Since my last blog post I've made some progress across a number of different areas of development. My last post here was a video showing off the music I've created for the game so far, which I got some useful feedback for. If you're interested, check it out and let me know what you think!

I decided to move on after creating some music tracks for the game areas I've created so far. There's obviously still a lot more work to be done on the music, so I'll revisit it in the future. I tend to do a lot of work on one aspect of the game(programming, music, art, level design etc) for a relatively small amount of time until it's passable and then come back and iterate on it at later times. After completing a reasonably polished demo I decided it was time to move onto the second area of the game.

Lava Caverns

The next area of the game is a lava themed area that's called the Lava Caverns. It h

Over the past month I've been doing pretty much nothing except bug fixes and sound design. I'm getting closer to having a section of the game at a level that I'm happy to show off, but it's still probably a couple more weeks away. My process for fixing bugs and polishing the game is just playing through it, writing down stuff that needs to be fixed or improved, fixing those things mostly in the order that they were written down in, and then crossing those out once they're done. I've also been working on making sure the game works at multiple resolutions(both "internal" and "output" resolutions, internal meaning the resolution the game actually renders at, and output meaning the resolution that the game scales up to in order to match the window/screen size).

I've also done some more rendering optimisations, but the game seems mostly fill rate limited at the moment on weaker GPUs. This is mainly because the game renders strictly back to front(for correct alpha blending) and does no c

This update will be a fair bit shorter than usual due to being busy with Nirion's development, trying to get a polished demo done, and not having a lot of new things to show. Next month should be back to normal. This month I've mostly been working on a little more level design, reworking one of the bosses, the minimap and sound design. In this post I'll go over my approach to Nirion's minimap.

Design

The minimap in Nirion looks like this:

As you can see, it roughly shows the shapes of rooms that have been discovered, uses colours to give the player information about the room(green for save room, flashing white for current room), and shows door connections as narrow red paths. The purpose of the map in Nirion is to help the player get around the world, but without being distracting or too "useful".

Personally I dislike minimaps that are either too detailed or show precise locations of moving objects(like the player),

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly going down my list of things to fix and improve for Nirion. One of the bigger tasks was to create a more generic and easy to use particle system solution. This ended up taking a week or two of my time, but so far it seems like it was worth it. Another big focus was on figuring out more interesting puzzle elements and improving level design overall. I believe the last few weeks of development have really gone a long way in making Nirion feel more like a complete game!

Generic Particle System

Up until I reworked this system, all particle effects had unique code written for their setup and simulation. This works great for some more complex effects, like the player evaporating into pixels when saving:

But for simple effects, I found it to be quite a lot of setup and code just to do what is basically changing parameters. My solution to this was to just chan

The last month or so of Nirion's development has been mainly focused on fixing obvious bugs and improving core functionality. I'm currently still trying to get the first area of the game at a level I'm happy with for a demo, but hopefully most of this work will go towards improving the entire game going forward.

Spatial Partitioning

One of the first things I did this month was a major change to the game's spatial partitioning. This code is used for broad phase collision detection, culling entities for rendering, querying tile data, and organizing the world into loadable "chunks". The approach I was using before this change was a simple sparse grid of fixed size. Entries could be added and removed by hashing their cell location(simply by dividing their location by the cell size and rounding down), and then looking up their cell from a hash table. This worked great in a lot of ways, since adding and removing was very fast. Unfortunately, using this approach, the code

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a variety of different aspects of Nirion. Probably the one that I spent the most time on recently was music and sound. So far I had been neglecting sound and music to an extent, having only gotten basic sine waves playing way back when I first started the project. It's a relief to have made some progress in this area, and I think I have a lot more confidence going forward. I've also updated the art, added a 3D effect for upgrades, and finished off a first pass of the first major boss. Here's an overview of some things I've done since the last update.

3D Upgrades

A while ago I decided that I wanted a few select things in the game to have a 3D effect, influenced mostly by Sonic 3 and Sonic Mania, where the player can come across giant 3D rings that transports them to special stages. To me this makes the things that are 3D feel more special, and they stick out more.

I first tried exporting and loading PLY files from blend

Nirion is a 2D action adventure game drawing heavy inspiration from mostly The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past and Super Metroid. I've always wanted to make my own games similar to these and in 2017 I started working on this game from scratch in C++, inspired by Handmade Hero. Originally the game was going to be a pretty complete "shoot em up" game modeled after relatively simple games like "1942", however I quickly switched to what Nirion is now, a top down action adventure game focusing on more complex combat and exploration. I figured that this would be much more interesting to work on and would keep my motivation up.

Of course, this greatly increased the volume of work. I'm not a designer or artist, I've only ever done gameplay programming professionally and a small amount of engine level programming while porting a game from a custom engine to UE4. I'm definitely still learning a lot of these skills as I go on, but I'm relatively happy with how the art and design have been