I just had to blog this. But spoiler alerts are due. So, if you haven't watched Seasons 3 or 4 of The Last Kingdom and intend watching it, feel free to come back later.
I love historical shows and movies. An extreme example of what I've witnessed in The Last Kingdom was the Starz show, Black Sails. This was where the writers came up with a historical setting and shoehorned characters from books and actual historical pirates into the show. It was never intended to be historically accu
Anyone who's played the original will know how eerie the game looks. The Arboreal Trees are the main feature of the game. They are the items that spread infection across the land. They look great on the ST and Amiga. They grow then sink into the ground, before growing again at an adjacent square. Having played around with some Gear VR games I had noticed a few games that had minimalistic, yet effective, untextured polygon graphics. And as I'm still trying to grow my confidence with 3DS Max, I
Oh God. Hard to believe that she's just started nursery. She looked cute as hell in her uniform.But when we got there she started getting clingy, as we knew she would. In the end we had to ask the teacher to grab her. She started screaming the place down and reaching out for me. We hung around outside for a minute or so and all we could hear was "daddy! daddy!" It was almost as if we'd had to hand her over to social services.Maurita warned me what it was like since she'd been through exactly th
Cleared out my blog - except for one entry. Decided that it was time to start afresh. This is going to be a dev-only blog from now on. For the past couple of weeks I've been working on remakes of Sentinel and Archipelagos in Unity. Sentinel turned out to be quite a tricky game to write, not least because I have to go by YouTube videos as I've never played it. The feature of the two games is that the landscapes are pseudo randomly generated. Something I've never been confident with is level de
As previously mentioned, I cheated a bit with the map for each level. Originally I was going to create endless levels by using a pseudo-random generator and a Perlin noise generator. The problem, however, was that I couldn't figure out (was too lazy to figure out) how to restrict the number of islands on a level. When the map was generated there was no way to figure out where an island's edge was. I probably could do it by tracing around the sand coloured pixels. That will have to come later i
Movement has been working fine on desktop, except I haven't implemented a way to turn around yet. All it does is allow players to click somewhere on the land ahead of the camera to move to that point. I decided that I'd allow free movement. Just simplified things for me. It means that the player doesn't end up in the middle of a square, as with the original. You can move wherever you want, so long as it's a valid area. As this is intended primarily for VR I decided to concentrate on getting th
I have just spent a frustrating 4-5 days trying to figure out why movement wasn't working properly. I've reverted the project to a Windows game while I develop the mechanics. Clicking the mouse while the pointer's on a tile will move the camera to that location. Moving the pointer to the left or right edge of the screen will rotate the camera. However, I noticed that it didn't seem to be detecting the correct tile type when it came close to the sand tiles. Sometimes it was detecting water or was
As usual, my code was getting a bit messy and a bit long. So I ended up spending 2-3 days refactoring the code and splitting it up into more classes. As a general rule, classes and methods should contain as few lines as possible. I'm more of a brute force coder but I'm trying to change the habit of 20+ years' with this project ... hell, I've even added documentation to my code! Another quirk I discovered in Unity was the way that Textures are instanced and referenced. A cool feature of Unit
It's been a while since I did anything with this project. I've been working on a couple of simpler mobile games (one loosely based on the Amiga game, Oxyd). I'm going to try to put a few days' worth of work into this one this week. The latest is that the game itself is working fine. After the previous update I went back to debugging the issues with the tree placement in the game world. Took me a while to realise where I had gone wrong but I eventually fixed it. For now, however, it's running e
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