Darkwind Media Blog

Over the past year or so, one amazingly handy use for Luster has become very apparent: tools and utilities. Luster is incredibly fast to develop in, very easy to modify, and powerful enough to be flexible. These are the exact traits that make it an amazing platform for building game tools. One thing that a game team does not want to get bogged down in is the creation of their tools. They are, after all, trying to make a game, not a game tool. Luster has allowed me to create quick and easy level editors, or utilities, without putting in very much effort. Many of these tools took less than a week to craft, and could be maintained and modified throughout the project’s lifetime with minimal effort.

These are images from the level editor for the single player version of Bombs. Bombs was never released, and the single player puzzle version of the game was very experimental. This editor made it easy to quickly prototype levels. The editor itself took only a couple of days to set up, and was then maintained and evolved throughout the game prototyping process. It was simple and effective, allowing us to quickly set up quite elaborate levels.

A lot has been shown of Blocks lately. The editor has been critical to setting up this project in the short amount of time we have (so far, Blocks is only 3 weeks old). The editor allows fast level creation totally integrated within the Blocks engine. With a single button press you can switch from editing a level to playing it and back. It makes level making fun, fast, and effective.

This is a recent project. An observation I made was that a large amount of time was spent managing, copying, or rewriting old shader and materials, and then tweaking those materials for a project. Without a visual material editor, tweaking was a painful process of changing a variable in a script, re-running the project to see the effect, and then quitting it to go back and tweak some more. This material editor makes it very simple to apply materials, change their properties, and export them for easy integration into any project. The editor exports all you need: materials, shaders, and textures. The functionality here is all done, all within 1 week. The main effort now is simply filling up the library of available materials for artists to apply to their models. This will be a huge time-saver and probably also increase the overall quality of the materials produced.

So, you can see how Luster has made itself incredibly useful in this area. There’s plenty more tools I have plans to make. We are certainly open to creating these kinds of tools for other people’s projects as well. Just contact us and let us know how Luster can help.

So, thanks to Luster’s rapid development philosophy, we’ve been making fast progress on Blocks. We have most of the gameplay worked out, and are now working on the polishing. This includes the GUI, some of the final artwork (mostly textures) and lighting, and experimenting with level design to come up with the first few levels of the game. When released, the first levels will be a little instructional, moving into some moderate difficulty. More challenging levels will be released later. Here’s some more screenshots from the game.

In the last post, a mentioned a puzzle game that will be released along with version 0.19. We are finalizing this new version, and I thought it was time to show you some progress on this puzzle game. These are early development screenshots, but already the basic gameplay, editor, and look are complete. We still have some more assets to finish, levels to make, and control balancing to do. The first release will feature a few simple levels in tutorial form to get people interested. We will release new versions with more gameplay and more challenge as time goes on.

This game is very simple. Incredibly simple. You control the pad, which transports the precious cargo in the crate to the landing zone that is the floating island. You control the pad by powering the thrusters on either side. You can fire 1 side of thrusters at a time. You must navigate through the levels and get the crate resting on the island in any way you can. It doesn’t matter if the pad is on the island. You can throw the crate across the level if you want, as long as you get it on the island.

Here are those screenshots I promised.

The final two screenshots are from the built-in editor. And before you ask, yes we are planning to release the editor as well at some point.

During this last quiet period we’ve been hard at work on the new version of Luster. This new version will be adding a large amount of new systems and a bunch of small improvements. It will also include a complete overhaul of the browser plugins which should give better performance, more stability, and more flexibility.

Along with the new version of the runtime we have a lot of new demos and application for our beta users to try out. We have many new tech demos (showing render textures, a new text system, compositors, terrain, particle systems, procedural meshes, etc.) as well as the first release of some of our showcase apps. We will be releasing early versions of our 3D music visualizers, a new version of our Arthas dance app which will have broader hardware support, and a first release of our Luster showcase puzzle game. I’ll be making a more detailed post about this upcoming separately.

Make sure you keep watching this blog and our Luster site at www.luster3d.com for the new version and the new demos when they come out. We’ll make sure to get a notice out to all our current beta users, and if you haven’t signed up yet you’ll want to sign up to try out this new version.