So I'm trying to come up with puzzles that seem difficult but are actually simple to solve. The wonderful Monument Valley did a great job of this.

First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.

I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to a server, as opposed to Wordpress, which generates fresh HTML every time someone loads your page.

Advantages:

I need to find a new texture for that garish green material.

Lots of other things are happening, but they're more like a million tiny updates rather than a few conveniently screenshot-worthy ones. So that's it for this week! Thanks for reading.

I survived 7DFPS, barely. Here are some fascinating statistics:

• Days to create an FPS: 7
• Hours spent: 93
• Levels built: 5
• Lines of code written: 2313
• Hours to spare before deadline: 2
• Functioning brain cells remaining: approximately 4

I'm happy with the result, though. Jack did a great job on the audio as usual, although at the last minute I had to throw in some clunky placeholder sfxr sounds. Blame me for those! Maybe we'll replace them later.

I'm participating in 7dfps this year, which means I'm making an FPS game in 7 days. Here's what I've got so far:

In Soviet Russia, you are bullet.

In my 7dfps entry, moving and shooting are the same thing.

Here's my favorite form of humor: physics glitches.

Here's me getting killed:

Here's a better shot of the city:

Lots to do still.

This past weekend I exhibited Lemma at the Ohio Game Dev Expo. It was an awesome time. Extra Life raised over $9,000 for charity (yes, it is in fact over 9000).

The Oculus Rift was a huge hit!

I worked on various improvements right up to the expo. First, some new textures for moving platforms and doors:

This is the first texture I've created that has any kind of directional meaning. The reason is that until this week, I had no control over how the textures mapped to the voxels. It was all procedural. So if I put an arrow graphic in a texture, there was no guarantee which way it would face.

I'll be running a booth, speaking, and participating in a panel at the Ohio Game Dev Expo next weekend! Come on out and hang with us!

Yesterday I gave a talk at Dev Workshop Conf introducing the basic concepts of vertex and fragment shaders. Unfortunately I don't have a video, just this one potato picture:

It's probably for the best, because Chrome locked up on me halfway through. The slide deck is pretty cool though. It includes over 20 interactive WebGL samples, complete with source code. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I immediately tried it out with Half-Life 2 and was shocked at the massive improvement over DK1. I was so impressed that I've spent pretty much every waking minute since then trying to get it working in Lemma.

Current status? It's very, very close. The VR itself is 100% functional now, I just need to make some UI tweaks. The Oculus SDK makes an incredibly difficult thing as simple as it possibly can be. For Unity users it's almost plug and play, but because I'm still stuck in 2008 with XNA I had to rip out the Unity plugin and hook it up on my own (similar to what I did for Wwise). I discovered that it's very easy to get a somewhat passable result that's actually incorrect. You have to learn about crazy things like chromatic aberration and time warping to get the best result.