Today I added a handful of little things, but the most interesting is the guard paths.

-Phil

It took a few tricks to get this working, but I’m happy to say I’ve got it running at 60 FPS, fullscreen, and with full level of water now.

-Phil

I made some tropical beach side waves this weekend.

I also did some more experimenting with other 3D effects, but they didn’t work out.

-Phil

I did some work improving the “3D” look of the game today.

This effect seems to work well with water, light, and shadows. Much better than my previous efforts.

-Phil

I worked on a particle system this week, and put together this explosion. I’m quite happy with how I got the water to reflect it! I also tried out a subtle 3D effect, and decided that it actually did work nicely, so I’m going to try that for a while.

The next day I did a bit more with improving the explosion, and I also added in sprites for the character.

I’m happy with how it’s all coming along!
-Phil

I did some more work on the look over the last few weeks. First I added light reflections to the waves.

This week I worked on getting refraction working. This really helped the look a ton!

Lastly I played with some perspective / 3D rendering. While it looks good from a distance, all the details that go into making 3D really work would get bogged down under the light and water effects. So I’m pretty sure I’ll be keeping this game 2D overhead.

-Phil

This weekend I got a lot of items done! The core engine is somewhat working, and the most fun bit has been trying to work out the interactions between water and light.

-Phil

I spent most of my time working on improving the water flow algorithm. As it turns out, I couldn’t find any real improvements, so it’s not visually any different than last week. Code-wise, it’s maybe a bit better.

To say I got something done, I added in basic auto-tiling and a barely functioning editor.

Nothing too fancy, but hopefully I can add gameplay sometime soon. Will probably build up the editor more first.

-Phil

After a while I found re-working the water algorithm in C++ was taking too long. I recoded it in Lua with a much lower resolution and numbers over the water so I could see exactly what was happening.

I first reproduced the classic demo-scene effect. The problem with this effect is that it does not maintain volume at all, it is a rapid simulation of the waves only.

I found an algorithm that would preserve volume, however it was very slow and did not have a very wavy / water feel to it. I’m not even sure if I implemented it right.

I did a lot of experimenting with different ideas until I made one that did work! This effect is wavy and maintains volumes. It also settles down over time. Quite a few of my experiments would never result in a calm pool.

I then re-coded it into C++. Initially I was disappointed to see it not work at all, but I found by adjusting the parameters I was able to get the effect I want. With a larger area for the waves to wave in, they behaved much differently than in a small area.

I did a bit of optimization work on the algorithm and the rendering and it now works at a decent speed even for large bodies of water.

-Phil

I tried playing around with water effects. This first one is a pretty standard cellular water effect.

I was messing around with the settings and got this really fun effect.

The tough bit is getting the water to distribute in a way that no water is lost or gained. Haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet. The basic effect really gives “infinite” water and just models the waves.

-Phil