…and it all happened because of an April Fools’ joke. How could that happen? Two days ago I thought of a small joke – I figured I can easily replace crew portraits with some AI-generated[…]
Tag: dev
If you are not a gamedev, you will likely find this boring.
Artificial Support
One of the worst bugs your game can encounter is a race condition. It happens when multiple threads try to access the data and usually is deceptively elusive – game can run fine for a[…]
Account of Greed
I spend bulk of the development time expanding the games AI. Latest improvement is the ability of NPC ringer ships to find and catch asteroids. This is a multi-level improvement: Pathfinding AI has been improved[…]
Sneak-peek on the dive summary screen
The dive summary screen will look something like this: The noteworthy detail is the fact that this screen uses exactly same mineral sprites that are used in-game – they are just zoomed in. This means[…]
The Design of Mechanics
Aiden Iozzo has joined ΔV development team as Mechanical Designer. His role is to ensure that all contents of the game adhere to hard science-fiction paradigm we subscribed. He will make sure that all the thrusters are[…]
The grand Paralax
“You know what ΔV needs?” – said a friend a while ago – “A parallax scrolling”. And he was right. This was supposed to be easy, but turned out not so much. Godot Engine has build-in[…]
Shading the EMP
The EMP blast causes massive discharges on the surface of the hull, as well as lasting damage to electronic equipment. It’s about time I had some fun with shaders and show it off. Ships in ΔV[…]
Does it scale?
With a little after-hours studio in-depth testing becomes an issue. We are doing my best to test everything I write, but our resources are limited, so we often miss some edge cases. That’s where our[…]
Avoiding responsibility
Time to add AI-controlled ships. Since all movement ΔV is physics based, AI has to be physics aware. This is first attempt of AI-controlled flight: Seems to work well enough. Collision avoidance is bit reckless, but[…]
Designing the damage
Games usually handle damage via hitpoints, or similar concepts. But my car does not explode if I kick it a thousand times – and neither should a spaceship. Those are sophisticated machines with many levels[…]