I won Intel Level Up 2009. I Know Your Deeds, the one-level demo I finished after three nights without sleep, took first place in Best Game Optimized for Intel® Graphics and second place in Best Threaded Game. I can hardly believe it.

The judges were some of the best-known game developers and designers in the world. You can see the list here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/levelup-judges/

Thanks, Intel.

Here is my current demo (about 50 MB). It has one level, and for now there is more graphics than gameplay in it. This is the build I submitted to the Intel Level Up 2009 competition.

Your goal is to find cover before night falls. Close the doors, and use boxes to build barricades.

Run the “best threaded” shortcut for the best graphics. If your machine has integrated graphics, use the “Intel graphics” shortcut.

I’m carrying on with the game. I’ve found a talented artist, and I’m implementing networking.

Here is how I got dynamic paths working in my engine.

First I went through the path-finding engines that are available and didn’t find one I could use. Some cost money, and the others weren’t complete enough.

A month ago I saw a demonstration of the Recast library by Mikko Mononen. It takes a triangle soup, voxelises it and generates correct paths from the result. I was impressed, so I downloaded it and added support for dynamic objects. The video shows the result. I described the tile update steps in my previous post about the Intel Level Up demo.

I’m going to upload a few tech videos from I Know Your Deeds, the demo I made for Intel Level Up. This one is about graphics.

It shows grass, trees, deferred shading, a dynamic sky with clouds, and a landscape with three materials blended by a weight map. I modelled the landscape in Photoshop with the Clouds filter, then edited it by hand to make room for the houses.

Grass is drawn from a grass density map, one per landscape. I placed the trees in Photoshop as well. There is a separate bitmap for foliage: paint a red dot on it, for example, and a tree appears at that spot in the level.

Shadows use ordinary shadow mapping. I don’t use perspective shadow maps.

Today I finished the game demo for Intel Level Up 2009. It cost me three nights without sleep. Some things are still not implemented, but the overall picture is good. I’ll prepare a longer video and the demo itself later.

For now, here is a short video of the dynamic navigation meshes in my engine. They are based on TileMesh and they are fast: the whole level (300x300) builds in a separate thread in 5 seconds on a single-core PC, with a tile size of 32. Don’t look at the frame rate. That’s deferred shading on an old PC.