click to enlarge
Development continues steadily on Free Company here in the Shed. I’ve been doing a lot of fiddly bits that don’t particularly lend themselves well to individual highlighting. So here’s a little sampling of my recent to do list:
- I’ve fixed up the shadow mapping a lot better so it now works properly when you scroll about the world and interacts better with the point lights (orthographic projection, once I figured out not to divide by the far clip anymore, was the key).
- I’ve added little notification numbers that float up above enemies and the player’s mercs when they take damage or are healed.
- I’ve started to build up the enemy variety by adding three differently armed variants of the bare-chested barbarian you can see above.
- Improved the tooltips for all the items so they give details on the item’s stats.
- Changed the font to a smaller variant and tweaked all the font colours to be less garish.
- Boosted the light level on all the interactive objects to make them stand out a bit more from the background.
- Properly cleaned up render targets when the fancy effects are disabled.
- Added a modular system for useable items, like health potions and made the health potion drinkable as an example.
- Added chainmail armour and made body armour variants visually swappable and have an impact on the player’s stats.
- Added the capability for head variants and beheading to humanoid enemies.
- Tweaked enemy stats and added more scope for variance in stats generally, hopefully to increase difficulty and tactical variety.
- Now possible to edit mercenary nick names and compare their stats in the campaign screens.
- Fixed some loading state bugs.
Outside of working on the game, I went to London Indies for the first time this week and slightly nervously introduced myself to some lovely people while sipping on a beer. Other braver (crazier?) people apparently made out like ninjas in the street outside. It was fun and I’m sure I’ll go again.
I also succeeded in repairing my long serving monitor in true hardcore indie developer style, using nothing but a soldering iron and some capacitors I ordered off the internet. Total cost £18. I was pretty pleased with myself when it actually worked. This is not the kind of madcap thing I usually have any success with.
Robotic Shed 