New Game! Swirling Blades: Desert Thunder

[kazade]

So this is just a tech demo. My priority right now is to get it running at at least 30fps.

Once that's done, there will be tweaks to the demo gameplay (fixing controls, some kind of auto-aim, fix the occasional freezes) then it will be into the full game.

That will be very different. It'll have missions, pick ups, buildings and various level themes (e.g jungle, urban etc.)

But it's going to take time, I only have small amounts of gamedev time unfortunately

[Wrath of Khan]

So this is just a tech demo. My priority right now is to get it running at at least 30fps.

Once that's done, there will be tweaks to the demo gameplay (fixing controls, some kind of auto-aim, fix the occasional freezes) then it will be into the full game.

That will be very different. It'll have missions, pick ups, buildings and various level themes (e.g jungle, urban etc.)

But it's going to take time, I only have small amounts of gamedev time unfortunately

Fair enough. Looking forward to a video of the new demo when its done. I think this style of game could be a refreshing addition to the dc catalogue.

[Wrath of Khan]

Swirling blades? Dragonblade, Fireblade...

[Wrath of Khan]

Hoping to see how it evolves.

[bjankins1]

Anything new with this project?

[kazade]

So work is still ongoing, but mainly focused on increasing performance of the engine itself, things that I've done since the last release:

* Written an entirely new threading subsystem on top of pthread. This allows the same threading code to run on all platforms. The c++ threading library, which I used up until now, isn't fully implemented in the dreamcast toolchain.

* Written a sampling profiler for the dreamcast. This lets me track down the bottlenecks.

* Written replacements for C++ dictionary like containers which are faster than the standard ones for workloads which repeatedly insert then clear the container. This should speed up the render queue and reduce the number of memory allocations during rendering.

This is a slow process, but hopefully soon I can get back to work on the game itself

[Wrath of Khan]

So work is still ongoing, but mainly focused on increasing performance of the engine itself, things that I've done since the last release:

* Written an entirely new threading subsystem on top of pthread. This allows the same threading code to run on all platforms. The c++ threading library, which I used up until now, isn't fully implemented in the dreamcast toolchain.

* Written a sampling profiler for the dreamcast. This lets me track down the bottlenecks.

* Written replacements for C++ dictionary like containers which are faster than the standard ones for workloads which repeatedly insert then clear the container. This should speed up the render queue and reduce the number of memory allocations during rendering.

This is a slow process, but hopefully soon I can get back to work on the game itself

Thanks for the update.

[kazade]

New release!

I've just uploaded version 0.1.1 of Swirling Blades: Desert Thunder to the itch.Io page: https://kazade.itch.io/swirling-blades-desert-thunder

Changes

* Improved performance (still a way to go)
* Fixed display of UI widgets
* Fixed crashes and freezes on load
* Fixed crashes on restart
* Missiles now home-in on targets and leave rocket trails
* Improved the camera
* Fixed clipping issues
* Many improvements and bug fixes in the underlying Simulant Engine

[Nico0020]

Glad to see progress. What inspired you to make this type of game by the way? Any far-fetched goals you wanna push for?

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[kazade]

I guess the inspiration was a collision of two things.

1. I'd been working on the terrain rendering in my game engine (Simulant)
2. I played Desert Strike while trying to work out what to do with the terrain

Planning to add buildings, more detailed landscapes, more level themes, more enemy types. All over the next few months