Defining Awesome

Finally got some time and made a HUD and respawn menu. Now it looks like a proper game.

Much to write about after the Game Developers Conference but right now I’d rather go back to work. Smoothened jumping animations and behaviour; it was bothering me since the test version.

I will be gone for the next week. I’ll be on the conference but also on a little vacation. So not to leave you empty I present you the
first preview of the gore & blood system in Link-Dead. Dudes don’t just die in this game they will die slowly in agony trying to desperately save themselves from their brutal agressor. And yes, that is one of the sprites Victor made.

I’m preparing for the Games Developers Conference in Gdansk. I will have a lot of never seen before Link-Dead footage. For sure the event will be filmed. Hopefully I will be able to show it online some time after.

Felt really tired, demotivated and pressured today by the massive work I still have to do in Link-Dead. But then I made some fantastic looking explosions and Odin blessed me with an awesome game idea about making respawn points an integral part of the gameplay and I feel a lot better.

Update:
– made parts of netcode 3 times faster, still it suffers from performance issues, gotta work more on it
– tried running game without video driver initialized for dedicated server – works!
– got tired of netcode and made game intro
– experimented with dust procesor to make different explosions
– bullet projectiles are awesome! what was I thinking with hitscan weapons?

Playing LD with bots on a new map shows me how much this game is different than Soldat and how much I need to change. I think the most important thing is the characters are much larger. This brings a difficulty in aiming because you can’t get such a good feel for were the bullets are travelling from. The weapon changes positions all the time, the player is not a dot like in Soldat. The Soldat-style camera doesn’t help here either. Fixing the camera on the player gives nice results. It feels more as if I am the player, all the bumps and movements are seen with the camera shaking. The gostek is always on the center of the screen. These things give a much greater sense of how the bullet will travel once shot.
Also: hitscan bullets suck. I’m switching them to physics based projectiles.

Quick update:
– collision has different materials resulting in different sounds (concrete, gravel, wet…)
– first map is 80% complete
– the alpha release will be a team deathmatch game, the proper game mode called Invasion will be added later
– weapons, items and game rules are fully synchronized across network
– added zoom button
– Big change? I’m thinking about changing the aim system to a point-click fire one (it might need a drawing to explain…)

I’m doing the most intense coding right now. Requiring most of my mental focus. Network code is really hard. I had to create a flow chart in Powerpoint just to illustrate what is happening between the two computers connected.

I’m rewriting the whole join game code. Game rules, items, weapons and maps will be serialized by server and sent to client on join game. This is mainly done so that mods are fully compatible over network.