Back to Bizarro - Progress Report

Long time no post or update here.

I was working on this project from to time to time, more this year and soon I'll be in the position to start working on the actual gameplay.

There are few technical things to be solved, from some area visibility improvements. Most is working fine but can be improved for some more speed gain, areas that should be hidden are still unnecessarily drawn, but some of them are occluded successfully. And if maps will grow up I need to refactor the way I do it.

Other things are solved:

• Texture LODing to be lighter on 3DO CEL side. Remains to also quad LOD close, the big polygons up close to split in four, to solve the issue of quads getting too big or out of Z and weird things happening, distorts or dissapear.
• A PC port that will also work in editor mode to help me easier build stuff, already off loading of map mesh generation/visibility/prebaked shade calculation on PC side (major refactor) and load maps directly, saved 3DO for generating map and taking like 10-15 seconds to start now takes 1-3 seconds. Would be worse if I make bigger maps so it's good I did that.
• Proper allocation/deallocation every time you finish a map and load the next to avoid memory leaks (but they came back again as I add more stuff, so this is an ongoing issue).
• And a lot of other things I might forget. Most of them do not show something entirely new relevant to the gameplay, just internal working of the engine that had to be done.

Good new feature, addition of entities, objects like Enemy or Thing which I will program behaviour, but they are attached to 3d objects now and seamlessly added to the scene. I will start to procedurally generate some lowres messes or billboard to represent certain things like collectable items, various kinds of enemies, even objects like dynamic blocks you can break that might block your way, something that requires a key or certain amount of gems, animated water or fire in a small block area. With this, I can start working on one part of the gameplay, which is not yet decided so I have to experiment.

Secondly, I plan to make:

• Inventory or crafting system. Maybe you can just swap weapons or look at items to get information. Would like to do some simple material editor like minecraft. Like collecting those gems and build something with them. It's in the plans but I don't know yet how I will use it, so it's something to experiment with and see if it fits the gameplay.
• Complete the PC editor. I need to fly like minecraft on the PC port and add/remove blocks. Right now I have offloaded the procgen code from 3DO to PC only, but this is just commands that dig tunnels and boxed areas with calling functions. I also need to make my editor add those entities, not by code as I do it. If it tends to be daunting task, maybe I can create levels the way I do, but a crude editor will help. Nothing too big and complicated, just flying around in editor mode and adding/removing blocks or objects.
• Finish the area visibility algorithm. This might need more refactoring to allow more than 32 area splits (they are 32bits on an integer right now which I am ORing to know which areas are visible from a certain block). I need more areas, possibly 256. But I don't want to increase memory consumption by adding 8 32bit integers, I have something else in mind.
• Improve memory consumption and remove leaks. Need to do more work on this. I realized here how much more difficult game development is than the demoscene demos I was doing, where I would alloc things and those would be thrown away at the end of the demo. But here things need to clean up and reinit during passage to next level, also things are interactive and can fail in so many ways and data structure are way more complex than anything demoscene like I did before.
• Continue working on the actual gameplay and add new features and things. I will need a lot of testing to see if I can tweak it into something that is somewhat playable and fun. I can't say I have much experience in true gamedev, I am mostly coming from the demoscene and like to do tech demos and impressive rendering code.
• My future dream is to make a King's Field like, whether on 3DO or any other retro platform or even modern PC (I develop another software rendering engine recently on SDL2 but could also switch to OpenGL). But will leave this for now and try to finish the thing I started.