Blogs - CorrectureGames

Hello,

After getting seasons working properly in the Cubecity prototype, I've now managed to implement what I've learnt there into Atmocity and fully implemented a year cycle.

Grass is now mapped via the alpha channel on building footprint textures. The grass area has a black and white area with baked lighting on top of which a grass texture is then added. This allows me to easily set the color of the grass according to what season we're in.

Trees work in a similar fashion, except I divide the tree texture into several distinct channels. The red channel is used for the tree shades. The green channel marks what areas are constant, ie the stem of the tree or if it's a pine tree then the entire tree. The alpha channel is used for cutout. A gradient is then used and sent to the shader to determine the color of the leaves and the alpha whether the leaves are on or off as the year progresses. When the alpha drops, trees shed their leaves, as in winter.

Hello,

I haven't posted about my side projects in ages, but figured it was time to change that and display some of the dev work I put in on other things than Atmocity currently.

Currently I'm mostly working on the QBCity project. This is mainly because of the many similarities to Atmocity. Working on a smaller scale prototype such as this, allows me to easily test different things I want to add to Atmocity but without having to run tests in a slow environment (Atmocity is a huge project...). For example, way back, this side project laid the foundation for how cars found their way around cities in Atmocity. This was the case up until about a month ago, when traffic in Atmocity was overhauled.

Recently I've been working on a system to add seasons into this prototype and managed to code up a shader that can shift certain colors (in this case pink) using a gradient. This effectively changes the grass color to emulate seasons. On top of this I use the alpha channel to strip the trees of leaves in winter.

With the lessons learned working on a system to handle seasons in QBCity, this will be much easier to do on a large scale (in Atmocity).

Currently I've adapted the existing ground shader in Atmocity to replace an area (using the alpha channel) with grass. The grass texture used is black and white to allow the color to be changed at runtime to emulate seasons in a similar way as above. The main difficulty will be to remove leaves from trees in a way that looks good and transitions well, but using the alpha channel should be a possibility there as well.

Hello,

Atmocity is a fairly ambitious project. The goal is to have a game that allows players to build complex cities not only visually, but also functionally. It's also very well adapted to the PC platform, so it's unlikely it will ever release for console or mobile.

But currently I am working on a variant of Atmocity for mobile. It's stripped of all complex economic systems and instead focuses on city building in the form of small puzzles. I think of it as a small optimization puzzle, where each building needs to be placed in the location where it does the most good and least bad. The levels will consist of 2x2x2, 3x3x3 and 4x4x4 sized levels with different objectives and problems that need to be solved.

Should the prototype end up being any good, it should release sometime after Atmocity hits Steam. :)

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello,

Seeing as the game doesn't have a game page here or anywhere else yet I figured I would share some info and news about the game here.

I've not really worked much on it recently, because I'm focusing almost 100% of my available game dev time to working on Atmocity. But I intend on picking things up when I'm getting closer to finishing the buildings in Atmocity. Currently Cubelins is rather finished on the code-side of things, but the production of meshes has lagged behind. Seeing as Atmocity is a very graphically heavy game featuring more than 100 buildings, I had to resort putting Cubelins on hold.

Unlike Brink of Extinction, Cubelins TD is a more conventional tower defence game in that it utilizes mazes. What's less conventional is that it uses randomisation to generate levels. Initially, the idea was to allow for 65k levels (16bits), but this will likely be capped to around 10k. This is mainly due to constraints in leaderboard functionality on Steam - 10k leaderboards being the maximum amount. The final level count will also depend on the perceived variability of the levels.

I have a write up on the level generation on the Correcture Games homepage, for those interested in the technical side of things.

The game will feature two turrets, defense and offense. The defense towers double as resource siphons, generating money and resources needed to build more towers and buying upgrades. When upgrading towers, the player will be able to choose specific customizations for the tower. One such customization might be to make the Tower a flame thrower tower, or a blitz Tower.

That was a short intro to Cubelins, I'm hoping around the next time I update this blog, I will have some early iteration versions of the towers. :)

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello,

Recently I've been trying to gauge the amount of work I can reasonably put into gamedev given I still work a normal day job. Along with this, I've also been detailing the work left on Atmocity. Both these things considered I concluded it was best to delay the EA-release of Atmocity from early December to mid March. This, I hope, will mean I can release a more fleshed out and finished game, that will allow me to focus work on the game during the EA period to really perfecting things, rather than finish up things that are sort of expected of the base game.

This delay also means I can put work in on other projects. This may sound strange, but I find that I generally put out better work when I can vary what I work on instead of focusing 100% of time developing games on the same project. I just need the variation it seems. I've decided to put this dev time to use finishing up the remainder of Twinstack Pocket ed. for portable platforms. I'm hoping this should be able to hit portable platforms in October.

Another recent development is that I've been approved as a Nintendo Switch dev. This means some of my time going forward, will be used for what I'm hoping is a future Switch release.

In a previous post I mentioned the possibility of a Brink of Extinction mobile version. I'm still undecided as to what style to go for, but the project is not cancelled. I'm hoping that this can get some attention soon too. :)

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello,

It's been a while since I updated the blog section of the site. I am chronically bad at keeping my online presence updated (aside from Twitter pretty much).

The past few months I've spent mostly working on Atmocity. I have to say the game has come a rather long way and has gone from a rough alpha/tech demo to more of a functional game with most of the UI-work complete, and many of the systems implemented and functional.

As for the near future for the game, I plan on releasing a "demo" for streamers. Hopefully this will help garner some interest in the game and make people see what it's all about. The demo won't be feature complete of course, missing half of all planned buildings and only getting a barebones local and global economy system implementation. It should still show off enough to, hopefully, peak the interest of gamers who love city building games.

As for my other developments, Battlespace now has a functional vertical slice featuring three cards and online play. We should get around to pitching this to publishers soon, to hopefully get some funds.

I've put Brink of Extinction for portable on the backburner, because I couldn't reconcile with how simplistic I want to go. Being a bit of a perfectionist I have a hard time simplifying stuff and finding the proper level of details for things I work on. It will happen, but later than I first expected. Given the amount of work I need to put into Atmocity to hit my December EA release window, this is not unexpected either.

I am however, working on Twinstack for portable. This should be finished within a few weeks, and you should hopefully be able to play the game on portable platforms starting september or shortly thereafter.

On a final note, I will be using this space to post some prototype stuff I'm working on. Among them the P5 prototype fairly soon.

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello!

I've been quite slow updating my pages, mainly because I've prioritized game dev, but also because I'm currently overrun with work at my regular job. I was thinking of using this blog to write down some of my plans for this year and mention some smaller things I'm working on, but haven't made pages for.

I currently have three major projects -

1. Atmocity, which will be seeing an early alpha release to a select few hopefully this week. More info on the recent progress on the game's page.
2. Brink of Extinction version Blitz Ant, which should release on Steam and GameJolt next weekend. This has taken up a lot of time recently because it is such a huge update. It rebalances the game completely and adds new features like special abilities for turrets among other things. More about the update on the game's page.
3. Lastly, I am lead programmer on a game called Battlespace. A card game in the vein of Hearthstone, but set in space and with more interactive graphics. This project is also nearing a sort of early alpha release state and will be sent out to testers soon.

What I really wanted to write about was the small stuff I do when I can't motivate myself to work on the above mentioned projects or when I don't have access to my desktop computer.

The first project is Brink of Extinction mini, which will be a free version of the game for portable platforms. I've not decided on a whole lot of the content, except that it will feature 7 of the turrets from the PC-version and the Tesla as an additional turret (it will function more like a regular turret, unlike how it is in the PC-version). The game will also feature 11 of the enemies.

The game will be 2D and mostly 2D renders of the 3D objects, but edited to fit a somewhat different style (no worries, it will still have a colorful post apocalyptic look!). Currently I'm working on code cleanup and removing redundant code, since the game will need to shed quite a few features when it's to fit into a small suit, so to speak.

From the mini version I will also make a pocket edition which will be closer to the original PC-version, but for portable. The mini and pocket versions have no release date as of yet, but June-July for the mini version seems reasonable.

Another prototype that I've worked on is called Svedala Zombie Apocalypse. It will be a simple top down-ish zombie survival game set in a Swedish rural setting. I've currently worked on a system to randomly select specific prefabs from a set, given a weight of likeliness. Basically the game will pit the player against progressively more difficult zombies, feature looting buildings for typically Swedish objects and also a good dose of humor.

Lastly I'm working on a sort of very simplistic climbing game. This game uses the same system of randomly picking prefabs to make a sort of endless map system. More details and a playable prototype will follow in the near future.

I've also kept on working on Cubelins TD, which will soon get a page here on IndieDB. I've also worked on the prototype P5, but I will share details on this on a later date.

// Dispersing Minds

Hello!

It's been a hectic couple of weeks, releasing Twinstack on Steam, making a pretty hefty update for Brink of Extinction, while also trying to celebrate Christmas and new years eve.

Lately I've been working on a new tile set asset that will go up on the Unity asset store in roughly two weeks. But my main aim atm is to get Atmocity into an early alpha state. Currently most of the code regarding construction/destruction, buildings' wants and don't wants is done. But UI and main menu code is sorely lacking atm. So that will be my main focus moving forward.

The early alpha for Atmocity is scheduled to be available to a select few at the end of January. I hope to be able to post some updates until then. :)

/ Dispersing Minds

Greetings!

I've been hard at work working on the BoE update. I decided to upgrade from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2017 which had the unfortunate effect of every level needing lights rebaked, but that's finished now. The main reward of this is that I can now run all my games on the latest Unity version which benefits my workflow, but some of the heavier assets I've used have also been updated since to become better optimized, which is the main reason I decided to update.

Aside from this I've gotten around to rebalancing turrets, the details behind this change can be read on the BoE page. This will go into testing over the weekend, when I will also be tweaking some of the upgrade values for enemies to make the endless mode (even) more intense. Hopefully I will get around to fixing some of the minor things also, like sprucing up visual effects and adding the first bits for the collectible story notes.

I've also been up to some prototyping again. I will try to finish that project really quickly and it will most likely be released for free somewhere or at a very low cost. :) More details to follow!

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello!

I figured I'd try to keep the blog fairly updated also, although I am pretty crap at keeping things up to date in general with all the stuff I have going on atm.

Anyway! There will soon be an article where I describe how I approached making the music for Brink of Extinction. I will have a more in depth description of a specific song in the future, but will wait until I have released the OST.

Currently I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on Twinstack so that I can get the builds uploaded and approved by Valve. The release date being December 20th, things need to be done this weekend pretty much. The only thing remaining are some issues with the Mac build and that I wish to replace the main theme song with something else, but this can be done after approval also.

I've also started planning for what goes into the next Brink of Extinction update. From what I have gathered the game is very stable and doesn't have that many bugs - which is the experience I have had testing it also. So I will focus mainly on adding new content. Content planned is the ability to zoom the camera, two new endless mode levels, four new achievements, some more bling when it comes to turret firing effects, story notes and object descriptions before each level (among some other things). This update will also include the mac and possibly linux version if I can get them to work. Estimated release is Jan/feb 2018.

Lastly, I am aiming at having a pre alpha build of Atmocity finished by Jan 2018. This will feature a very small campaign level showcasing some of the gameplay.

Aside from that, some Unity asset stuff going on, but nothing huge. :)

/ Dispersing Minds