Wild Shadow Studios

Texturable Objects

While I've been out of town, Alex has been cooking up some great stuff for GameHalf's map editor. He's given players the ability to upload their own textures and apply them to in-game objects. In this screenshot you can see that I've created a map with a concrete floor, and added two walls:

One of the walls (at center) is a square-filling object, while the other wall (top right) is a destroyable wall which sits between squares. Neither wall is textured yet. But, using the "texture objects" and "texture walls" modes, I can apply a texture to them.

In this case, I chose the leftmost brick texture from the palette at the bottom. The box on the right is new; it contains all the other sets of textures that I've added to this map. I populated the list of texture sets from the server using the "add texture" button.

The system supplies some textures, but I can also add my own textures, using the "upload texture" button. This pops open a dialog which lets me upload an image file from my computer to use as a texture.

Once I've uploaded a texture, I can use it in my maps, and other people can use it in their maps. Alex and I hope that the community of map makers can help each other by uploading and sharing lots of quality textures.

I'm not sure when we'll be able to push this change out to the live servers, but if you have opinions on the screenshots, please let us know via email or the blog comment system.

Player-Created Maps

Alex and I are grateful for the support we've had from our testers -- the feedback has been super helpful. One valuable source of input has been players' use of the map editor. The "I wish I could do X in the map editor..." emails have given us a lot of new ideas.

Here are a some highlights of recent player-created maps. This one is "Hit Them Where They Live", by MophMoph:

The Wrong Neighborhood, by MophMoph:

King of the Hill, by MophMoph:

Space Lobby, by weasel:

Mars Bunker, by weasel:

Thank you, players! You can play these maps by clicking here. Click the "Play" button and select the "All Maps" tab.

New GameHalf Build

Play the new build of GameHalf.

In response to user feedback, we've made a few changes to GameHalf, including several bug fixes. We've also added the ability to see over low walls. This screenshot, from the map editor's line-of-sight mode, shows that Ben Fisher can see over the lower sections of wall, but not the higher ones.

I'd like to thank everyone who tried the game. This week Alex and I will be incorporating as many of your suggestions as we can.

Play the new build of GameHalf.

GameHalf Engine Testing

Today Rob and I are releasing a playable demo of GameHalf. The game is far from finished. In fact it is more of technology demo than a game (hence: "engine testing"), but it's reached the point that we wanted to get it into people's hands.

GameHalf is a turn-based squad-level tactics game. You play by loading up a map and trying to eliminate all the enemies without getting your squad wiped out.

GameHalf includes a map editor, which anyone can use to make their own scenarios. By choosing a name and password (no email address or annoying stuff required), you can save your maps onto our servers, where other people can discover and play them. We're hoping that players will use the map editor to push the game engine in creative ways.

As a two programmer shop, our art and UIs are mostly of the placeholder variety at this point since the game is still evolving. Any art that is even half-decent was done by Rob and the really terrible stuff you can blame on me.

Your feedback will shape the game's future! Please use the blog's comment system to leave gripes, suggestions, ideas, bug reports or any other comments you have. We really appreciate your help.

Play GameHalf

GameHalf Preview

Here's a GameHalf video I made this morning, after spending yesterday incorporating new sound effects.

We are getting very close to releasing a demo of GameHalf!

GameHalf Sound Effects

We are getting ready to release a demo of GameHalf, and a big item looming on the todo list is sound assets. This morning there was only one sound in the game, a laser beam noise. Today I spent hours poring over the many sounds available at sound-effect.com. I had three aliens and a human to shop for; I needed footsteps, "ouch" sounds, death rattles, monster bite noises, explosions, guns, a teleporter sound, and the sound of a medkit.

The effects arrived as WAV files: uncompressed, but high quality. After checking the originals into SVN, I went to work on them with Audacity, an open-source sound editing tool. I wanted to get just the "good parts" of the sound files, trimming away the excess and fading away any clicks or pops at the ends of the samples. I wanted to separate the footsteps so that we could match the gait of the onscreen graphics. I also thought it might be nice to try choosing a random footstep sample at each footfall.

The last task was to save the edited samples as MP3s; these are much smaller than WAVs and Flash requires MP3 files anyway. Some very annoying patent issues currently prevent Audacity from shipping with an MP3 encoder, but after finding one and installing it, I was able to convert and save the samples.

Tomorrow: incorporate the new audio assets into the game.

Camera Buttons

We are pushing to get a demo of GameHalf released as soon as possible. Yesterday we added camera control buttons to the UI; previously, the only way to control the camera was to use the WASD keys for panning, and QE for rotation. You can see the buttons at top right, near the Login button.

Our hope is that players won't need to use the camera controls very often. Alex recently implemented a cool feature that makes walls transparent when the mouse is on top of them; reducing the need for the player to control the camera. We have a few more ideas along these lines; with luck, a few of them will prove useful and players will hardly ever need to mess with the camera.

Phong Shading in Flash 10

A few weeks ago, I was looking at a scene in GameHalf and felt it was difficult to parse visually. It seemed to take some mental effort to discern the walls from the floor and such. Part of the problem was that I had used a single texture for the walls and the ground but the other part was that the scene was not lit. The problem was even more apparent when looking at sloping ground. For example, in the scene below it is easy enough to discern the ground height:

But if you switch the texture, it becomes nearly impossible:

Of course, lighting is computationally expensive and Flash tends to resist any sort of computational complexity. However, Flash 10 provides what seems like the perfect solution: shaders. However, although similar to the H/GLSL shaders used for lighting in DirectX and OpenGL, Flash shaders lack some features which make it a bit more challenging to use them to light a 3D scene.

Most importantly, a Flash shader is just a pixel shader. There is no vertex shader and the only per invocation information you get is the (x,y) position of the pixel. So to do Phong shading, you need to calculate and send in the transformation from texture space to local space, the normal of each vertex in the polygon, and the light vector in local space. In the shader, you convert the (x,y) position to a position in local space. Then use a barycentric coordinate calculation to find the right mix of vertices and calculate the normal in local space. After that you are pretty much just a dot product away from a nicely lit scene:

Even for the first texture the scene looks much more realistic:

Of course, this is just ambient and diffuse directed light but from this point adding specular lighting, point lights or even normal maps are pretty simple extensions. However, keep in mind that unlike H/GLSL, this code is getting executed on the cpu, not the gpu (even if you put flash in "gpu" mode), so you can't push it too far if you need the redraw to be reasonably fast. It is, however, much faster than pure Actionscript code.

For more on Flash Shaders, there is a great post at kaourantin.net which spells out all the gotchas (of which there are more than a few).

Cobrazoid

Last fall, when I needed to make some sprite sheets for GameHalf characters, I turned to Blender, an open source 3D modeling and animation tool. Blender's interface is difficult to learn, but with a lot of help from web and YouTube tutorials, I was able to take some models from TurboSquid and successfully get them into GameHalf. The whole process goes like this:

1. Modeling -- arrange vertices in 3D space until they look like a character
2. Texturing -- get a 2D picture which will become the model's skin
3. UV Mapping -- map each 3D vertex to a point on the 2D texture
4. Rigging -- add a skeleton to the model
5. Animating -- move the skeleton around to make the model do things
6. Rendering -- take many pictures of the animating model
7. Compositing -- put all the rendered animation frames together into a sprite sheet

Starting with a model from TurboSquid meant that steps 1 to 3 had already been done for me.  I only had to learn steps 4 through 7. The results were pretty good, but I wanted to learn the first three steps. So I built a brand new model, a six-foot-tall snake alien I call Cobrazoid.

Cobrazoid was easy to model.  He's basically just a squished, bent tube.

His texture is this picture from cgtextures.com:

After UV mapping he looks like this:

The next step was to add the skeleton:

I did the animations today.  Here's the resulting sprite sheet:

GameHalf

Alex's project is a turn-based squad combat game codenamed GameHalf, somewhat reminiscent of one of our favorite games of the 90s, XCOM. This screenshot is from a test map called "Town Raid", toward the end of the battle. Fallen enemies lie all around, and the walls of various rooms have been blown away by grenade fire.

GameHalf has a lot of innovative features that I'm really excited about. I think Alex has done a great job on it and we're both working hard to get a demo into people's hands as soon as we can.