Update friday

This blogging is still new to me. And I’m trying to figure out what the best date and timelaps are to post. I think I’m going to stick with Friday for development diary/tech talk and Monday’s for releasing new stuff about the game.
First off; I would like to thank everyone for the awesome messages that I got after announcing the game! I was already pretty dedicated and motivated, but seeing so much positive reaction really shows me this game might just work :)

Engine tech talk

If you’re not a game programmer feel free to skip this part!
After the announcement I’ve got a lot of questions about the engine. So I thought it might be good idea to explain it a bit. My voxel data (created by my own win32 tools) uses a modified approach to Ken Silverman’s slabs. The basic idea behind slabs (for the ones not familiar with Ken’s work) is that all visible (from at least one angle) voxels that are next to each other on a line (with no air between them) get grouped together into a slab. So you only need to store x,y and with of the slab for a bunch of voxels. Instead of x,y per voxel.
I use the slabs and an octree to scan through my data. And I use a subset of the data for the destruction part.

Game talk

Right now I’m working on a new theme to go with the second world. It’s pretty hard to come up with some decent looking themes. So I’ll probably make a few before I pick the right one.
After that I’m going to work on the menu graphics. When all graphics things on my list are done, I’ll probably add visual feedback for the character movement first. After that I want to edit the level-data format abit. Hopefully I have some nice new screenshots next week :)