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

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

Upgrade Triggered Refactoring Avalanche

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 Arcade 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:

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

Just assembled the todo list for Nordenfelt 0.2. Man, that is going to be a big load of work!

I don’t know which points this version finally will contain but I will start with redesigning the player’s ship. Monday or Tuesday should bring you a list of rough designs from which you can choose your favorites.

That’s all for now. Weekend awaits!

Cheers,
Thomas