This post was a long time coming.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but over the weekend I completed my longest running game project ever.  At just over six months of development, Driveby Gangster has been finished and submitted to the Mac app store for review!

It almost feels like I’m not really done.  It’s going to take a while for it to settle in the accomplishment of producing and finishing a 3D game of this scale by myself in any reasonable amount of time – especially with a custom from-scratch C++ game engine.  Every 3D Game that I’ve ever tried to make that had any scale larger than a small mini game had to be abandoned due to the loss of focus and eventual giving in to life’s demands.  I definitely wanted to throw in the towel at a couple points and came close to putting the project on hold, but something told me to finish the damn thing now or never!

I’m going to wait a couple weeks, and then post a proper post-mortem of the project and maybe even discuss some of the initial sales (which I expect to be weak due to the competitive nature of the game market these days).

I also plan on live streaming a full play-through of the game on twitch sometime in the coming weeks so stay tuned for that.

For those of you interested in purchasing & playing the game, it’ll be priced at $4 and will feature no stupid freemium or IAP crap ($4 buys the whole thing).  I’ll post the link to the mac app store as soon as it becomes available.

The Windows version is still pending steam green light which could use your help!  So if you want the game for windows, please head over there and vote via the greenlight link at the top of this page!

It’s 1am and I don’t want to go to bed yet.  Thus, I’ll supplement the last post with some of my latest screenshots.

As shown, I now can select my retina mac book pro’s 2880×1800 resolution (and watch it have a disastrous effect on my framerate) as well as support anti aliasing in combination with post processing effects (which is actually alot more work in OpenGL than it would seem).

It may not seem it from reading this blog, but this game is actually nearing release. Since I’ve last posted, I’ve put all of my efforts into finishing the game during the month of March. All of the levels 1-30 are functionally complete, and Ive moved on to the remaining items on my master todo list. These include implementing cutscenes such as the game over sequence, implementing graphics options such as resolution settings, pause menus, and otherwise polishing the game as much as possible.

I also stumbled onto a hard to detect bug in the SSAO shader settings that made the quality of the SSAO effect in the actual game to be much poorer.  Once I fixed that, I was able to dial the ambient occlusion for the game scenes as I originally intended and it looks really nice (albeit still subtle).

The steam greenlight campaign has slowed quite a bit.  I’ve decided that unless this picks up, or other more popular windows deployment options become available, that the Mac platform will be the initial release for this game.  In other words, I’ll be holding off on the windows version until it gets approved for steam.

More soon.

Still working on things..