IndieCade East
So, I have some pretty exciting news. I learned a few days ago that I’ll be demoing Relativity at one of the Show & Tell sessions at IndieCade East next week. The session I’m scheduled for is Sunday, February 16th 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM. I’ll have a playable version for people try out. So if any of you will be in NYC for IndieCade East, come say hi! (Itay Keren‘s Mushroom 11 will also be at the same timespot, so be sure to check out that game as well. It looks super sweet) It’ll be the first time I’m having the game playtested publicly in over 3 months, so I’m really looking forward to getting some feedback.
Also, if you stop by, you’ll get one of these sweet business cards, which I just got in the mail:
Integrating Portals
I’ve placed myself in a self-imposed crunch to try to get a mac build ready these few days before heading off to New York. My goal is to integrate portals into the main gameplay, and have the first several levels be able to smoothly transition between one another. This is probably the biggest change to the game since the last stable build, and I’d really like to see if it works well.
Here’s a shot of a portal integrated into the actual game:
You can see that the lighting between the two scenes is not consistent – there are no shadows in the scene inside the portal. However, this is something that’s going to have to wait for now. More important problems to tackle at the moment.
Mesh Collider vs Primitive Collider
Everything in Relativity is constructed out of boxes. This is mainly so that you any surface would fall explicity under one of six gravitational fields (if I had a slope at 45 degrees, it would have to be in 2 gravitational fields), and also because I have limited resources, it’s a minimalist style that I can do well. To try to optimize my scenes, I started to merge all the primitives into meshes, in order to reduce draw calls.
However, I soon started to have all these weird problems with collision. It turns out, while having a single mesh over many primitives may be preferable for rendering, it is not for so for collision. Thanksfully, I still had my original primitives saved. The current set up is I created a giant mesh with the primitives, but the mesh only has a renderer and no collider. I keep all the primitives, but turn off their renderers, so that only colliders remain.
It took a while to figure this out, but I’m glad things are working now.
Mac Build
Also, I finally went ahead and put together a build for Mac. And everything works great, except the camera is inverted along the Y-Axis…
