Yearly Archives: 2014

Changelog 2014-10-06

Summary

Time marches on.

It’s been a while since the last changelog; about five weeks or so, as it appears. My goal has been to keep this as a weekly update, but sometimes life doesn’t play along. Just like this past May, we’ve again been dealing with the loss of another cherished family member, so work slowed down considerably. It has been a tough 12 months in that regard, with the loss of too many of our close family. In addition to that, NR has taken on a new day job, so work on his side has also taken a hit. It was not a very good September.

But now, it’s October, and it’s time to get back into the swing of things. It hasn’t [More...] Read the rest

Posted in Vespers | Leave a comment

Changelog 2014-09-01

Summary

Well, yet another month is in the books. Weird August fact that only I find interesting: I know I don’t post a great deal on this blog compared with other blogs, but looking back over the years it seems that August is the month I have posted the least overall. In fact, until this year, I hadn’t posted a single blog entry in August since the first year of the blog, in 2008. I have no idea what this means.

This week was relatively quiet, but still important tasks were accomplished or started. As I mentioned last week, I installed Parallels on my Mac dev machine so I could do my modeling/animation/exporting work side-by-side with my programming and testing work without having to reboot [More...] Read the rest

Posted in Vespers | Leave a comment

Changelog 2014-08-25

Summary

Well, it’s been a little bit since the last update, hasn’t it?

Work has been somewhat slow lately, owing to several things. A week of vacation was followed by a week of work-related travel, so not a lot of progress was made over that time. We did accomplish a few things; NR finished his work on the last two holy water rmodels (“dull” and “boiling”), and passed them on to me for implementation, so at this point all holy water versions are complete and functional. The “dull” version was a bit challenging because I wanted the water to appear cloudy, and that isn’t an easy thing to do in Torque. The solution that worked best was to create underwater smoke emitters, which was effective [More...] Read the rest

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Player Freedom vs. Railroading, Revisited

Although I’m still implementing material for Act 2 in Vespers, I’ve been working with NR on creating some of the new material for Act 3. In Act 3, there is considerably more action, and the story branches out in a couple of potential directions. There are a set of interactions and events that occur inside the monastery, and others that occur outside the monastery, where the player had not been able to venture before in Acts 1 and 2.

In reviewing the interactions and events for Act 3, I referred back to the design document I made, which I discussed a while back in another post. In so doing, I began to think about storyline issues I hadn’t considered before.

Be warned, spoilers [More...] Read the rest

Posted in game design, story in games, Vespers | Leave a comment

Changelog 2014-08-04

Summary

Work continued this week on the holy water, as we turned our attention to the two remaining versions needed. One is a “dull” version for Act 2, and the other is a “boiling” version for Act 4. NR and I went back and reviewed a couple of AVIs that could work for these animations, and he started the work on converting them to PNGs and IFLs. He created first pass versions of the DTS shapes with the animations, and so far so good. We’ll need to continue the work on them to refine the look and feel, but hopefully all that should be done in the next week or two. The rest of my time was spent fixing old issues and adding new functionality. [More...] Read the rest

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