Elecorn: The Animated Coder

We created Age of Empires II HD here at Hidden Path!

Available on Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380/

To motivate how easy it can be to make games, I made a quick game in Small Basic based on my daughter’s game idea about rescuing pets.  Enjoy!

http://www.elecorn.com/pet_rescue/pet_rescue.zip

Art mostly lifted from Ignition Entertainment’s Zoo Keeper game for Nintendo DS.

Hey everyone!

I’ve collaborated with the great folks over at IndieGameStand to post Caster up in a pay-what-you-want format.  Get it here:

https://indiegamestand.com/

The sale only lasts a few hours, so get it while you can!

10% of the proceeds go to support adoption via the Dave Thomas Foundation  for Adoption.
Thanks!

Yes… Finally after a long wait, we at Hidden Path Entertainment are starting work on Defense Grid 2!

We’ve been trying to get a publishing deal for quite some time for this project, but publishers have fallen through time and time again.  Since then, Kickstarter has started to prove viable for large projects so we’ve decided to use Kickstarter to get the funding we need to complete the game.

You can get all the details on the project here:

http://kickstarter.hiddenpath.com

Please tell your friends.  Without any publisher funding, we need your help to make this game!

Thank you for your support!

Let’s Make More Defense Grid!

#IwantDG2

It all begins at 2:00pm PST today…

I’d like to see this game made.

If you’re a fan of stealth games, you may want to help these guys out.  Only 3 days left!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/486250632/republique-by-camouflaj-logan

So I’ve decided to take a little diversion from work on Caster… again… and make a small multiplayer voxel based shooter.  The development name is Lexov, but it will not ship with that name.

I have this trailer for Lexaloffle’s game Voxatron to blame for this diversion:

Pretty cool, eh?  Get more details here: http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php

I’m targeting Xbox 360 via Xbox Indie Games.

Working on this game with C# on the 360 has some interesting problems that have been quite a bit of fun to try and overcome.  For example, say I have a 128 x 128 x 64 volume of voxels.  Simply walking across that volume of voxels requires over a million operations.  Doing one million operations alone in C# on the Xbox brings my frame rate down to less than 30 frames per second (just write a for loop and increment a local variable to see what I mean).

Here is an early version of Lexov where I am evaluating the voxel volume and adding the appropriate geometry for rendering:

Because of the performance issues with C# on the Xbox, I’ve had to get pretty creative in my approach.  I’ve started using approaches that reduce the number of operations that need to be done while favoring doing more work on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).  For example, in C# on the 360, it’s faster to draw an extra million triangles to save several thousand instructions per frame.

Currently, I’m using several dynamic vertex buffers and updating changes to the buffers as they happen in the game rather than evaluating the entire voxel volume each frame.

One important difference when using this approach is that I no longer have to render cubes on voxel boundaries.  This breaks some of the retro feel from being a true voxel volume, but allows for much smoother movement.

At this point I had to ask myself what it was that I really wanted to do with this game.  I decided that what I really wanted was a simple fun destructible environment game at 60 frames per second on the Xbox 360.  As cool as evaluating a single voxel volume would have been, it was secondary in importance.

Still, it’s hard to sacrifice the simplicity and beauty of the single voxel volume approach.  In the end, I’m actually very happy to have sub voxel movement in the game.

Here are some more videos of progress I’ve made.

And earlier today:

I’m going to try and keep an active blog on my Lexov’s progress.  I’ve been debating if the extra time to write blog posts is worth it when I could spend that time working on the game.  I’ve decided that if I get extra feedback and community support from doing the posts, then it will make for a better game.  Caster is a great example of this.  Caster would have been pretty lame and boring were it not for the amazing feedback I got while showing the game off to friends and colleagues.

More details on the plans for game play and design forth coming.

Thanks!

Thank you all for your patience!  Caster 1.3 has been released for Linux in 32 and 64 bit versions.  You can get the update here:

www.casterthegame.com

Thanks and have a great new year!

So having taken a break from Caster for a while to work on some other projects, and then having taken a break from working on games in general over this Christmas break (playing a few instead), I’m pumped about working on Caster again!

I have some ideas for game play and story that I’m really excited about.

Story has been a weak point for Caster and hopefully the next few updates will make it more compelling.

I’m also adding in better mod support.  Instead of adding in mods in a separate mods directory, I’m going to treat them like separate game with their own sub directory.

Before I release the next update to Caster, I’ll be releasing Sunshine as a mod of Caster. Most of my initial work on Sunshine has been in 2D (because I wanted to do something “simple” ), it looks like I’m going to promote that to 3D as well.  A lot of the game play will be 2D, but I might play around with the camera a bit.

As far as updating the visual style for Caster (higher poly, shaders, etc), I’ll probably wait until Caster 2 to do that.

Here’s for a great 2011 with some sweet updates to Caster!