Adventures in Game Development

I’ve been busy with the holidays and now i’m working on a new game project with some actual artists (as in, not my crappy art).  I thought to myself “I have to jump on this”… so my own Crypt Keeper game will have to wait a bit.  The good news is that i’ll be writing stuff for this game that i’ve been meaning to get to with CryptKeeper :).

I thought i’d post a quick movie of what the game currently looks like (that way, no downloads are required to see it in action — it’s short!)

Much time has passed and new things can be seen in my demo. The tree limbs are now being rendered with 3d cylinders and textured. I had to take the branches off the limbs to reduce the number of calculations I’m doing. It’s currently being very wasteful with math and will need to change so i can calculate & render branches too… which will make the limbs look much prettier.

Here is a screen shot of the game in it’s present state.

each person has little animations now, and so does the evil tree flinging the people. It’s coming along

Here is a sketch of the backdrop that I will be using in the game. Just some town/local village for now… I’m still experimenting with my digital tablet. I sort have a direction of where i want to go with the look/feel & game play of Crypt Keeper, but there’s also a giant amorphous blob of unknown there too. Lights will be pouring out of the building windows, and from the lamp.

And here is what i have so far of the face for one of the evil trees. again, still experimenting!

Here is a screen shot from the current version of my game-in-progress.

Please note the hand-drawn (with my new digital tablet) people roaming around on the ground. my own art, of which i am proud

Also note the non-textured mono-colored tree (it’s much more visible in game). It has a number of animated limbs that seek out, grab and fling the people on the ground. It was dead simple getting this working in 2 dimensions… but moving to 3 dimensions was much less trivial than i was hoping it would be. After running that gauntlet, i have a profound respect for 3D graphics programmers. Wow.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the tree textured for this post. It would have certainly looked better on my debut post to have a textured tree moving around in 3D, but i (a) didn’t have a texture actually drawn for the tree yet, and (b) I’m currently rendering the tree with lines (not polygons) in OpenGL… which cannot be textured. This is OK though… since I have no readers yet, I’m confident I can have textures on the tree before anyone sees it

Hello and welcome to the very first post of my very own blog!

My intent for this blog (at least in the present) is simply to be a development journal for my current side project Crypt Keeper. I will make posts whenever i make significant changes to the game and I will try to touch on “what went right” and “what went wrong” in each post. In this way I hope to produce something that may (or may not) be useful to somebody at some point. HUGE goals, i know.
You can read more about Crypt Keeper & download it HERE.

I also recently purchased a digital tablet to do my own game art; I will post my crappy (hopefully approaching not-as-crappy) art for you to gawk at. Someday, if my art transcends the realm of the crappy, I will make it available as ’stupid-programmer-art’ for other programmers to use in their own projects.

Someday soon i hope to have not-so-crappy games that i can submit to competitions and be famous (and awesome) like 2Dboy & Kloonigames