Infiltrator E46 - Video Playback

Those of you who checked out my Infiltrator pre-alpha demo video awhile back probably know that I had a spiffy animated background with circuit patterns on the main menu. Those of you who didn't: I had a spiffy animated background with-you get the point. I bet you guys didn't know that I don't have that anymore, did you? I'm hoping to get it back at some point, but the problems that led to its removal are deep and annoying.

Let's talk about them!

Infiltrator E45 - Enough With the GUI Already!

This session went almost entirely into GUI work. I've finally got the menu art and editor interface up to a point where I feel comfortable moving on though, and that is a good thing. I've been getting pretty sick of working on these same GUI's for so long. The fruit of all of this work is pretty sweet though.

Infiltrator Part 43 - Sights On Editor

Do you think this blog is becoming an Infiltrator dev journal with random game design articles and music updates popping up every once in awhile? Then congratulations, you passed the being observative test! Now shut up and read this Infiltrator dev update because I'm already spreading myself thinner than the peanut butter on your sandwich when your little sister Julibop who prefers Jam makes it for you just to get the giant stack of ridonkulous things I do done.

Infiltrator Part 42 - Swarms Of Warriors

Swing your partner left and right, wrap your code up nice and tight. Throw your partner on the ground,  spend a little time on sound. When you hit them in the face, make your swarmers fly with grace. No ID you wear a hood, warriors also going good.

Also, I'm in one of those moods where all the little personalities in my head want me to do different things at the same-BREAK IT DOWN NOW!

Infiltrator Part 40 - Swarmer Skeleton

So... swarmers. It turned out to be a ridiculous pain to get the swarmers to even home in on a target, but I got through it. The resulting swarmers will now launch and home in on enemies. But which enemies?

Unfortunately, not the most intelligently chosen ones yet. Currently they just target the onscreen enemy spawned longest ago, which is pretty arbitrary and exists only because it was the quickest and easiest to add. I have a few different target choosing algorithms in mind. I'll have to try and weigh each of them in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, and that will be fun.

That's actually it. The swarmer art, as you can see, is basically placeholder. The final swarmers will also be tiny, but they will have a glowing contrail so it will be easy to see them and where they are going. I put so much into working out the simple things that I didn't have time for details.


    --LazerBlade

Infiltrator Part 39 - Tedious Baselines and Reworkings

Aside from the hustle and bustle of the other parts of my life this session has also gone slowly because it was mostly design work. There are some changes that can be expressed via screenshot though, and there is plenty to talk about.

Infiltrator Part 38 - HUD, EMP, and stability

It seems like I have this internal clock that every few months says "Hey! That HUD could totally be better designed!" I then proceed to completely rewrite the code for it and move everything around. That happened again, but this time I found that I had anticipated this earlier and redesigned the HUD code to be more accommodative to change in the future.

Also, accommodative should totally be a word.

Infiltrator Part 37 - Lightning!

This session was fun but didn't really see a lot of notable outside improvements. It saw one, super cool one.

Infiltrator Part 36 - Editor Improvements

This short session was dedicated mainly to improving the level editor. After all, once I finish most of the core mechanics, I will be spending a lot of time using it to create the content. Additionally, I'm hoping to release the game with level editor enabled the way it is now. (as a command line option) That way users will get to play around with creating their own levels and all that good stuff. The upshot is that a lot of other people could also potentially be spending a lot of time using this level editor, and I want to make that as painless as reasonably possible.

Rotation!

Infiltrator Part 35 - Here is the Menu

I absolutely hate creating GUI's and menu's. I also love it. I'm awesome like that, so this is the session in which I've tackled the task of creating Infiltrator's menu system.

Infiltrator Part 34 - Style Cam

There isn't a whole ton to say about this session. I guess it's mostly because a lot of the work that got done was under the hood where the end user will likely never see. Still, there are some pretty major changes happening on the outside as well.

Infiltrator Part 32 - Boon Town Shredders

This session was rather fun for me. It saw the completion of several tasks that seemed very daunting. Some of them were just extra's that I managed to fit in within the session time even though I had already met my goals. Put simply: this session was an epic boon.

Infiltrator Part 31 - With a two in it!

The long and painful move from SFML 1.6 to SFML 2 is finally complete. There actually isn't a whole ton of difference, except that now my framerate has taken a giant tan- GUN BLAM IT! Just a minute...

Okay, so now the long and painful-aw skip it.

Infiltrator Part 30 - Shredders + SFML 2

This particular feature addition stretched out over a long period of time for many reasons. All of which are completely unimportant. The shredder AI is almost 100% up and kicking and that's what matters.

Infiltrator Part 29 - Debug Draw

After a few days I come up with a good set of rules for the Shredder AI. It's a simple four mode program that I should be able to implement in a week or two. I should get started on it, but first let's just make a few little tweaks in order to make sure the gameplay feels right. I mean, what's the probability of getting sidetracked and going off trying to fix huge bugs you didn't know were there? Pretty big I guess. Deal with it.

Infiltrator part 26 - Circle 2D

The lack of feature additions in this episode can be attributed to the relentless chase of a particular bug which very effectively crunked up the kinaesthetics. Yes I just used the word kinaesthetics, get used to it. And go watch yourself some Errant Signal if you have no idea what I mean.

Infiltrator Part 24 - Fighting Fighters

This session was actually finished a few days ago, but I wanted to add a few extra features before I wrote about it. I then found out that said features were quite a bit more complex than I thought, and I ended up moving it to the list of long term features. Anyway, I have some interesting new bells and whistles to show you all.

Infiltrator - Part 22 - Primordial Code

The majority of this session went into one very fun improvement. It's not that great, nor is it something that can be fully communicated via screenshot, but it's awesome anyway.

Infiltrator - Part 21 - Optimizing and Upgrading

Well a-whoop-dee-do for me. My game got to the point where it needed optimized. Sometimes optimization is just going through and replacing place-holder code that does the ridiculously stupid with more neat and tidy code that is easier on the CPU, but sometimes it's a bunch of tedious busywork as you try to pinpoint bottle-necks and come up with convoluted ways to circumvent the need for using up vital processing time.

Infiltrator Part 20

This session marks an important milestone, as it concludes at the same time as version 0.0.5. That means I'm halfway to the first alpha, and I've got some spiffy features to show for it. Unfortunately, there are too many features and too little time to do a full breakdown, so I'm just going to quickly mention some of the more notable improvements.