New Year, New Demo, New Direction

My goal for last year was to really focus on making more art assets. I was tempted to delay uploading a new demo on account of there not being any significant gameplay changes, but having recently tried out the DD49 release, the game looks significantly sexier now and I'm much happier to put up a new build for Demo Day 54.

On top of a whole new set of textures, I've also ditched my short-lived custom editor in favor of Trenchbroom and EricW's tools for Quake. World lighting will now be much more striking and my iteration time for level design is now orders of magnitude faster while producing results with way less errors and lightmap artifacts. I'm also phasing out my custom model format in favor of IQM, another Quake standard.

Also, there's been yet more work done on the character controller so now ledges and stairs work pretty much 100% reliably. It's still possible to get stuck on corners but I suspect this will affect the relatively clumsy AI much more than it will players so I'm going to put off handling any more edge cases and leave the collision system mostly as-is.

My plan for the new year is to knuckle down and get most of the game completed hoping for a release maybe early next year. This demo level is pretty close to done and there are only a couple engine features still missing (swimming, saving/loading, navmeshes) so the majority of the work to come will be assets: the other levels, a couple more weapons, a bunch of food and armor pickups, and the remaining cast of enemies along with an AI overhaul. I also intend on throwing together some story in little comic strips shown during the loading screens. There's plenty to do still, but I'm confident all of the most difficult stuff is well behind.