Our development phases

After more than a year, we’ve finally finished the first phase of our development. This first development phase has been dedicated to getting our basic technology up and running: having a fully functional map editor, being able to run around in maps, getting all of the scripting systems into place, and getting skyboxes, lightmaps, and other visual technology elements implemented and working properly. It’s been a lot of work just to get the very basics in, but we’re very pleased with the results so far!

So now we move into the next phase of development: application. To use a housing metaphor, if the first phase was laying the foundation, this phase is about putting up walls, and flushing out the overall design of the house. In short, we’re starting to make use of everything the foundation has provided us to make something we can live in… or in our case, play.

Each phase of development is also broken into two phases: a gameplay phase, and a visual phase. So, once the gameplay elements are all set for a phase, we work on making them all look pretty. For instance, with the maps, in the gameplay phase we focused on getting them up and running so that there was actual geometry you could run around on, and in the visual phase we focused on making them look nice with cool lighting, textures, etc.

So now that we’ve completed the first visual phase, it’s time to get back to focusing on gameplay. It should be a lot of fun to start utilizing everything that we put into place before.

I’ll leave you all with this: a lightmap texture generated for one of the new maps Todd’s working on. Each region represents the lighting for a face, so if you stretch that region out of the face, and combine it with the texture, you end up with the face’s lighting. Enjoy! :D

A lightmap generated from a new map.

A lightmap generated from a new map.

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4 Responses to Our development phases

  1. Wartorn says:

    this is terrible D:

    ..hahahah kidding, cool stuff bro 8]

  2. Brad Carney says:

    No, *you’re* terrible! >:(

    haha, nah :)

  3. Tom Lelli says:

    Fullof pretty colours. :D

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