Let There Be Cowbell

As promised, here's a look at a few pretties. We have a level segment with a new palette, and a new badguy, the froggy. These are the entry level badguys, so they don't put up much of a fight. Still blow up nice though.

I've also snuck in the healing item in the game: mushrooms.

So, coming on from last time's discussion of mesh animation, this update shows more examples of it. All the effects and character animations are done in the mesh animation manner, and hopefully to a consistent style. I still like it, still planning on writing a more efficient Content Pipeline plugin to pack them for me.

The art style is still holding together, I think. There's enough range in it, that I think I can cover all the locales I'm thinking of, and the gradient in the character of the environments I hope to depict over the story. I wish I had some time to sit down and concept out, but honestly at this point it's more profitable to just plow along. It takes an hour or so to model a new badguy. Bouncing back and forth between code and art (ignoring the vertigo), it was about 5 hours to get the frogs up and running from scratch. It's still a discovery process though, so I'm not too hung up on polishing yet. Getting everything working is first priority.

I have the design for the first level laid out now. It happens entirely underground, in a Zelda like dungeon configuration, complete with boss character. I'll stay focused on getting that done before moving on with any other portion of the game. I'm considering putting it up for public download at that point, to get a little feedback on how it feels.

Depends, really, on how embarrassing the whole thing is by then.

Before anyone asks, there's nothing clever about the cave scene. Reflections are the good old fashioned "render everything upside down", and the caustics are nothing more than a bit of fancy texture scrolling, where the x component is a sin wave on the y component. Sometimes, you just don't need clever to be fancy.

I'll be moving home for the next few weeks, so this might be my last post for a while. On the bright side: I'll be getting some new gear when I get to my new place, so perhaps I'll get around to trying some of those clever bits. At present, this PC is pretty much nipping at the limits of its little NVidia Ti4400 graphics card!