New project: Short tales of a tall man

This is a screenshot of a graphics test I just did... I'm considering using a heavily modified version of my GFPS engine for this new game; "Shorts tales of a tall man"... well... that's not the title of the new project, but I am hoping to make a series of games based around the "slender man mythos" (quite interesting stuff, look it up)... This screenshot was just of me raising the resolutions for entity displays and wall testures... it seems to still run fine. The game itself WILL NOT be a first-person-shooter... It will remain first person, but be more like a first person adventure mixed with a visual novel... No guns will be in the game.

The graphics here are also no representation of the game in its final state.... I'm going to be trying to add 3d model loading to the 3d engine so rooms will be decorated with furnature, outside there will be trees and so on... The basis of the engine will be still tile based, but with some additions to make it seem less "boxes and sprites"... Mouse looking will probably be switchable so the mouse can also be used to interact with the world.

This was just a quick concept sketch of "the slender man" I did... I'm still not sure what look I'm going for yet though... My girlfriend is going to also be contributing to the project in a design and probably story context, so hopefully this will make it more interesting that what I'd probably do by myself...

I've just decided on starting the project today, so it will be quite a while to any of the games are finished... engine rewrites will probably take a while... but there should be updates soon.

Released the Complex

This is a bit of a late update but due to my lack of viewers I decided it wasn't really that much of a big thing...
Anywho; I released "The Complex" about a month ago... it can be played here:
The complex at newgrounds

The release was plauged with problems... first being a lack of feedback... or contradictory feedback... I posted it on flash game license but got little interest... then after a while I released it but unfortunatley I didn't bug check the game enough due to impatience so the first release (the one that gets most the views) wasn't as good as the second release (version 1.1)... so... I guess I can take this all as a learning experience...
After a bit of reading I found alot of 3d flash games don't do so well... not much of a audience for them since poeple usually prefer "flash styled graphics" in there flash games...
But it's been posted onto quite a few sites... any support or interest would be nice.

Released a little Tech demo of 3d engine

I've FINALLY released a playable tech demo with the new renderer and such...

The demo can be tested Here:
Play the GFPS demo!

Any feedback would be nice... I'm hoping to shove together the rest of the content and try to get this sponsored soon... After I release the final game I am considering writing tutorials on using 3d in flash WITHOUT having to use an external library...

rewrote renderer

I rewrote the rendering library last night and now the engine uses polygon clipping, the FOV is corrected and now it is possible to look up and down using the mouse... (yes; I folded on my thoughts of mouse aim in flash games... *sigh* ).

I imagine that I might be reusing the rendering library I made a few more times... maybe the map engine too... just for quick projects though... the actual rendering library I made is fed vector points, it then clips them and renders them onscreen... pretty simple but useful to have lying around.

An interesting thing about the new renderer is that it no longer colours the tiles darker using colour transformations... it renders a second texture that holds a transparent shading map... the effect is alot more nice and pretty fancy... It gives more atmosphere than vertex shading... It sort of looks like a volumetric fogging effect at times.

Well... the project is getting closer to being finished... even though the rewrite of the renderer from scratch only took a day; it was quite an effort... I had to resync up alot of the other functions...

Hopefully I'll get around to writing a few tutorials on all this later on... and release the source code at some point.... it could be a good learning tool for others.

Back to coding

Unfortunately my notebook (which I have written many horrible things about) was just getting too slow for what I needed... probably because of the amount of stuff I had on there...

Anywho; I purchased a new notebook which has been very helpful... no more annoying slowdowns while coding or waiting for my computer to unfreeze... So I've went back to my coding...

The first project I have to finish is my GFPS engine (which I SHOULD of finished AGES ago!)...

Now the game has 4 weapons... a new monster (more soon), it's faster and I have written a level editor for it to make level creation faster and to use the potential of the engine even more.

The image of the editor is quite small, but this is what it looks like anywho... I coded it in c++ using the openGL & SDL libraries... The key commands are pretty silly, but since it's just for me to use so far, it's not important for others to find it easy right now. Tile selection is at the top of the screen, item selection is at the bottom... Thankfully the editor makes stair cases and platforms easier to craft.

"So WHY isn't it released yet?" you may ask... Well apart from the lack of time I've had for it until recently; I need to rewrite the renderer... when I originally wrote the basis of the engine (in one night), it was in AS2 and I wasn't think about height differences... just speed. One of the speed tricks was to avoid polygon clipping (too much complicated maths with floating point numbers really slows down AS2)... so I adjusted the FOV and clipping plane... which is now showing dead space on the screen where nothing is being rendered.. and distorting the perspective... making platforms confusing and rooms look smaller than they are... So a better rendering library is going to be coded... This shouldn't really cause too much slowdown thanks to AS3.

Well, that's some of what I've been up to...
Back to coding, university work, painting and reading for me.

If you have any questions, advice, need help on your own projects or wish to work with me; feel free to leave a comment or Email me at "kalisme (at) hotmail (dot) com".
No spam please...

Added height differences in FPS engine

Recently I have been talking about a simple 3d engine
that I have been placing together to use in flash games
(mainly first person shooters).
I have just added floor and ceiling height differences to
the engine and it seems to be working quite fine...

 As you can see; the
engine is still running
off a 2d grid based
engine similar to
wolfenstein3d, but now
that it has height
differences it's a bit
more interesting.

Currently the textures
haven't been fitted
properly to the
extrusions, but that
won't be much of a
hassle at all to fix.

My biggest problem will probably be rewriting the enemy AI and collision
code, but that's okay since (as you would of seen if you played the tech demo),
I already needed to update that. The enemies should be able to detect if a floor
tile is too high to walk onto (creating a wall) or if it is too low (creating a drop).
They should be able to walk up stair cases and so on as well...

I'd love to be working on this more, but unfortunately I'm WAY behind at Uni...
Luckily though, my break is in 4 weeks, so if I'm a good li'l art student and get
a passing grade, I'll be able to finish this very soon when I get my break.

Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.

Finally released tech demo for FPS (Generic FPS)

Well, I finally released the tech demo of my FPS engine on newgrounds....
Play "Generic FPS" on newgrounds

I figure the actual engine is quite stable, but unfortunately the texture work
and other graphics are somewhat poor... This all needs to be updated.
I'm thinking in the later version I might push the wall textures up to 100x100
instead of the 50x50 I'm currently using... I've done a test and it seemed to
run at around the same frame rate... I didn't notice any speed difference at
all really.

 I've just made the
textures repeat in
this screenshot,
but (in theory)
running the game
with 100x100
textures should be
perfectly fine.

Another idea I'm
thinking of adding to
the engine is height
differences in floors
and roof tiles.


Pretty much this will work by saving the map files into arrays that are
objects... each object (2d map location) will hold the tile type, the roof
height, floor height and so on, unless it is a solid wall, in which case the
heights aren't required and will be rendered in context to the surrounding
tiles. I'm not sure if I'll encorporate this into the current engine for the
upcoming project, or have it in a sort of "gFPSII engine" for later projects.
In theory this will make it alot more like the system shock 1 engine (but
without slanted floor tiles, bridges and so on)...

The reference to System shock brings up another addition I wish to add...
A mouse system... but no; not one for aiming... Like I said: Not a fan of that
when it comes to flash games... but more of an adventure game styled mouse
interface... of course this isn't going to be used in the upcoming shooter...
I do actually want to keep this one quite simple...

But I am hoping to adapt "H.P. Lovecraft's The Hound" into a flash game
for a class I have for University... Well, I say "game", but it's more of an
interactive graphic novel sort of thing... a very short one... I want the 3d walkable
parts of the game to incorporate a modified version of this engine with the addition
of a mouse select... like those "point and click" flash games we've all played.

Well, I have to take apart the engine now because I wrote the basis over one
night then just kept adding to it... so I want to take apart all the functions into
separate files so that it will be easier to modify... it's a bit all over the place
right now.

I might even release some tutorials on how to replicate this engine after I've
finished it and released a game or two... I sort of wanna try to get some
sponsorship for at least one of them... but after that I'll release a tutorial or
two... maybe even the source code... but I wouldn't want people to just
use my engine directly... I wouldn't mind, but I'd prefer people learn how
to make their own... It's more rewarding for them that way.

Well... any feedback or suggestions for the upcoming first person shooter,
or anything else I've mentioned... or if anyone is interested in helping out;
please do leave a comment.