Author Archives: Krom

Walking units

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Krom

Making a new game from scratch is a huge deal, but what about redoing an existing 2D into 3D? Game logic remains 2D, most of the internals don’t change that much either. Still it is a huge deal when it … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work | Leave a comment

Live progress #7 – fast forward

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Krom

Here’s build menu sketch. Since we are going to get houses count increased a bit, I’ve decided to split them into 4 tabs – core, materials, food and military. These 4 domains have naturally formed: There’s no decision about menu … Continue reading →

Posted in Live progress | 4 Comments

Tech tree plans

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Krom

Let’s temporarily switch away from technical side of development and take a look at planning. Over initial course of planning we had several iterations over tech-tree plans. Here is how it looked like: First plan was rather short and based … Continue reading →

Posted in Early plans, Ideas | 19 Comments

Live progress #6 – breeding pines

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Krom

NextGame has got some growing pine trees today. This was not a small bit, here’s why:

Posted in Live progress | 6 Comments

Gallery section

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Krom

Gallery has been added – there you might see pictures from the articles and hopefully some new ones will be added soon.

Posted in Site | Leave a comment

Live progress #5 – tile overlays

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Krom

Today I’m going to explain how overlays are intended to work in NextGame. In NG terrain consists of 3D tiles that are morphed to follow the heightmap. Overlays are 3D models of special tiles “upgrades”. They are morphed too and … Continue reading →

Posted in Ideas, Live progress | 3 Comments

Tile engine in 3D

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Krom

Converting games from 2.5D to 3D is simple – make a terrain, put some 3D houses and units, setup perspective projection camera. Game logic still remains the 2D. Starting from the top – is it really that simple to make … Continue reading →

Posted in Early plans | 2 Comments

Live progress #4 – throwing old stuff away

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Krom

Today’s went under the “Throw away old stuff” flag. Since the code is our property and art assets are mostly not, they all have to go. The process has started a few months ago already, but today it was mostly … Continue reading →

Posted in Live progress | 6 Comments

Live progress #3 – tile surfaces editing

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Krom

Tileset surfaces got some improvements. Now they are stored in XML instead of hardcode (which allows for handy editing in a Notepad). Of course XML is slower to parse, but for development we need it to be easy to edit. … Continue reading →

Posted in Live progress | Leave a comment

Neat advantage of 3D

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Krom

3D models have many advantages over 2D sprites, (and drawbacks too), but when it comes to little details, 3D has a neat one – we can change how a unit model looks and that change is propagated throughout the game … Continue reading →

Posted in Early plans, Sidenotes | Leave a comment