hi everyone!!! my gamedev work continues apace...
the game i talked about in my last .plan update is now called IRIDIUM VERTIGO! this is probably the final title. me and a good friend have been hashing out the story and framing for the game, such as it is. originally i had planned for it to have no story, but i also planned to have it done by now... things change, yknow?
i've made substantial progress getting enemy NPC behaviours up and running for the game as well! instead of using the built-in janky Quake engine monster movements, i'm repurposing the code for the player's movement to give it more smooth and natural feeling movements. i also got a nodegraph system (similar to that used by Half-Life) up and running to allow NPCs to navigate to arbitrary points in the level. i will show this off soon!
i also had to learn to write some actually-good branching search code to enable me to find out if two nodes are already connected by some route (for example). and as you can see from the screenshot at the top of the page, i've finally got some texture work done for the level! huge thanks to my friend rowen for providing all the textures you see there.
i'm super excited about this project!! i really hope to have it done by 2025, but who knows...
...and here's some other stuff i did in the last two weeks:
- kinda spent a silly amount of time creating a detailed player debug info view for NZ:P. pull request here!
- restored an old page to my website, some Half-Life 2: Lost Coast development info that used to be on the site in 2020.
- organized a bunch of ancient project screenshots into their respective project folders, for better record keeping of my own work. maybe some of those archives will end as pages on my portfolio?
- did a lot of reading and research on what it might take to build a brush-based CSG level editor that can export to various game-specific formats.
- created a repository of reverse engineering tools for Narbacular Drop (2005) that i put together myself in Python and Kaitai Struct. now you can make levels for the game in TrenchBroom!
as a final note i wanted to give a quick shoutout to the original Max Headroom TV movie from 1985! i watched it this morning and honestly had a great time with it. peak 80s cyberpunk! my only complaint was that they obviously didnt have enough time because the story ends pretty abruptly at the 60 minute mark. good shit otherwise tho!
ok... stay sweet <3
