As promised, I’ll be raffling off one $75USD Steam digital gift cards, and two $25 cards shortly. Just to be super transparent, here’s the raffle code.
And no, I’m sure mathematically this wouldn’t hold up in a real lottery–but for a raffle with fewer than 20 valid entrants, I think we can call it good.
function rankRaffleEntrants(){
var entrants = "Prima Secunda Tertia Quarta Quinta Sexta Septima Octavia Nina Decima"; //Steam handles
entrants = entrants.split(" ");
ol = document.getElementById("orderedList");
//print function
function addToList(entrant){
var li = document.createElement('li');
var nextInList = document.createTextNode(entrant);
li.appendChild(nextInList);
ol.appendChild(li);
}
while (entrants.length>1){
var pick = Math.round(Math.random()*(entrants.length-1));
var entrant = entrants.splice(pick,1);
addToList(entrant);
}
addToList(entrants[0]);
}
For Chronovoros, I created a Twine hack using custom macros inserted via Chapel’s Custom Macro Framework. These interact with the game’s custom CSS styling by adding foreground and background image elements. The image files, indexed-color PNGs with a 1-bit alpha channel, are crushed down to surprisingly small file sizes for their resolution. (GIF would be just as useable, with interesting implications for animation.)
A layout for the different planes of one “scene” in the game, color-coded
Each set of images has its own macro, which when called passes a list of the desired image filenames and styling to a function which displays them. The images are scaled to fit the width of the window, and positioned to align either their top edge to the top of the viewport (the entire scrollable content of the page) or their bottom edge to the bottom of the window. An additional function is called every time the window paints (started by a call to its own macro on the first page of the game) which adjusts the vertical positions of the planes based on user scrolling; the vertical positions are calculated so that whatever the height of each individual image, scrolling completely from the top to the bottom of the window displays the entire image.
In practice, the multiplane hack breaks when the window is too tall. An aspect ratio should really be enforced with some kind of letterboxing scheme in the CSS. Having to write and call an entirely new macro for each set of image planes, while not complicated, is a little inelegant for a production-ready tool. Additionally, HTML5 special effects like contrast, color adjustment and blurring are implemented, but didn’t end up used on Chronovoros. Knocking the multiplane hack into something easier to use would be a good weekend project, for a later date.
Click here to download demo files and code for the Twine Multiplane Hack.
The Nordic Game Jam 2021 is over and–as far as I know–everyone survived. My team set out to make a “cinematic text adventure” you can play in your browser. Which wasn’t totally a thing, so we had to invent some stuff.
The theme, announced at 6:30PM Friday, was “Pending.” (Yes, you can imagine the initial confusion!) We had the story, setting and characters in rough form by mid-morning Saturday. All five characters were designed, the outline was running in Twine, my basic multiplane hack was running, and I had some of the layouts sketched out by the end of that day. (Around 1AM, for all of us.) Sunday was a sprint to get the temporary artwork replaced, layers assembled and compressed, story finished, and the bugs squashed. We got it submitted at 4:50PM Sunday–10 minutes to spare!
The story and interactive logic were written by Sejr Thompson. The character design and other hand-illustrated art were by Alexander Pechlivanidis. My own role was twofold: Designing the layouts–in an animation sense–of the independently scrolling background and foreground art layers, and hacking the Twine text engine to display them.
It’s a jam game, so there are a few rough edges, but not half as many as you’d expect. Reviews so far have been very good. Check it out:
An html5 auto-conversation game about the different versions of ourselves that have been, are, and will be, meeting an ex from many years prior. Graphics designed/performed with iOS Messages animojis. Created for the October 2020- game jam at KADK. (Plus fixes, cleanup, and the addition of a third character.)
Introducing beta 7 of Forest, with better graphics, a more dynamic game world, and many behind the scenes tweaks. This project is released under an MIT License.
Forest Gods. Nearly all aspects of the board can now be influenced by randomly-generated, free-floating roamers. Some are dramatic (like lightning gods) others practically invisible (like soil porosity gods). They’re intended to make the forest more varied, and perhaps even less lonely and more mysterious.
Improved Fire. Fire has been an aspect of the game world for several versions, but is completely rewritten in beta 7 to be much more graphical, dramatic, realistic in its effect on the forest, and unpredictable.
Better Graphics. The band of the sun now moves throughout the year more accurately, and the stars now properly blur into rings as well. Fog is a custom shader, the minimum of height fog and linear distance fog. Lighting for the ground and water now comes from an array of lights aligned with the sun ring. (Trees are still sprites, however, and don’t yet respond to lighting.) The randomly generated forest’s average temperature is used as a stand-in for latitude.
Smaller Board. Moved from a 200×200 tile grid down to 128×128. This seems to tax the CPU a little less without noticeably changing the scale of the game.
Erosion. Soil is now washed along by water. Stream system formation is still rare, but it does happen.
The House of Time, a scale model of earth history, public beta v0.3 is now live. While it’s still pretty empty, this is the first release where I feel the important pieces are all in place (if only as stubs).
Dreadnaughtus schematic for modeling (Be kind, I’m no Mark Witton!)
The House of Time, a scale model of earth history, is now in public beta. Introducing v0.1.
New This Release:
Assets
Holocene Gate – Pleistocene Drain – Pliocene Verge – Miocene Planters – Oligocene Drive – Eocene Circle – Paleocene Stairs – Hall of the Cretaceous – Hall of the Jurassic – Hall of the Triassic – Permian Veranda – Carboniferous Grove – Devonian Stand – Silurian Deck – Ordovician Walk – Cambrian Path – Proterozoic Acreage – Archean Waste – Hadean Shore
Engine
Babylon.js-Based Engine – Zero-Texture-Map Detailing (world space and model space GPU noise functions, SVG importer, client-side extrusion) – Positional Asset Loading/Unloading – Sound Manager – Environment Manager – Async Terrain Updater
Bug Fixes
Not enough
To Do:
Assets
Membership/Info Card – Titanosaur & Other Models – Low-res Ionic Column – Moon – Stony Beach – Stars – Sunset – Much Much More
Engine
Framerate-Independant Movement Speed – Lazy Shader Compiler – “Crawler” Mesh – Fill Lighting for Darkness – Touch Controls – Frame Rate Optimization
Bugs
Unpredictable Sprites – Ocean Vertex Displacement Not Following Waves – Hadean Cliff Artifacts – Ripples Only Visible When Looking East – Safari Support
In a short while, the link to the venerable Bestiary of Geekdom up top will move to the sidebar, and be replaced with the House of Time.
This is a project I’ve been tapping away at for six months or so, on and off, and in an effort to play a little less of my usual gin rummy, I’m working toward soft-launching a public beta. It will be missing a lot of features and content, but should be a good start.
The 3d engine is built in Javascript on the Babylon.js WebGL framework. My goal is for it to run in all modern browsers–including mobile–with low-to-modest hardware requirements. There will be no loading screens, HUD or narration, no accounts or other tracking, no objectives or “gamification,” and certainly no ads. The House of Time will be free and available to all. If you’re old enough to remember the experience of Myst when it first came out, you’ll understand the quiet, contemplative, even lonely atmosphere I wish to create. Art as science as art. This is in furtherance of my personal philosophy that education should be free.
I’ve been designing a system that uses as little bandwidth as possible. Most interactive 3d is built around the expectations of PCs and consoles: That transfer is fast, storage is large, and the GPU is the bottleneck. Here that’s reversed. There will be zero texture maps. Shaders will supply most of the visual detail procedurally, generating it on the fly in your graphics card. SVGs will be rendered to bitmap in a hidden canvas element to supply more specific 2d imagery. Most of the shaders will rely on world space coordinates, so that two instanced models sitting side by side may look radically different. Instanced geometry will be used as much as possible. Complex extruded shapes will be generated in the browser from a path and cross-section. Chunks of geometry will load only when needed, and free their memory when no longer in use.
The overall scene (more than a mile long) is being built in Blender, as it plays well with Babylon.js and glTF export. Even with the UI improvements in the Bforartists fork, this has been a major pain point, and creation of complex 3d assets (dinos!) lags badly. (My preferred 3d package, Hash Animation:Master, has sadly become a paid zombie, with no meaningful updates this decade. The quest for a replacement continues…) I split the large scene into chunks manually and export them for browser loading with Babylon.js’s Blender export plugin. Tags in the names of models and lights are digested by the engine on load, to do things like assigning noise shaders, creating extruded shapes, or replacing a mesh with sprites.
This week, I’ve built a new stageManager object to move scenery on- and offstage and in and out of memory, as well as written a new pine foliage shader I’m reasonably happy with. Before going public, I still need to create and fix a few more things:
StageManager – New evergreen shader – Sound manager
Bugs
Crash on deleting assetContainer – Falling sprites not finding ground – Sprite systems not reusing correctly – Too much fog at start – Left-hand side of gate not animating – Miocene grass too short – Cretaceous Hall light wonkiness – No Carboniferous shadows
