This past month I've been working almost exclusively on improving my tools for metaprogramming. Generating code at compile time has been an important part of Nirion's engine since almost the beginning. It generates the data necessary for reflection at runtime, which is then used to implement serialization of assets and entities as well as property editing in the editor. The way I was going about this before was really hacked together and rushed. The tool would basically go over every file in the project and look for special tokens in the code. These tokens were just macros that expanded to ...
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Since my last blog post I've made some progress across a number of different areas of development. My last post here was a video showing off the music I've created for the game so far, which I got some useful feedback for. If you're interested, check it out and let me know what you think!
I decided to move on after creating some music tracks for the game areas I've created so far. There's obviously still a lot more work to be done on the music, so I'll revisit it in the future. I tend to do a lot of ... Read More →
I decided to move on after creating some music tracks for the game areas I've created so far. There's obviously still a lot more work to be done on the music, so I'll revisit it in the future. I tend to do a lot of ... Read More →
Over the past month I've been doing pretty much nothing except bug fixes and sound design. I'm getting closer to having a section of the game at a level that I'm happy to show off, but it's still probably a couple more weeks away. My process for fixing bugs and polishing the game is just playing through it, writing down stuff that needs to be fixed or improved, fixing those things mostly in the order that they were written down in, and then crossing those out once they're done. I've also been working on making sure the game works at ...
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This update will be a fair bit shorter than usual due to being busy with Nirion's development, trying to get a polished demo done, and not having a lot of new things to show. Next month should be back to normal. This month I've mostly been working on a little more level design, reworking one of the bosses, the minimap and sound design. In this post I'll go over my approach to Nirion's minimap.
Design
The minimap in Nirion looks like this:
As you can see, it roughly shows the shapes of rooms that have been discovered, uses colours to ... Read More →
Design
The minimap in Nirion looks like this:
As you can see, it roughly shows the shapes of rooms that have been discovered, uses colours to ... Read More →
Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly going down my list of things to fix and improve for Nirion. One of the bigger tasks was to create a more generic and easy to use particle system solution. This ended up taking a week or two of my time, but so far it seems like it was worth it. Another big focus was on figuring out more interesting puzzle elements and improving level design overall. I believe the last few weeks of development have really gone a long way in making Nirion feel more like a complete game!
Generic Particle ... Read More →
Generic Particle ... Read More →
The last month or so of Nirion's development has been mainly focused on fixing obvious bugs and improving core functionality. I'm currently still trying to get the first area of the game at a level I'm happy with for a demo, but hopefully most of this work will go towards improving the entire game going forward.
Spatial Partitioning
One of the first things I did this month was a major change to the game's spatial partitioning. This code is used for broad phase collision detection, culling entities for rendering, querying tile data, and organizing the world into loadable "chunks". The ... Read More →
Spatial Partitioning
One of the first things I did this month was a major change to the game's spatial partitioning. This code is used for broad phase collision detection, culling entities for rendering, querying tile data, and organizing the world into loadable "chunks". The ... Read More →
Over the last few weeks I've been working on a variety of different aspects of Nirion. Probably the one that I spent the most time on recently was music and sound. So far I had been neglecting sound and music to an extent, having only gotten basic sine waves playing way back when I first started the project. It's a relief to have made some progress in this area, and I think I have a lot more confidence going forward. I've also updated the art, added a 3D effect for upgrades, and finished off a first pass of the first ...
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Nirion is a 2D action adventure game drawing heavy inspiration from mostly The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past and Super Metroid. I've always wanted to make my own games similar to these and in 2017 I started working on this game from scratch in C++, inspired by Handmade Hero. Originally the game was going to be a pretty complete "shoot em up" game modeled after relatively simple games like "1942", however I quickly switched to what Nirion is now, a top down action adventure game focusing on more complex combat and exploration. I figured that this would ...
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