to work between all these celebrations and events.

Nevertheless, I’ve finished drop shadow rendering yesterday:

Read this if you are interested in how this sausage was made.

What’s Next?

The next big points on my to-do list are:

• reactivate adventure mode
• online highscore board
• create real game-play in available levels
• finish graphics in available levels

I don’t know which one should come first. The order basically depends on the time point I’m going to switch over to closed beta. The alpha phase should end in the near future. That means Nordenfelt will start to cost a few bucks. It will be a fraction of the final price. Purchasers will get full access to an exclusive area where they can download all versions and can take part in the further development process. Finally they get the full game for free when it’s done.

Going beta at the end of February seems feasible. After a year building the engine it’s time to leave the demo state.

I’m looking forward to welcome you in the exclusive beta area!

Cheers,
Thomas

2010 is coming to its end. Time to recapitulate what developing Nordenfelt tough me so far.

What Went Right

Early Showcases

The best way to know how your game will perform in the wilderness is by sending it right there. At the beginning I was afraid showing ugly test graphics and features which won’t make it into the final version. I thought people would laugh and ignore my project immediately. But that never happened. There’s the phrase “no interest in how the sausage is made”. Not true, at least for game development.

Dumping Thoughts on the Internet

Posting thoughts, feelings and lessons-learned gives your product a human touch. It shows people that you are not a cold, capitalistic corporation but a human being. They will remember your best/worst hour if you share it with them. And they will remember your game.

Learned How to Handle Feedback

Feedback is a double-edged sword. It can improve your game or push it off track. Don’t follow each advice. Most of them are well-intentioned but may not marry up with your own vision. Finally you can’t be everybody’s darling.

3rd-Party Libraries and Tools

What should I explain here? Simply save work time by using external libraries and tools as much as you can. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Data-Driven Content

That’s a common trade-off: should I hard-code this or define it in an additional file/database/whatever? The former is the fast solution at short sight but the latter becomes apparent to be the better choice in most cases. At the latest tweaking for game-play will extrude many properties in a bunch of files. So why delay it?

What Went Wrong

Lack of Exact Vision

In the shmup genre some distinct game mechanics evolved over time. There are game-play styles like danmaku, maniac or memorizer. Scroll movement can be vertical, horizontal, isometric, inside an arena, etc. From the very beginning I knew that Nordenfelt will become a vertical shooter. Reading about all the different game mechanics and scoring systems soon confused me. What I should go for? Each time I’ve settled for one game mechanic I became aware of two new ones. As long as there is no clear goal you can’t follow the shortest path to it. It’s that simple.

No Clue About Visual Style

In the early days of Nordenfelt I wanted it to have sprite art. It’s the graphics style I like the most in shmups. Some investigation into this visual style made it clear that sprite art would be the wrong choice. Modern high resolution monitors and the cumbersome nature of sprite art made it hardly applicable for me. Prerendered 3D models were the simplest solution I could imagine. This insight took nearly 2 months. In this case my lack of artistic experience wasted many hours.

Less Design Results in More Redesign

Quick and dirty hacks may solve problems immediately. In the long run they become hurdles where you have to jump over each time you alter code around it. Soon they become real show-stoppers. So you have to fix them by redesigning this part of code. The longer you wait the more work (exponentially growing) it will be.

Back-End Features

One of my favorite interests is procedural content generation. I’ve planned using PCG heavily in Nordenfelt. So I started off by implementing algorithms for building levels, distributing enemies and concatenating these levels to an appropriate story. It was really fun… for me! But the game-play did not profit from PCG. Therefore I switched over to handcrafted levels. IMO it’s important to be able to design levels by hand first before you can write algorithms mimicking the design tasks. The human factor won’t disappear from creating game-play in the near future. But PCG can boost the boring parts a lot.

Forging Nails Yourself

When you want to do every part of the game yourself don’t be surprised if everything lasts longer than planned. Forging your own nails can be rewarding work but buying them in a hardware store saves you a lot of time.

goto 2011;

That’s it for my very first year in my career as indie game developer. I hope you enjoyed the journey so far and keep following me here, at www.blackgolem.com, on Twitter or Facebook for another year. We will meet again in 2011.

Happy new year,
Thomas

Currently I’m adding drop shadows to flying objects. What I like the most here is its scalability, as I’ve written about here. Shadows can be everything from simple black circles to realistically casted, semi-transparent drop shadows. To get started I’ve implemented the former:

Further versions could be blurred circles with different radii, depending on their casters sizes. The best quality would be shadows exactly derived from the objects, blurred and displaced depending on flight height and shape-changing according to their casters states. I want to keep it as simple as possible yet matching the overall graphics style. The effort ramps up quickly.

Cheers,
Thomas

Nordenfelt 0.3 is coming and it will have a new level and new enemies.

The whole procedure of designing/modeling/texturing/rendering of level parts and enemies is sooo time consuming. These tasks are millstones around the neck in times of feature testing. Therefore I’ve entered “MS Paint mode” (again). Rule of thumb: graphics must be as simple as possible but have to represent the intention.

Second level, MS Paint graphics

The primitive shapes and gaudy colors may bring you eye cancer. But hey, they are functional! Improved test graphics won’t be as distinguishable and may be kept in the game forever for compromise. These ugly geometrics will never survive ’til final release. Critics would eat me alive!

The testing focus of version 0.3 lies on gameplay. Graphics will follow – in beta versions, starting before 2011 (hopefully).

Cheers,
Thomas

I’ve just finished the basic version of the particle system preview in Nordenfelt. This new mode is for dev purposes only and just can show predefined particle effects. They can be altered in any external XML editor while the preview is running. A mouse click creates a particle effect at the cursor and a context menu allows to change the active particle system type and background color:

I wanted to keep this stuff as simple as possible. Visual feedback is imperative when you want to create particle systems that don’t suck. The shortest path here was to build the preview into the game. It’s primitive but it works – just like me. 🙂

The video was made with Screenr so its quality is rather bad. I don’t know if Screenr or my workstation has to be blamed. I just wanted to test this video recording service. Nevertheless, the choppy video should give you an idea what the preview mode is all about.

Cheers,
Thomas