I had some free time over the Easter long weekend, so work on the game continued.

At the same time, the Gizmo For You website experienced a lot of outages so the end of phase one of the contest has been pushed back till the 9th of this month. Technically, phase one is simply suggesting an idea, and the prizes are awarded accordingly, in expectation that the ideas will be delivered as a finished product by the winners. I'm well into implementation now, so hopefully it'll give the judges a good idea of what I'm trying to do. At this stage there's four entries: my mix of genres, SG57's RPG, a platformer and a shooter.

With the extra time up my sleeve, I've decided to partially flesh out all the screens in the game rather than concentrate on finishing them one at a time. What's made this easier is having the Keepers prototype that I created for the competition which basically included placeholder graphics for all the screens, so it's been easy to work my way through them one at a time, plugging in freshly rendered graphics.

I've paid particular attention to the "outside view" screen today, which is where the Scorched Earth stuff happens. To give the scene some depth, I created a view of the mountains seen in the title screen, then blurred it to give it an out-of-focus appearance, helping to keep the player's attention on the foreground. The gray mountains make up the destructible part of the scene and these are much simpler, drawn as basic 2D silhouettes. They're done this way because they need to be randomly generated and dynamically destroyed, so rendering them isn't really an option. The data for the foreground mountains is simply an array of height values, with the same number of entries as there are pixels across the screen. Drawing these mountains is then a case of just rendering a vertical line for each pixel across the screen. When a section of mountain is destroyed, the height of a line is reduced, so overall, it's a pretty basic process.

Another slight change I made was to remove one of the downstairs doors and replace it with the computer. I'd threatened to do this some time ago as I wasn't sure if it was worth having the two doors downstairs. I finally decided that it just confused the issue having both, so only the storeroom is accessible downstairs now, with the four turrets doors remaining on the upper landing. The computer has also been added to the scene.

Finally, I've also rendered the background graphics for the towers. I'm using two layers again, one for the tower walls, and the second for the platforms and I actually spent quite a bit of time experimenting with graphics for this. My initial effort used a half cylinder textured with bricks for the background wall, but I had trouble with it since rendering the inside of the half cylinder using the orthographic camera caused the cylinder to look inverted, as though the platforms were on the outside of the tower. I ended up simply using a flat polygon for the background wall and adding a bit of lighting to create shadows at the sides of the screen. It doesn't really look cylindrical, but at least it also doesn't look as badly inside out.

The foreground platforms are still using placeholder graphics, so wipe that shocked look off your face!

And yes, you are correct, that painting on the wall is of Vlad the Impaler, inspiration for Dracula.