Why I Made Star and Serpent Solitaire
I like solitaire, but I have a complicated relationship with it. Klondike is one of those designs that is almost aggressively efficient. It is simple, readable, and familiar to almost…
Star and Serpent Game Studio Blog
Thoughts of a game developer
It's been a while
Laziness the root of all evil I realized that I haven’t been updating the Star and Serpent blog for 6 years, but it’s still linked from the Star and Serpent…
Voxel-demo Csharp version is now open sourced and released
We finally pushed out the Godot Csharp version of our Voxel-demo and related technologies as open source under the permissive MIT-license. You can find them on our Github: https://github.com/starandserpent/Voxel-demo
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 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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
Game development wrecks lives & player character progress
When we first started building our player character I couldn't have anticipated all the troubles - and numerous interations - we'd have to wade through. It's been a rocky and educational…
A Ray-Box Intersection Algorithm and Efficient Dynamic Voxel Rendering
Trying out the voxel renderer on the new NVIDIA 2018 paper “A Ray-Box Intersection Algorithm and Efficient Dynamic Voxel Rendering” (http://www.jcgt.org/published/0007/03/04/5). We don’t have yet texture support or any optimizations…
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).
Progress on horse model
The horse model has been progressing nicely. Textures missing.
Testing connecting blocks
Textures connecting blocks.
The horror that is sending updates to several incompatible social media sites
Dear development diary, I’ve been neglecting you. I’m sorry. I know it’s not a good excuse, but I’ve had so much development work to do that I haven’t been motivated…
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…
Worked on books today
Dear development diary...
Jack and Jill
Testing the new models. Still needs texturing.
Modular character design
He’s certainly having a bad day. Exploring the modular character design.
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…
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…
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…
Rituals of the old 256 days in development
Rituals of the old has been in development for 256 days today. I wanted to celebrate this by writing a bit more than usual and going through what's been going…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Walk cycle
Here is the walk cycle animation loop v1 for our player character as promised.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The evolution of grass
We've been working on grass.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Finished making sketches of the playermodel
I’ve been designing what the playermodel should look like for a couple of days . I will use the sketch below as a reference when I eventually start making the 3D…
Rituals of the old development has started
Rituals of the Old is an upcoming PC title from an independent Finnish game studio Star and Serpent for Linux, Mac and Windows. Rituals of the Old is a multiplayer…