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
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
The easiest, but none the less effective, way to optimize a large outdoor scene is setting a view range for an entity. Here are some basic rules that I used during the rebuild of the Return to the Zone project.
Max: Here you can think of essential buildings and large structures. Think about distant buildings, powerlines, bridges and entities that stick out above the vegetation or water plane.
Far: Here we have the larger props: containers, trains, vehicles, walls, statues. This als
I downloaded the Saturn tutorial project yesterday to see how the project was holding up after all this time. After some bug fixing and adjusting some of the scenery ingame, I came to the conclusion I really liked the parcours part of the scene. So I thought lets just turn it in to a run and jump game real quick and add it to the winter games tournament.
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/viewitem?fileid=616857680
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
Leadwerks
It has been quite a while since I have been active on werkspace or with Leadwerks. Still, even after working with severall Engines and Frameworks, I allways come back to Leadwerks. I don't know what it is. The coding? The Visuals? The ease of use? The lighting? Anyway, I had some time of, since homework was fairly quickly finished. Spare time has been scarce so I am glad I can finaly make some time werkspace...
Year 2
Year 2 of Game development is an enormous improvement on the f
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.
As of next year I will be studying Game development in Amsterdam This is going to be awesome!
At the moment I am taking an extra course math. Although it is really tough, I really enjoy it! (in contrary to most of my surrounding living organisms.)
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
Technically the title isn't really correct since game development hasn't really started yet. The first 10 weeks are introduction weeks, which are probably neccesary for a lot people who do not know which business unit they want to choose. As for me it has been clear that Game Development is my direction but in the mean time I get all sorts of classes from different IT directions:
System and Network engineer
Software engineer
IT manager
Human Centered Design
Technical Computing
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
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
I started out 7 months ago with splines and it turned in to one of those annoying projects you start but then fail to finish even to it is in the back of your head the entire time. The reason this time was that I managed to delete my online repository and my local files, leaving me with nothing of the work I had created. I finally had the spirit to sit down and start rebuilding.
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
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
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
Some new possibilities
I have spend another evening on my in game console and it is shaping up nicely.
To-do or not to do
I am happy with how the console works right now. There are enough things that I could implement to make it even more usable but I don't need those (right now) for my project. Possible to do's
Intellisense.
Saving command log to a file.
Adjusting color, settings and size of console via commands.
I have been working on some new features for the SplineTools package for Leadwerks. In the video below I demonstrate 2 new features
Reverse spline followers: Reverse any spline follower at any given time on the spline. Just call the Reverse() function on a spline follower and enjoy the ride.
Closest point on the spline: helper functions that can check what the closest point on a spline is based on given position.
Quite some time ago I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas with a coworker (not during work time). We were doing terrorist hunt on this construction site map and we were having a great time enjoying this classic game. At some point I wanted to throw a grenade quite far away. Of course with my pro-fps skills I managed to hit the electric pole standing right in front of me. After I was done facepalming, something caught my eye: the wires on the electric pole were swinging, probably by the grenade's shock
