stomygame

[stomygame]

It's important to stay hydrated

#ctesiphon #progress #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #fps #agdg #water #boomershooter

[stomygame]

Making a new map, adding some new textures.

#gamedev #ctesiphon #agdg #progress #screenshotsaturday #boomershooter

[stomygame]

It's a little tough making good foliage in BSP format, but after noticing a few tricks in Morrowind and some of the Quake mapjams I've got a system I'm happy with.

#ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #low poly #agdg #progress #indiedev #quake #trenchbroom

[stomygame]

While I consider myself an alright programmer and have always found it easy to spend hours in level design, I tend to be a little intimidated by having to make art assets. There's always some doubt that prevents me from starting on an art piece.

This year I plan to overcome that by making at least one piece of artwork everyday. Doesn't have to be gamedev-related, it can just be a half-page of doodles but I want to do something each and every day. I've already started in an attempt to warm up so here's a selection from the last week or so. I'm especially happy that I'm comfortable enough with blender that I can just do doodles in it and they turn out fine.

#gamedev #indiedev #low poly

[stomygame]

Now that I've got all my statics converted to IQM format and loading in-game, I can lay my old imgui custom editor to rest and do everything with Trenchbroom and EricW's tools. Apart from configs for Trenchbroom the only custom part of toolchain is a little util at the end that does some pre-processing on the final map outputs to make them load faster in-game.

Iteration time is a breeze now too. Basic rebuilds went from ~5 min to ~10 sec, while more polished "release" rebuilds now only take a ~2 min instead of ~2 hrs. I've still got some ugly seams in the lightmapping but the drop in iteration time is more than worth it, I won't be going back now.

#ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #retro fps #boomershooter #agdg #lowpoly #opengl #quake #trenchbroom

[stomygame]

The monster under the stairs is finally slain. This has been a thorn in my side for years at this point, but with some digging into Bullet's triangle collision I finally managed to get the character controller to work the way it's supposed to

#ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #low poly #progress #fps #agdg #boomer shooter #retro fps

[stomygame]

It's time to face facts. Bullet and my custom editor have slowed me down for far too long. I originally modeled CtEditor on exactly how Trenchbroom works back when its support for non-Quake games was still in its infancy.

Things have come a long way since then and after just messing around a little bit in Trenchbroom itself, its superiority is blindingly obvious. This will mean also abandoning my custom model format for IQM. Rolling your own is fine once to learn how these things tick but I'm far too susceptible to Not-Invented-Here and this is an obvious way to reduce the workload.

By contrast, Bullet has been pure suffering to work with and I don't even really use it for anything more than some bouncing debris. So I'm going to go back to my roots and make a hand-written BSP collision system. I've already got code for brush-clipping in the editor, and I can adapt FOP's old tree-building functions to a terminal program that I'll need anyway to make maps made in TB playable.

Art assets are still something of an Achilles' heel for me, but at least I'll be able to do level design precisely how I want to without needing to write everything myself. I'm also awfully tempted to make a Quake map or two at some point...

#ctesiphon #progress #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #fps #agdg #level design #quake #retro fps #boomer shooter

[stomygame]

All weekend I've been overhauling Ctesiphon's textures. After digging around the resources available on the Quake Mapping discord I was inspired to make some new stuff to replace the very plain textures I previously had.

While I'm working in krita, the workflow from this video has been a huge help as it was pretty close to how I was already trying to do things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6Eu8Cti9nI

This guide on how to use trimsheets also gave me the epiphany that I should actually make some trimsheets myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piiYIExIN6E

The hard part now is that after messing around with Trenchbroom it's become pretty clear that I should just abandon my own custom editor and use that. Back when I started, TB was much more primitive and would've required significant retooling to be useful to me. Now though, I've resolved to do my mapping in a more Quake-like manner and if I can extract my map compiler and lightmapper into command-line utilities (like they really ought to be anyway) then there's no real reason not to just use Trenchbroom.

I'll have to think about it this week. I already use the plain .map format for building maps in my editor, and being plain-text allows me to selectively add things to a custom Trenchbroom game config.

#ctesiphon #gamedev #fps #progress #retro fps #low poly #quake #level design #texture

[stomygame]

This was a much faster process for Ctesiphon, but I had a crapload more daily backups for Turbostellar so I wanted their commit dates to more-or-less match up with when I actually wrote them.

#gamedev #github #turbostellar

[stomygame]

I took what was supposed to be a quick detour to focus on a tabletop homebrew 40k campaign I'm running, making terrain and rules and such. But it's now been six months and I'm completely burnt out.

So now I'm finally back to Ctesiphon. Over the weekend I added some hinting to static mesh materials so they can be ignored for collision. Later I intend to also have separate channels for visibility/clip/bullet-clip etc, but for now it's just "collide" or "don't collide"

I also moved all of my archived code over to git instead of keeping it in zips backed up locally. It totally passed me by that git now does unlimited private repos otherwise I would've always done that. I think the last time I checked must have been the last couple of weeks they still charged for that.

I also added a couple of new textures and statics, especially these fences and railings.

#gamedev #ctesiphon #agdg #fps #retro fps #c lang #progress

[stomygame]

While this isn't the final location of the keycard anyway, enough people complained about the instant death pit that I figured there ought to be a sign.

#Ctesiphon #agdg #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #boomer shooter

[stomygame]

I want to go on a little segue to make something for #dcjam2023 so I’ve been putting together a template with raylib, cimgui, and physfs so I don’t have to waste time writing all of the boilerplate when the jam actually starts.

This here is a snippet of my Makefile, which I’ll be porting back to Ctesiphon and Turbostellar as well, to do a build with docker using the Steam Runtime environment instead of the local machine. Anyone who’s released binaries for Linux may be aware that glibc has completely non-existent forward-compatibility (one of the few things Linux does objectively worse than Windows). So if you build on Manjaro and someone tries to run on an older version of Ubuntu, odds are it just won’t work no matter what they try.

#screenshotsaturday #gamedev #dcjam2023 #linux #linux games #glibc #makefile #docker #steamos

[stomygame]

When visiting Ctesiphon's many convenience stores, be mindful of sociopathic offworld security personnel. Go about your business privately and avoid eye contact.

#Ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #agdg #low-poly #boomer shooter

[stomygame]

Making animations for the new guy.

#Ctesiphon #agdg #gamedev #indiedev #boomer shooter #animation #low-poly #blender

[stomygame]

Ctesiphon’s getting a new enemy type in the upcoming demo! These goons are the bulk of the manpower for the Black Death PMC. Mercenaries with more money than sense, they all lug around an expensive, tricked-out submachinegun with a smartlink connection allowing them to aim using their helmet visors while firing from the hip.

Not used to fighting peer adversaries, the goons will have trouble keeping up with our heroine’s impressive mobility, even if she fights them using their own stolen weaponry.

On a personal note, I’m really happy with how far I’ve come as artist. I definitely consider myself a programmer first and foremost, but I’ve had enough practice (and bought some of the right books, Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth is worth every penny) that given enough time I can make some art I’m entirely happy with. The next focus for improvement though is definitely speed!

#Ctesiphon #gamedev #indiedev #boomershooter #agdg #blender #low-poly

[stomygame]

A couple more statics and a concept for what will now be the most common enemy type: The Mercenary Goon.

#Ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #boomer shooter #retro fps #agdg #low poly #sketch

[stomygame]

A pair of slick-looking new APCs. Fresh off the production line, ready for overconfident mercenaries to ride around town intimidating tourists, locals, and would-be heroes.

I now kinda wish I was adding vehicular gameplay so I could drive them around. Alas that’s out of scope for Ctesiphon. They’ll just be left around as appropriate set-dressing everywhere the enemy might leave them parked.

#Ctesiphon #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #agdg #boomer shooter #low-poly