Oops, it's been over two months again since I last remembered to update this.

To be fair RL has been increasingly hectic after the redundancies at work and the increased workload for myself so I've lost a lot of time/energy to such.

In fact I've only spent the time building upon my original simple particle emitting thing to making a full out particle engine that'll be able to do what I want for a few games and potentially more.

My 'quest', as it were, for the last couple of months has been to produce a swirly particle! In particular for a summoning animation in my testbed where the particle spawns on the ground and travels to the height of the thing being summoned whilst moving around it in a circular motion. When the unit has finished being summoned these particles are then flung outward instead in a 'pop'.

Today I managed it!


Okay, so it doesn't really show in a static screenshot,...

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I almost managed a sort of quarterly update this time!

Still haven't been posting here because of a lack of serious 'breakthroughs', plus RL has been a pain with work so slowing me a lot more then I'd like, but I thought I'd make log of my activities over the last couple of months so I could look back in years to come and think 'wtf?'.

First up, not seen after I wrote the last entry I put a hiatus on working with AI; I've kept and progressed the 'awareness' grid I started up (so an AI knows all the moves it can take in the next, say, 20 squares. I used it in the runaway tests for the AI to work out the best route that keeps distance amongst other criteria) but for the moment I initially shifted my attention elsewhere since there's so many things I have to dabble with to learn how to make a full game with just OpenGl. -.-

My main focus has been on UI and I've managed to get up a very patchwork framework of windows that vaguely sort of rips off Windows.Forms but being much simpler. Still,...

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Wow, over a year since I actually updated this blog. Oops. Still, now that blogs are no longer on the main page anymore I should probably look to write in this more often about development.

Development certainly hasn't stopped, just in the past year I dumped the SDL library I was using (SdlDotNet), finally got around to actually starting to learn and use OpenGl directly where I've started to slowly put my own tools together for such. It hasn't exactly produced anything worth showing, but it's certainly been fulfilling to me as a person with learning something new. Not only that, but now I'll see graphical glitches in games or clipping areas and I'll know why they're happening. That always surprises me. I'm still keeping to 2D though, since producing something 3D ups the skills required from me quite severely.

At the moment I've basically been producing a bunch of mini-apps to test certain things (Water flow, Map generation, Pathfinding, etc) as I gradually learn different elements of...

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About time I actually posted something here just to note I haven't stopped tinkering with things. A combination of a hard drive crash and the fact the library I was using hadn't been updated in over a year/didn't do what I wanted led me to start again forgoing the use of a library and using OpenGl directly.
I'm not very good at it. :p
Still, have been slowly learning things as well as raising my expectations for what the game's engine will process. I'm way back at adding tile transitions back in again and just created sensible maps, but now I've the two major improvements of:
Tile by tile lighting - It's not a smooth transition, but does mean I'll be able to have truly dark caves that require a lightsource/lamp in the players hand. It also allows for tinted lights; in the (poor) screenshot the badly drawn lampposts are giving off a slightly yellow light as opposed to pure white. This'll prove useful when I get about to the obligatory 'giant stomach' level with a red tint!
Z layers (Or...

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Wee, I'm utterly terrible at keeping up with these things! But thought I'd write something to record 'progress' so far.
There isn't any!
Well, okay, not that bad.. More I've been distracted by working on a non-vore game I've been writing (Some typical sci-fi space ship thing); this tends to get a little more priority as I can show it to folk I know in RL, whereas a vore game is sort of secret for obvious reasons. :> It's not all bad though, as at least some things on the other game will eventually be usuable on the vore game (Mainly lessons I've learnt on how-not-to-do-things)

Of course at this point I'm still not even sure what level of complexity I want to put into the game and the general theme. I've been gravitating toward making a 'team' game where the player would control more then one character. I also have a desire to built an RTS sort of model with the player having to set up and maintain a colony and deal with things such as monster-attacks.
That's long term though,...

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