Indie game development – What an awesome world!

OK, maybe it’s from lack of sleep… Maybe it’s because I’ve stayed up all night and morning reading from various indie development blogs. Whatever the reason, I gotta say that the indie game world is one amazing place.

Molehill Racer

I’ve recently come across some developers who’ve tried to document the Molehill source code visible in the Adobe videos just so we can get an early start. Such dedication! So awesome! From Flash to Unity, from browser, phone and even consoles… Everywhere  I look I can find indie devs working hard on their game projects, and making money to boot! I never thought that anyone could be making money with these small 1-2 man game teams until I jumped into it myself.

Unintentional motion-blur in Away3DLite

Shading planes. Faking depth since.... forever.

So I was working with some semi-transparent planes to add some darkness / depth to my game, and came across a strange bug.

Oh, that's pretty!

Is Papervision3D really dead?

So I’ve noticed there hasn’t been too many updates on Papervision recently, and it’s understandable because there hasn’t been much out there to increase performance, even though I see away3d constantly getting updates. I don’t really care for Away3D. Away3D performance is poor, and I got started with Papervision, so I tend to stick with it. Not to mention the documentation that’s already out there. And now I see on the forums that the project has been pretty much abandoned, even with Molehill around the corner! What the hell guys? Do I really have to move to Away3d?

EDIT: Now that I’ve played with the Away3D Molehill demos, it looks like I’ll be switching to Away3D once Flash Player 11 is released. Until then, I’ll stick with Papervision because it can push more triangles in more DisplayObject3Ds. Papervision still draws faster than Away3DLite, so until Molehill is widely adopted, there’s no point in changing renderers. They’re very similar anyway, so the switch will be easy.

Overloading my game with effects

So now that I’m pushing hard to get my game out, I’ve run into some issues. I’ve had to cut a lot of features to get the game out ASAP, and this has helped for the most part. But there are some features which are pretty much finished, but not truly optimized. Here’s an image of my game with bloom, lighting, and other effects applied.

3d rendering in flash.

Been playing around with different rendering engines. Each has their own set of features, and I’m not sure what I want to use.

Found a good list here:
http://matteley.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/as3-quick-guides-open-source-3d-engines/

Now that alternativa has been released, I’ll probably try it out. My project currently uses papervision3d, and I was planning on moving to the much smaller ND3D, but it’s missing some essential features (UV tiling, multiple viewportlayers). I might also try out Away3d Lite, seeing as it gives good performance, has the features I need, and it’s not TOO much different than papervision. Going to do some peformance tests because rendering speed is all that matters!!!!