We have seen a lot of statistics on the forum recently. I thought I'd share some from my Youtube account.
The stats below are from the past 365 days, including only videos that are relative to Leadwerks.
Geo stats
This is the final blog post for my game entry this tournament.
GUI
I am really happy the way the GUI came together in the end. UI really isn't my strongpoint so being able to produce something doable is a great reward.
Car physics
Although most car tracks can be finished with a car, it is not an easy task. The car tumbles over far to quickly. There is also a bug left were loading a new car level causes the car to glitch. Since I am reusing the same car here, I have no idea what is furt
Instead of spending more time on getting the car to work properly, I added in a simple ball real quick and to be honest: I like the faster gameplay a lot more. What do you guys think? I do miss the ghost cars, so those will definitely come back.
I have updated the game in the launcher. http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/viewitem?fileid=821020417
Here I thought that I would be done with my entry in no time. Finetuning everything turned out to be a pain to be honest. Luckily the GUI was set up rather quickly and most of the game state switching worked almost instantly.
Tired of the tires
The real time consumers came when suddenly my tires wouldn't update with the vehicle. Spend a good time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, but eventually just decided to leave it until the very end.
Analytics
I added Josh's ne
Finally done moving to my new house and today I got my computer setup again. And as a start, I thought, lets give it a go for the winter games tournament.
It is a little racing game where the tracks gets randomly generated on the given seed. I think I will call it "On the road again", named after the song and because of the fact that the level generation allows you to skip parts of the track if you simple fall down on the track below you.
I have been using Visual Studio Code for a couple of years now and it is my defacto text editor next to Notepadd++. I mainly use it however to write Lua scripts.
Opensource
Lightweight
Cross platform
Completely adjustable hotkeys (or automatically map from Visual Studio: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.vs-keybindings)
Fully customisable theming (with standard themes included)
Supports all major languages. Lua is supported
Paid scripts
I am looking in to publishing paid scripts to the workshop. There are 2 script collections that others might find interesting:
Advanced Third Person Controller
Many tweakable options: from double jumping, to camera offset, camera snapping, smoothing, speed controls etc
Spline paths
Not just useful for camera paths, but also for instance factory belts, vehicular movement (static cars, trains etc), airial paths (birds, planes), VR on rails.
Terrain tutorials
There are 2 new video tutorials on how to use the terrain editor.
Sculpting terrain:
Terrain painting:
Tutorials: Project Saturn
It has been a while since I made a tutorial for Project Saturn, but that will change in the near future. Since there are so many new members using Leadwerks I am going to make some free time for some new tutorials. In the past 3 months there were only a handful of viewers and that didn't quite way up to time spend on making th
Something that has always been a time consuming process is getting the audio right in my recordings. Although I have a very decent headset, recordings allways contained a lot of static noise and voice 'pops'. To get an acceptablequality I required a finetuned microphone placement for every recording. 1cm to the left could make a big difference. The recording software that I use has some build in noice reduction filters, but they do not always guarantee a smooth audio track.
Since there are g
After 8 months since I purchased the Leadwerks Engine I'm still doubting about which direction to choose when it comes to game developing. At the moment I'm at a point where I can't choose whether I should focus more on moddeling, or if I should pay al my attention to scripting/coding. I'm doing a lot of these things at the same time without actually making some good progress. I never expected that I would learn how to programm by just messing around in the Leadwerks editor, but I have to admit
The past 30 days have been very hectic but fun none the less. While it all started with the thought that I would have some time to spare, it became one of the busiest months of the year. It started with a non-Leadwerks project, where I am currently working on with 2 artists. I was done with the coding for the current sprint (we are using scrum). This meant simply waiting for the artists to do their part. The sprint ends December 14th, so that would mean time for a new project.
Back to Leadwe
Okay, so last night I got a burst of inspiration after seeing a horror movie. I wanted to use that energy to create a simple horror game. Recently I played Slender and I was surprised to see how 'easy to create' it seemed. Ofcourse that is easier said than done. So lets get to work
Rebuild for Leadwerks
So how hard can it be right? Within 2 hours I had a nice little start. You jump over a fence and thats were the fun begins. I have added a temporary ending to set the mood a little.
Leve
The world of games, game development and game design is awesome. I just love it. The fun part is, that I only realised this since the past year and a half. Before that, I just liked playing games. Nothing else slipped in to my mind about "how a game is made etc.".
I like to tell you a little story about myself. We didn't have a computer at home until I was 10. Before that, I used to play games at my neighbours house. My neighgbours where German and their kid had a computer at his room with o
A little extra information regarding the end of the Leadwerks Community Project.
Why did we stop
There are many reasons for ending the project. The most important reason is that we think the motivation and amount of time people will invest in the project will drop extremely once LE3 has been released. It was allways something that played in the back of our heads. What if we are halfway through the game development process and LE will be released. You bet your *ss that the project will be di
I was working in the cantina of the school the other day when I noticed a showcase by 2 (second years) game developer students. Their project for the last 6 months was to build some kind of interactive system for a rehabilitation center. I was really cool to see and to think of it that only 2 seconds students made this. Really impressive. They also made a bunch of small games but I didn't make a recording after this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiNCt0m-HXY
Now that the steam updating works again, the Spline Tools 1.04 package has been uploaded on Steam.
Update 1.04
This version contains some updated maps for Leadwerks 4.5. The moving platforms map unfortunately is not working properly and will have to be sorted out.
Wire splines added.
Wire splines can be used for creating wires, cables or rope. By default, wires have no physics.
Physics can be added as static shapes by selecting the wire type
If you don't know that the blog title exists out of game names, you are probably a little confused . My upcoming job interviews are almost 2 weeks away, which gives me plenty of space to do some development stuff on the side from my main project. Besides my main project I have been working on the tutorial project Saturn as well as reviving the the Tunnels demo from Leadwerks 2.
Project Saturn
I didn't think I would have so much fun making project Saturn. It proves that making gameplay can b
Back in 2010 Josh, creator of the Leadwerks Engine, asked Dave Lee to create a part of the exclusion zone. 7 years later, this project has been revisited and rebuild.
Original footage from Leadwerks 2.3
With Leadwerks 3 I asked Josh if I could convert the assets to the new engine. Most assets were uploaded to the workshop, but they lacked proper physics, materials etc. Back then the Leadwerks 3 engine didn't have the vegatation editor and no deferred renderer. So build
I have been using a concept of Game Modes to tell me in which part of the game I am. This really helps in getting code organised and planning of the game.
I am currently looking into some 2d basic/arcade game tutorials which might follow up on the OLED project once all the lua basics tutorials are done.
Think about games like:
Minesweeper
Tetris
Pong
Bejeweld (match 3)
Asteroids
Snake
Arkanoid (breakout)
Minesweeper is already finished:
Replicating all these games myself gives a great indication on their complexity, even for arcade games. Grid based games like minesweeper, bejeweled and tetris are the easi
I have uploaded a new version containing save games and some improvements regarding restarting a level, going to back menus etc.
Saves
Every time you finish a level, a property is set to keep track of the levels you finished. Only downside when using the launcher is that this will only get set, when the game is closed. So when you finish 4 levels, it will not become clear you finished these levels until after you have restarted the game. But still a pretty nice feature to have.
Track
Tower defense games are my favorite casual games. The last few weeks I have been spending some free time on playing several of them. Steam had a lot of sales recently which gave me no choice but to buy them. Here are a few:
Defense Grid: The awakening
Orcs must die
iBomber: Pacific
They are quite addictive and found myself buying a lot of available DLC´s.
Mutant Madness
I want to build a simple tower defense game. That means:
Build a tower on flat ground
Tower shoots o
Bugs
Since the last blog I have been spending most of my time trying to find and solve bugs. There is a nasty one which causes a memory error. But it is not always present in every single playthrough.
Firing
I started working on the firing mechanism. That didn't go as smooth as I had hoped. Especially my particles looked really boring. After a couple of days, I decided to remove them for now.
Bunkers, canons and Sniper tower can succesfully fire. Rotation and good particles are added lat
Building selection
A little update on the building placement. You can scroll with your mousewheel to select a different tower.
I made the following code to cycle through the towers:
//Mouse wheel checking
m = LE.MouseZ();
if (prevM < m)
{
selectionID++;
if (selectionID > 4)
{
selectionID = 0;
Console.WriteLine("now 0");
}
SetNewCurrentTempTower();
}
else if (prevM > m)
{
selectionID--;
if (selectionID < 0)
{
selectionID = 4;
C
Something I have never tried before is working with terrain and placing buildings on top of it. The idea is that you can build everywhere on the map as long as the slopes aren't to steep and there is no building already placed.
The Grid.
Although you have the freedom of building a tower where ever you want, the underlying system still works with a grid system. That means that gridpoints can be tagged as "can not build". It also leaves space between buildings which is nice because I don't ha
