2017 TOTDD Video Diary 2

For anyone who's interested in the newest version of the game you can see the current video diary here:

I'm very happy with the atmosphere of the game so far. I feel like it's something I can work with.

I've got a lot of ideas for the game, but for now I'm just going to keep slogging away trying to get a working gameplay demo.

The schedule so far is:

1. Item generation.
2. Basic player stats.
3. Inventory management.
4. Moving items between the screen and the inventory.
5. Using items to attack and trigger events.

I'm going to be working a lot with messages this time around. That should clear up many of the hurdles I was facing in past versions of t he game.

One problem I had before is that I had to complete both player mechanics, and enemy mechanics simultaneously. A player attacked a monster causing damage directly, the monster had to process that damage and so on.

With messages, I can just send a message and forget about it. It doesn't matter that the monster isn't processing it. I can work on player mechanics in isolation before bringing in working enemies.

Same with items, everything can be built as an empty framework of send and receive messages, then the message processing routines can be filled in.

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Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho

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