Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Getting Results

It's been close to a week, and so far I'm very happy with how my project Mythic is coming along. I know a week isn't a lengthy period of time, but still, I've been working up a storm on the code and graphics (and even concept sketches and the story script). When I work, I mean business.

Anyway, for anyone who wants to know some of these results, read on.

I've been working mostly on graphics the past couple days. I incorporated a "painterly" style to the backgrounds, as I feel it fits best with the theme of the game. The game is set in modern times, yes; but its heavily myth-driven flavor lends well to painting-style images.

If you want a sample of the work I've done for the project, there is a sample scene that I put together using the graphics I've made. Since I don't have a suitable map editor yet, I had to put it together in my graphics editor, but this still gives you an idea of what things may look like, at least for outdoor, forested areas.

Of course, this is all for nothing unless the game runs well. After all, there are things like free-roaming, alpha-blended clouds floating around in the background. So, I decided to add some code that populates a decent-sized map with a simple (but comparable to a real-world scenario) background. As you can see, I'm getting a solid frame rate of over 30 frames per second. Note that this test was run on an old single-core, single-threaded laptop processor running at 1.86GHz, with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon Mobility X600 with 64MB of video memory. The program performs equally well on my Asus Eee PC 901, with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU (overclocked to 1.8GHz using "Super Performance Mode"), with 2GB of RAM, and an integrated Intel GMA 950.

The final product will obviously be more active than this, but the performance so far on this equipment makes me a happy camper.

As I mentioned earlier, I've also been working on sketches and other things that lean more toward the design aspect of Mythic. I have the full script for the first portion of the game (there's a lot of dialog as the game is story-driven, but it won't be as wordy after the beginning of the game) and a few sketches of one of the main characters as well as one of the key items in the story.

That's all for today. As always, stay tuned for updates. If we're lucky, we might have another blog post this week!

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