Flan's Blog

Following on from "O Captain! My Captain!" that I made for Ludum Dare 46, I've been hard at work pulling the project apart, refactoring the code and experimenting with new concepts. On the art side, I've been getting into AssetForge, a kit bash tool with a few hundred assets in it, which is a definite improvement over Blocks. I'm still trying it out and am always on the lookout for other one-step-above-programmer-art tools. In terms of code, there's a big problem with O Captain jam edition, and vehicle games in general, in that most game engines are built for fixed size levels of about +/-2000m in each dimension. This is due to the limited precision of floating-point numbers, where the difference between 0.001 and 0.002 (which could be relevant when making a model of a control panel) gets completely swamped when added to your ship's position at +4000 units. This causes textures to jitter and at extreme lengths can start making player movement jittery

Last weekend was Ludum Dare weekend and so I was busy making a game once again. Ludum Dare is one of the world's biggest game jams that now runs twice a year and which I have been taking part in for the past 8 years or so.  We had a great theme this year of "Keep It Alive". I'd had an idea in the back of my mind for a while about making a space pirate game and decided to have a go at it, with the ship being your sentient AI friend you have to keep alive. Judging by the other entries, I don't think I was alone in taking an idea and adapting it to the theme; there is such a wide variety of entries this time around! So the game that I made, with my partner Lucy doing the voice-acting and some of the VR modelling, is called "O Captain! My Captain!" and features you and RobinOS flying around a (very small) asteroid belt completing missions. Please give it a go and let me know if you like it! If you entered a game into the jam too, let me k