Darien

Molte Maschere by Darien Short boss fight against a devious clown

New game; with clowns.

dariengames.itch.io/molte-maschere

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I like what I had before, but optimizing a game like that in 3D turned out to be too massive a task, and I'd probably have had to build a custom engine from scratch in C++. Narrowing the scope let's me focus on the spellcrafting system, which was the main point of the game from the beginning.

Player and spider monster stand in a cave filled with magic materials.

New year, new update! After months of endlessly optimizing and realizing I'd never finish the game at its current scale, I restarted the project as a 2D dungeon crawler, keeping the emphasis on spellbuilding. I’ll share more soon; for now, here's a screenshot:

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Experimented with adding voxels to my game's terrain deformation system. It looks great but currently uses a ton of RAM. Time to optimize...

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Hills made from sin waves with placeholder art animals

#GMTK Day 1 progress: Added procedural terrain generation and made some funny looking horses.

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Added a tooltip to the spell editor

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Working on force-field mechanics

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New fire shader!

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The spell language now supports input events, so you can set certain actions to happen whenever those keys are pressed. The events last until the spell is terminated, even if you're casting another spell.

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Added some fancy effects to my game's text editor

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I think it has to do with my screen-reading shader reading its own texture, which causes parts of the screen to not clear. This is what I get for trying to render liquids on a separate layer.

Godot's subviewports are going to be the death of me.

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I added particle effects and decoration to projectiles. It's not much, but it looks a lot better than the default white spheres. The projectile's color is determined by parsing the code to see what spell it casts on a hit, while the size is based on the mana cost.

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When the spell is cast, the mana spent on the BRIDGE spell gets transferred to its projectile, which uses it to cast the PILLAR spell once per loop until it runs out of mana. At some point I want to add syntax for explicitly stating how much mana to use, so spells can last longer than one second.

Code for the ICE BRIDGE spell

For example, here is the code for the ice bridge spell. HEAT is a built-in spell that costs 1 mana for each unit heated or cooled. The PILLAR spell casts HEAT once, so it costs 50 mana. The BRIDGE spell casts PILLAR once every loop (10 per sec) so we estimate it being worth PILLAR * 10; 500 mana.

This week's progress features post processing to give everything nice outlines and a mana system to limit spellcasting. Since all the spells are custom and often involve recursive casting, the game estimates how much mana is spent by parsing the spell's code before casting

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To make water flow down hills properly, I used 3 bits of each pixel in the heightmap to represent slope. When the mesh loads, each face calculates which direction in UV space correlates to downward motion, shown by the color of each pixel it covers.

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Thanks! I'm trying to make a wizard game where you create the spells yourself with code. I'm making a system for elemental spells to cover the ground with their respective material, which has resulted in the delicious substance seen in the video.

My attempts at adding flowing water have resulted in some tasty looking Jell-O. I may use this for adding slime magic down the road.

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I made some new spells to test the ice and terrain systems. Most of them work by having a spell's projectile cast another spell in the air.

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I've added temperature data to the height-map, so spells that affect heat can cause ice formations or start fires. The ice gradually melts on its own, but it can be melted faster by heating it.

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After a long night of writing shader code and search algorithms, I got the surface covering system fully working and optimized. It looks a little weird on sharp corners, but it's ready enough that I can start making spells that use this system.

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For elemental spells, I want a way for materials to cover the surfaces of a level for effects like freezing the ground and terraforming. I'm making good progress, but for now it just looks like chunky Splatoon.

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Here's a telekinesis spell I made in-game using the "push," "hold," and "scan" keywords. My goal for the game is to have lots of simple keywords that can be combined into more complex spells, so coding a spell feels like solving an open ended puzzle.

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Code editor for a game where you program your own spells. You can select a spell to edit on the left side, then edit its code, title, and icon in the center. Below is a hotbar where spells can be assigned for use.

I added some more features to the spell editor, namely a list of your spells on the left side and a simple reference pane on the right. I also gave each spell a customizable icon to better distinguish them on the hotbar.

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Got the spell editor working! I also played around with adding procedural effects to the text, like the wavy effect on the word "Launch".

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I switched everything to 3D and played around with making spells. Next I'm going to work on some UI and an in-game spell editor.

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Back after a hiatus (college). I've started working on a game that lets you create your own spells with code. Here are two example spells that I made.
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Got most of the mechanics figured out and blocked out a level. Now I just need to add some enemy animations and grind out more levels.
#GlobalGameJam

Day one of the jam over, making good progress.
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