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posts filed under: general

TowerFall Tournament Finals



Check out me playing TowerFall at the Humble Bundle 2014 World Invitational Tournament vs. my good friend and training buddy Will Courtney. It was a best of 5 set and each of us had to play through amazing opponents to get to the finals. Good times!
good times yay!
Posted March 28th 2014 3:29 PM (General)
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The Assassin Prince

The Assassin Prince
It's no secret that TowerFall might be my favorite game made in the past decade. The local TowerFall community in Phoenix is quite strong, and we play almost every night. We've been playing the beta for the recent PC and PS4 release for a few months now, and over that time I've collected a whole lot of replays.

Since the game is finally out I'm going to start sharing all of my awesome replays on The Assassin Prince. I pretty much always play pink, so every replay is going to feature the pink archer somehow.

Also, next week is Game Developers Conference and I'm looking forward to playing so much TowerFall with everyone, YEAH!
towerfall gdc good times yay!
Posted March 14th 2014 2:17 PM (General)
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Bidness Crads

Image


Get one of these rare KPULV collectors items at Game Developers Conference! :D
yay! gdc good times
Posted March 13th 2014 12:30 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Some Shaders

Dev Log: Some Shaders
One of the things I miss about working in FlashPunk and working with a bunch of bitmaps and blitting to the screen is the super easy color overlay blending. FlashPunk had an Image blending mode called Tint and it could be used in place of Multiply and it is amazing for doing effects like fading an entire sprite to a specific color. The world of rendering quads and triangles I don't have such a luxury, but I do have shaders.

I've been working on the building islands animation, and here's a really fast version of it:

Image


At the end of it when the island pops out it's silhouetted with solid white. The white fades to cyan, and also fades back to the normal art at the same time. To get this effect I used a simple shader to handle a color overlay.
uniform sampler2D texture;

uniform vec4 overlayColor;



void main() {

	vec4 pixcol = texture2D(texture, gl_TexCoord[0].xy);

	vec4 outcol = mix(pixcol, overlayColor, overlayColor.a);

	outcol.a = pixcol.a;

	gl_FragColor = outcol;

}
I also use this code for enemies as well. When they get hit they turn red for a brief moment. I use code in the C# end to determine the color and intensity of the overlay and pass it along to the shader.
var overlay = Util.ScaleClamp(Combatant.Stun, 0, Combatant.StunMax, 0, 1);

var color = new Color(1, 0.2f, 0.1f, overlay);



ImageSpineAnim.Shader.SetParameter("overlayColor", color);
Soon I'll probably make some sort of system that allows me to easily add a bunch of color overlays to the shader and automatically figure out the final color for the shader to use. I'll probably also use the shader for a bunch of different effects down the road.
shaders gamedev dev log csharp programming
Posted March 12th 2014 9:22 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Slow and Steady

Dev Log: Slow and Steady
I've been tinkering with a lot of systems over the past couple of days. Mostly stuff involving enemies, and some other things involving building islands and structures on the islands.

At some point last week I sat down and tried to figure out path finding with moderate success. I have something working, but it's pretty dang laggy when it has to figure out a path. As far as I know I'm just doing straight up A* path finding and I copied the psuedocode from Wikipedia right into the game. I started looking into using different data structures for storing things to hopefully speed it up, but honestly I still have no idea what I'm doing and I don't know how to use some of these fancy things that people suggest (priority heaps, or something?)

I took a break from that to tinker with placing structures on islands, and trying to figure out how I want to animate the building process for building a structure on an island. This is also a tough one to solve, and I'm not sure if frame by frame stuff in Flash would be good, or if structures should be animated with skeletons similar to the enemies using Spine.

Image


Back in the world of enemies I've started experimenting with behavior trees for how they should interact with the world. It seems like a good way to do things, but part of me feels like it's over-engineering. Setting up a whole series of classes for the system to run the behaviors, and then every simple little task then has to be a behavior command... I kind of like systems like this, but I wonder if it will be worth it in the end working on a system that takes a lot of up-front work to get running.

It's definitely a very different way of doing things outside of the game jam environment. I've made a lot of cool stuff in game jams, but it's all been on top of really odd code that doesn't leave a lot of room for expansion. I'm trying not to design or code myself into a corner when it comes to working on this new game, so things are going a little slower than they did for Offspring Fling, but it's also probably due to the fact that I'm in pretty unfamiliar territory. Working on something that's not a platformer can be pretty tough!
gamedev dev log programming
Posted March 11th 2014 5:03 PM (General)
3 Comments

Dev Log: Workin' Away

Dev Log: Workin' Away
I've been pretty heads down on my game project for the past couple of days. I've managed to fix a few bugs in Otter as well, but I'm putting a hold on any official updates due to issues with the Spine license that I'm pretty sad about.

The Spine license only allows people with a full copy of Spine to download and use the official Spine runtimes. I didn't know this at the time when I created a simple Spine graphic type for Otter. The situation I'm in now is trying to figure out how to easily provide that Spine graphic type for people using Otter, but also separate it from Otter so that I can distribute it only to people that have the Spine license... argh.

In the wild world of my new game, I've been just working on some art related tasks. I've been jumping all over the place and working on totally different things on each day, but that ends up working out because it keeps things fresh and interesting.

That's all for now! Things are going to be pretty hectic for me in the next 2 or 3 weeks, as GDC is fast approaching and I'm also going to be traveling a little bit before then. If you're going to GDC, we should hang out and get sushi!
gamedev dev log otter
Posted March 6th 2014 12:02 PM (General)
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