I'm Chris. I would like to make games but all that comes out are prototypes and mountains of assets. Am I doing this right?

Report RSS DevRamblings 7 - Soft Shadows & Sequence Editors

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Hello there!
I'm writing again because I have a little progress. First and foremost I went ahead and turned these dynamic shadows I showed off a while ago (https://www.moddb.com/members/damagefilter/videos/dynamic-2d-volumetric-lights#imagebox) into soft shadows.
That looks something like this:
PARTY LIGHT  (Soft Shadows)

Pretty pretty. It's even better when it's moving. I'll have a video for you soon.
The cool thing is, I can have the shadow casters really low-poly now and it wouldn't matter.
That means ... MORE dynamic lights! Can never have enough dynamic lights.

A word on the visual style on the screenshots so far:
This is not the final artwork. The finished or final versions will look darker with more detailed and less like they are straight from a kids game. I'll have some of this for you soon! We're currently developing the city layout and after that it's remaking and creating new sprites.

Now, what took me most of the time the past weeks was the new sequence editor.
It is based on the behaviour tree implementation I also use for the AI and so creating a sequence structure was not the hard part. I have it all there already, including serialisation and save game compatibility.
What took me so long was all the editor code. It went down to an extend where I was wondering if it was worth all the trouble I had.
sequence ed

Turned out it was worth it indeed. You may recognise that pseudo code thing - once again I borrowed from the old RPG Makers. With this sequence editor ready, we can push out story and gameplay progress very rapidly. But of course, it's not 100% functional yet. Some event types are still missing, like Sound triggers.

Generally though, variable operations, switches, messages - all the basics - are in and working.
And that feels good. Seems like I'll make it to my tech-release deadline in a timely manner!

And that's it for today, thanks for reading!

Cheers,
df

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