This is K.Song Tan's game development blog. Once a fanatic gamer, capable of juggling several game simultaneously, including the notorious World of Warcraft, while doing a PhD. Now finally out of uni and out of job, he is having a crack at the final frontier of gaming, developing.
Welcome to Song-GameDev, You'll find Song's work trying to beat what he call the ultimate end game.
It has finally happened! The little game that I've been working on has been Greenlit! As cliche as it sound, I like to thanks those who has given their support to make this happen. You have my eternal gratitude!
Now the work begins to push it over the finish line. I can't wait!
Once again I decided to spend the weekend working on something novel. And this week, it's a new path system that may or may not be the back bone of next major TDTK upgrade. I'm not sure where I get the idea from but wouldn't it be great if the creep can choose the shortest between multiple branching path. And following short video demonstrate the the concept in working.
It's still a very flexible system. There is not limit to how many branch a path can take. Branched out paths can rejoin, or not, or branch out to even more path. Either way, the creep will always look for the shortest way to get to one of the potential many end point at every branching point.
The best thing of course, in my opinion, is the code. For what it's, it's cleaner and easier to maintain than the old code in TDTK. That is the one thing I'm most please with.
However I should clarify that this doesn't mean I'll be actively working on TDTK. It's just something I'm casually working/experimenting on weekend atm. Until it's finally released, MechCorp still takes precedent over everything in my schedule.
This has been coming for a long time. But it's finally happen now. MechCorp is now live on Steam Greenlight. I've been dread this moment since it feels like throwing all my precious work into a pit of great unknown. At the same time, It's so exciting to see how it will unfold. I'm going to keep my finger cross and pray a lot.
Here's the complimentary media piece that comes with a major news release, in the form of a full gameplay video
The game is not complete yet of course. It's still missing content, specifically a main plot. And the gameplay balance is still need tweaking. But for the first time since the start of development I think I've got a rather solid core gameplay and mechanic. So much so that I'm confident that I'm not going to make any more major change. That's why I think it's time to put it on greenlight.
That said, there are still a lot of work left to be done. I'll probably still need to spend quite a few months on it. But it would be nice if it can be green-lit and given a place on Steam before the actual game is done. It would also be very nice to see what are the general response to it.
Anyway, enough rambling. The whole point of this post is to ask for your support. So if you are still reading. Please go vote for it. Here's the link again:
Finally, I'm back at work after a rather long break. It's why there hasn't been any post for the past one month.
Before the break, I talked about posting a gameplay video. Seeing the game is almost ready to be shown, I took the time this week to record a full battle and here it's. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to let me know what you think about it.
I've said I'm going to do a gameplay video in my last post. Well I'm afraid that is not going to happen. I've decided to delay things a bit until its more ready rather than rush it. Consider that I'm going to take some time off starting new week, I'm not sure when is that going to happen. But you never know, there's a chance I'll just do one out of the blue.
While there are no video, I do have some screen shots of the battle scene with the new environment. Enjoy!
It's time for another development update for MechCorp. I'm now at the stage of getting ready for Steam Greenlight. So what I've done since the last update is a lot of polishing now most of the core component is now in place. Thing like UI and presentation has been given a lot of attention. The AI has also gone through a big overhaul with AI unit now using abilities. Most visual and sound effect has been put in as well. It almost feels like it's ready for release, except that there are still a lot more work needed to be done. Game balance is still off the wack, performance optimization are needed, more content need to be added, etc.
One surprise addition is that I've decided to make use of the low-poly scenery asset I've made over the last few posts to build the environment for the battle scene. I know it's not changing how the game play in anyway but visually this has given a game a big boost. It's making a huge difference in my opinion. Surprising the low-poly (and stylized) asset do goes really well with the existing setting. These are some of the settings I've for now. Keep in mind that it's still a work in progress.
Not going to lie, I feel pretty good about the project at the moment. I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I can't wait to get it done and get it release. That said, I plan to do a game-play video showcasing the game in very near future. Probably next week or the week after.
Didn't manage to get much done this weekend to be honest. I've very good reasons for that. First I got to deal with some sh**. That took way too long. Then some of the stuff I've been attempting didn't turn out quite as well as I hope. Guess they will never see the light of day, until I improve them of course. What I've been left with, are a set of very minecraft-ish square rocks. I decided to play with them anyway to see how much I can do with them, with other stuff I've done in the past few week naturally. This is what I've end up with, an autumn version of the pine forest, and a volcano/lava-cavern thing?
Autumn Pine Forest
Volcanic Rock Formation
It's surprising that how much you can do with what is essentially a few slightly textured cubes. I especially like the rock formations in the autumn scene. And the autumn color theme looks really nice. Probably better than the originals. Shame I don't have any more time to layout the scene better. I think the placement of the rock is too random as it's now. But it will have to do for now.
So that's it for this week then. I'll carry carry on where I've stopped next weekend... or probably not? I'm contemplating about taking a few days off. We'll see.
