UV maps and tiled Pixel art

3D objects today are often built up from a mesh of triangles. To let the object know how to paint a texture on it a UV map is used, which is a set of relative coordinates in an image that references every corner in a triangle.

From inheritance to traits

When I started this project I was quite fond of inheritance. Inheritance is great for a lot of things, but if you are inheriting more than 3 levels you’re either doing something particular or you are on you way to inheritance hell.

Megaman’s Costumes: the failed Shader approach

In all Megaman games when you equip another power, Megman changes his color.

The “clothing” of the character graphic in Megaman 2 always has exactly two colors swapped. I could create all these graphics by hand but that…

First public demo

The other day I held the first public demo. I call this version 0.1. It’s far from complete. Only Heatman’s and Flashman’s stages are playable, but the bulk of the experience is there.

Lagging in the video was introduced by the video capturing process on my Macbook Air.

Level markup

I’ve chosen to use XML for level markup. I know that XML has a bad reputation in a lot of circles, but this will not be a post about defending my choice.

For now, each level has it’s own XML document. To create a new level you need at least a <scene type=”level” name=”Bubbleman”>…

TimeStopper

One of the woes of this project has been how to create Flashman’s TimeStopper weapon. A core value I always had since I started writing this engine was to keep separation of concerns close to perfect. And I felt like I would have to taint some controllers with tasks they were not meant to handle to solve…

Level Editor and Camera Paths

I’m struggling with enjoying working with the level editor. It’s not as fun. And I’m constantly ping-ponging between the feeling that “having a separate level editor in regular HTML is probably the easiest” and “I should just make a switch in the game that puts it in edit…

Debugger

A game engine needs good ways of debugging games. My engine doesn’t provide much of that kind. I felt like the debug code polluted my project. I could already expose collision zones, but since I wrote the camera path feature I felt I needed a good way to debug that as well.

Optimizing howMuchInsideAmI()

A couple of nights earlier I created camera paths and for that I needed a value to represent how close to the center of something I was. I spent probably two hours, filling two pages in my notebook with scribbles before I had this freak of a function that gave back what I…

Challenging gameplay materialized

A couple of weeks back I started working on Heatman’s level. It has a fairly low amount of animated lava, which I’m using UV map switching to animate. Updating UV maps is supposedly slow, but I currently have no better idea. I think that given how simple my scenes are…