Back to the Platformer (again)

Well, it's official, I'm bored with the spaceship game already. Went too simple and found it dull to develop, let alone play, so am back with the 3D platform game.

It's the game I always wanted to write anyway and the existing code is bearable although needs a bit of a tidy in a few places now. Was good to dust it off.

Not all back to square zero though. I've been using my Perlin noise experiments this morning to generate a seamless cloud-based sky box for the backdrop to the level, which looks and feels a lot nicer than the pregenerated one's I'd erm, found, stolen from Google before.

I've made a few mods to the editor (a separate project called Sandbox) to make it a bit easier to use. I'm not actually constrained to voxels in the level geometry but I've decided I don't mind if it looks and feels a bit voxelly and it speeds up the process of creating level geometry. Levels can actually be constructed from any kind of convex 3D shapes with individual faces being coloured and textured in whatever way you wish, and there will soon be support for free-standing meshes inside the levels as well.

The main focus for the forseeable is capabilities of the central character. Need a whole new model to replace the stand-in and I want him to have archery working at the least, perhaps as well as shield and blade of some kind. Thinking of a kind of Link, Zelda style heroic with puzzle solving and fighting. I can make basic animations with Charm, my model editor, and have not worked with attaching weapons to bones before, but I can sort of glimpse how it might work in my head.

Bit more level interaction as well - ledge grabbing and so on. You can already walk to stay on edges and there is an autoated edge detection system working to pre-process the levels on load to find the edges. Can use the same edges for grabbing and shimmy, just a case of getting the animations to look right.

Just feels "right" to be working on this project now.

Thanks for stopping by. Hopefully a flurry of updates over the next few days :)