We're now into the last quarter of the competition. 6 days left; this is officially crunch time.

Did quite a few things during the past four days, as I showed in the comments of my last blog. What I didn't do was talk about it much. So here we go.

First off, a screenshot or two:

Me dicking around with Sun Shafts:

And dicking around with Bloom settings:

Going to make things like Bloom optional. Motion blur was going to be optional, but due to some changes, it's not really effective any more.

Anyway… changes.

Switch from Level orientated to Player orientated

My original concept that I threw together had two 'segments' of the level, or 'road', as I'm calling it. These were pretty long (Stretching well beyond the 'back' of the view frustum). When the player hit the join between the two segments, he would be flung back to the starting point , seamlessly (More or less).

This 'works', but was shortsighted of me. Figured this out when I added projectiles. Now I had to either make every moving object jump back if it hit the boundary, or figure out a new way of doing things.

I decided on the latter; generally if you're doing too much work you're doing things wrong.

The system I decided to use is very common in 'endless' games. In this system, the player doesn't move. The level does.

So in my game, the level segments are moving towards the camera at the the same velocity the player should be moving. When it's out of the camera bounds completely, it jumps up to behind the segment behind it.

This is, in fact, a much more seamless transition, and is also going to make handling my AI code a lot easier down the line.

Modeling an Enemy

Spent some time today working on an enemy model. I've been getting far more comfortable with Blender, and the creation of exactly what I have envisioned in my mind. Mechanical and inorganic objects are easier to work with; add a couple of hours overhead to anything vaguely humanoid. :P

I posted a timelapse video on my last blog, but I'll repost it here:

Had a bit of trouble with my normals; I think I accidentally hit Laplacian Smooth at some point during my tweaking of the model, and that did something to the faces I had selected.

I still have a few more enemies to model (Though I'm only aiming to complete one more before the comp deadline), and a huge boss that I have planned.

Anyway, that's enough out of me. Have a GIF/Video of the progress so far: