Advancing to Faster than Light

So I know I’ve been super quiet again, things have gotten busy with real life which has given me some trouble with working on Shuffle Breaker recently, apart from the video blog i put up a few days ago. But rest assured I am still working on it.

Also taking up my time recently… FTL: Faster Than Light had its Advanced Edition DLC come out earlier this month (for free, even!). FTL was one of my favorite games to play in 2012 and while initially I was a bit burnt out on it, a couple of my friends talking up the new features of Advanced Edition convinced me to dive back in and now I wonder why I ever left. All of the new features are pretty awesome.

Tesseract Update, Version 0.2

I did some more updating to Tesseract today after some feedback by a playtester. You can download the PC build here (WinRAR or 7zip needed).

Fixes:
-Contextual pickup notices for treasure and ammo now disappear when you are too far away to pick them up
-Enemy corpses can now be walked through by the player (players will still be blocked by live enemies)
-Weapons will no longer break if you switch them before the reload is done. Simply switch back to the weapon at any time when it’s empty and it will reload.

EDIT: Had a problem with the hyperlink, it’s fixed now.

Tesseract : A procedural FPS Prototype Postmortem

So on the SA forums I’ve been participating in biweekly game jams. Sometimes I’ve made stuff, and sometimes I haven’t, but this week I feel I made something pretty decent at least from a prototype standpoint.

Tesseract is an FPS consisting entirely of procedurally generated levels. Currently the prototype only runs the player through 10 of them, just to get an idea for what’s going on. I made it in about a week using Unity, doing just about everything myself although most art assets and some pieces of code were taken from free resources on the Internet.

What originally inspired me to create Tesseract was the idea of taking concepts from Roguelikes (randomly generated levels, one life to live, permadeath, etc.) and put them into an FPS. Along the way however I think I got a bit hung up on the FPS aspects and less on the Roguelike aspect, but I’ll get to that.