#lsd:r

In like 9 hours I'll have released my first proper game (at least an early alpha version of it anyway). I have 'released' a game before but it was terrible and not many people played it so I'm not counting it.

I'm both excited and nervous at the same time. There's every possibility that I just think the game is good, and everyone else doesn't like it. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but I suppose it could.

There's also the possibility that it might not work. I have tested it kind of a lot, but it's only been on my own hardware, so there could be completely new problems on other pieces of hardware. What happens if the bug reports I get aren't descriptive enough? What happens if I don't get any bug reports?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I apologize in advance if the launch doesn't go smoothly. It's my first time doing this properly!

Now I'm going to get some sleep. Hopefully tomorrow will be a day free of frantic bug fixing and such.

I'll do a small write up on the current state of the game and plans for the future at the end of tomorrow.

I'm entering Ludum Dare! I need to prep by quickly making a library. I'll be livestreaming development of my game over the weekend in case anyone wants to watch.

Going to try and post a screenshot almost every day so everyone can see what I've been working on.

It may not look like much at the moment, but over the past week I've made a .map file deserialiser that takes data from a .map file (created with brush based level editors (I use Jackhammer, alternatives include radiant)) and converts it to a mesh in Unity. This structure in the foreground came from a .map file!

This means the game will support custom levels exported as .map files!

What I've been working on today though is something called planar UV mapping. Basically every mesh needs to have something called a UV map, which just tells the game engine where each vertex is in relation to a texture. Since the default UV mapping for a plane is that the minimum (bottom left corner) vertex is (0, 0) and the maximum (top right corner) vertex is (1, 1), which means for planes that aren't square, the texture would be all stretched or squashed. Another downside is that different size planes would equal different sized textures.

To alleviate this problem I got the bounds of the mesh when generating it, then fed that into the UV coordinates and multiplied it by the texture scale (deserialised from the map file). As you can see in the image the meshes are all different sizes but the texture remains of uniform size! Aren't UVs fun?

Next up is implementing texture offsets and testing with a variety of texture sizes.

Is this a teaser?

As of today (albeit on and off).

It's been through approximately 3 complete overhauls, with this incarnation of it being the final one. More details on the game to follow in a relatively short period of time.