Comments - Rayvolution

Thanks for the support!

.. and Java, for the ease of multiplatform support. ;)

haha. ;)

Not to get it on Kickstarter, no. :(

For the upcoming Kickstarter, the lowest backer reward that comes with a free copy of the game is $7. :)

For the actual retail price; I honestly have no idea yet, When you get Greenlit on Steam they recommend a price to you, so I was going to go from there.

Thanks. :D

There's a map editor build on our official website. But I plan to release the construction/AI build somewhat soon! ;)

Retropixelcastles.com

Thanks! Had fun making it. Sometimes it's fun to break away from the grueling part of development and just play with things. :)

Yep! I also plan a Kickstarter I'll be launching at the same time.

Steam is a major part of my plans, as I also wanted Steam Workshop support for map sharing. ;)

Probably closer to about 30%. Once all the core gameplay mechanics are in, I still have to draw a ton of maps and tilesets/artwork. :)

But, the game should be playable long before it's "complete". Although, I'm not sure exactly when that will be as I still have a few more core mechanics that have not been started yet, like the monsters and combat system to go along side it. :)

What I did was made a grayscale heightmap of the object I want to cast a shadow, then internal to the shadow .class/code I have a shadow builder that reads the map and splits up the various parts of the shadow (based on color on the grayscale) into separate images (kinda like slices of the building).

Then, I took those images and rendered them to a FBO, and re-rendered it out by +- a fraction of a number (float), for as many times as that slice required in whatever direction they were being told to go. For example, if slice 10 was rendering, it would render itself 10 times each time moving out in whatever direction it was told to based on the time of day. Where as slice 5 would only "move out" 5 times. Slice 15, 15 times, and so forth. So what happens is the higher number slices (or the slices generated from the brighter colors on the height map) would push out longer distances.

You would think doing it this way would be slow, since there are much faster methods for generating shadows (Like raycasting for example). But, because the resolution of these shadows are very low, I can take the performance hit to obtain extremely accurate shadows and the game still runs at a solid 60FPS on most machines.

Here's a link to the Lumber Mill's heightmap if you're curious:
Sixtygig.com

They look a lot better in the game too, it's hard to capture the full effect in a short gif. :)

This video can also be found on YouTube in full 1080p:

Not really no, but many people have told me the little villagers look like Lemmings ;)