Defining Awesome

Creating tile maps is a pain in the ass, especially when you’ve got 100s of tiles. How would you arrange data differently to make it easier?

Recent inspirations:

played this 20 years ago but somehow I have fresh memory of it

also

Added today fully working raycasting for collisions. So shooting works against maps and characters.

I’m testing a new gameplay & rendering technique for 2D FOV.

12 basic principles of animation defined by the 9 Old Men. The one’s useful for me now are 1,5,6 & 7.

I optimized the shit out of the shadow casting algorithm. I had to do it after I realized that the shadows aren’t just a gimmick but they will be one of the defining elements in Link-Dead’s gameplay. I got rid of the nasty square roots and other unnecessary calculations. The result is shown on the video. Each ball has a light attached to it. The framerate drops by half after about 100 lights/balls. It is a really good optimization (there won’t ever be that many lights). Also the balls have now corrected physics collision responses.

(open link for better quality)

I didn’t have electricity for a few days but that didn’t stop me from using the paper compiler. I solved a big physics collision problem.

Because of the recent code rewritings and the fact that I don’t have a graphic artist I decided to cut-down features and focus on releasing a working game as fast as possible. By the end of the calendar year.

It’s amazing how much life you can bring into animation with Lagrange interpolation. Here is a comparison with linear:

Big animation lesson: all movements of living creatures go along curves. Linear = robotic. I’m implementing Lagrange curve interpolation.