Sunlight

The gameplay of my live performance game Cello Fortress is nearly finished, but the graphics are still basic blocks with some crude textures. Recently I've been working on figuring out what style I want for the game, and I've ended up with two possible styles that I like: one dubbed "Surreal Architecture" and the other "Rough Polygons". Since I have a hard time choosing, I figured I'd just ask here. Which style should I use for Cello Fortress? I've also added the pros and cons of each style as I see them. Several are just my personal taste so let me know in the comments if you disagree. "Surreal Architecture" style The basic idea of this style is that you travel through a world of surreal architecture. The surrealism is of the subtle sort: on first sight it might look like normal classical architecture, but if you stop and think for a second you realise this cannot be: buildings are too big and repetitive, it makes no sense to have a city ...

I've added a new cello attack to Cello Fortress! Check this little video for a demo and explanation. :)

To use a 3D model for 3D printing it usually needs to be altered quite a bit, since 3D printing adds a bunch of additional requirements that rendering and games don't care about. I've recently done this for the first time so today I would like to explain the process and show the result. Let's first have a look at the result: Click for high resolution I used a model I made in 2007 of Captain August , a webcomic that ran until 2010. The author of Captain August is a friend of mine, Roderick Leeuwenhart, and I made this 3D print as a birthday gift for him. Awesomenauts players might be familiar with Roderick's work as a writer: he wrote the voice scripts for a bunch of the latest additions to Awesomenauts, including Ksenia, Rocco and the Wildlife Documentary Announcer. Roderick also writes books: he wrote the "Pindakaas en Sushi" series. This title means "Peanut Butter and Sushi", which must be a delicious combination since I personally came up with th...

Most gamers and reviewers these days expect almost any game to have online multiplayer. What they might not realise (or not care about), is that adding online multiplayer makes a game twice as much work to program . Most programmers who build this for the first time hugely underestimate how much work it really is. For those who have never made an online multiplayer game, here are some of the reasons why it doubles the programming effort needed. Before I start, of course note that the real complexity of building multiplayer depends on the game. Adding a multiplayer match-3 minigame to Mass Effect probably wouldn't be much work compared to the main game, but that isn't realistic: big, complex games usually also have big, complex multiplayer features. Roughly doubling the time it takes to program a game when multiplayer is added is in most cases a good guideline. Latency The basic cause of all multiplayer complexities, is that it takes time for a message to travel from one compute...