Creating a universe

Recently I've been making a lot of progress with my 3D engine, and therefore the game utilizing it, Contention. Most of it is stuff that you won't notice like tweaks in draw distance and focal length. Notably, though, it has crosshairs and a zoom button (the beginnings of a HUD), planets and these rings:



These rings (which may be a space 'road' to major places in the final game) are currently the most complex object in the game. They're great for testing the upper limits of my 3D engine. Also, the zoom view has a night vision effect, as shown below, and the AI can now shoot.

Let there be light!

Recently I've been working on my portfolio site, but there has been some good progress on my 3D game. As you can see above, I've added stars, debri, and windscreens.

Switch 2, however, is a different story entirely.

Alas; a screenshot

Well, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I could show you a screenshot of my 3D engine, but I think it's to early for that. So, here's a thousand words:

Ah, never mind. Feast your eyes upon this:

It may not look like much, but I'm making great progress now! It's got Z-sorting, backface culling and 3 axis rotation for the camera, models, and meshes.

As I mentioned last post, there is a lot of contention as to which project I work on, but rest assured I will return to Switch 2 shortly.

Well, at least I hope so.

Back off the straight and narrow

Well I knew it would't be long before I got distracted from making Switch, but don't worry I'm not exactly making an epic mmorpg.

I finally managed to fix the annoying 3D perspective bug in my 3D engine. I'm not sure what I'll do next though, I'll probably just switch between this and Switch 2, until I get back into the swing of things.

40 days later

My 3D engine went quite well. Unfortunately though a problem has arisen to do with the X-axis rotation which makes the perspective wrong.

3D mathematics can get quite tricky and sometimes I've had to resort to good ol' trial and error. So I don't think I'll be making a full 3D game any time soon. One day!

A have started designing the menu system for Switch "2". I'm not completely happy with how it's turning out, and I keep starting again. I think it's actually easier to design menus within the limits of 4k, because the completely garish is completely acceptable. I think I might just make the menu system exactly the same as it was in Switch "1", just with a little more style.

I suppose I should get to the actual programming, before I waste up all of my creativity!

What now?

Soon as how I'm no longer making my mystery game, I guess the question is: what am I going to do now? The next game I'll make will probably be Switch's sequel game, but I haven't started work on that yet.

Instead I've decided to experiment with 3D. I've already got some xml model importing (using my own proprietary xml model file format) and the 3D positioning is brilliant. Still no rotation yet, but rome wasn't built in one day, you know.