#blastion

[oakleaff]

Couldn't resist resurrecting this project with new engine tech. Spent the whole day creating the lighting system, and gotta say I'm pretty happy. "Dynamic" per-pixel lighting with normal/specular mapping and stylized dithering. Runs ok, considering it supports up to 15 simultaneous light sources at the same time.

[oakleaff]

I got this idea last night, so today instead of working on something more essetial (such as enemy AI), I added grates / doors and item spawns behind them. The idea is that this way I can easily have a place to hide chests / exits that require a key.

Also added game pausing and a “pause” effect (end of video).

[oakleaff]

Smol progress.

Enemies now have functional pathfinding & several movement states: they can just wander around randomly, patrol an area, try to chase the player, evade the player, position themselves so that they can shoot the player or seek other enemies.

Added a few collectibles/drops (keys and coins, just cosmetic at the moment) and two new guns (one is in the webm). Also a bunch of engine stuff, like streamlining the level generation and separating level collisions from lighting collisions (the grates for example have separate colliders, one box-shaped for character collisions and another with four “bars” so light can bleed through it. In theory. Just to see if I could.)

Other, smaller additions include:

Critical hits for x2 dmg

Hud info prompt (press e to open, etc)

More level textures

Pillars no longer individual instances

[oakleaff]

Juicemaxed the game, yet again. Level entrances and exits now have eerie green torches, and made a basic “cutscene” system as well (!).

I can rudimentarily control player and camera movement, for example, when exiting the level to get a sequence like in the vid. Still lot of bugs to fix and things to adjust, but the basics are there.

Also, the game “loop” is now functional, meaning I can actually find the level exit and proceed to the next floor while stuff like exp, gold and items stay the same. (Mermory is leaking with the level gen, though...)

[oakleaff]

Been busy with actual work, so haven’t really devved in a while. A little bit of progress has, however, been made. The game now has a functional loop, complete with a rudimentary main menu and level progression. I suspect I’m starting to get VRAM issues with the game, since if I try to record the level generation with OBS, the level gen (which relies on surfaces) fails almost always. When not recording, it works as it should.

[oakleaff]

Item system basics are now in. The player can pick up items (currently only guns & armour, and armour doesn’t really DO anything yet) and the HUD displays information correctly. Some more minor things include:

-Torch stands that can be destroyed by melee attacks

-4 Gun types implemented

-Enemy damage counter tries to merge damage numbers, needs tweaking

[oakleaff]

Another video for showing off.

The spider enemies now walk on the ceiling and drop down on an unsuspecting player. “Poison” status effect is in, and spider bites will poison the player (purple flashing). The levels can have water in them, complete with water particles, and falling down a chasm also kills the player.

[oakleaff]

Progress, mostly "under the hood" stuff.

Re-implemented the level ceiling, this time just flat and textured. This in turn made the lighting look stupid, since it was actually just a 2d shadowmap, so shadows and lights on the floor were also getting projected on the ceiling.

So, I made another lightmap and tweaked the shader. One lightmap is the "floor level" while the other is "ceiling level", and the shader interpolates between them depending on a pixel's Z value. I also halved the lightmap's resolution, without any significant loss in quality.

Pillars are now round (well, hexagonal) instead of angular, and level walls have pillars placed on the corners.

Sword hitbox needs tweaking to accurately place the hit effects, which have been added for both sword and bullet hits (debris).

Split the level model into chunks (level is 256x256 cells, while the chunks are 64x64 cells each. Also tried fixing the worst memory leaks, but some still elude me.