HLSL another steep learning curve.

What did I achieve this past week? Well! Not only did I complete the tutorial on HLSL 2D Lighting (Having very limited experience here), I more importantly LEARNT it, too many people copy and paste or just data entry and that leaves people not knowing what they are putting into their games and unable to customize it, could you be happy to use somebody else’s words/work and say “I did that”?

It’s amazing what lighting brings to the table in games as I’m sure everybody knows, but even the simplest and humblest of 2D games greatly appreciate light. In fact to make the darkest of game, light sets the scene, a bit flicker and the recipe of a good horror game emerges.

With HLSL I learnt about 2DRenderTargets to render one scene with the mask and the other with the overlay, deciding how bright an area is on screen depending on how light the colour is beneath it. Which is not explained in the tutorial sadly but once you understand this it opens up many opportunities  from colour to shape to EVEN dynamic lighting, but one step at a time!

I have had some major things happening in my personal life and being personal we’ll stop it here, but I do promise mostly myself that within the next few weeks I’ll be making more effort with my two prime projects, “CHICKEN” and “Isometric Drag Racing”, both names being place holders as quite frankly.... they are crap.

Even my artist who I have known nearly 12 years now has set up an office at home bought 30mb broadband is brimming with good ideas and most importantly desire, it’s contagious to say the least! I’m very much looking forward to the next few months and I hope to deliver SADGames 2^nd title, it’s a race (pardon the pun) between Chicken and Drag Racer, both in the racing genre, however not in the traditional sense, something I’ve never touched before, always up for the challenge though!

I wanted this blog to contain a lot more pictures, I’ve not tried as of yet being new to 'Blogger' but I'll be adding more art assets once I have them in my gritty paws.

Quite frankly an awful screenshot but the best demonstration of 2D HLSL light I currently implemented.

 4 lights in this scene, one screen light and then 3 "spot", the character without a light is controlled to see how light effects it, as you can see it darkens where relevant and how it should. I'm happy with the effect, but the background image makes it look fairly ugly. It's late and I really want to show the effect off so here you go!

Sighing out!

One + One = Two

I have another member of SAD Games, my best friend Matt Davis has decided to jump on board and lend me his graphical talent and I can tell you it’s been a massive help and provided me with huge inspiration for our next titles. We both have the same mine sets in regard to realism, we aren’t going to set unachievable goals, but this does open up a lot more opportunities to develop games that I’ve shied away from through lack of man hours and lacking artistic skills. I’ll post some screenshots of his work here soon.

We both like the idea of our next game (SADGames second game) to be an Isometric grame, I’ve been learning a lot with this view expecting it to be difficult but it has so far proved much harder than anticipated. I’m going to approach a second tutorial which can be found here.

Wish me luck!