tentacles of doom

Some results from my creature creator.

The two differ significantly in structure and coloration while retaining a standard base body shape and color pattern. Extensions from the central body can resemble tentacles, wings, or ray-like tissue flaps. They beat at the air in a sinusoidal rhythm (hard to see in a still photo, of course).

This week, I plan to get them moving through the cave. I also have plans to add at least one more type of creature before moving the project into another phase (namely, the “why are we here and what are we doing?” phase).

silhouette saturday

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






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.

the great twenty-four hour thing

 I was just watching one of those videos where a game development team has to develop a game in 24 hours. It got me thinking, wow, I wonder if I could do that. Then I recalled that I already have. It was called “working at a startup”.

Chris! We need you to invent a completely new product offering over the weekend or we’ll lose a massive contract!

That happened more than once, actually. Good times.

caves are easy (and fun)

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.

soaring majestically above the foam

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.

not feeling so foamy anymore

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.

service resumed, for now

Everything seems to be in order. I have to say that WordPress is looking pretty good these days. I dumped it a few years back in favor of Habari, a lightweight alternative that sadly isn’t seeing much action anymore. Though I wish I wasn’t locked into a MySQL back-end (higher cost for me), I appreciated how quickly I was able to get back up with WordPress. Thanks, folks!

Ironically, I’m going dark tomorrow for the SOPA/PIPA protest. See you on the other side.

 

technical difficulties

Tumblr seems to have yanked my blog without warning or reason. Thanks, folks. I’m back to self-hosting; probably for good. It’ll be a little hectic around here as I reassemble things.

pavo has escaped

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.