Particles!

Not much progress on American Hero… But earlier this month I did add particles! They make the game look a lot more professional:

This isn’t online yet, because the the XML files defining the particle emitters aren’t loaded using the resource manager at the moment. I only spent one day on this feature, using Slick‘s particle engine. You can design the particle systems with a tool called Pedigree:

If you compare the preview to the screenshot above, you’ll notice that the smoke plume looks a little bit different in-game. This is mostly because I re-sample the images using nearest-neighbor, so the pixels don’t get blurry. The editor is still very helpful to create these effects. You can create a color gradient for the lifetime of the particles and curves to control their opacity. There are some limitations and I have to be careful not to have too many particles on screen at the same time, but I’m very happy with how the animated particles add to the graphics of the game.

Smoke is nice and all, but I really need some cool looking, powerful explosions! It’s a little more tricky, because the particles should only be spawned at one point in time. To make it look good I probably need multiple emitters. Let’s see how that goes… The other way to do it would be sprite animation… Which is another big challenge I still need to tackle!

Started making my own indie game

Making a video game has been my dream since childhood. A few months after graduating, I realized that I have enough skills and knowledge about game development to actually do it. My first attempt from last summer didn’t really go anywhere. But right now, I’m actually finally making my own game and having a lot of fun!

I made a page for it.

This has been in development since the beginning of the new year, excluding a 2 week break, when I was having a fever. The game has evolved quite a bit in this time. I noticed that I didn’t even take screenshots to document the progress and wanted to blog about new features and challenges I had faced. So I thought about setting up a tumblr or something, soon realizing that I already have a blog! And it is in desperate need of new content! So here you go. I’m keeping this international; everything will be in English.

(more screenshots)

It’s an old idea really. In 2004 two buddies from school, Wolfgang and Thomas, wanted to make a game with me. We were 16/17 years old and had never done this before. We wanted it to be heavy on the narrative, so we created a huge ambitious concept detailing the characters and the story. 3D assets and some levels were created. But we didn’t think of a fun gameplay concept. After some years, the project was abandoned.

It is now back in a smaller scope, with a focus on creating a fun playable game that is supported by awesome game art!