So I've been mostly taking it easy over the Christmas break, but I have been working on a few things
I finally pulled myself together and set up a new homepage for Lonely Giant Games. This time instead of going for a way too expensive webhosting where I had to do everything from scratch I went for a simple Wordpress site that I can easily update and which was a lot cheaper. The site is now up and the domain moved so lonelygiantgames.com works again.
Meanwhile both Jungle Jumper and Space Sheep had been taken down due Google's new content policies, so I had to do a bit of work to upgrade their listings and resubmit them, they are now back up.
I've also been putting some work into Cretaceous Cravings. I definitely shipped it in a pretty bad shape to get it done in the two weeks, so it's been really nice to go back to it and work on it in a less stressful way. There are a ton of things that still need to be improved, but here is what I managed in this first update:
- You now only need to eat a single enemy to grow when you start out and then every time you grow, you will need to eat more to grow again.
- Adjusted the sizes of the enemies so there is always a good challenge.
- If you do get hit by an enemy, it only kills you if your Eat Meter is empty, otherwise it empties your Eat Meter and makes you invulnerable for a few seconds. This means it's pretty tough in the beginning when your Eat Meter fills up quickly, but easier to survive when you are bigger, but tough to grow, since your Eat Meter will get emptied from time to time.
- Water improvements - I was really sad that I didn't have time to do nice water shading in the initial release, so I took some time to make a few nice shaders to make water that looked like it flowed and made little foam rings around obstacles.
- Fixed audio bugs that made the growing sound not play.
- Fixed a bug where the enemies didn't correctly change colour when their size compared to you changed.
I'm already thinking about the next update, which will be centered around refactoring, performance improvements and setting up some unit testing.
And lastly I've decided to do another crazy project for the next two weeks. I'm going to create an animated scene in blender of a Trolloc bursting into a room.
In case you don't know what a Trolloc is, it is a fantasy creature from the Wheel of Time series that is half man half animal.
I've had the idea for a while now that it could be fun to create a realistic looking Trolloc with really good fur rendering and I then got the idea to make it an animation instead, of the Trolloc bursting in through a door, like you first see them in the book series when they attack the Al'Thor farm.
The animation will only be a few seconds long, but will hopefully look really good. I expect I will use most of the time making the Trolloc.
