

Took some time away from development to craft a trailer for Turnover that reveals some of the storyline and gameplay mechanics. This trailer cobbles together some pieces of the first fourth of the game. I’m pretty excited to show off a little bit of the work I have been doing.



Ok, time for a little technical stuff I’ve accomplished lately, since it’s been a while. Maybe I won’t feel so guilty about not getting down and dirty on this devblog.



Rendering



I rewrote my sprite drawing pipeline. Right now, the engine outputs 2 “RenderTargets” during drawing operations.



The first is the game-space target, which is the cumulative of the entire ticked and drawn scene. The second is any overlay information, like the HUD and text. Keeping them separate allows me to apply a full-scene shader in the scene without it effecting the HUD or text elements.



One of my big motivators when it came to rewriting the drawing was my old method, which was “spill it all to the screen”. It had a lot of problems rendering correctly in Linux. It was one of my earliest written pieces of my engine, so finishing that off was a huge relief.



If you compare the trailer footage with an earlier screenshot, you can see the new look is a tad more filtered. Filtering the target resolved some scaling issues I had when marrying the game view with the rendered output.



So, Turnover’s engine has three discreet visual components:



* The game view - a hard coded camera. It sets what can be seen in a scene (I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it), as well as dictating what sprites in the world are immediately drawn or culled.



* The RenderTarger resolution, which will be exposed to the player as a “quality setting”. An old laptop plays Turnover just fine at optimal quality (1920x1080 target), so it’s there for really old systems.



* The window size, called display resolution.



Splitting all three up and keeping them independent gives me far more flexibility when it comes to applying shaders, tweaking GPU usage, and controlling sprite drawing.



Next



Work continues in earnest. The engine is pretty much done and I now have the mood, story, flow, characters, et. al. established. I have an internal schedule that I’m going to do my damned best to stick to. Publically, I’ll say Turnover will be out “when it’s done”, but I feel confident it will see a beta in 2014.