Reepblue's Notebook

Wow, two posts in the same month! Something that this blog hasn't seen in a long time. I hope to continue writing more frequently from now on. I have a lot of days where yeah, I got time, but not enough to get invested in something like level design, modeling or anything that needs hours of attention. What I wish to write about this evening are my opinions about making video games in this day in age. To put it bluntly: It's mostly long, tedious, can cost a lot, and most of the time has high expectations. Now, sometimes like seen with Cuphead , years on working on a project full of passion can really pay off. But have you noticed the last few games that you saw all over the internet wasn't a full, 3D Triple-A product? Games like Minecraft and UnderTale used very simple graphics and did what they wanted to do well. They were both easily accessible games that can run on pretty much any hardware, which I think is a key element of if a game makes or breaks. If people see...

It's been quite a while since I've touched this blog. I was posting most of my content over on my Leadwerks Developer Blog (cause it was 99% Leadwerks related.) If you take the time to read some posts, I've released a Lua framework called Luawerks, and it's right now on sale on Steam for $9.99!  Luawerks is my first (and so far my only) purchasable content. Long story short for those who are wondering what the hell it does; it pretty much adds a developer console, menu ui, and other gross stuff that most people don't want to do. (You know, what most Triple-A engines give you out of the box sometimes.) It's because of Leadwerks, I actually taught myself the gross bits of game developing. I wasn't just programming the fun gameplay stuff; oh no, I was doing the crap that most people took for granted, and ripping my hair out to get it right. While most might see it as a waste of time, I enjoyed the experience, and gained a lot of confidence in programming i...

I believe I was 16 or so when I was developing Blue Portals, and boy, I dreamed of having it on Steam. Being able to deliver updates easily was something I always wanted for the project; in-fact, that's why it was officially supported on that Desura platform. But time went on, and I started to look at Blue Portals more and more critically then I've done before. The mistakes we've made, and the complaints of users of the time just started to make more and more sense. It's not a bad mod, but I always thought it could be better. Since Steam Greenlight became a thing, I thought about putting Blue Portals on there. It's a mod that people ether really liked, or didn't like at all. But I felt that it was a mod for it's time as there were many fling and timed puzzles; commonly like how most community maps were at the time. It wasn't until a month ago, I told Colossal to put it up there and see what would happen. Now, my teenage dream came true. Blue Portals ...

When I first started this blog, I was mostly planning on reporting and going deeper on my logic I/O experiments of my Hammer Notepad video series. However, after 2012, my interest in making crazy things with just the I/O alone grew dull, and became more, and more simple. With this, Hammer Notepad videos became less of a thing. That, and I also forgot about this blog. Earlier last month, I was like "I should really make sure that everything (well, mostly everything) I released is up to date, and can be downloaded and installed after the trillion updates that happened over the years." I started with A Little Higher, and Tornate by fixing a few hiccups on the workshop version, and re-releasing the manual install version with detailed instructions. After those two series was done, I started to look at my other maps which where finished. For Old Times Sake did not need to be updated, and Feather Away was intended to be a Workshop only release. I'm still working on Blue Port...

It has been over a year since the last blog post. Sorry about that. I would usually post things if I wanted to share information, talk about projects, or announce releases of Portal maps. So what happened? From the time I last post, PUNT has been on and off with it's development progress. With it, I learned so much more about the Source Engine, how to do more things with code, how the engine mostly works. So, even if it does not pull through, the things I learned are greater then the time I spent on it. So, is it dead? Tsh, No! After a while, I was questioning about the overall game play mechanics of the mod. I felt like it was just  "Press Mouse 1" type of game. You turned things on, you turned things off. There was no spark that Portal had. I talked about the game play changes on ModDB over the summer. This was a much more fun game mechanic, and it was really fun having power balls bounce all over the map! But with this, the Retro-Futuristic look had to go. In th...

People work on mods when they have spare time, and when they feel like it. But since last week, I've been working almost non-stop on PUNT since the art style change. Non stop development since November. There was always something I was doing for PUNT. To make developing easier, I composed the puzzles as separate maps and then later stitch the maps together. This would be slapping level transition prefabs to the ends of the map and re-saving under the final name. But while developing the chambers, I configured the 2009 tools to work with PUNT with a work around with appid and file reading. This gives me the availability to use instances which are the most useful thing when developing a mod, and a better model viewer that lets you see the loaded vmts. During the finalization process, the doors and other instance-able elements will replace the prefab counter parts, and the level changing prefabs will be slapped on. I already did this to some maps so far...