March 7, 2008

I've always wanted to do a shooter and a castlevania-style platformer. Is there a way to combine the two? Those are the only genres still in the running. My musical style (and the fact I'm the only one working on this) lends itself to a shooter, but I'm leaning towards platformer.

Collision detection! It's working, except for collision response. The genre I choose will dictate how detailed I have to be with response.

Looks like I'm not going to use filter-free scrolling after all. It looks great, but only when making massive assumptions about the sytems this will run on. Monitor resolution, not listening when I turn vsync on, variance in refresh rates all point to me just filtering everything and letting the subpixel rendering take care of everything. I hope I don't get too gratuitous with zooming/rotation as a result.

February 24, 2008

Progress is being made on design. It's interesting how a nice, smooth 2D hardware accelerated game engine requires a different mindset than a 3D engine. In a 3D engine you usually update the game logic relatively slowly and then tween the animation/movement at a higher rate. The tweening produces high frequency visual updates while the slower update lets you 'take your time' with a lot of the other logic. With 2D, it's better to update everything (logic/rendering) at a really high rate, and use vsync. Vsync off looks horrible with scrolling backgrounds. The best solution is having a really really fast target fixed framerate so no matter when the screen updates, it's virtually up to date. I absolutely hate texture filtering for backgrounds in 2D games. This means I'll probably design the game for 1 basic 4:3 resolution and one basic widescreen resolution, and if the user doesn't have those resolutions (or multiples thereof) they'll have to make due with thin black borders on the top and/or sides. Having pixel-perfect backgrounds is important to me....nothing blurred. I've got the basic toolchain down. From photoshop, to AC3D (a nice simple 3D editor that'll work for 2D object placement/tagging), exported to the game. I did the first successful test of the whole path today with a couple background layers and object/camera cues.

One challenge was figuring out how to maximize the use of texture memory while not having to rely on tile sets or streaming texture data to VRAM during a level (which is an inconsistent prospect whose timing varies widely amongst hardware). I settled on a reverse tiling method....the backdrops are split into quads at export time, and empty (seethrough) parts are ignored, and the rest tiled automatically into larger textures. If you do use tiles for part of the level it'll recognize them and not duplicate the data in the textues. I think it's a nice compromise because you can construct your level background/foreground any way you'd like. Once the chopped up shiznits is imported to AC3D it's just a matter of placing the background planes and placing/tagging objects.

I'm also excited to have ordered a wacom tablet with built-in LCD. It looks rad and I'm excited to try it out. Stay tuned!

February 17, 2008

I've begun work on my next project. It's a 2D-style action game with a metal soundtrack. The soundtrack will be original. I'll post periodic developer blogs here as a means to track progress and provide motivation. The game will be sold for $$ and will be distributed online. So, stick around and enjoy the trainwreck...stay tuned.

September 15, 2007

I was invited to be a guest guitarist for a metroid metal track. I had a blast rocking the metroid and doing a looooooong solo at the end. It's from Metroid 2: The Tunnel. Check it out on the metroid metal songs page.

July 25, 2007

GameTrailers is making a metroid retrospective. The first episode is live and has some goaty music in it...the intro is from stemage's metroid metal tribute and the outro has some of my super metroid song "The Ice Beam Cometh." Check it out!

June 26, 2007

After wavering back and forth on whether to release CDs, the best path is to keep Unchosen Paths as is (online/mp3). Some official artwork may appear. The forum is gone (thanks silvereye for helping moderate, and apologies to those who liked the forum....it basically exploded), but the songs will remain.  As for what's next, I'm not sure. I'm going to bask in the glory of the playstation 3's destruction, and continue to make music. Thanks to everyone for the support and kind words!

May 31, 2007

The Unchosen Paths project is finished! "When Spirits Sleep" is a cover of Evergreen. Check out the project page for details!

May 4, 2007

New Contra song - Feeding Frenzy

April 1, 2007

Shadow Buster (cover of Flashback) is done.

February 11, 2007

January 28, 2007

New song: Ghost Voyage, a cover of Anxiety.

December 8, 2006

Forum is back!

December 6, 2006

The forum is being upgraded. Until that's finished, the forum will be down :(

September 3, 2006

New Song: "Nefarious" covers Aquarius.

July 29, 2006

New song, "Froggy Mosh," a cover of Dead Beat.