For my followers on this site: I dropped a truth bomb over at the KO-OP Mode dev blog. That is to say, I talked about how weightlessness is weird.

A good portion of Red Rover takes place on the first human ship to Mars, christened NOMAD-V (pictures posted previously). Since she doesn’t provide any form of artificial gravity, that means her occupant(s) will necessarily be bouncing around in zero-g; a mechanic that seems oddly under-represented in games.

Check it out.

As promised, it’s the long-awaited, Emmy-nominated, gluten-free video recap of IGDA Montreal’s recent DemoNight, where a passel of programmers (and artists, and soundfolk, &c) were given seven minutes apiece to showcase their works-in-progress. I’m on with Red Rover at 00:31:00 and very, very dark — apparently it’s hard to show off The Cosmos on a projector? Meanwhile, my comrades-in-arms Saleem and Bronson drop their Skipping Stones poetry-slam jams at 01:13:41. Check out those and the rest of the sweet and nutritious lineup below.

And once again, a big thanks to IGDA Montréal for putting together a great show!

About a week and a half ago, I had the opportunity to talk a little bit about Red Rover at IGDA Montreal‘s yearly DemoNight, which is a night where people show demos. So that was pretty rad.

Honestly though: it was great to speak alongside some really interesting projects (check them out on the IGDA’s website, above), and to start actually showcasing in public. What I had on display was very rough — we’d only hired our 3D artist about two weeks beforehand (unwise) — and so it was a lot of talk, but I think people got the gist of it. I got some genuinely positive feedback, which would really work great as an IV drip.

The video’s not up just yet, but I’ll post again when it’s online (and be sure to check it out if only for Saleem’s surprise poetry-slam demo of Skipping Stones). In the meantime, it’s that time of the week. Have yourself a teaserful, pre-early-alpha Screenshot Saturday.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the back end of Red Rover lately (as usual), with a few digressions for various jams and Princes.

Most of the work was pretty much FPS fundamentals: that is, walking and pointing at things. This week, however, I finally got around to merging the old planetary rendering code from the teaser into this new framework.

Feels good to be back.

Physics and physics and physics again.

My calculations indicate that for a Stanford torus with a radius of 20m, simulating Martian gravity (3.711m/(s*s)) requires an angular velocity of around 2RPM. Which is right stately.

And walking around inside of one presents all sorts of interesting challenges to a physics engine.