Just a few days to go now, and after hours of exporting issues we have a trailer video:
Even though we only recorded it a week ago, it feels like a lot has changed in the game. If you’re in Edinburgh around the 14th to the 16th of August, you can come check out Pollen and all the Dare to be Digital games.
I like how colourful this game is making my blog look! We’ve had the ability to add post-processing effects to our game easily for a couple of weeks now, but have only just considered what to do with that. Inspired by some of the effect from rendering fur over the weekend, I created some examples of a brushstroke shader in effect the game. It’s good having a colourful 3D environment to play with like this.
Continue reading »
Here’s the second Pollen progress video, recorded towards the end of week 4 (so around a week ago). Although it doesn’t reflect the state the game is in now
(more assets, better controls, better motions and animations for each bee type) it’s a huge jump from the first video we shared. It shows a basic walkthrough of our level, and how the different bees can be used. Since then, the level has been tweaked (ie made less brutal), we’ve added a tutorial, the tunnel section looks less like it “is from the movie Saw” (Ian’s description) and we’ve started work on our scary boss battle.
Obviously the game is still far from finished, so we’ve got a lot of room to change and adjust it. If you have any feedback or suggestions, we’d love to hear them.
There seems to be a commonly held belief that secretly all games programmers long to be artists.
I’ll admit that being able to draw anything even remotely resembling what I’m aiming for can be disappointing, but I certainly would never want to switch from being a programmer. That said, spending hours on a demo only for it to be ruined by horrible coder art is almost as frustrating as try to explain why it really *is* cool even if it doesn’t look like much. I guess that’s why I’ve fallen in love with the idea of procedural content generation. Continue reading »
It’s now half way through week 3 of Dare to be Digital, and although progress has slowed slightly as we focus on refining our level, things are still coming along nicely.
Although the core gameplay remains the same (swarming, the abilities of various bee classes) we’ve made some huge changes to our level. It’s now far more focussed on platforming and simple obstacles, rather than obscure puzzles, and balanced between the strengths of each type of bee. The gesture controls are working well, allowing all bee actions to be based on circling an object (for example to select some pollen to pick up) or drawing a line (for example to throw a rock in a particular direction), making it fairly easy to interact with objects even when they are moving or quite small, and would have been difficult to click.
Despite a few issues we’ve had with textures, animations and shaders, we’re getting a lot more art assets into the game to replace some horrific coder art which Ian and I added. On the advice of our mentors, we have also made some adjustments to our group plane and camera making the level far more fluid. There are a lot of improvements still to be made but we’re focussing on prioritising each feature correctly, so hopefully we’ll get through all of the most important ones.