[Mattias Gustavsson]

I've been working on a new game for a while - working title is Rage&Sorrow. Progress have been quite slow, mostly because this game is quite tech-heavy (for me, at least).



I wanted to make a more story based game, and one with a manageable scope - so it will be something like 5 levels only, but I'm hoping to make more games of a similar style and using the same tech, after I finish this one. The character you play is pictured above, and when the game starts, you won't know much about who he is or what he's up to, but it will be revealed bit by bit as you get further into the game. At the core, the story is about loss, revenge and sacrifice.

The technology I'm developing for this is very exciting to me. I'm basically pulling out all the stops and finally making the isometric 2D engine I've always wanted to make. It's sure taking its time, but it's also a lot of fun, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the process.




I'm aiming for something quite powerful. Basically, I want an engine that supports full dynamic lighting and per-pixel depth sorting, while being capable of rendering thousands of sprites. I want to automate everything I can when it comes to generating the art assets for it. The images above show an early prototype of the lighting. What's happening is, that I render the scene four times, and then do a fifth pass to calculate lighting and final pixel colour (I even put in some "filmic tone-mapping", inspired by a GDC lecture on Uncharted 2 :D).

If you want to see a simple prototype of what the lighting looks like, you can download this:
Download prototype
It's all done in software, just to try out what it would look like, but the real thing will need hardware accelerated rendering (shaders) to get decent speed.


I'm rendering my objects and characters in Poser as usual - but I've automated everything to the point where I can just create my character, save it, and my tools pipeline will automatically get poser to render all the necessary frames from all camera angles etc. which is a great help - I can just have this process going overnight.



However, I can't lean on Poser as much for rendering the ground for my game. So the approach I'm taking is to procedurally generate tiles for the ground, by generating fractal height fields and use basic textures which I blend depending on height and slope. With the addition of some lighting, I think I'm off to a promising start (as pictured above).



I did a quick experiment on using it to generate wall tiles as well - and I think it shows enough potential to make it worth continuing to explore it.

There's a thousand and one things left to do - I've barely got started. But I'm very much enjoying it, and I'm not really in a hurry to finish it - for this one, I'm set on enjoying the ride :-)
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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[RampantCoyote]

I'm suddenly beginning to feel a bit of hurry for you to finish it... :)

Looks awesome. Way to upscale the 2D Iso engine!
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz