Tile editor update

Only bringing you screenshots this time, whats new here is iv'e added elevation (tile heights) and also your'e painting tiles using a brush (only a rectangle brush is available right now).

There is a point light following the brush to.

Tile editor part 1

A preview of my tile editor is available here

Use wasd keys to move the camera around and the mouse to paint tiles :)

More Tilez!

Got some results in Unity now, quite nice how little time that took to port from XNA :)

Now to optimize tile creation, combine meshes and find/make a optimized shader for large (read HUGE) tilemaps.

Oh, and the tiles in the image is borrowed from Advance Wars.

Tilez!

Started porting my tile editor and tools from XNA to Unity a couple of days ago, it's going to be sweet!

My new implementation might end up with a voxel grid for terrain tiles which was used in Red Alert 2 for instance. I reeeeally want to make a game similar to RA2 (it's one of the best games of all times) and I just really think that tile/grid based games are so much better fitting for strategy genres. So might as well try to make a solution that could work for any tile based game (even 3D).

Moving on

 (NOTE: I am no longer working for the company Deadbug)

Wow, it's been such a long time since I've touched this blog.

But I will try to make new efforts in keeping it alive with new insights on my discoveries on game programming and also what is new since last time is that I delved into the world of music production, so I will probably throw up a few links to some tunes later on and maybe even write about sound design in correlation with games!

So now this blog is focused on both games and music, the two things i love the most.

Back to topic - since last time I wrote I have graduated from my school, got a job, and on that job released a full game for the iPhone / iPod Touch. The company I started working on is called Deadbug (www.deadbug.net, facebook group) and the game we released is called Attack of the Titans.

Deadbug actually only consists of two guys including myself, the other one being the founder, Chris from Canada. So we're definitely what you would call a indie studio :P

I am the guy who does the programming (obviously) and comes with a lot of good game design ideas and concepts (being that I've played so many games since I was little I get a lot of inspiration and ways to improve game mechanics). Chris is the graphical artist and project manager. It's a really awesome setup we've got going, being so few people working together is so much fun and you get be apart of just about every decision about the games you make. Of course, we only make quite casual games right now, but we have some cooler ideas for the future.

Attack of the Titans is a small tower defense game, the first one Deadbug ever made and the first game I ever worked on that got officially released in a store (that being the App store). It's not the best game out there, also there where a lot of things we learned a long the way making it; so would we make a similar game again it come out so much better. That being said, the games I've played on the App store are usually crap, either made for idiots - or - without any thought or compelling gameplay. And since it's so incredible hard to get noticed on the app store, we don't think our game got the attention it deserves. Anyway we are on are way with new titles as we speak and hope to get some purchases from those so we can keep on going as a studio and also keep on making games!

So all that being said, I will still have my personal stuff that I will be writing about here. Hopefully there will be some interesting articles, interesting applications, short tutorials, code snippets / libraries, maybe even a few tunes made by me - so stay tuned!

Project unfinished

Due to some unfortunate events, I was not able to get the needed assets to finish the project mentioned here, that also was going to show my PathBuilder application in action. I'm not going to go in on the details why, but I might still be able to show you the PathBuilder - just not at this day. As of now, all of my work related to Ogre is put on ice until further notice.

XNA and C#

I thought I show you a bit of what I have been doing the last couple of days. This is a few screen shots of a project I first started working on for almost two years ago, I felt I needed a break from my usual work and to do something different.







As you should be able to see in the pictures above, this application is a sort of editor for tiled 2D games. Right now a user can import a bitmap image as a tileset and add so called "brushes" which will greatly speed up the process of creating large tiled environments. The app is programmed solely in C#.

A second application (shown below) is used as the actual level editor where the user can actually use the brushes put together in the first one. This app is also programmed in C#, but also using the Xna framework.