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Asylum Dev Diary 92 – Code Profiling
October 20, 2019This week my goal was to run the extremely useful profiler on Asylum and see what I can do to optimise the code. First up is the light drawing routines. This is the heaviest code in the game because it has a lot of calculations to do. When the light engine (Aura2) was released there… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 91 – Light Casting
October 13, 2019This week saw a 5 day development cycle that allowed me to concentrate on more tweaks to the lighting system in Asylum. The first thing I wanted to do was to see if switching out the surface based lighting engine (Aura2) with a shader based engine would yield any performance improvements. After taking a day… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 90 – Trinkets
September 29, 2019This week was more of a bug fix session than I’d expected but I did add in one new feature that has been needed since I added collectibles to the game. Previously you’d find a collectible, read the text (maybe) and then close the window, at this point there would be no way to view… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 89
September 15, 2019After the last two weeks of real life distractions I’m back on Asylum development. I’ve realised that the final basement part will require a feature that GameMaker Studio 2 doesn’t have at the moment, however it should be dropping in the last quarter of this year, which means there shouldn’t be a long wait now.… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 88 – Kaboom
August 26, 2019Last time during the bug fix session I discovered a glitch with the objective completion notification display that would mean that the process got stuck if the game attempted to use more than one notification at the same time. This was due to an issue with the queuing system I had in place. I was… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 87 – Bug Fix Session
August 18, 2019It always surprises me that you can be developing something, you go to test it, and for some very strange reason a entirely different function that has been working for months just throws up an error. This weekend I’ve been tackling a few of those issues as I start to implement the transition from the… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 86
August 11, 2019As I mentioned last time this week has been about focusing on getting some new sprites artworked for the second flashback sequence. This sequence takes place at the *removed spoilers*. And so a lot of new objects were required to fill out this new environment. Most of the sprites are now done and are in… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 85
August 4, 2019This weekend involved working out the communication with the first main NPC (non player character). The Janitor. When the player first meets the janitor he can talk with him and he will tell you what happened and what he needs. In this case 2 items will need to be found. And that’s where it get… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 84 – Drawing Board
July 21, 2019I’m taking a little breather in development so that I can work out what comes next and draw up the next environments ready for inclusion in the game. The basement area is the most complicated I’ve put together so far and I need to do one or two more things to complete it but they… [Read More]
Asylum Dev Diary 83
June 30, 2019This weekend the temperature in the UK has hit a crazy 32 degrees (centigrade) and so working on Asylum was reduced to avoid overheating. What I have managed to do, however, is to finish off the pause menu for now. If the player presses ESC the options screen is shown by default, which contains the… [Read More]