Been playing with this for creature creation in my latest game project.

click me

I’ve written code to expand the silhouette into a 3D mesh, and now I’m working on code to generate a texture skin to wrap around the mesh. The idea is to generate creatures on the fly. We’ll see how well it works.

So, I’ve been working on my next gaming project. I’d planned to set it in a dark and tangled forest, but my first crack at the visuals didn’t inspire me. Next, I started hashing out an idea that was something like an RPG set on a roller coaster. I haven’t thrown that one out. However, I wanted something else to work on while I let it stew. What could I do?

I turned back to my forest prototype, which had quite a bit of useful terrain and physics code implemented, and realized that I could project the terrain through the xz plane to create a cave. The result?

I’m tentatively referring to it as “caves are easy”. Because they are. Not sure where this one wants to go but I’m cooking up a few odd things for it.

As promised, the Soar object library is now checked into GitHub. I’ve been developing a new project with it, and the showstopper bugs seem to be gone. Accordingly, I have deprecated the Foam library.

Foam, the library I created to wrap WebGL, is getting a little moldy. It was written at a time when I wasn’t well-read on the possibilities of objects in JavaScript, and I was just excited about creating 3D graphics in a browser. I think it’s time to retire the faithful old dog and let it slumber by the fire.

So what’s to replace it? I’ve written a new library called Soar. It’s not checked in yet, nor is it well-tested, but I’ll be doing both in the days to come. Soar is fully prototypal and object-based, and avoids the increasingly embarrassing code Foam requires to handle even the most basic inheritance.

I was considering updating Fissure and pavo to run on the new library, but I’d rather not. I think they all sort of belong together in a way. On with the new.

I’m releasing the code for Fissure into the wild. Find it on github.

If you look to the sidebar, you’ll see a new item. Yes, pavo is complete.

So, what the hell is it? I had originally planned it as an RPG, but it didn’t want to go that way. Instead, it’s become an experiment in interactive fiction. The scope is not as large as I had originally planned, in either physical or narrative space. I did have the option of expanding it, but it’s spawned a lot of new ideas that I wanted to work on, so I felt the best thing to do was find a good stopping point and wrap it up.

It’s been tested on Chrome and Firefox under Windows and Linux. I have noticed an odd bug in FF/Windows (and nowhere else) where the game space stops redrawing if the window is resized. I will be looking at that. If you notice anything else, please drop me a line.

Oh, and I’ll be posting the source code on github today as well.

I’ve completed the rough script for pavo. What remains is writing the metadata–in its own way, as much of a challenge as the script itself, as this is where the game logic is really implemented–and running through as much testing as I can before the itch to release becomes unbearable.

Anyone who’s played through Fissure (and I have no idea if anyone has) might notice a few similar ideas leaking through in pavo. Thing is, Fissure and pavo share a common ancestor: a game called Transients that I never got around to creating. In that game, you would have assumed the role of a robotic probe imprinted with the personality (and certain memories) of a human being. The goal would have been to explore a space cave (there’s the Fissure connection) as well as your own past (and there’s a hint of what’s to come in pavo).

Still hoping for a mid-January release.

“Major coding has been completed.” I so want that on a t-shirt, or a gravestone. It seems that in the last week I’ve completely rewritten the dialogue code several times as my ideas change.

I do have strong ideas about how I want the player to interact with pavo and what I want to be going on underneath. I’m trying out some models that I’ve had over the last couple of years regarding how dialogue, and by extension storytelling, can work. I’ll cover that in more detail once the game’s released. For now, the work continues. I’m not moving the release date out of its somewhat vague “mid-January” area just yet.

Happy? New! Year.

Major coding has been completed on pavo, and I’m just now writing the script. It’s coming along nicely, but I’m certain the game won’t be available until mid-January. I may be posting a few choice excerpts between now and then, either to here or Twitter. In the meantime, here’s a screen shot of the new dialogue, er, dialog.

It’s running from a test script at the moment.

The actual game is in English, I promise.