It's hard to see in screenshots, but I added a subtle cloud shadow effect as well. It doesn't respond to the actual clouds, so in a sense it's slightly faked. Because of that I was able to do the projection easily with a ray-plane intersection rather than a full matrix multiplication. Here's the shader code, edited for clarity:

Here's the thread where I got that rock texture. It's a gold mine with a bunch of totally free diffuse, specular, normal, and even displacement maps.

Unfortunately that's all I have time to talk about today. Thanks for reading!

This is a perfect example of my patent-pending Design by Trial and Error™ process.

MGDS was a huge success! There was almost always a line to play the game, and I got a ton of useful feedback. Here are some pictures:

Most of the feedback was related to level design. I came home with a phone full of "todo" items. Here are some screenshots of overhauled or brand new sections that resulted:

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In the mean time, the old trailer was looking woefully outdated, so here's a brand new one!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