Road to Lumina Studio 0.2.0 pt.1
I have been busy working and improving Lumina Studio for quite some time since it hit its first milestone. Along the way, I've been doing a lot. A LOT. of testing of the engine and its capabilities. I actually quite forgot most of them actually and the biggest milestone as of now, is well... the 0.1.6.
I've been adding new features until 0.1.3 and just decided to freeze it because we are now adding a game to our pipeline.
We call it the Tomorrow Project as of now, and we are building all our production piplines along with the capabilities of the engine, hence the reason why I stopped writing because there are still a lot of things to be done during this stages.
Sample projects vs Real projects
I did consider to create small and bitesized projects, which I did, but doing those small projects got boring quite too fast because the goal wasn't really to have fun, but to prove that the engine is working and is a bit stable (I won't claim that this is 100% stable).
So I decided to make a game out of it. An actual project that I would love, and know that I will pour myself into. Quite a fun adventure if you ask me
Lumina Studio 0.2.0
The upcoming release is still too far, but this is the version of the engine that I want to be the base for our game. When the engine do hit this milestone, we will completely freeze the production of the engine, and focus solely on our game, which I guess will be on alpha stages when that time arrives.
Current 0.1.6 Problem
We faced a big problem during our asset pipeline testing. We are currently in the pre-production stage of the game that we are working on, and we've been trying out importing 3D, 2D, Audio, making game specific tools, and a vertical slice of the game all a the same time.
Along the way, we find some issues that relates to a wide net of features that the engine has. Of course one of them would be asset residency problems, and the timing of those. Material issues. Animation issues. Just the works. The one that really hit us hard was the particle system.
We tried doing the particle system in gpu. The problem is that we wanted to implement it really quickly, that we slowly violated our graphics pipeline just to make it work.
There we decided to freeze the testing for the particle system and move on to a different part of the engine, which is tool creation, or at least one of the biggest tools that we'll need to create a game: a graph based sequencing tool for cutscenes.
The Sequencer
We call it Sequencer. The ideea is to create a graph (FSM actually) that will allow us to create nodes depending on the sequecne that we want the cutscene to be in. Initially we just wanted it to be for cutscenes, but then in grew to include battle initiations, in-game cutscenes, dialogue, etc.
Basically the backbone of the game that we are about to do.
It wasn't easy because although we do have an editor scripting now, it's not mature enough to create graphs. We could have done them in a list, but... where's the fun in that?
The Editor Scripting problem
This wasnt' really designed to be a complex system. I just wanted to make a layout (horizontal/vertical) containers, and slap in some uis, and call them editor tools. They do work, but there isn't really much customizations that you can do.
In 0.1.6 we have expanded the APIs for more imgui drawings and updated interactions so that we can do proper layering of our UIs in the editor scirpting. We are also introducing a GraphCanvas, an editor owned graph editor that can be expanded to different tools and by 0.2.0, all of our graph editors will be transitioned to the GraphCanvas.
Since 0.1.0, this will be a second genearation implementaiton of the Editor Scripting.
Tomorrow Project
The project will be a tactics rpg style game (i've been attempting this for years) and we currently have our first vertical slice where most of the thigns included here are the proof of concepts of different functionalities of the engine.
Stage Designer
The stage designer is a game specific editor tool for us to easily create levels using game assets/prefabs. We can lay down tiles, and add props to the stage.
Animation Tests
This is one of our prototype characters in play. We have been trying out the sprite animations of the animation system of the engine.
Vertical Slice
And as for our vertical slice, we have moving units, simple AIs that play with you and a sucess/lose criteria.
This marks our first concepts (pretty early) because most of the features that we would need to create the game, works quite well.
I guess that's it for this post, I am very sleepy and tired already.