Smoo~th...

Tweaked the mesh-building algorithms somewhat to get smoothing working properly, much more pleased with the outcome.  It'll look much better with the multi-texture gradients applied, once I get that added in.

I also threw together a character model stand-in to get a sense of scale, you might be able to see it in the first screenshot, but let's zoom in...

Ah, there we are, guess that's a pretty large mountain with the current y-scale.  Consider this a proto-concept-art shot for one of the two main character models...like a w.i.p. of a w.i.p... there's some Inception joke there, I'm sure.

...and really, what good is a stand-in if it's not made of cardboard.

Heightmaps!

Just got heightmaps working, thought I'd post up the first-ever in-development screenshot of Hazard Pay:

And yes, that IS a photoshop brush artifact in the source bitmap.  That's how you know it's genuinely unfinished.  Totally on purpose.  Yup.

Cameras, shaders, and input oh my?

Lots of work being done on the rendering portion of the game's engine (which is really just an engine insomuch as it sits in a separate project that is referenced by my actual game project, so it's content-unaware).  Almost done coding up the camera so that it swaps in before- and after-effects dynamically.  The framework for deferred rendering is already in place, which means lots of fun shader programming down the line.

I dove in to the graphics pretty early as the sooner I could get visual feedback, the more enjoyable the rest of the coding could be, and the better momentum I could keep on the project.

Elsewise the engine just has stubbed-out managers for other systems (AI, physics, world resource content) and an input handler so I could use controls to roam around the gamespace.

Currently working on: implementing a heightmap for level terrain with 4-texture blending.  Once I get that done, I'll be happy to start throwing in screenshots, but right now the entire project just renders a  spaceship from an open-source shader demo.

'ello world

Thought I should jot this down somewhere, my first post seems a good enough place.

Hazard Pay started life in March of 2012, with the vision of providing a fun first/third person combat game with base-building and resource-gathering mechanics thrown in amongst hostile alien bugs, pve/pvp multiplayer matches, and a single-player (or co-op) storyline campaign.

Inspirations reach as far back as Dune II and Battlezone, through Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Starship Troopers, Borderlands, and Natural Selection.

This blog will be a place to track development and for me to store thoughts, images, and other errata.

I'm Brandon, the designer, programmer, concept artist, modeler, and animator for Hazard Pay. I work on this in my spare time, when I'm not busy completing my CS degree or working as a SysAdmin. I look forward to sharing more with you as development continues.