Steaming Ahead - WEEK 02

The Second week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I'm not going to lie: this was a week of frustration. Source of the frustration was a wild goose chase to fix a shadow mapping bug. As a detour, I thought a windows port could help me solve this bug, with some OpenGL debugger tools from AMD, e.g.

So the sub-goal for the week was a windows port. So far I have been developing under GNU/Linux, and occasionally using the Mac OSX port. There are a lot of things missing in the windows world. One of them is pthreads. Fortunately, SDL includes support for platform independent threading, so I rewrote my pthread code to SDL_Thread code, which has a similar API. I am seeing really bad performance on windows though, and I am not sure what the cause of this is. It could be that SDL threads are slower than pthreads. This needs more investigation.

Other missing functionality in windows world is opendir(3), which I worked around with a temporary hack.

So did anything gameplay-related happen this week? Well, at least I can now read in modular level designs, that were created with my Little Crane World Editor. So at the very least I can build things like parking lots, or spawning-platforms, so that not everything in the world is muddy hills.

Steaming Ahead - WEEK 01

The first week of work after the Steam Green-lighting has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

I've spent this week on actually building a crane vehicle. The code base so far only contained a bulldozer/loader and an excavator. And now, there is an actual crane as well. The crane turret and cabin are from a model purchased at TurboSquid. The truck underneath, I modelled myself in Wings3D.

However, most of the time was spent on doing the physics sim for the truck and the crane. I'm pleased with the truck, that now has 4 axles instead of 2, and all driven. The wheel suspension is softer than the old crane I used in the mobile version of the game, and they look great. It took quite some time to get the sim stable without too much jitter, but the quality is now pretty close to shippable. So without further ado, shown below is what the new Little Crane looks like.

For next week, I want to see if I can get some actual game-play back in, probably in the form of the old basket-ball level from the mobile game version. I hope you'll follow me again in next week's progress report. Until then, I will leave you with this great shot of the truck's suspension.

Steaming Ahead - WEEK 00

Such great news, Friday 13th of February 2015: The Little Crane That Could has been green-lit, meaning my game will be published on the Steam store. Yesterday I announced that I pledge to, EACH AND EVERY WEEK, publish a progress report on my steam publication.

So without further ado, here is report 00, where I will report on the current state of the project.

There are two code bases relevant to this steam publication. There is the unified code base that is used to build the iOS, Mac, Linux, Win, Android, OUYA, GearVR versions of the game. This is what I call the Legacy Code Base (LCB). Next, there is a new code base where I have researched soil simulation, with real time terrain deformations. I will call this the Research Code Base, or RCB. The steam build will be making use of the RCB, to make it a fresh new game, with some amazing technology behind it.

Currently the RCB is a capable engine with the following features:

• Soil simulation where terrain can be scooped up, and deposited anywhere. It is a true isosurface capable of caves, overhangs and such, so is not limited to a simple height field.
• Supports an infinitely large procedural world. Only changes made to the terrain are stored to disk.
• Features a bulldozer simulation.
• Features an excavator simulation.
• Diesel-engine sound effect.
• Caterpillar track simulation that leaves depressions in the terrain.

The most notable omissions in the RCB include:

• Lack of integration with steam.
• Lack of levels, goals, gameplay.
• No crane vehicle simulation.

In the months ahead, I intend to address the crane simulation first, and will read up on steam publishing. There are some decisions to be made regarding publication, as there are:

• Will I do Steam Early Access? I'm leaning towards yes, but gameplay needs to be in place for this.
• Will I adopt any steam specific technology, as there are steam trading cards, steam big picture, etc?
• How many game levels will be part of the first release? And how much overlap with levels in the mobile game will it have?

Tune in next week to see what progress has been made. And let me leave you with the current vehicles from the RCB.

Here is a video of the excavator in action, and one of the dozer in action.