Plan for Brian Richardson (bzztbomb)

Move to Portland, GID Ghosts Entry, other silliness

Due to all kinds of "real world" things going on and some gamedev side projects I haven't gotten too much done on my own projects. This resource is the only public thing I've done recently. Some of this is due to my move from Washington, DC to Portland, OR. I love this town so far and I hope I'll be able to settle in with a job soon. (If anyone knows of any cool openings, please get in touch!)

So, now that I've gotten here, I've gotten back into gamedev work a little bit. I've been playing around with HLSL and Rendermonkey alot. I really want to get more into non-photorealistic rendering and doing weird games. So on that note, I decided to jump in and do a gid this weekend. Here's what the critics have to say:

Quote:

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<TomB> its quite possibly the weirdest thing ive seen come out of a GID ever

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Here's a screenshot:



It's called "Fade to Nothing". The premise behind the game is simple. Everytime you are hit, you become invisible for 5 seconds. As your health decreases, so does your opacity. This makes it harder for your opponents to hit you. This also opens up neat strategic possibilities. You could damage yourself, then run to a new hiding place while you are invisible. There are all kinds of neat gameplay possibilities. There's also a full screen "GHOOOOOSTVISION" shader effect to make seeing more annoying.

I'm hosting a dedicated server for a while, so you can download it here and join the action! There are a couple things to keep in mind. One: This currently requires a ps2.0 capable card. This is because I'm lazy. Two, there's a weird bug with the material mapping. When you join the server for the first time, the level will blink because the mappings have not taken effect. If you disconnect and reconnect, it's fine. Three, there are spelling and grammar errors on my title screen. I may or may not fix this in the future. ;)

Finally, here's a quick rundown of the dev:

1. Port starter.fps over to TSE. (This will hurt me later. ;)
2. Enable my GHOOOOOOOSTVISION shader.
3. Notice that setting alpha on shapebase objects is annoying. I implement a simple shader to get around that. (Minus the ugly sorting issues that I ignored.)
4. Fix network bug with my shader hack.
4.5: Start implementing "last man standing" mode. This would do a normal last man standing game, but you are still allowed to run around and shoot people after you're dead. You'd just be invisible, and you would do no damage, you would just throw them around. I thought this would be very fun! But I didn't feel like dealing with the "dead" state management.
5. Create a quick .MAP level. Used textures from Games Extract for the level. Rock on free textures!
6. Get annoyed because my material mapping isn't working. Matt Fairfax issues the smackdown and let's me know that the demoMaterial macro is reference demo. Why didn't I see that!?
7. Random cleanup

Wow, long plan! ;) I'm sure I missed something. Oh well.. I'm going to be looking into hatching/stippling style rendering soon. Other future plans are blurry right now.