Spirit Day and Blockade Map

Been working on a death-match map for blockade, still works with the power progress I've decided to keep that consistent throughout the game. Been interesting designing maps with a heavier emphasis on verticle mobility and jump distances. Especially since most the plat-former stuff I've done before besides my Kirby map for CS has been quite linear. So mixing Multi-player pathing with plat-forming paths has been a good challenge so far.

The map also contains teleport/portal like pipes and moving platforms. Been ill for the first time in awhile yesterday but i got around to redoing one of my paintings for Spirit Day http://stormandy.deviantart.com/art/Spirit-Day-Inner-Universe-333255181

Blockade Progress 18th oct

Been 10 days since my last post so I figured I'd post another update on the games progress. 

I've got quite far mostly over the last 4-5 days, sorted out the camera, planned out the player characters proportions, which are very similar to Bomberman. Made icons for the movement abilities (the icon in the top right hand corner of the screen) sorted out a health and power bar. Tested out some basic split-screen.

Little update for the progress with my Unreal Game Blockade

So i've got an atlas (1 texture maps) for all my 64x64 materials and cut it up into 16x16. Got the ideas from Minecraft textures packs/sheets. Using the material editor I've divided up the texture space and altered the UV's to view one section and offset the UV's for each material I've made referencing to the same texture.

Also used the same material set-up to pixelize drop the rez of the results in the sky-dome materials to create I nice looking voxel sky. The done the same to one my own grass textures for a quick floor placeholder.

I've coded the destructible blocks to store an up-datable material instance, so I can offset the uv's of a texture which stores a damage overlay for my materials, I can eventually make a better looking and unique one for each material however for now I've made a quick generic ones for testing purposes.

Scalar Paramater setup which is passed to the code which calculates the blocks health percentage remaining and uses a case statement to update the block to the appropriate UV space of the damage overlay.

 Test texture

Soldiering on

Just played through a bit of Battalion Wars 2 for an hour or so, got some new rechargeable batteries only to find one of my Wii motes has died no reason. Cheap modern Nintendo for ya, wish there were more games like it preferably for the PC though, I'm short sighted so seeing the blurry low rez TV isn't an option gotta wear my glasses just so I can still barely see. It's a nice game but i wish there was a skirmish mode like Advance Wars. The theme tune is pretty awesome....

I've been a pretty crap mood for the last 4-5 hours, started the day quite well with a load of Uscript theory and a bit of Uscripting. Going to try get another hour or so of it in today before i crash. Decided i'm going to spend the next 2 months working on my unreal game and maybe try and put it up on Greenlight if i continue on with it from there.

Playing Battalion Wars reminded me of one my favorite GBA games Advance Wars 2 : Black Hole Rising and how awesome some the midis are for it

Sami's Theme

Grit's Theme

Game Expo and a day of Magic

Been down to EuroGamer Expo down at Earls Court in London on the 27/28th which went well didn't find the Indie stall till 3 hours before i left though, which was the best part for me really. After so much traveling followed by a whole day of Magic Draft for the new set, i can finally sit down and rest and get back to reading more of the UDN.

I met some pretty interesting indie devs down at EuroGamer, whilst play-testing a game called Proteus i recognized from a website a friend had sent me. The programmer for Proteus  spoke to me whilst i was discussing the game with another play tester who was insistent on finding a meaning/goal to the game trying to follow the stars. We got talking about the game, sprites and programming in general and i mentioned that i've been working on my voxel art game in unreal with growing entities and that I've been trying to find resources to help me learn algorithms for growing patterns and other theory. He told me to just drop him an email and he'd quickly try gather some links of the resources he used which is pretty awesome, so I'm going to send a email later today. Been practicing and writing notes on all the UnrealScript state commands and syntax and practicing compiling some really basic test entities with demo states.


I met a few other indie devs one working a relaxing puzzle/exploration game in Unity called Kairo which i quite liked, it reminded me of TFC(Team Fortress Classic) and CS (Counter Strike) Jump/Explore Maps with more music. Another 2 were making a side scrolling jumping/rhythm game similar to the likes of Bit Trip Runner with some smoothly animated vector graphics, which caught my attention for the wrong reasons at first but i got into them. Names slipped my mind so I'll update it with the name later, i also quite liked a game called Barbariball i think.

Been thinking about setting up a Specular sheet for  my terrain pixels since specular maps show so much properties for a material and i don't feel the need to keep the lighting style too retro may as well make use of the unreal engines visuals. Considering normal maps also and maybe even different geometry meshes for blocks done it a voxel style of course like my gun meshes.

Went to a place in Liverpool to play a Magic the Gathering draft with friends and my best friends family which was quite good, minus the occasional stuck up rule nerd. Always like doing drafts for Magic since they always introduce small new mechanics which completely change how the game plays. Its like a endless resource for game mechanic ideas and some of my best mod and game ideas stem from them in some way or another. Also love reading the art since they're on small cards they usually always have a stronger focus on thumbnail composition and silhouette.

Got a nice shiny Slime Molding Card and another normal and a lot of populate cards a new mechanic which allows you to make a copy of a token card you own on the battlefield. So my deck was centered around that. Put a larger emphasis on the difference between normal and token creatures which was normally quite a subtle part of the game in most Magic I've played previously.