Level Decoration
Andrew
- Tuesday, June 8th, 2021
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Hey everyone! Andrew here bringing you a quick show n tell on how we approach decorating a level for Blightmare! It’s quite simple. We tend to do it by layers. Far background, immediate background, foreground, and extreme close foreground. The interactive objects such as lightbugs and ladybugs all exist on the player layer which is Continue Reading
Drawing What You See (Redux)
Chris
- Tuesday, May 4th, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to the Blightmare dev blog! Today’s post revisits the topic of culling – first discussed here. It turns out that there were some problems with the initial implementation, and I finally got around to fixing them. I’ll start by discussing the problems that need to be addressed and then we’ll move Continue Reading
Story Basics
Chris
- Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
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Hey all! It’s Andrew back with a few tips on simple story elements that can help you come up with a solid outline. I use these steps in almost all of my story projects. There are only three, and they can be often referenced as Act 1 , 2, and 3 in a play Continue Reading
2D Lighting: Performance
Chris
- Tuesday, April 20th, 2021
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Hi there! Welcome back to the Blightmare developer blog. Today’s post is a continuation of our ongoing series about 2D lighting. Specifically, we’re going to start looking at some performance improvements because with all our recent effects, there are some areas that are so slow they can’t really be played and that’s no good. This Continue Reading
2D Lighting: Shadows
Chris
- Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to another Blightmare dev blog! This post is a continuation of our 2D lighting series which started with the basics here. Last time we saw what a little bit of lighting could do to help our test scene pop a little bit, and today we’re going to make it even better Continue Reading
2D Lighting Basics
Chris
- Tuesday, March 9th, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to another installment of the Blightmare Development Blog! Today we will be beginning a series on 2D lighting that will show an in-depth look into how 2D lighting works, and how we are using it in Blightmare. In this first post, we will start with the basics of what 2D lighting Continue Reading
Terrain Shadowing
Chris
- Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to the Blightmare development blog! Today’s post is about how we went about automatically generating shadow casters for our terrain. In order to frame what I’m talking about, I think a picture is the best way. Below, you can see a test scene with shadow casting enabled for some of the Continue Reading
Cameras!
Tom
- Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021
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Welcome to another Blightmare Dev Blog! Chris has spent some time talking about lighting, now I’ll talk a bit about the camera we use for Blightmare. To render the game, we need to tell the engine where the camera is located, and how big the field of view is that the camera can see. By Continue Reading
The Fastest Code Is Code That Doesn’t Run
Chris
- Tuesday, February 16th, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to the Blightmare dev blog! Recently, we’ve been working on some performance improvements, and today we’ll take a look at a very common technique called culling. The basic idea is that if you can’t see something, then there’s no sense in drawing or animating it. Let’s dig into how this works. Continue Reading
Why Video Games?
Chris
- Tuesday, February 9th, 2021
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Hey everyone! It’s Andrew, the artist/designer, to talk a little bit about the importance of video game story telling! I truly believe that video games are the single greatest form of storytelling that we have easy access to in our day. In a game, a story can be told through text, still images, Continue Reading