holidays

Ahh, winter holidays. Time for distractions aplenty! buub0nik and I have been doing our best to hack away at Tower Climbs whenever we get the chance. Progress is good -- we are happy with the gameplay mechanics and nearly have a style pinned down. Style is what we've been working on the most these past few weeks. Since neither of us are any good with textures and we have no budget to hire someone who is, we've had to use other strengths to our advantage. buub0nik is playing around with noise algorithms that we can plaster onto objects, and I'm working on an edge detection algorithm to spice up the final rendering. I'm also working on better integrating our lighting system with Blender so we can get an example of what the lighting will look like without leaving the editor.

We want to have the style and mechanics solid by new year. We can then switch our full attention to level development and include more people in the testing. I'll have some screenshots and a video up Soon (TM) once we're happy with the new style :)

what is indie

IndieCity put out a survey recently that asked a short but difficult question... what is indie? My response is copied below.

How do you define indie games?

Indie goes straight from idea to finished form with as little resistance as possible. There is a lot of resistance that happens in corporate culture that may be completely out of the control of those involved. Features axed because they, while innovative, did not contribute to the appeal of the masses. Profit over innovation... more concerned over investors than the game itself. All things that can transform a bright idea into the grey drab of the status quo.

The older a game is the broader the definition of 'indie' feels to me. S2Games (indies in my mind) were definitely not heavy hitters like EA, but they also weren't just a hadful of people. With each passing day the definition of indie seems to shrink, such that it's less acceptable to be a team of 20 or 10. Still, I'd like to think that there is significant audience that sees the game for what it is and doesn't get too distracted by strict definitions.

tl;dr -- To me, a game that is indie goes as unadulterated as possible from conception to product and passes through as few hands as possible.

let there be lights.....a lot of them

Been working on a multilight shader and being able to load lights from Blender. Using a somewhat naive method at the moment but the results look nice. One problem I am still investigating is a compile crash when I try to use too many lights. Here are some screens of what it looks like: