NinjaGhostDev

Not going to bore you with a bunch of pre-text, done that way too many times (just finished deleting a bunch of old blog posts dating back to 2008 lol)

Past couple months I decided to rebrand to Ninja Ghost and start it's first project: an old school first person shooter called Rion.

And when I say old school, I don't mean using Unity or Unreal 5 to make an old school facsimile game as which is super popular to do right now. Instead I mean I dusted off a 26 year old relic of the past and have been doing some heavy research and development with it. That 26 year old code base is called Quake 2.

Quake 2 is so old at this point, I've had to do quite a bit of work to get the asset production pipeline working. By and large I do want to leave the engine alone, but I had some changes of my own to make, such as escaping the 255 color palette limitation, and bringing in 24bit color. I've also been hard at work smoothing over the asset creation pipeline. Unlike modern engines where you can drag n' drop an fbx file into a folder and drag n' drop it into a scene and call it a day, Id Tech 2 does require that you deliberately program everything into it. This is what's been taking a while, is creating custom test assets from scratch with all new code. That also meant I needed to re-familiarize myself with Quake 2 mapping and it's quirks, Blender and it's quirks, MD2 and it's quirks, etc etc.

But I'm happy to say that we're about to enter pre-production, I'm satisfied with the research, and I'm satisfied with my design bible, so it's now time to pursue making the game proper.

I've put out some feelers for a concept artist.

I don't have a game page up yet. I want to wait a little while yet to hopefully get some screenshots or in-production stuff to post. Which is why I'm posting to my blog.

That's all I got for now.

Till next time.

~k