Ah ha! This post didn't take a month get to get done! Sorry, surprised I remembered haha :). Anyway, Shader Sandwich is progressing nicely, I've added a page for it (The Software Page), and it's looking pretty cool.
Unfortunately it may take a bit longer than expected. I recently went on a trip down to Daylesford (It's a country town in Australia), so that slowed progress by a week. I'm also going to have to rewrite a decent amount of the code generation as well though.
Warning - Technical Stuff Ahead!
You see, previously I was using a very useful tool in Unity called Surface Shaders. These allowed me to write the shader code in a simple format, and then have Unity generate most of the lighting functionality around it. This simplified the code base a ton, although created an annoying divide between the base of the shader and any shells generated around it (Which use simple vertex/fragment programs).
The major problem with this is, well, Surface Shaders are terribly documented and buggy as heck. I've been working around this in the past but it's just gotten ridiculous.
For example, there's a variable that Unity can populate called TEXTURENAME_ST, which is the offset and tiling values that are set in the editor. This is great, except depending on where you put certain inputs and define variables it will be populated in different positions, may already be declared, or not be populated at all! I added a ton of code checking for all these undocumented problems, but it seems unsolvable :(.
So, I'm now going to unify the shells and base systems by switching completely to Vertex/Fragment programs.
This means I'll have to rewrite a ton of code to get them together, but by the end the codebase should be smaller and the program will be able to do more things!
And two months later, here I am! It's been a while, sorry again! One of these days I'll work out the schedule, just been so busy haha!
Anyway, in the past month or so I've been working on a Unity editor extension that allows the simple creation of shaders. It's pretty useful, you can find out more on the new software page.
Within the next month I'll be putting it up on the Unity Asset Store, it'll be around $30-$40. After that I'll be getting back to Morte Grimm, although that's not to say I haven't worked on it recently! I've composed a ton of music, ironed out most of the story, and a few other things.
Well, I'll hopefully be posting back here in a few weeks with the asset posted, and after that I'll post the first in-game footage of Morte Grimm!
Sorry about the wait for the new blog! I've been hard at work updating the site and working on the game, hope this makes up for it!
Project Kenny now has a name! We have chosen the name Morte Grimm, and created a logo for it. You can find this over at our new games page. We've decided to cut back on all the extra side projects and focus mostly on Morte Grimm, as can be seen on the games page. Over there you can find out about the game itself.
The game itself is progressing well, albeit a little slowly. I(The lead developer) have been unable to access my computer every so often and the upgrades to the site have taken some time. However, I'll share what we've got done :). All the game mechanics have been completely worked out, and several have been programmed in. We've got item interaction and movement finished, and a few locations have been started on.
Some music has been completed as well, you can find it here: https://soundcloud.com/spike-1-3/rushing. A few more tracks have been worked on, although we are hoping to keep it under-wraps as most of it is specifically created for certain events. Hope you enjoy this little peak though!
I hope to get a video out sometime soon after a bit more has been completed, hopefully we'll see you in a few weeks/less, although as you can see I'm not good at remaining on a schedule!