Redpoint Blog

I’ve been talking on Twitter and Google+ for the last few days about getting Tychaia running in the browser with JSIL.  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to do that because Javascript doesn’t support full 64-bit integers natively, and the resulting emulation makes everything run horridly slow (the game uses them everywhere to address the near infinite game space).

We’re going to look into things like Native Client, although this will only be supported in Chrome obviously so we’re unsure of how much time we’d want to dedicate to get that running.  The website we’re setting up where people can generate their own map renders is still underway, but we’ll be moving the generation code onto the server and have the browser just download chunks of the map.

That actually gives us a few benefits over the client-only version; we can save copies of the renders on the server and we can also implementing panning around the world since we can just query the server for new 128×128 renders of images.

So it doesn’t look like I’ll get to finish my Ludum Dare entry (have to go to work tomorrow!)

Here’s some pictures of it though.. The idea was that you were given missions to steal things from places around the world, but it turns out in the end that you’re stealing parts that are being used to build some sort of super weapon, then there’s some moral choice ending.

The biggest thing I got out of this was improving my pixel art skills though, and I’m really proud of the tile set graphics.. :)

Ingame, where you’d walk around, disarm traps and sneak around guards before stealing the item. There’d be a mission time limit as well.

World map selection screen. You click on the yellow dots to goto missions (in the original design, you’d unlock them as you do missions, but they’re all unlocked here).

Introducing… MelbourneIndie.

We have a lot of independent game developers in Melbourne and they all have something interesting to say. But keeping up with everyone’s individual blogs when you want to keep up with what’s going on is a little bit difficult (especially because there are so many indies!)

This site collates all of the blog entries from any Melbourne game developers who are participating and highlights their best blog posts that focus on both game development techniques and tips, as well as progress on their latest creations.

This is a short update for those that don’t follow me on Twitter. Josh and I are working on a new game called “Tychaia”; it’s a procedurally generated, infinite world, hardcore RPG. We hope to have some kind of official website up in the next few days / week where we’ll be making playable builds available.

There are technical development logs on TIGSource which if you’ve ever wondered how to do a game with an infinite world, are a good resource to have a look at. Since it’s being openly developed (but not under an open source license), the source code and assets are on GitHub.