Editor Is Minimally Functional

I've been doing some more Battle Balloons work in the little pieces of spare time I can scavenge.

The editor is minimally functional now, so I can finally start making the actual game. Too bad I foresee even less free-time in the short-term... too many other things happening at the moment (both work and personal)! So this will probably be the last update for awhile. :(

If you want, give it a spin (not sure if it will work, as it's not seen much testing at all). Just download the .exe below and run ballooned.exe for the editor and balloon.exe for the game. By default the game loads the level, data/game/start.level.lua, but you can specify a different one as a command-line argument.

Good luck!

Download: battle_balloons-release-20121005.zip

Native GUI editor and a bit more...

Been awhile since the last update, so here it is...

As usual, I'm busy with real work (at Respawn Entertainment), so Battle Balloons has been put on the back burner. :( But I have been occasionally chipping away at it. So far, the major changes have been:

1. rolling my own 2D physics engine (for multiplayer support later),
2. Direct3D 11 based renderer (OpenGL ES will still be supported too),
3. Lua scripting (also replaces YAML as the serialization format), and
4. a level editor that now uses native GUI controls (only testing with the Win32 C API for now, but I want to support other OS's too).

I really should stop messing around and finish the actual game, but I can't help get distracted with wanting to learn new things. Once this editor is done, I'll get right to it!

P.S. Also, Abbie (the community manager at Respawn) did an interview of me here!

Hello from Los Angeles

The demo for the The Darkness II came out today (for Xbox Live Gold subscribers only - everyone else will need to wait about another week). It's an exciting feeling knowing the product of so much combined hard work  is finally out there for the world to play!

In other news: after finishing up on D2, I have since moved to Los Angeles to join another group of rad people - Respawn Entertainment! Our current project is top secret, so I can't say much except I'm really looking forward to it. :)

Anyway, download The Darkness II demo and give it a spin! When I played the demo tonight, it had been two months since I picked it up. I'm proud to say it still feels rock-solid!

P.S. Battle Balloons work continues! I'll post some progress soon...