Artwork 2

Looking at neighbor sketch I took a try at making one of my own. Yep, I can draw a thing or two, although not as easily. It’s time to remember how it’s done after years. Hardest part is choosing the right character in the right pose. For that I browsed through several dozens of references, until the right one was found. A figure in action. Meet the archer – affordable ranged threat of the battlegrounds:

Archer D

Archer

This exact archer is a good example of his kind. He has no noble roots nor fancy outfit – a true man from the crowd, who took short training courses in archery and was given a bow. His protection is very light – just basic leather coat, so that his movements and aiming are swift and precise.

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Artwork

Good news everyone – we have first real artwork made specially for NG!

Blacksmith is one of my favorite characters in the game, for he has this unique combination of working with cold steel and burning hot fire, creating tools and weapons from chunks of raw metal – a true artist of hammer and a man of highest respect in town.

Few days ago I have asked my friend Basy to make a sketch based on NG, for example depicting the smith. To my surprise she agreed. With a couple of references and some guidance she made this wonderful and heart-touching sketch:

Blacksmith

Blacksmith

Smith’s strength becomes obvious when you see his huge hammer, few people can actually lift, but he operates it with ease. He is a hard-working man, with a touch of fiery fire in his beard, noble spirit and a very kind heart.

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Small anniversary

It’s been 500th commit into NG repository right this moment 🙂

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Live progress #14 – tile picking

With a help from Jery now we have a precise tile picking algo and a nice debug visualization of it, showing the bounding boxes underneath:

2014-05-04 terrain bounding boxes

We split terrain into quadtree of bounding boxes. When we need to pick a tile below the cursor, we first check bounding boxes and discard those that don’t intersect with the picking ray (cast from cursor position). That way we effectively discard 95% of tiles and hittest only remaining few inside the hit bounding boxes. On the screenshot that is the smallest purple box around the cyan picked tile.

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Live progress #13 – archers

Experimenting with adding new kinds of towers and projectiles required to make the projectiles to work in the first place. So here is the core of any distant attacks – the arrows, now in 3D:

2014-05-04 archers attack

Colored circles below units are to separate their by types – reds are archers, yellows are footmen. Cyan and blue ones in the distance are serfs and workers.

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Live progress #12 – Stones, roads, cursors, AI

The funny thing about AI, is that once you let it loose it starts living on it’s own. So I was poking around, fixing various bits and pieces and added a second player to the Lake map.

Continue reading

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Thoughts about military

I’ve been thinking about organizing troops in NextGame. This post is a snapshot of my thoughts, incomplete and fragmented, so please allow enough room for later changes and details to be added.

Firstly we would want to keep the Rock-Paper-Scissors principle, so that each troop type has a weakness and an advantage. Secondly we want to keep tiers – that is different levels of troops.

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Live progress #11 – stonemining

Taking advantage of 3D and stone deposits being decals, now stone can be mined from any direction and from any terrain type underneath:

stone2stone3stone4

P.S. Meanwhile School and Store got a little sketching progress.

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Live progress #10 – refactorings

Last week has been rather busy, so most of the time spent was in shorter session and aimed at refactoring.

Redoing rendering approach. Now houses and units do not draw themselves, like they used to. That allowed to put all the rendering code into single unit and adjoin many identical pieces into one.

Decals are being regrouped for easier usage in terrain too. Internal stuff.

Houses got a simple building visualization – wip house slowly grow up from under the ground. Until we have a better idea, that sort of indication is quite sufficient.

Viewport settings are read from XML and now can be refreshed from F11 menu without restarting the game. Such approach helps a lot while development goes – so that any section of meta-data can be refreshed on-the-fly.

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How terrain works #2

Last time we have stopped on basic terrain appearance. How mixing surfaces and transitions between them works. Today’s the second part of the terrain being explained – decals.

terrain01

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