Connect the dots

Can you guess what this is?

dots

How about now?

connected dots

And if you're still unsure:

and here's one we made earlier!

With special thanks to the excellent Doom Wiki!

Metal

stealth edited on 19-9 with slightly newer song
and then stealth edited again on 20-9 with even newer song

No youtubes today, but instead an auditory preview. Musical mastermind Pete Brannan has graciously offered to write some original tracks for Gloom.

A few years back Pete astounded me with a top notch soundtrack for Revenge of the Evil Aliens*. I had decided to put that game up for sale which meant replacing all the music which consisted of (unlicensed) tracks of some of my favorite artists such as UNKLE. I handed him the soundtrack and said I wanted something that "sounds like this", not expecting much. Imagine my surprise when he came through with some great sounding tunes that have even been noted by reviewers as a high point of the game!

But enough flattery, here's a first draft of what a Gloom song might sound like:

Peter Brannan - Metal1


And for reference of how a completed song sounds, here's the final level for Evil Aliens:

Peter Brannan - Revenge of the Evil Aliens (Stage 3)


*available now FREE on personal computer and CHEAP on xbox live indie games!

Check out what I can do!

If you're not familiar with the limitations of the original Doom engine then the following might not impress you much, but check this out:



Yeah baby, rooms above rooms!

Check out how wonky that looks in the editor:

Hax

I'm not sure if this trick will work once I put in collision detection and physics, but if it does I'm totally going to make a tower level!

Gloom Does Undo

 "Repeatedly adding and removing nodes, lines and sectors doesn´t look like much, so I won´t make a video out of it."

I lied.

Post holiday update

Gamescom 2010

Had a great couple of weeks of vacation, spent going to Gamescom, Lowlands and Berlin, and reading Kevin Smith´s diary cover to cover.

Unfortunately I didn´t get to do as much coding as I´d have liked to, but still managed to get a couple of days of solid work in.

I noticed, especially after taking a short break from the project, that the code was getting messy. I was using the same classes in the game as in the editor, so stuff like 3D rendering was living confusingly alongside 2D editor drawing. I´d also put a lot of editor UI code directly in the classes that dealt with the actual editing, so they were busy changing the level and updating the screen at the same time, leading to more muddledness.

So I cleaned up! I now have a nice layer between the level and the editor (aptly called EditableLevel) that exposes whatever data the editor needs to change but hides all of the hardcore engine stuff. While I was in there I also improved on a bunch of other stuff, among which a move to the new XNA 4 framework (potential winphone support yo!).

I´m pretty happy with the results!

Using the new architecture I´ve put an undo-list in place. Repeatedly adding and removing nodes, lines and sectors doesn´t look like much, so I won´t make a video out of it, but I assure you it´s pretty neat!

In other news, I´ve asked the talented Pete Brannan (of Evil Aliens fame) if he´d be interested in doing the soundtrack and he´s into it! This guy´s great and I really hope we can make it work. If so, I´ll be sure to post some tune previews!