It’s been too long since I have written a blog post!
Let’s begin with the progress we have made on Schism over the past two or three days. Brandon created a sweet algorithm to calculate trajectories for thrown objects which I turned into a new combat mechanic that allows the player to throw equipped items, i.e. grenades, in combat mode. It took a while, and about 100 emails to Brandon in order to get all of the functionality right. I needed the “targeting ring” to attach flat to whatever surface the trajectory was contacting which really gave me fits, a method to allow the player to “cook off” the grenade timer, and several other features that I really struggled with until now, it all works just as we want it too.
Here is a quick, rough video demo I just created to show you some of these features. Forgive the programmer art; I probably should have spiced the scene up. I’ll do that the next time.
Lets see; what else did we do these past couple of weeks. Brandon ironed out some of the character animations and got us working with our AI navmesh properly and has been working on some 3D modeling and texturing. We recently purchased a license for the Bitmap2Material software from Allegorithmic. Eventually we would like to purchase licenses for Substance Painter and Substance Designer as well, but they are just not in our budget right now.
I had some adventures and misadventures upgrading some hardware and trying to migrate to Windows 8.1. That was frustrating. I really like Windows 8.1 but unfortunately my video cards are just not supported by AMD anymore so I couldn’t find stable enough drivers and had to go back to Windows 7. I can’t afford to buy new cards at this point.
Thanks to my friend Jason Fox, we are now part of the Microsoft BizSpark Program which is really cool. This gives us free membership to the Microsoft Developers Network as well as support and visibility. I’m very grateful to Jason for pushing it through for us.
We are going to start pushing really hard for an alpha release that we can use to drum up support for a Kickstarter Campaign, hopefully within the next couple of months. In order to finish Schism, we are going to need some financial support in order to purchase the hardware and software we are going to need in order to make the vision we have for Schism come to life. We want the final product to have the “indie spirit” yet look almost like an expensive AAA game. I do believe that both of those goals are achievable if we can get the time and tools necessary to do it, and unfortunately, that requires a certain amount of capital. So get ready for that. We really hope to have your support!
I know there are some things I am leaving out! I invite Brandon to post further comments if he has anything he wants to add as well! And as always, if you have any questions about the game or the development process, please feel free to comment. Also, look me up on Twitter!
lunaticfringegames 