Star and Serpent

Game Development Weblog
Star and Serpent logo with a serpent in the middle of a nebula coiled around a blazing star
Campfire
Pilvinen Pilvinen

We are switching to Godot and C#

We are switching from JavaMonkeyEngine and Java to Godot game engine and C#. I won't get into all the details, but Godot is something we've been keeping an eye on for…

The world is getting it's shape
Pawlost Pawlost

The world gets it's shape

We apologize to all our fanatics that this blog post took us so long. The reason for that is that we've been mostly working on internal engine stuff and putting things together.

Detail: birch leaf
Pawlost Pawlost

World generation update

Time for another blog post. It has been almost a month since I last made an update, but we have made great progress in world generation. Current state of the…

World generation
Pawlost Pawlost

Weltschmerz

Hello, I'm Pawlost! I'm a new programmer in the Star and Serpent dev team, and I'll tell you a little bit about my work. I've been working on Weltschmerz, our world…

Terrain
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Terra is now open source

Terra, our voxel engine, is now open sourced under MIT license and published and you can find it here: https://github.com/starandserpent/Terra Note that it's still heavily under development and missing a…

Martha the carrion spirit. Concept art bust model.
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Models, animations, and code

Winter holidays are over and we're back at it. Our lead coder, Bensku, has started his military service and we're currently down to one active coder. We're trying to recruit new people,…

Axe upper chop
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Character model updates

We've been working hard on updating the head of the character model to make it better suited for simple modular customization and facial morph target animations. We hit some model import bugs, again,…

Grass test
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Grass test

Grass test. Here we have a grass field composed of grass models with 5 planes (10 tris) and grass models with 6 planes (12 tris).

Wagon undercarriage
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Wagons and carriages

Been working on an undercarriage of a wagon. The idea is that players can build their own horse drawn wagons and carriages block by block on top of undercarriage. The…

Rituals of the old text logo
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Audiovisual Feedback Based Simulation

Audiovisual Feedback Based Simulation and the death of the classical UI paradigm in gaming This paper deals with UIs from the perspective of the gaming industry. We set out to…

Banner
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Happy birthday Rituals of the old!

Rituals of the old has now been one year in the making. It’s been a wonderful experience so far. We’ve had our ups and downs along the way. We’ve had…

Pilvinen Pilvinen

Magic and spoilers

I've been working again on the magic system for Rituals of the old in the last few days. The thing is I don't really want to talk about it. In…

Game engine test v2
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Technical test is up

Looking for a 3D animator Star and serpent is looking for a 3D animator to join Rituals of the old! We will also consider thoroughly all applications from proficient Java…

New character concept
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Testing out new player model concepts

As I mentioned briefly earlier our player character model has been having some serious problems - which we may be unable to resolve. We will be testing out some new…

Various logs
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Preview of some of our 3D art

3D models Here are some previews of the 3D art we've been working on lately. Unfortunately milestone 2 has been delayed because we encountered some unexpected serious issues with our…

Detail: Backpack
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Alpha is getting nearer

Above you can see first proper screenshot of the WIP milestone 2 from inside the game engine which I just booted up. The server is working and client is working.

Tree
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Quick update

We’ve been looking for a 3D modeler for the past months. Found about 10. None of them worked out unfortunately. Still looking. Do you know someone? Please let them know…

Run cycle animation
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Projections and mappings

Another week has passed just like that. I’ve been mostly taking it easy standing in the middle of wheat field and watching birds. Can you spot me in the photo…

Face
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Walk cycle

Here is the walk cycle animation loop v1 for our player character as promised.

Player character faces
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Long due update - security and stuff

Greetings. It’s been a quiet two weeks, sorry about that. We’ve been busy at work as always. I’ve taken a closer look at the situation with octrees, map data handling…

People around campfire early version
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Octrees, networking and UI

Hello again. Nothing much happening this week. The first stage of the octree revamp is getting ready. A lot of time will be spent on that and the networking in…

Inventory mockup
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Inventories and sounds

We’ve been busy for the last week designing inventories, coding the octree v2 and making inquiries to different sound effect companies to find the one that would suit Rituals of…

Campfire skene sketch
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Death

I want to talk to you about a serious and grim subject: death in multiplayer games. Death in games - multiplayer games in particular - has been one of the…

First engine test
Pilvinen Pilvinen

First engine test

Sorry about the delay. We now have a Youtube channel. Here is a short video of our first engine test. The player model couldn’t be included for reference in this…

Launcher
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Multiplayer, single player and more UIs

Online multiplayer and offline single player So I’ve been thinking. Perhaps the offline single player mode in Rituals of the old should be free. You could just download the game…

TAB player list mockup
Pilvinen Pilvinen

TAB player list mockup

I’ll just leave this here... Currently it looks like that. I would like to remove at least the last line of text and turn it into maybe a symbol and…

Character v2
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Player models, music, sound and UI

Player models The player model v2 is getting almost ready. Looks exactly the same as the old one, right? Wrong! As you can see in the image above we now…

First bug!
Pilvinen Pilvinen

It’s aliiive!

We have our first bug(s)! We have a new coder, themiddleman, joining our team from across the Atlantic ocean from the west coast of USA. Welcome! Also we have a…

Early character model
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Sick, staying in bed

I've been sick for the last week coughing blood (streptococcus), not doing much development just tweaking little things and mostly taking it easy. The antibiotics are kicking in and I'm…

Character
Pilvinen Pilvinen

More planning

Solid plans are the foundation of any project. I’ve spent the last week doing just that - filling the holes in our internal wiki which lays out the plans for the…

Early character design
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Models and languages

Sorry for the delay. It’s been a busy week. I’ve been waiting to see if our 3D modeler could finish the new player model in time so I could get…

Early sketch of a hand with rings
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Quests, kind of

Today we got our third team member as TVdata joined our ranks to fill up the 3D artist’s position. Welcome! The interactive web page has taken some steps forward and…

Bensku Bensku

Progress on game engine

Over the last week there have been a lot of meetings about the game engine, physics implementations and still trying to decide between voxel pixel style and low poly. Our…

Early character model sketch
Pilvinen Pilvinen

3D models

Sorry for the lack of updates. Last week has been really busy with working on different kinds of concepts for the player characters 3D model. I’ve been going through 12…

Logo banner
Pilvinen Pilvinen

Forums and combat

Our forums are now open at http://ritualsoftheold.com/community/ We are using Flarum forum software, which is really cool but completely not production ready. I wanted to try it anyway. There is a…

Pilvinen Pilvinen

Building solid plans

While bensku has been coding the foundation of Rituals of the old I have been trying out different kinds of ideas for the player character’s 3D model. We tried out…