Yet More Wall Antics

Wee, I made a much better mockup level tonight, heavily based on a map from one of the games I've been using as inspiration. Kinda fun to go back and relearn QuArK, at least until I try to get some serious art out of it ;P.



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I'm back in school now for the final quarter of a Game Design degree. Not so hyped about getting it now as I was when I started 2-3 years ago, but I didn't have much a choice once I'd started. In any case it should be a fun last quarter. My occasional dawdlings with a third person action game in TGE have now become my final thesis like project for the degree. I met an artist in class who might be trying to do some characters for little project. He's shown some nice concept work, so it could end up with something interesting.

I've been experimenting with various manners of cel shading. Found all the existing resources on the site were pretty useless. I have noticed a few non-tge demos that has some nice effects done with standard OpenGL, and a couple people suddenly working on such things that might end with a code based solution. It's beyond my skill though, so for now I've found normal flipped overlay meshes work pretty well. Even looking into a ridiculously roundabout way to convert .map files to meshes to make overlays for those if need be. For a second I thought just using the debug render mode might work nice ;P

I've finally setup a quick mock level, to provide a better test environment than oddly scaled and rotated village houses. No more terrain or water in the mission either, as I don't have plans for any serious use of them. It helped me find a few bugs in my wall running and other acrobatics, so I went back and cleaned up and tweaked some of that. Tonight I went in and added vertical wall scaling, that lets you pop up to a higher level by running straight up a wall. Even threw in another horribly hacked up Jill run sequence to go with it. Tried doing dynamic player rotations at one point, and found that made a big mess, decided pre-made animations are the way to go for what I need.



Since I sadly didn't get an internship at GG, I'm making up my internship credit by teaching at my school now as well. One of my teacher's was at GDC and met the GG guys there. Apparentley they inspired him to get the school to buy some TGE stuff, and replace the mucky old WildTangent class with a Torque class. Unfortunately there is no one on campus that's ever actually used Torque. So now I'm going to be trying to help a 3D Art instructor and a cadre of lost souls that've seen nary a line of code in their lives, to try and do _something_ with TGE this quarter. Should be fun. Maybe some of them will even read this ;D.