Back to reality

Yup, 2009 is here, happy new year and all that.

Must admit that this new years eve felt a little awkward and I wasn't really looking forward to going back to work; but now I'm here, after a couple of weeks off doing nothing but blowing off some steam.

So, now it's back to everyday life, resuming projects etc. PowerCell is closing up to a first official release; I'm currently modeling some levels for it so we get some content which makes the game worthy of release, it's really the only thing missing - more content.

Another game that's in development, slowly but surely; is "Minigolf 3D" - there's a blog here about it, maintained by the main dev.

I'll also resume the 2D game pretty soon, I do have a couple of guys that depend on me on that one after all.

That's about it, really, I've also embraced the fact recently that I am a gamer, and there's nothing wrong about that; I'll post some more thought on that in the future - I even have another project planned regarding the topic of gaming that I have "scheduled" for this summer; we'll see how that turns out.

PowerCell follow-up

Yes, there is continued progress on PowerCell.

Currently PowerCell is developed 100% in Linux, and even though my initial goal for the game was a free, easy to pick up and play game, I have a couple of other guys working on it now who might think otherwise. It's too bad though since I think the linux community could use more free, open source games to forward and expand the linux gaming community.

There's also been talks of a PowerCell sequel with better graphics and physics. The current version of PowerCell is nearly complete as is, it just needs more content and a few final touches here and there, but overall I feel that the current engine is more than enough to create a release.

The first release should be coming soon enough, and in what scope that will be remains to be seen. I'll probably do a post-mortem on the game as well.

PowerCell

PowerCell is my most recent hobby project, I'm working on it alone when I feel like it, it uses Irrlicht and FMOD.

It's meant to be a small and lightweight project, with brainstormed gameplay elements; my primary goal is to make it fun to play and replay.

PowerCell gameplay preview 1 at YouTube.

It's been a while since I uploaded this video, and since then the game hasn't seen many updates. What I've been tackling since is mainly two things, the movement system which I've been trying to get to work properly scaled by time rather than FPS, and compiling and running it in Linux.

Linux is once again my main platform at home and while compiling and running the game in Linux have been pretty straight forward, converting the content to a Linux friendly format hasn't. The main problem is that I've been using IrrEdit as my main level editor, which is only available for windows presently. The XML files saved from the editor of course can't be opened with a default text editor in gnome since it doesn't recognize the format, not a major issue since vi takes care of that, so after going over the level files and changing case sensitivity issues, paths et.c. I've run into another issue, which is with the models themselves; it seems some of them have lost polygons on the way somewhere. Most likely a normals issue.

Now I just have to find a different way of getting 3d content into PowerCell, CSG modellers have crossed my mind and even the possibility of creating my own level editor for placing elements. Though the easiest and most painless way right now seems to be a windows partition where I can still run IrrEdit.

I might have to find a willing programmer to help me with the character movement issue and possibly adding a better physics engine.

More updates to come. I'm not ready to drop this project yet, unless it starts to deviate from my main goal.