Gearing up for Midwest Game Developers Summit this weekend. Tune in next week for my first expo post-mortem.

In the mean time, the old trailer was looking woefully outdated, so here's a brand new one!

Small update. This week was bug fixes and more improvements to the level editor (more on that here).

In other news, we were grateful to get some coverage from Monday Night Indie! Unfortunately the stream highlighted some pretty major issues with the tutorial, so...

Brand new level design!

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading.

Our animator Antonio has been hard at work on new animations. Check it out!

Guys, the level editor is really close to being done. Here's some cool features:

You can link entities together. For example, you can have a door open when the player enters a trigger volume. Or have a light turn on. Or both.

The UI now displays buttons for all available commands at any given moment, and their keyboard shortcuts. Different commands are available depending on what mode you're in, and what entities are selected.

I also got a sign for our booth at the Midwest Game Developer summit . Got it from eSigns, whom I highly recommend! Insanely cheap, fast, and high quality.

I am currently scrambling madly to complete a build for the Indie Megabooth submission deadline on Sunday. Stuff that's done:

Last week was a huge update, so this week is a bit smaller.

First, we're hard at work on the animations. Here are some early WIP animations:

There are also a ton of new player sounds to accompany those animations, but those aren't very screenshotable. :)

I also vastly improved the god ray effect from last week, so everything is much smoother. Here's another 4K screenshot of it:

Next, I added support for 4K screenshots. Now I can hit Alt-S and my renderer resizes all of its buffers to 4096x2304 (biggest 16:9 resolution supported by XNA), renders the scene, saves it to a PNG, then resizes everything back to normal.

Check out the effect source code here.

It's a big deal for me because I tried it once before and it came out like this:

I'm also still working on the player model. I think it's close to being in a usable state. What do you think? Is that a ponytail, or a brain slug?

Turns out, Blender has something called Rigify that can automatically generate an absolutely kick butt IK rig for your character, complete with blend weights for skinning. It's not perfect, especially when there are separate disconnected pieces (eyeballs, for example), but the few problem areas are easy to correct manually. Here's the character animated with the default calculated weights. I haven't touched them at all yet: