No More Free Time!

So my new year resolution to release one thing every month was a failure. It turns out I have even less free time than I thought. I am afraid it will continue to be so with E3 around the corner and my company, Respawn Entertainment, having "something" planned for it. ;-) I will be dedicating my time on that... and it's something exciting!

For the time being, I will just release what I have done so far. The idea was to make a small Dig Dug type of game. Maybe I will finish it at some point in the near future, but I think that is unlikely with my other commitments right now! Anyway, the download even includes the level editor (diged.exe) if you want to mess with that.

Download: dig-release-20130311.zip

... Or you can just watch the video below!

Almost there... !

Not almost there, actually. :) This is just a progress update.

I hooked up XAudio 2 sound support. It's good to hear those tiny, little feet thumping around again. My wife is helping me make some music now. :) The editor is also quite functional. It has undo/redo, you can place and erase tiles, save and load levels... I don't know what else more you would need! I even added support to rotate the camera, using Maya-like controls (alt + mouse button). You can see it in that screenshot below.

I recently finished adding frustum culling for the rendering. Now I plan on looking into sharing that spatial partitioning code with the physics system (right now collision detection is O(n^2)). Once that is done, I think I can start working on the game...

In other news, I finished a real-life Gnomon course for Maya awhile ago. Below is my finished, programmer art and the reference picture it is meant to be based on. Nothing great, but I did learn the basics of using Maya.

It was a pain making the trek down to Hollywood for class. After work. Twice a week. On top of a fairly heavy homework load. But I think it was worth it. It has given me an insight into what real 3D artists do and a greater appreciation for their work. It has also been a great help for my real work (which I still can't talk about). No, I don't make art, but knowing how Maya works helps with debugging.

My 2013 New Year's resolution is to release "something" around the end of each month (whenever the weekend falls, as that's my only free time). So I plan to release a "game" by the end of January. It won't be Battle Balloons, but something else. So that I can actually reach this goal, I have something simpler in mind (but hopefully still pretty cool). I can't wait to reveal it!

Anyway that's it from me... until the next post!

Editor Is Minimally Functional

I've been doing some more Battle Balloons work in the little pieces of spare time I can scavenge.

The editor is minimally functional now, so I can finally start making the actual game. Too bad I foresee even less free-time in the short-term... too many other things happening at the moment (both work and personal)! So this will probably be the last update for awhile. :(

If you want, give it a spin (not sure if it will work, as it's not seen much testing at all). Just download the .exe below and run ballooned.exe for the editor and balloon.exe for the game. By default the game loads the level, data/game/start.level.lua, but you can specify a different one as a command-line argument.

Good luck!

Download: battle_balloons-release-20121005.zip

Native GUI editor and a bit more...

Been awhile since the last update, so here it is...

As usual, I'm busy with real work (at Respawn Entertainment), so Battle Balloons has been put on the back burner. :( But I have been occasionally chipping away at it. So far, the major changes have been:

1. rolling my own 2D physics engine (for multiplayer support later),
2. Direct3D 11 based renderer (OpenGL ES will still be supported too),
3. Lua scripting (also replaces YAML as the serialization format), and
4. a level editor that now uses native GUI controls (only testing with the Win32 C API for now, but I want to support other OS's too).

I really should stop messing around and finish the actual game, but I can't help get distracted with wanting to learn new things. Once this editor is done, I'll get right to it!

P.S. Also, Abbie (the community manager at Respawn) did an interview of me here!

Hello from Los Angeles

The demo for the The Darkness II came out today (for Xbox Live Gold subscribers only - everyone else will need to wait about another week). It's an exciting feeling knowing the product of so much combined hard work  is finally out there for the world to play!

In other news: after finishing up on D2, I have since moved to Los Angeles to join another group of rad people - Respawn Entertainment! Our current project is top secret, so I can't say much except I'm really looking forward to it. :)

Anyway, download The Darkness II demo and give it a spin! When I played the demo tonight, it had been two months since I picked it up. I'm proud to say it still feels rock-solid!

P.S. Battle Balloons work continues! I'll post some progress soon...

Quad-wielding in slow-motion

Another trailer for The Darkness II came out on GameSpot today, showcasing the quad-wielding mechanic in our game! It reminded me of the first time I showed my mum screenshots of our game. One of her reactions was it was "too cruel" and had too much "terror". I can only imagine what she might think of this latest video below. :) Much love, Mum!

Here's Johnny Powell!

Here's the latest trailer for the game I've been working on for the past two years, The Darkness II. It's the best one yet, IMHO. :) My life lately has been focused on hammering out those final bugs for certification (where we send a build to Microsoft and Sony to approve). We're almost there!

WIP on placeable tiles

Quick video on initial placeable stuff (with snapping) for the level editor. I have been messing around with engine/low-level stuff for such a long time now, it's refreshing to see signs of my game returning again! Left to do is code to merge tile meshes together (no seams) and hooking it up to my barely-tested output serializer.

In unrelated news, my fiance wanted me to make a simple website for our wedding. So I took the opportunity to learn and mess with the Google App Engine and Go programming language. You can go to it here, but there is not much to see, unless you have a Google account that is actually invited. :(

What I can say though is the experience working with the Google App Engine has been pleasant. Quite easy and fast to get things up and running (compared to Java EE).

UPDATE: I put up a newer vid showing actual static boxes being placed! That's pretty much all I could get done with the little spare time I had for the weekend. :(