Melodive and Oveja

I couple of days ago I got this game from one of the readers of this blog. It is all procedural, including the progression of music. The name is Melodive and it is available for iOS.

Even without the help of mind altering substances, the game takes you to a different dimension. I did find the control scheme a bit frustrating, but it seems there is a whole class of games using this form of tilt, rotate interface. To many of you out there the controls may seem standard.

Oveja

And there is this other non-procedural game a Russian friend did from scratch, including programming, graphics and music. He named it Oveja, which in Spanish means "sheep". (Why a Russian guy is giving Spanish names to his games, it is beyond me.) The game is fun and equally surreal, but on a different level.

It runs in Android and it is available free from Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mastercluster.oveja

If you like air-traffic control games you should give it a try. It is like these games, but with sheep in it. I did not get why the black sheep needed to be segregated from the white sheep. This is 2013, those times should be over.

The next version is rumored to include sheep poop and other equally interesting gameplay mechanics.

This one is a talkie!

Here are two new videos showing some new features.

I finally decided to add an audio track to a video. It does help describing what is new as it appears on screen:

Let me know if you like this format. I think I could do one of these every month.

The second video is some sort of fast steady-cam flyover:

Undergrowth

Last weekend I took some time to add a new feature to the engine. It is some sort of mesh instancing system that brings additional detail on top of the geometry output. It can be used to add a new vegetation layer under trees, like the following images show:

I will be using it for rocks, pebbles, even man-made elements sticking out of the blocks you place.

Polygon counts are now escalating quickly because of this. My old 4770 still averages 40 FPS at 1080p but begins to struggle. It is still manageable, there are some polygons right now I can cut.

This one was long needed. I will be posting a video later so you guys can see how the LOD transitions are managed. I think this has improved a lot.

Unity makes strength

I like writing everything from scratch, but not everyone shares this form of dementia.

Many in the past have asked whether any of this would run on mainstream game engines. I could not see a reason why not. The VoxelFarm engine outputs traditional polygons, in theory it could be plugged into any engine using polygons for rendering, physics, etc. That remained a nice theory until recently. Now we have some hard proof:

This screnshot shows the VoxelFarm realtime engine providing polygons for terrain in Unity.

Here is are a video. It shows a simple physics test and a little bit of walking. The capture speed and resolution is not good, but hopefully you will get the idea.

I understand if this tech is to be widely used, it will likely come in the form of plugins for mainstream engines. So think this is very encouraging news.

Voxel Studio Videos

Here are three videos I captured from Voxel Studio to help with the AiGameDev.com interview: