2PersonGames
Sam joined
2 Person Games is a one person independent games studio, founded in May 2011. Being a one person studio I do everything for the company – that includes design, development, artwork (usually outsourced to friends), sounds (usually outsourced to other friends) and marketing (usually failing at). I occasionally take on freelance work when I can to give me room to think and create. I’m passionate about games of all sorts. I love video games, boardgames, tabletop and live-action roleplaying games. My favourite boardgame of all time is Twilight Imperium, without a shadow of a doubt. My favourite video game is StarCraft. As you can tell, there’s a strong running theme of Science Fiction there, which explains Space Salvager. My passion in life is making games, that’s what I do. Be it games mastering for my RPG group or making video games for a game jam – making games is what I do. I’ll develop for any platform that’s appropriate, which is usually desktop and any console that’ll take me.
The last change of note for this post is the collision bounds. Now, long long ago Space Salvager used “tight pixel” collision detection which was very expensive and didn’t really work. During my final year at University one of the assignments we had was an investigation into game physics, specifically collision detection. As with most things I thought this was a good opportunity to shove something new into Space Salvager, so I decided to implement SAT collision detection in.
Unfortunately much like the previous collision detection this didn’t really work either, but recently I’ve actually found out why and fixed it. Short version: the two-dimensional polygon being created was based on a texture that was colour compressed and wasn’t returning the correct results – between you and I I’m surprised it didn’t crash the entire game. Now though I have fixed it by rendering out the image into an uncompressed format. Above shows the debug render where the yellow circle is the collision radius, clearly broken on the ship which I will fix (note added) and the purple wireframe shows the two-dimensions convex hull. The result is a much, much more realistic collision detection and response. The physics for the game have responded much better with working SAT collision now, it’s really nice.