This week was full of highly practical developments. Gameplay building blocks, editor and lightmapping upgrades.

 

03/16 - implemented a basic messaging system

03/17 - started to build the other game (more on that later)

03/18 - worked on movement physics

03/19 - built more of the level, restored minimal skybox support into the engine

03/20 - working on lightmapping upgrades, restored light flares, added obstruction testing

03/21 - started working on the first puzzle room, you can see mesh arrays in action here...

...and later implemented interactive object queries and switch entities

03/22 - implemented a particle effect entity...

...then implemented damage effects and additional interaction...

...and finished room 1 interactive system design shortly after that.

Then I worked on more scenery and a jumping puzzle, adding all sorts of workarounds on the way. Click on images to view them in full size.

Finally, I did some more work on the level and tweaked the flares in the process. Some say they look much better now.

03/23 - Created the second puzzle - 3 doors and 3 switches.

 

About this new game I've been showing here: it's a new 2-week project for a local game development contest I mentioned in the previous post. It's a 3D FPS puzzle platformer. Puzzles are physical (jumping) as well as usual (interact with things until a new path is opened).

The idea largely comes from the Counter-Strike KZ jumping maps. They required the player to make lots of successful jumps to get to the top of the map, however usually there was a manual checkpoint system that made things much easier by allowing the players to save their progress anytime.

The scope of this project is to create one map that would provide more varied activities leading up to at least 15 minutes of fun on an average playthrough. We'll see what I have to show in a week.

 

Finally, these are editor/system changes not included in the images:

• A particle system picker was created. Allows to add nice environmental as well as on-demand particle effects using the new particle effect entity.
• Lightmapper was multithreaded in a way to provide maximum performance for lightmap and ambient occlusion rendering. Additional features and optimizations are expected to appear after some time.
• Scripting interface was extended to support the new objective system. Did I say that I have an objective system?
• Editor has a new feature - surface painting. It's possible to pick/paint any surface of any block.
• A new mesh entity was created (with support for dynamic lighting sampling, disabling collisions and changing lightmap quality).

Since most of the game content plan is complete, I'm moving to finish that and polish the game afterwards. Probably in the form of sounds/music and UI.

If you think I can keep up the development, and if you're interested in what's going to be made here, please visit the Steam Greenlight page and vote for the game. It would mean a lot to me.