2 November 2010,
DOOMclone IV has finally been released. It feels like at least the fifth time I've written that somewhere, and ironically, most people will come across this website after playing the game anyway.

At the moment I'm busy studying for exams, which are always a pain in the neck and will keep me for a while. But for now I have a bit of free time so I'll discuss Blindspot's future direction, or as I've come to call it, life after DOOMclone.

As you may have heard, there is a new project coming up, I've been passively working on it over the past few months. The base of the game originates from a project I started working on about 2 years ago, but since then it has morphed so much that it's a totally new game. The only thing I have to show for all those late nights so long ago is a really messy gmk. I've been flirting with a few different ideas for game distribution, ideally I'd like to engineer some kind of payment and shipping system. Maybe take out an ABN and make Blindspot Software a real game company. The reason behind this is that I'd like to produce something physical, a nice big disk box with artwork and autographed instruction manual. Unfortunately I probably won't be doing that since less people will want to pay for a game and the thought of making people pay for one of my games feels like me screwing them over. Another idea I've had is to compile a release package into a torrent file. This has the nice personal touch that every copy of the game comes directly from my hard drive, plus it's similar to ID Software's distribution technique for the DOOM shareware. Obviously this has the disadvantage of being a drain on my bandwidth, as well as potential frustrations for people trying to download my game at times when I'm not available to seed it. The conclusion I've come to is that YYG is still the best practical option for distribution. I do, however, like the idea of releasing torrents of bonus content.

The new project has no name currently. Working titles have included "Slaughter", "Rosethorn Propaganda" and "Thorn". However the final title will probably be none of these, maybe. The story and feel of the film will be dark mix of gothic horror and fps action with (hopefully) an immersive, cinematic quality. This project will be, by all means, an independent and original production. I've been composing and recording a soundtrack, taking pictures for graphics, designing my own models and much more. The main character of the film is one Elspeth Meier, professor of the occult sciences. In 1931, Elspeth is offered a residence in an old, remote castle in Germany. There she can conduct her research. She accepts this residence, and though at first things go smoothly, all is not as it seems in the old castle. One interesting game feature which will make this game stand out and be enjoyable to play, is a system I've developed for reading and displaying hierarchical trees of text files. Simply put, this allows for an arbitrarily large library of text for players to read. For diehard game maker fans I'll even add some useful tutorials I've found explaining some principles of 3D game design.

The game will play like a Hallowe'en movie marathon on steroids. If there's anything you'd like to know about it, or suggest, just drop me a line at leviathan_unbound@hotmail.com

25 October 2010,

Holidays cannot come soon enough, as I wade knee deep in assessment I am fantasizing of them.

But in the meantime I thought I'd update my blog with a random thought. It seems to me as though whenever people on yoyogames make Doom spinoffs, they forget what playing Doom was actually like. Most of these games look like they were made by people who've never played Doom before, at least not while it was current.

The evidence? Camp midi tracks, cartoony graphics and repetitive gameplay. Don't get me wrong, these kind of things can be great, as styling decisions. The problem is that these are not the style decisions to make for a Doom game. When Doom came out it shattered the gaming industry with 3D graphics capable of renderring fully textured environments on mind bogglingly low system requirements. It boasted a realistic (for the time) atmosphere and level of violence which (again, for the time) kept generations of players wide awake at night, clutching their cap guns and baseball bats.

However as time has gone by, the only things Doom seems to have been remembered for was 2D pictures which looked 3D and midi music.

When Doom 3 came out, everyone seemed to flip out because, guess what, it was modern and scared people. Not like it hadn't been almost 10 years since the last Doom game had come out or anything.

In my opinion, anyone looking to make a Doom knockoff should do the spirit of the game a bit of justice by trying to innovate and make something original.

4 October 2010,

Come back, holidays!
The lighting system is in place, I'll be using a combination of game maker lighting for Lambertian surfaces and, for the rare shiny thing, my own custom reflection method. Basically it'll be a Phong lighting method implemented on a vertex rather than pixel scale.

Scenery got done, though more accurately by brute force methods such as the time honored "sitting down in front of my laptop all day looking at the same hill until it works" process. Which works if you have the time, which I did.

Skeletal animation is finally working in theory. I haven't had the time or stamina to actually try to get it to work in practice yet.

The project I'm working on, which all this work is going to contribute to, is still in development. Basically we'll be releasing something which combines fps action with gothic horror and silent film chic.

More news when there's more to say.
Andrew

22 September 2010,

Holidays Coming up.
At long last my first term of the new semester almost is over, which means I can retire from my day job of pulling my hair out
in front of a terminal to a long and fruitful holiday of, well, pulling my hair out in front of a terminal.
Also, the holidays are only going to last for one week.

In the past few weeks I've been working on scenery production. More specifically, given a mesh of points on a grid,
my task is to design a script which will return the height at any (x,y) point, allowing for the modelling of hills, mountains etc.
In addition, I'm going to implement a method to calculate the normal vector at any point.

Also, I'm developing a custom lighting system. Game Maker's lighting system is convenient, because it hides a lot from the hobby game making enthusiast. And having said that, it does it in a really neat way which looks good. However, I'm interested in some more ambitious lighting setups which model reflections in a more realistic manner.

Skeletal structure animation is another project of mine I'd really like to see happen. It will make realistic animation so much
easier. Currently I'm at least 50% done on that, it's just a matter of going over the code I've got penned and actually finishing it.

I hope your holidays are as exciting as mine.
Andrew