Here are some screenshots and videos of VARN.

	(Click a thumbnail to view the full sized image.)

As you can see the map is rendered in 3D, even though the game is actually a 2D game. All polygons are defined with 2 dimensions and then the engine adds depth to them automatically when they are being drawn.

The players will however not have a third dimension, they will appear as 2D sprites at depth 0 in the world, which normally is at the exact center of the ground polygons.

Some ground polygons allow players to move in front of them, or behind them. These are easy to spot since the map is in 3D. Since the players do not have any depth they can hide behind polygons (or camouflage themselves by standing in front of them and trying to blend in to the texture) without an increased risk of being spotted from the sides.

I've chosen to do a 2D game in 3D because it looks pretty neat, helps the player to understand immediately which polygons you can run behind/infront and it's something new (for this exact type of game play, of course I know there has been 3D-2D mixed games before). Since the rendering is in 3D you can do a lot of cool maps with stuff being drawn in the distance or in the front, I will try my best not have any locks on how the polygons can be rendered so that everybody's creativity can run wild (for example you will be able to make polygon sides slope, texture each side of a polygon with a different texture, or stretch a side's texture).

So far there are only pure ground polygons supported on the map, I will make it possible to add sprites/bitmaps later so that the world can be decorated with bushes, backdrops etc. I plan to have all resources of a map contained within a single file, right now there is no map format though. What you are seeing today I created programmatically, in the future a map editor will exist for easy map creation. As you can see at the middle of the map the polygon corners can be colored, this can be used to variate ground apperance without having to change textures.

Two kinds of polygons can be on the map: squares and triangles. Since squares are allowed it's easy to make ground without glitches in it. I was thinking about adding support for circle polygons as well, though that will take a lot of work so I'll think more about that in the future, not sure if they will be supported in the game (at least for ground polygons). I have plans on making the terrain destroyable by the way, in some way. That would be really cool and it'll certainly open up a lot of new map possibilities. Got a couple of ideas on the subject though I try not to think too much about it since there's a lot of other things to be done first.

Well then, onto the videos ladies and gentlemen.

If you're only planning to watch one video I recommend you watch the fourth one.

I've uploaded the videos to YouTube and Vimeo, they turned out in low quality to my disappointment (especially on YouTube). It's my first ever upload on YouTube/Vimeo so maybe that shouldn't be a surprise but I encoded the videos in MP4 format since I thought that was what those sites liked.

In any case, I will embed the Vimeo ones and only link to the YouTube ones. But if you want to watch them in the best quality you can download the original movie files: http://www.mediafire.com/?mdhrqq9nso96eyc

I was going to disable the YouTube/Vimeo commenting since I'd rather want all comments here on this site (easier to see that there has been new comments) but in the end I left it open for commenting since I figured most that want to leave a comment wont bother to change site.

The animation in the videos may appear a little choppy but this is because of my computer getting a little choppy when I recorded my screen. When I didn't have recording on the camera moves across the map fluently. Also the videos seem to have become even more choppy when they were reencoded on YouTube and Vimeo, so download the original videos from the link above if the extreme choppyness annoys you.

The game will support up to 50 FPS, which is the amount of updates per second the game state has so there would be no point in going above that number due to the fact that nothing would move or animate between some frames. I've made it so that the FPS can be limited manually to a lower number on slower computers.

VARN, first glance (1/4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRiExCi8kBk&fmt=18
http://www.vimeo.com/14404130


In this first video the camera moves around the map, looking straight at it. This is how the camera will look at the world by default, it will position itself in the middle of your character and your aim and then film straight into the screen.

VARN, first glance (2/4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB4yzgMNaFQ&fmt=18
http://www.vimeo.com/14404604


This is the same as the first video with one important difference: the depth is turned off. People with slower computers can play the game in this rendering mode if they want to, or people that want the game to be in pure 2D.

VARN, first glance (3/4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaj1EcZ9GLU&fmt=18
http://www.vimeo.com/14404638


Here the camera is filming from the middle of the map, showing the world from a different perspective. Although the camera by default films straight into the map it can be tilted to give a different view.

VARN, first glance (4/4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSgiNotTHLU&fmt=18
http://www.vimeo.com/14404677


The final video is a combination of the first and third video, it gives the best view of the map. Notice the different thickness of the polygons, the thickest are ground polygons, the medium thick ones appear behind players and the thinnest ones appear in front of players.

This concludes the first demonstration of VARN. The graphics aren't meant to put you in awe and I know that map doesn't look like a great map to play on, the goal of this was just to show that there is a functioning graphic engine in place. One which will be improved as VARN develops.

Please don't hesitate to ask any questions you have in the comments and I will try to answer them.

Be careful not to reinvent the wheel.