First and foremost, I'm a developer. I work for a large company specialising in Web-based SAAS. But in my spare time, I do what I've always enjoyed - experiment.
I've wanted to write and release a game for as far back as I can remember. Now I'm in a position where I have two that, whilst still needing lots of work, are closer than I've gotten before.
Which brings us here. I wanted to perhaps belatedly share some of the progress from here on, as well as to document some of the things I figure out, tools I use, experiments and other general waffle. And also it's perhaps a good way of passing on some of the cool tricks already used in the games, in perhaps a way that's easier to grasp than some other tutorials.
Both games - Skiddies and Squishies - are heavily reliant on procedural content and quirky physics.
Skiddies is my top-down racing game, an homage to Super Skidmarks on the Amiga. This taught me everything I know about Bullet physics library, raycast vehicles, procedurally generating terrain and roads, and also gave me a really good excuse to dig into more complex OpenGL/3D rendering - lighting, shadows (CSM), volumetrics, etc - much of which is still somewhat hazy but a little less mysterious than it was. Skiddies is currently the game with the most left to do. Give or take audio and a bunch of little things, this is pretty much where i left off:
Squishies is my Worms/JellyCar-inspired softbody, battle royale game. This taught me everything I know about softbody/PBD/XPBD/verlet and various other fancy physics stuff, along with multiplayer (P2P right now), ECS and plenty more. Whilst buggy, and lacking in many areas that make it not yet releasable, it's also the closest of the two in terms of completion. I considered it to be a more achievable game with respect to getting multiplayer figured out, with a view of applying the same concepts eventually to Skiddies, so I parked Skiddies a little bit for that reason, as well as my own sanity. This is a little clip of where Squishies is at as of now:
Anyway - I'm not expecting much of an audience around this little devlog, but if you're reading...hello!