Day 4 is here:

6 hours ago, dmatter said:

So it's early-to-midway into my day4 and I'm settling in to work on this for the day. I just wanted to post an update about where I got to for day3; It was too late for me to write up a post last night but better late than never!

As you can see it's slowly beginning to look like a game now and it has some nods towards "chain-reaction" as a gameplay mechanic. Whereas the "alien invasion" theme will be more of a motif and featured in the graphics and story.

So I got a few features implemented yesterday including trapdoors, the dominos, the big gear thing in the sky, support for multiple minions and aiming.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though, I had to sink a few hours debugging issues with my fluid rendering. One of the big issues I was having was todo with transparency and blending. For some reason I always have a huge mental hangup when it comes to figuring out OpenGL's blend modes.

Initially I cranked the maths and thought that something like this might do a reasonable job:

glBlendEquationSeparate(GL_MAX, GL_FUNC_ADD);
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);

Alas GL_MAX is not supported in GLES2.0 so that screwed me over for a while. (Might not have worked anyway). Eventually I worked out an alternative for my purposes, I find it rather counter-intuitive as a solution though:

glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 0);
glBlendFuncSeparate(GL_ONE_MINUS_DST_ALPHA, GL_DST_ALPHA, GL_ONE, GL_ONE);

It seems to handle all edge cases that I could think to test.

I do not understand why the blend function is fixed-function and not programmable. This is totally bizarre to me and seems incredibly easy to do in theory using a "blend shader" that takes the source and destination fragments and emits the resultant colour. 

Why is blending fixed function, does anybody know? Am I missing something obvious here?

 

Anyhoo, onto day4. Not sure what I'll work on today. At some point I really need to start finding or making proper art assets instead of all this placeholder stuff!

Looks nice! The games with balls and spheres are my favourite!

End of day 4 update! Feeling massively behind and under pressure due to real life first two days, having the whole week off work last year makes a huge difference!

Totally missed this (RL!)

Best of luck to all of the contestants. More than half-mark here, keep the juices going!

End of day four blog entry.

6 hours ago, __Toz__ said:

I just noticed something missing from this competition when compared to the one two years ago. In that competition games were required to show a splash screen on startup showing who contributed to making the Week of Awesome possible. Was this rule removed on purpose, or was it simply forgotten about?

Yes, i did that the one year.  I didn't feel it worked very well, or the design that was used was kindof meh.  so i decided to scrap it for future contests.

Not quite finished for the day but I've been replacing the placeholder graphics with slightly less-worse programmer art. So here's a peek:

I'm not necessarily settled on all these sprites yet either, still WIP.

Thoughts welcome!

Done for today.

Thanks to ryan20fun for the heads up, as I originally posted this in the wrong thread earlier.

Ok this is kinda a blog update but I'll add more stuff like pictures and videos later on this evening.

So my untitled game will combine the alien invasion and castles theme and will feature slime monsters from mars that crash land on Earth and try to take over a medieval land. You as the hero must stop them before they reach the king and overthrow him, and the rest of the world. That's what I have so far. Took me just about all day yesterday to come up with it. Looking to make a hack n slash type game similar to um... Light Crusader or Fatal Laybrinth on Sega Genesis, but with less RPG elements. I'll be using the Unity Game Engine. I've started playing with some assets from the unity asset store trying to get them to play nice together, more updates later tonight!

Just got home from work, going to eat and then work a bit on my game and then post something before I go to bed.

Done for today. Here is my little blog post :