Week 34 progress update
Added 2023-07-15 19:48:51 +0000 UTCThis week I did the first significant work on my game prototype. The main game character will be a little robot that can move inside rooms and solve puzzles in there. You can see a rough sketch in the attached image. After thinking a bit about it, I decided to go for a “drone-like” shape. There is a good reason for this shape. Keeping it short, I want to show the acceleration of the body by drawing flames out of the engines. The born-rigidity constraint of the body implies that engines should push and also pull the robot, depending on the relative directions of velocity and acceleration. The four-arm drone configuration is then perfect. The flames coming out of the engines can point in any direction, and push or pull the robot body.
This week I continued doing substantial improvements to the game infrastructure. I focused on reorganising the shader code. e.g. I moved the code for lighting and the code for material computations in separate files. This code is now also easier to extend. For example, it is possible to specify material parameters from textures or procedurally generate materials in the shader. I also added facilities to preprocess shader code. I wrote a sort-of Python preprocessor. This is stuff that is not going to ship with the game, but that will help me ship it.
Finally, I adapted some code I had for player control. It’s the end of the week and I have a little robot that can move and spit flames from its engine, albeit not quite perfectly. It cannot do much else. In the coming weeks I’ll focus on decorating it, as I plan to use this new character for one or two demos, so I cannot completely neglect aesthetics.
