Traveling Down Memory Lane

    So I've been missing for a few days. My mind has been drifting in and out of reality, adventuring into the deep recesses of my past. Basically, I've been playing a bunch of old games that I used to play as a little kid. I found a bunch of my old CD's, some in good condition, while others mostly battered up. Of these games, many were LEGO games. Most of the games were only average, but they symbolize something much more to me: the past.

LEGO Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge

    An adventure of epic proportions spanning multiple islands, interesting and varied characters, and a really cool story. What else did a game need? In my opinion, this game was a true LEGO game. It really matched the feeling of goofing around with LEGO sets, and making weird scenarios to thrust mini-figs into. Oh, and there was the skate park music.

LEGO Island Xtreme Stunts

    What do I remember about this game? Epic music. Just epic music. LEGO Island Xtreme Stunts was a fitting end to the series, sporting a bunch of cool mini-games in true LEGO Island fashion. I had a blast exploring the island and getting all of the collectibles.

Hot Wheels Stunt Track Challenge

    You know what race I remember from this game? This one. And I had an amazing flashback while playing Koopa Cape Mario Kart Wii. The game had awesome fast paced racing, as well as a bunch of mini-games to spice up the experience. I never actually beat this game, and I got stuck on the first challenge in the final area, but what I did play was a blast.

LEGO Stunt Rally

    Lego Stunt Rally wasn't exactly my favorite game, but one thing gave it the privilege of being on this list: the track creator. I have no idea how much of time I spent creating random tracks and racing on them. It was just amazingly fun! I also made countless attempts at going off the borders of the map, but I re-spawned each time.

LEGO Racers 2

    LEGO Racers 2 was a pretty awesome game. Although it bears little resemblance to the original other than the concept, it was still fun to play. My favorite part was exploring the several thematically distinct areas that the game had to offer. Multi-player was pretty awesome too.

LEGO Racers

    LEGO Racers was great! Just amazingly fun! The game had great artistic style, and left a lasting impression on me. What's great is the physics, which stick to what's fun, as opposed to what looks real. Multi-player was a blast to play with friends, and I loved leaving them in the dust with my amazing knowledge of the shortcuts! It's also noteworthy that this game is 11 years old, yet installs and runs without a hitch on my Vista Core i7.

Sonic Adventure DX

    Sonic Adventure DX is probably one of the best Sonic games that I have ever played (Shares the spot with Sonic Adventure 2 Battle). Someday, I'd like to play the original Dreamcast games. This game was probably one of the best games that I have ever played, and exemplified everything good about Sonic. It had cool music too! Multiple characters, fast paced game-play, great environments, and an awesome story all came together to create this work of art, which I still enjoy today.

Star of Doom

     Ok. This is it. I'm going to finish this game. I've failed before, but this time, I can finish it. Watch out world! Here comes Star of Doom!

And development begins...


Using Ogitor to block out a basic map


NPC Conversations

Voxel Terrain Engine Update

Just finished version 0.3 (Voxelvania) of the engine. This has a fully playable demo, with three maps and 1 player, 3 bot death-matches.

You can download the game here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?c1rj9jbtzxjddc9

Voxel Terrain Engine

Over the past week, I've been working on a simple voxel terrain engine, just to amuse myself. This happens to be my first project using purely OpenGL for rendering (In the past, I've used DirectX, and a variety of rendering engines). The demo is pretty simple, and took me about 3 days to make.


The voxels are rendered by a brute force method with voxels that are not touching air being ignored. I'm planning on adding some kind of partitioning system along with lod, so that much larger maps can be rendered.


I'm considering making a simple shooter game around this, where the destruction of the environment is actually part of strategy.


More Info + Download Link: http://varunramesh.net/portfolio/right/VoxelEngine/

Physics Selector Tool

I've just added a simple tool that allows you to define physics boundaries by tracing them out on an image. The saved .physics files are then loaded by a simple component.

In other news, the next major release of the engine should be ready in a few weeks, one the example game has matured a bit more.

Progress on Solaris Machinae

After about a week, I've made considerable progress with the engine.

1. Components

It's now much easier to attach a sprite to an object. Instead of having to setup a sprite, and updating and drawing it manually, you can just add a component with a single line of code. Less code = awesome. Components can be easily written and placed in the Engine\Components directory.

2. Denativization
I've started to perform the denativization, so now many of the helper functions are written in Lua, as opposed to in C++. This, obviously, makes it much easier to edit any of them.

3. Example Game
I've begun work on a example game (Solaris Machinae Tournament) which aims to showcase many of the features of the engine, as well as serve as a kind of template. It also doubles as a kind of method to identify weak points, and develop better tools and such.