Lighting, Weather, Parallaxing, OH MY!

Here’s two new video’s to show of some of the new neat-o-rama updates for Moldering. There’s also a few smaller changes, if you pay attention closely (or read the dialog boxes), that haven’t been in previous videos.

The first video shows off the new volumetric and ambient lighting systems. There’s three in place. I personally favor the first, and I believe we’ll be using that for most things. The others might prove useful in caves, or other areas.

#12 Moldering: Lighting Effects

Some ideas we’re toying with: little glowing lightning bugs that hover and dart around, complete with their own light source and strings of glowing mushrooms that glow brighter as you near them. Again, complete with their own light sources.

The next video shows off many different features including the new predictive camera system that lets the player see ahead of them. This video also shows off the dynamic weather system which adds to the atmosphere of the first world, as well as the parallax scrolling that I’ve been meaning to implement for some time now.

#13 Moldering: Parallaxing, Weather, Camera

Since these videos we’ve added some other features, including fading foreground objects. This way the player can enter caves and the walls in front will fade to let the player see into the cave. You’ll see these updates in upcoming videos.

Feedback is always welcomed!

-James

It took me some time, but I finally finished chopping up the art work into a tile-able format for our level editor.  I ran into a few minor problems along the way, but nothing a little game magic can’t fix (and/or hide from your unknown eyes, mwa haha)! 

I have a very busy next few days with my paying job(s), this will slow things a bit for me, unfortunately.  With my previous 4 day holiday over the past weekend, that was suppose to free up some time for me to spend meshing things together, but life always gets in the way! 

A map showing off our little orange friend running around his new environment will be up as soon as I have a demo level ready!

-Zach

Ah… the life of a game developer. It has it’s ups and it has it’s downs. I toiled away the good part of the day fixing a very minor bug that most people wouldn’t even notice. Instead of being productive and attending to matters in the real world I spent six hours making the player move the same speed when moving up slopes from the left vs from the right.

Regardless, I got it fixed, so, that’s out of the way. But, I need to spend my time better. Yesterday I spent maybe an hour implementing a brand new feature (hooks the player can grab on to), which was extremely rewarding. It can be very gratifying when implementing something cool goes smoothly. It’s why I develop games. However, a few days like today, here and there, are inevitable.

More about the hooks though. If you’ve played Donkey Kong you probably have a good idea of what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t know, I added hooks to the game that the player can jump to and from. They act like grapple points for climbing up to higher areas. They work awesome, and are awesome, and I’m really happy with how they came out. More news to follow.

-James