I can’t always work on this game full-time, but when I do, I drink espresso.

I’ve been doing a lot of really solid programming the last couple of weeks and it really shows. The project is continuing to come together. With Zach working on the level creation, Bob on storyboarding, and Phillipe working on art, things are looking better than ever at each new interval (God, it’s great to have fellow team-members).

I could get into the technicalities of what I’ve been doing, but I’ll avoid that for the time being. In the last couple of weeks we’ve done some great developing. I’ve added some of the objects for the actual game, really buckled down and cleaned up the level editor (called the World Builder from here-on-in), and added in-game features that give the game a really polished look (e.g. excellent camera motion, parallex scrolling, blurring and other special effects). This game may take another million and two years until it’s release date but when it’s done, it will be done. We won’t be satisfied until Moldering is of commercial quality and hopefully an immersive experience that people simply cannot forget.

Here’s a great quote from Oddball on the TIGSource forum talking about the game Cafe that sums up our development: “progress on hobby projects [ebb] and [flow],” and currently, Moldering is flowing.

We’ll keep you posted when we have some new media to share. Hopefully we can show off some of the new parallexing soon, or maybe a sneak peak at some of the different game modes, or even info about the new “combat” system (and yes, combat is in quotes for a reason :] ).

-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

So, while designing levels in the level editor I was getting sick of scrolling through all the different tiles looking for the ones I wanted. So, I took matters into my own hands and created a class called Palette which extends Java’s JFrame. These little windows can be brought up allowing you to drag a collection of tiles/objects from the editor into them and use them from there.

The palettes can also be saved and there can be multiple on screen at any given time. It can be very useful to make different palettes for enemies, for different areas, or for anything and load them later.

Now, if I can find the time, I’m going to make a bunch of really useful palettes and save them all for when I want to do some serious level editing.

-James

I created a mechanism for drawing custom polygon shapes in the level editor. These shapes can be used to draw boundaries. Unfortunately because they’re created as Box2D polygons they must meet these requirements:

1. Must be convex. Concave shapes are not allowed. However concave shapes can be simulated by using multiple polygons.

2. Must be drawn clockwise. I don’t really get why this must be done, but hey, its not my rules.

3. Must not exceed 8 vertices.

I’m looking forward to creating some interesting maps!

-James

I just spent a couple of hours toying with the level editor trying to remove glitches. At this point all known bugs are dealt with and the level editor is extremely stable. This is good. very good. :D

That doesn’t mean there are no bugs, though. Building a game from the ground up is a long treacherous road and it’s inevitable that you’ll build bugs into your system you didn’t mean to.

-James