Bitshift Entertainment

First day in the new Dallas office today! We're going to need programmers. Contact @BitshiftEnt if that could be you. Minimum barrier of entry, at least for the first couple of hires: * you know what O(n log n) means * you play zachlikes for fun * you're a slightly better programmer than i am

ogre_gib.gif by @DanielWienerson

Programmer? We're hiring! In, or willing to be in, the Los Angeles area? Want to make an old dos game, but this time it's ray traced sparse voxel octtrees? Apply via @bitshiftent. Not exactly sure what skills you need. You tell us. no vibe coders or new-line-{-ers

The current plan for Levers and Chests is to get something extremely early and premature out for early adopter enjoyers to aimlessly meander around in as we painstakingly slowly add content to the game based on player feedback we either listen to or ignore. Like early Minecraft.

Compute shader based physics enabled particle stress test: passed I'll get around to working on the ui soon, honest, but particles flying through walls looks too sloppy to leave as is.

Compute shader driven particles. oh and also the panel there is WIP. I was rewriting the GUI code and accidentally picked up a side quest involving a modular procedural generation framework.

And it convinced me we're going to need emissive or translucent materials! Imagine this thing but less tangible looking!

There were all taken in freecam mode, and are very rough still. Mostly just blocking and color exploration for the terrain especially. Super not final, some of these, heh.

Got intersecting voxels? Why not use the integer taxicab distance from the voxel volume the camera is in to the volume the face is facing as the basis for the depth buffer? Well, it makes the far clipping plane super wonky, for one. But it fixes z fighting!

This, but even cooler.

Procgen explorations. Try to find the odd one out.

There's a game in here somewhere, we just need to get the dot products right.

Daryl's been working on a raytraced voxel renderer, and when changing it to be rendered from the back facing faces instead of the front (so you can be inside the volume), a couple of really cool glitches showed up. They're so good I asked permission to share them.

We're looking for a voxel/pixel artist for Levers and Chests. Please contact @BitshiftEnt if you're in the LA area and are interested in joining the team.

Stress testing a ray tracer thing for viability. Not being locked to linear projection is nice, in this screenshot you can see all six edges of the menger sponge at the same time. #WebGPU

I even have tool tips with transparent backgrounds. Lesson learned: if you want a dark semi transparent background that actually makes text easier to read, apply the blend in SRGB space, not linear space. In linear space it becomes dark glass.

All the character portraits and inventory icons are AI generated placeholders. All other assets are temporary first drafts. But it's slowly becoming a game!

Oh and the thing I said to let me cook is Levers and Chests, a roguelike roguelite dungeon crawler. Planned release date: no clue yet.

A sprite sheet of "Inventory items for a fantasy game" Not entirely sure what some of these are, but they're fairly easy to extract and clean up and look way better than a magenta box.

My last two tweets were about the release dates for the Factorio expansion and the 1.0 release of Satisfactory respectively. Levers and Chests has no estimated release date yet. Heck if anything, the two release dates mentioned above will probably delay LaC a bit. ;) Eventually