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World 1 demo brings you to the outer forests

Calling all playtesters,

After 2 months from the last playtest, the third demo is ready for review. This one brings the first real graphics to the game; with the addition of Voxel Cone Tracing there's a warm glow to the whole forest. Right now that's the biggest time sink per-frame so I am doing some more research about different variations of the technique. Because everything is one screen, there might be a screen space approx that looks good enough.

The final boss has been made to shoot out enemies as an attack, which I think is a cool idea, but needs to be balanced more. I've found a couple of strategies that work well, but you can cheese it easily if you know some tricks. Not too sure if that's a good or bad thing right now, I'm leaning towards the second because it should still pose some challenge. We'll leave it to the playtest though.

The side rooms have turned into more of item rooms than alt paths that teach you how to play, which was the original idea. But I think that it works better not to get to crazy with the path for the first world. . Maybe I'll come back and rework these but I think that it's good for now, the items that you get can help you if you have trouble and work to highlight the gameplay mechanics well.

There are the first hints at what the story is going to be. I'm going to try to tell it through lore and you'll need to piece it together. I was reading something, I'll link it if I can find it, where someone was talking about how telling a simple story through complex means is the worst way to do it, and I have to agree. But, I think that it'll work well and it follows with the themes that I want to focus on so I am going to go ahead with it and we'll see what happens.

You can download it and check it out at the top of the page or right here. Let me know if you don't trust it or what ever I'll bust out the hashes, but c'mon ❤️.

Comments

2 replies

Dave

Thanks! Is there an rss feed for your blog?

Reply
Aug 1

Iain

It looks like wordpres has it’s default https://blog.winter.dev/feed/
Not sure how good that is though.

Reply
Aug 1

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Projects

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IwEngine is an engine that I started as a way to lean about how computer games are made. Right now I am trying to make my first publishable game with it. I started by making something that was linear and story based and got about 50% done with it, but I wanted to try and publish something smaller and more arcade like first. That has turned into these sand games...

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Every shape has some method of generating a mesh for it, but there is no good central spot. This website will eventially contain a full list of differnt algorithms for every shape.

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There is something to be said about learning through trying to teach. I found that I have trouble explaining code to other people, so I am going to use these articles as practice. I’ve been making a game engine for the last 2 years which has taken me to many different corners of C++, and I have learned some useful practices along the way that I want to share.

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