A New Zero video update

I added a simple AI to test out infantry combat.  There's only two weapons so far, a submachine gun and an auto-cannon.  At the end of the video you can see how to look around corners, you back up to a wall, hold down the right mouse button and then look right and down.  I've seen a lot of games with cover systems, but they're almost always just pressing a button to cover.  I think it's more interesting to actually control it yourself, it feels pretty natural once you get used to it.  You can also see what happens when I decide to leave cover and charge in.

I will be doing an open beta with infantry soon, there's a lot of things to fix/add to do an open test though, last week I found a bug where it runs at 2 seconds per frame on some PCs here.  I also need to optimize the net code, and improve the AI some.  And no, the ballmen aren't final, but it will be some sort of abstraction of a human.

Recommended: Escape Goat

Last week Ian from MagicalTimeBean came by to show his game Escape Goat, a really fun goat-based puzzle game.  If you have an Xbox you can buy it from the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, I know Microsoft likes to bury that behind 10 different interfaces but I think you can also buy it here.  It's only $3, or just 240 space bucks.  If you don't have an Xbox there will be a PC version out soon, hopefully on Steam.  I don't usually recommend games, but this is a really good one and I'd like to try and get the word out on it.

Hockey? Mac?

Hockey? for the Mac is now available, and there's a new Windows build with improved stick handling.

Download:

Mac: hockey055.dmg

Windows: hockey055.zip

Also more fun with Google translations of Hockey? reviews:

Well, a very fun game from Cryptic Sea . Represents a such simulation hockey with a first-person.
Multiplayer - a generator of pain management for very peculiar. Play a lot of fun if you gather a small group in Skype - without communicating somehow not.

StopGame

Ludum Dare: Relativity

I actually finished something for Ludum Dare, it's entered in the game jam section (72 hours instead of 48, and relaxed rules).  It's a first-person puzzle game, you can slow down light to 2 m/s, the puzzles are very simple right now since I didn't have much time to work on them.  The engine is a 4D raycaster, the world is stored in a 4 dimensional voxel grid, as the ray moves though the spatial grid it also moves backward in the time dimension.  There's a lot of cool stuff that could be done with this with some more time.

Try it out here: relativity.zip

Ludum Dare video update

Here's a quick video of my Ludum Dare game so far, you can see some of the effects of having a very slow speed of light, the ball appears to warp when it's moving towards the camera.  I've been working on optimizing the raycasting, I changed the structure of the voxels to a nested grid, which at first seemed way slower but that was just a bug in calculating which part of spacetime to check.  I'm done for tonight so tomorrow will be a mad dash to try and finish it.

Ludum Dare Halftime

Ludum Dare is halfway through, I have the basic engine working, still need to figure out the gameplay.  The concept of the game is that the speed of light is really slow, like 1 m/s or so.  I'm going to try and figure out some puzzles based on that, I need to fix up the engine some more before I can though.  The engine is a raycasting voxel engine but it casts rays through 4 dimensions instead of 3.

Ludum Daring

I've decided to try a strange concept for this Ludum Dare, not sure if it will work or not, I'll try to do some posts tomorrow with progress(or lack of) updates.