Where Have I Been?
It's been months since I've blogged. They've been productive months, though. See, in early October, another beautiful baby girl joined our family! It's been a rush having another child. It's incredible how you can still be completely awestruck as if it were the first time, each and every time. :)
Prior to that, vacation.
Because I had some time off, I slipped in some hours on my Impossible Dream. I hadn't really considered blogging about it yet until I stumbled across Project Steel & Glass at The Cluttered Desk that motivated me to write an update.
Before leaving on vacation this summer, I'd made some headway with Pair, my embedded script language. Especially, I'd made some strides compiling it to more efficent bytecode, etc. It's in a sort-of usable state. Still, some things like lexical closures are not 100%. I'll leave blogging about that until later.
Basically, much of the material pass (no illumination yet) of the game is rendering. It looks pretty raw and repetitive with respect to content right now. There's not yet much differentiation in city sections. No niceties such as shadows or even basic lighting yet. And, jeez, how am I gonna do trees? It's time, though, to switch gears for a bit and prototype the gameplay. As you might infer from the screenshots, the protagonist will be capable of flight. I've got my Xbox 360 controllers hooked up to my PC and I can fly all around town.
(Zaragosa, Mexico [fictional])
(Puebla, Mexico [real])
Please, I'm Just One Man!
So I must enlist the machine to generate a great deal of content automatically, albeit offline. This approach, of course, runs the risk of a high degree of repetition, but I think with some caution and tool refinement this will turn out great. I'm really happy with how auto-generation has gone so far. It's actually starting to vaguely resemble the residential city streets of central Mexico, which is, of course, the idea.
Anyhow, I'm pretty pumped about it. Given some time (lots) and little-by-little refinement, we may have something pretty cool here.
