Level Design

Working on some level design, finally after a long break.

Putting some of the things I've coded to use such as Force Triggers. Here is a video of how the triggers can be used. The "tube" area will have particle effects later indicating that there is air flowing inside it.

Fun with Boxes

Just a final test of collision working smoothly.

Still have to fix the odd flicker when the box is destroyed.

Physics are working nicely now and don't hit the phone too hard performance wise if there are only a few things being destroyed at once.

Still working on destructibles. Looking somewhat better now. The bodies of the debris objects are now properly synced with the original object but for some reason that I have yet to figure out, there is a frame in between the deletion of the original object and the creation of the debris objects where nothing is rendered. This obviously has to be fixed because it just looks bad.

Updated Destructibles

Here is a better looking version of the destructible crate. If you look closely you can see that the debris objects aren't quite lined up with the original object. That's because I have to figure out how to rotate them to the same orientation as the object being destroyed. D'oh!

Destructibles

Adding support for destroyable objects that leave somewhat realistic debris around.

The video below shows a crude box being destroyed. There is no rendering of the debris objects yet, so I turned debug rendering on to show the collision objects that are created for the debris.

Automatic Lift

Nothing impressive, but I've implemented the auto-lift which is currently being demonstrated with my random grey object of doom.

Memory Leaks!

After some hardcore leak detection and debugging the Gozak engine is now fully capable of managing it's own resources (very efficiently I might add) between loads and unloads of levels, textures and sounds.

The general resource manager unloads definitions (which include sounds, textures and various per-type defined datas) which are no longer in use between level loads. This keeps the memory usage nice and tight. Objects that are not defined or scripted into a level never get loaded at all.

The texture manager keeps track of textures via reference counting and unloads textures that are no longer in use. No one texture is loaded twice, and the same goes for sounds. Sprite and level definitions have an automated system for releasing their handles to textures and sounds when deleted, which then get cleaned up by the related manager.

The audio manager keeps track of sound resources via reference counting as well, and in addition it can optionally continue a playing sound until completion and then unload the sound if it is no longer in use at end of play.

Air.. Frog...

World Select Screen

Started world select screen.

The video below shows the scrolling interface for selecting the "Polaroid" for each world. The graphics are obviously not yet complete. Each polaroid will star Gozak in an interesting situation in the theme of the world. On the iPhone you can swipe your finger left and right to scroll through the polaroids, or drag slowly to snap through them one by one.

No graphics for GUI are final yet, including the logo. The Gozak logo seems a bit too serious for the theme of the game.

"Wish you were here!"

Oh no, iPad!

Okay so with the release of the iPad I realize that to really get Gozak out there into the real world the way I would like, I have to speed things up a little.

My goal was originally to release Gozak Uses His Head for iPhone first, and then move towards re-releasing it for the Wii. This has changed a little with the announcement of the iPad.

It would be very nice to have at least a Gozak demo ready at or around the launch of the iPad. With that I will have to double my efforts to turn Gozak into a complete game as soon as possible.

I would also like to get my hands on an iPad ASAP to determine exactly what I can do as far as iPad enhancements to the game. Clearly I will have to rework the UI stuff.

Particle Expansion

The particle system has been extended and integrated with the scene manager. Objects can now start particle animations as part of their object, manage them and then abandon them if necessary. The object passes it's particle emitters to the scene and the scene completes the particle simulation before deleting the emitter from the scene.

New Particle Effects

Upgraded particle effects to support better rotation, fade and now scale.

The result makes for much better looking smoke effects on the cannon:

And here is a test with a negative particle direction. The effect is that particles get "sucked in" to the ejection point.

Cannon

The first enemy in Gozak appears! Behold! It's...

A cannon? Why is it firing peas?

Gozak Editor

Just in case anybody was wondering what editing a level in Gozak looks like, it looks like this:

Editing is quite simply done in 3d Studio Max and levels are exported using a custom exporter tool. Object references are made with names, and details about each object are stored in the Custom Properties section for each object.

In time I would like to release the exporter for public use and allow user levels to be downloaded directly within the Gozak game.

Acorns!

Acorns are now pickups!

Two new little features..

Gozak hits his head on stuff a lot. So you can feel his pain he now emits stars when colliding with objects with enough force. This is coupled with new pain sounds.

Secret zones now reveal themselves when Gozak gets close. I have no idea what happened to the encoding of the video when it was uploaded.

Native Pea!

Just a quick update showing the pea/cabbage or whatever it is in it's native viney habitat.

Particles

I had put the particle engine on hold a while back. I decided to re-implement it today and added some flare to the grass particles.

Gozak kicks up grass when he's moving fast enough or hits a grassy object hard.

Parallax Texturing

During the XMas break I managed to implement parallax texturing. I had already written parallax backdrop support but now I can pop any shape of object in the background or foreground of the scene and the object is rendered in place but the texture is rendered in a way that gives a parallax effect

Progress!

I just thought it would be neat to post some very early progress screenshots from early early Gozak development when the project was completely fresh without much direction.

Pre-texturing:

Early Texturing, Before Z ordering:

First GUI Object test: