After attempting to texture some models recently, using projection painting in 3d paint, the new healing brush is proving fantastic at healing up those edges between projections, but I must admit I get very frustrated trying to find suitable reference images. Part of the problem I have decided i…

Something I feel doesn't get discussed enough in the world of gamedev, and something that in general we (more often than not) tend to be incredibly bad at, is project management. This isn't something I'm an expert at myself, I get it wrong plenty of times, but at least I'd like to stimulate a li…

It's been a few days since I put my latest alpha of my entry for the Tower Defence challenge on itch.io and my project page:

https://lawnjelly.itch.io/ramsbottom

I think I've covered the requirements for the challenge, and made the game a bit above just the requiremen…

After an initial burst of energy last month, I knew I wouldn't have so much time available for working on Tower Defence challenge up until the June 30th finish. However I did manage to get much of it working already and now I am mostly at the 'finishing up' stage.

• More music tr…

This is my second alpha version for my gamedev Tower Defence challenge entry. Fingers crossed the links will work.

Linux64 (40 megs)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jfzzh3rluzd6a3h/TowerD_012_Linux_x86_64.zip?dl=0

Win32 (32 megs)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8uj1zo8izp0weg3/TowerD_012_wi…

In the spirit of release early and often I have a playable alpha version of my challenge entry. I am not quite sure where is reliable to upload to so I have been trying dropbox which I've had issues with in the past, fingers crossed these links might work, please let me know if the links work / …

After a few days away from home I've done a bit more on the game. I must admit I'm kind of looking forward to wrapping up and working on the next thing, so am thinking more in terms of what I need to finish.

• The towers now have separate logic and firing / sounds. There are just 3 so far…

Just posting this quickly as I will be off for 5 days or so and unable to access PC / work on game, so a little update.

• Got sound working, although it needs some tweaking I need variations for the sounds but the programming side is all done. I have a sound manager that pools soun…

Finally made a video:

This doesn't have the terrain showing, I figured out it is quicker to make a build with terrain switched off, and it increases the filesize quite a bit so I might drop the terrain, not sure yet.

I put in support yesterday for more than one enemy type, I …

I actually got to spend more time on tower defence game today. Things I got done

Just a quick one, and not a real day, as I only got to spend an hour or two in the morning yesterday before another day trip. In fact none of these 'days' are really days of work, just on and off playing with the game in between other tasks.

Another day with more time spent wrestling with Unity rather than writing much code .. there doesn't seem to be a great deal of consistency in the commands to do things with the engine, and I seem to spend a lot of time googling how to do something simple (like turn off and on a particle effect,…

Well suffice to say that finally getting some sunshine and nice weather here in the UK is anathema to making any kind of progress in game development, as I spent the day motobiking in Wales. In fact, my mum suggests that part of the reason the UK does well in intellectual pursuits is because we …

Ok so I needed a distraction so I might have a go at this tower defence challenge at Gamedev. I've been meaning to have a play with Unity .. I'm a c++ guy who tends to do *everything* themselves, so this is quite a change using a rapid development environment and *gasp* someone elses engine. Tha…

These past few days I have been putting in some improvements to my dodgy custom GUI system.

I wrote this originally a few years ago and have gradually been tweaking things as I use it, kind of like Han Solo and the Millenium Falcon. Writing my basic GUI was not all that…

I've been using my own internal physics so far for my jungle game, but had been meaning to try out Box2D as I had heard good things. Whether to use third party middleware for physics comes down to a few pros and cons for me:

• Mostly written already
• Tested
…

This is a quick one just to show progress with getting 4 legged creatures matched to the terrain. While it w…

For a long time I had been delaying finding a solution to feet etc interpenetrating terrain in my game. Finally I asked for suggestions here, and came to the conclusion that Inverse Kinematics (IK) was probably the best solution.

Read more in Lawnjelly's Journal

This will be a short technical one for anyone else facing the same problem. I can't pretend to have a clue what I was doing here, only the procedure I followed in the hope it will help others, I found little information online on this subject.

I am writing an Android game and want to put in …

In the last few weeks I've been focusing on getting the Android build of my jungle game working and tested. Last time I did this I was working from Windows, but now I've totally migrated to Linux I wasn't sure how easily everything would go. In the end, it turns out that support for Linux is…

Just a little progress video. As well as getting the scripting working a bit more, I've been placing villages and naming map areas. The area names are generated by putting together random chosen syllables.

For variation with the natives they now use realtime bones li…

Lots of improvements since moving my development to Linux. All the software has been working great, just as a recap I am using mainly QT Creator, Blender, Geany, Gimp, and Audacity.

One of the big changes I made was to the export toolchain for static 3d models - buil…

For an introduction to my reasons for migrating from Windows to Linux, see my previous blog post. Here I will try to stick to my experience as a Linux beginner, and hopefully inspire other developers to try it out.

The first stage of course in migrating to Linux is to e…

I've been developing on Microsoft Windows for a long time, since around 1992/93, when I got my first PC. Various other platforms before that, but I've pretty much stayed with it, not because it is a technical marvel (it's not), but based on the idea that it was the most popular OS so it shou…

Time for an update to show how I'm getting on. A lot of what I've been doing is copy-pasting and reworking code from th…

I've been working hard the last week.. firstly I put all the plants so far in the same blender file so I could render all the frames out in an automated fashion rather than manually. It was becoming ridiculous that everytime I wanted to tweak the lighting / depth export I'd have to redo all the fil…

The big tech feature that I'm pleased to be getting working for this game is that the entire background jungle and terrain is pre-rendered, with a scrolling system, so it takes very little CPU / GPU / battery at runtime and can thus…

Scrolling

The rewrite is going well .. it was quite tricky to get the scrolling landscape to work with terrain elevation. In the end I had to have not one, but 2 scrolling systems working in parallel (which requires some cleverness to stop them stepping on each other's toes). One to do the terrain …

I decided to get back to work on my (extremely long running development, "duke nukem forever" style :lol: ) jungle game, after 7 months gap. As is always the nature of returning to something after a long gap, I found myself trying to remember how the thing worked (this normally takes a while to get…