Madrigal Games

How I made my Zig gameplay code hot reloadable

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post as well as all code listed in it are 100% written by me, a human, without any help from LLMs or other AI tools.

Code “hot reloading” means updating the code of a application while it is running. It is very useful during development when you want to quickly iterate on a feature without having to restart the game between every change, and it also gives you some serious superpowers when it comes to debugging, as we’ll see later on. The concept goes by many names, “Hot reloading”, “Live updating”, “Live reloading” etc, but they usually mean the same thing: The ability to change the logic of your app without having to shut it down.

How I made Traction Point moddable using Zig and WebAssembly

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Traction Point is a sandbox game. Yes there is a campaign with a focus on the story, and yes it has some scripted sequences, but at its core the game is about physically simulated vehicles and how they interact with their environment. The game lends itself well to experimentation and “messing around”, and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Image 1. The Mother lifting her baby scout and some boxes

This also applies to the technical side. Since I am building the game using my own Basis game engine, I own the whole tech stack and can release any of the tools I use to make the game to the public, allowing players to create new levels, scenarios, vehicles etc. This can be done without having to touch the game code since the object type system is very data driven. Eg. a new vehicle can be created by telling the game engine the size and shape of the chassis, how many wheels the vehicle should have, what kind of drivetrain, suspension etc it should have, and what chassis and wheel meshes it should use.

Traction Point now has a store page on Steam!

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After a couple of years of development, Traction Point finally has a store page on Steam! This is great news for a few reasons. First of all, you can now show your support by wishlisting the game! Which you should do, it really helps the project. So do that before reading on :) Great, thanks!

As part of getting the Traction Point store page online I really had to up my marketing game and create the final key art for the game, which you can see above. I created the image by tracing over a few of different screenshots in Affinity Designer, combining the pieces by drawing some parts freehand, and coloring it afterwards. It’s all vector graphics, so it will scale well and to be honest I am quite happy with it. It’s a genuine piece of programmer art, but one I think shows the spirit of the game pretty well, and it should make it easier to market the game in the future.

Traction Point in the GP-Direct 2025 Showcase!

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Traction Point was included in the GP-Direct 2025 Graphics Programming Showcase video! The video shows a whole bunch of games/apps and technology created without using any 3rd party game engines. The projects were created by members of the Graphics Programming discord server.

Have a look below:

New Traction Point screenshots!

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s true, I have been putting most of my energy into the YouTube channel and Discord server lately, but I am going to make an effort to post here more often too! And what better way to kick that off than with a batch of Traction Point screenshots! Click the images for larger versions.

The name of the game: Traction Point

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After a long time in development, our game now has a proper title! The game previously called Project Slide, which went through a sort of reboot under the project name Means, will be released as Traction Point!

While the rate of updates here on the website has gone down, the development of the game is actively being chronicled on Madrigal’s YouTube channel. Check out the name reveal video below:

DevShot #6 and plugging the Madrigal YouTube channel

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, long time no see! It has indeed been a while since this blog was updated. This isn’t because of a lack of exciting new things, but rather because I have been concentrating the updates onto Madrigal’s YouTube channel. More on that below, but first, let’s have a new DevShot of Project Slide:

Image 1. The plains near the linear transport station.

As usual, click the image for a larger version. The image shows the plains near the linear transport station. The gray ark ship debris is still lacking a proper material and textures, but otherwise the devshot is approaching the look I am aiming for. Quite a few new features have been added since the previous DevShot. We have indirect lighting in the form of lightmaps (for larger objects) and light probes (for smaller/dynamic ones), there is support for rendering really far-away objects such as the clouds, we finally have grass and foliage in the scene etc.

Creating a material editor for a custom game engine

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While developing the material editor I kept a video devlog on Youtube where I went through the new features as I was developing them. Check out the playlist to see the material editor coming together!

Background

As a (mostly) solo developer using my own game engine I am used to working with less-than-stellar tools. In fact, there is a long TODO list of tasks for making the level editor and asset browser nicer and easier to use. Some of those will eventually get done, others won’t. There is only so much time in the day and you have to ship the game at some point.

DevShot #5 - Tire tracks

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Project Slide is a game where the player drives vehicles on various types of terrain. With that in mind, it may surprise you that there haven’t been any tire tracks left by the vehicles up to this point. I decided it was finally time to do something about that and spent a few days designing a system where any vehicle can have its tires leave tracks on the landscape.

Image 1. The new tire track system in action.

The system is not yet complete but it is already showing promising results. It supports many different track patterns (although only one is created at this point), varying tire widths, it takes slipping and skidding into account etc.

Post-vacation fun time: Writing a Zig-powered Twin Stick Shooter

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Every year, after returning from my summer vacation, I spend a week or two working on a fun little side project. This is to take a break from the massive thing that is Project Slide, and try out ideas that have been percolating in the back of my mind during the summer (or way before that).

Last summer, in 2020, I added Zig programming support to the Basis game engine as a post-vacation fun thing, but I never really did anything with it, except a little proof-of-concept in Project Slide which you can read about here.

DevShot #4 and Combat Test video

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The summer is here and the Madrigal office is steaming hot. Time to take a well deserved break from development and return in August with new energy! Before we do that, though, we have one more DevShot for you. In fact, this time it is a video + a series of shots, enjoy!

Video showing an early version of vehicle combat in Project Slide. A Lancer is fighting a couple of Combat Badgers.

Below, you’ll see three DevShots of a Lancer blowing up a Combat Badger. They all show the same situation, but from different angles. Keep in mind that everything is work in progress; the level, the gameplay, the AI, the particle effects, sound effects etc. Everything will be improved and polished, and there are lots of things missing still.

DevShot #3

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this DevShot we take a first look at a new vehicle from Project Slide: The GW80 “Gullwing” dropship. This VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) cargo aircraft is capable of lifting heavy equipment, including other vehicles. While players won’t be able to pilot Gullwings in the game, the aircraft is featured in several parts of the campaign.

Image 1. A GW80 'gullwing' dropship being prepped for take-off.

Image 2. A blueprint for the GW80 dropship.

DevShot #2

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Monday morning. Let’s start off the week with a new DevShot of Project Slide!

Image 1. A cargo badger with a heavy trailer, parked at the hydro plant.

In the image above we see another part of the demo level. After a long trip, the driver of this cargo badger decided to stop at the hydro plant for a break. Here we can see them pondering the whitebox cliffs in the distance.

Level design video - cliffs, rocks, trees and terrain

Sun, 23 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this video we take a look at how the natural environments in Project Slide are put together in the level editor. You’ll get a glimpse at how the game’s level editor works, I’ll explain some of my level design principles, and finally we drive around a bit looking at the newly created environment from the player’s perspective.

Project Slide level design - cliffs, rocks, trees and terrain.

The music played during the sped-up parts of the video is original music composed for the game by Lasse Piirainen. Curiously, most of the time making this video went into piecing together the music. The game will feature dynamic music which reacts to the gameplay and triggers different elements/sections of the music to be played. Because of this, Lasse has provided me with lots of audio clips containing individual instruments and sections. Some of them have been fed into FMOD already where the game can simply trigger a version of a song to play, but a lot of it was still only available as a collection of wave files.

DevShot #1

Thu, 20 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have been meaning to write a blog post for a several months, but creating assets for the demo level has taken up all my time. In an effort to let you know what is going on, I am going to start posting development screenshots as I work on the game.

In our first development screenshot (or devshot if you will) we see a lancer racing through a canyon, no doubt in a hurry to get somewhere important. Click on the image below for a full-size version.

Careful with that firing rate, Eugene!

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I have been working on the Combat Badger vehicle’s weapons. It sports a twin-barrel automatic cannon in the front and a grenade launcher in the back. The vehicle itself was introduced in the previous blog post but the weapons were missing materials as well as the actual firing logic.

The first thing I did this week was finish the modeling and texturing of the weapons. You can see the result in image 1 below:

Status Update - January 2021

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks, it has been a while since the last blog post. That doesn’t mean that development on Project Slide has slowed down. On the contrary, lots of things have happened since October. Writing these blog posts is a lot of work and I find that the more I concentrate on them, the less time I have to do actual game development. That means that I have had lots of time to develop the game over the past few months!

Six-wheel drive vehicles in PhysX

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Image 1. Car3

Vehicles with six wheels are interesting. They perform well in rough terrain, they can handle heavy loads and they look cool! I am working on a six-wheeled vehicle for Project Slide and it’s really fun to drive. It also handles distinctly different than all the other (four-wheel) vehicles already in the game, which is nice.

Implementing six-wheel vehicles comes with a set of new challenges though, and in this blog post we’ll look at one which can become a problem with so called six-wheel drive (6x6) vehicles, ie. vehicles where all six wheels are driven by the engine.

The birth of a vehicle

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you have been following my development blog you know that I am working on Project Slide, a vehicle action game. Given that the game is all about vehicles, you might think I would have started by creating a bunch of interesting and fun vehicles to put into the game. You would be wrong. In fact, for the first 6 months so of development there was only a single test car to play around with. Later a heavy hauler as well as a few different trailers were added to the game, but they were all minimum-effort creations, just enough to be able to flesh out the gameplay mechanics and code.

Little Victories in Game Development - Level data queries

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Making games is hard. It’s even harder when you work alone or in a team consisting of only a few people, especially when making your own tech. That’s why every little victory counts. In ‘Little Victories in Game Development’ we take a look at things that went really right; things that payed back their development cost many times over, and made our work much easier or more fun!

In the last part of Little Victories in Game Development we talked about an issue with quickly finding and selecting certain objects in the level editor. We briefly mentioned the fact that game levels can have many many objects, sometimes tens of thousands. We solved the issue with selecting certain specific objects very elegantly using object selection groups. However, sometimes we don’t know which objects we want to select. What if we want to group all “small rocks” together, or we want to know how many modular building pieces using a specific material are in a given corner of the map? That’s what level data queries are all about.

Ramblings about video game AI - Part 3 - Navigating the game world

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about video game AI. See the first part here and the second part here.

There and Back Again

Navigating the game world is one of the most complex tasks required by AI agents in a game. To give the illusion of independent, intelligent entities, the agents must act intelligently when moving around. They should move in a way that fits their current task, however, often we don’t want the AI to take the 100% optimal path because we don’t want them to act like robots.

Little Victories in Game Development - Editor selection groups

Sat, 30 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Making games is hard. It’s even harder when you work alone or in a team consisting of only a few people, especially when making your own tech. That’s why every little victory counts. In ‘Little Victories in Game Development’ we take a look at things that went really right; things that payed back their development cost many times over, and made our work much easier or more fun!

Today I’d like to talk a bit about level editors. Game developers use level editors to design levels and content for their games. The editor allows the developers to place objects, shape the environment, set up lighting, write behavior scripts, design AI encounters etc. For many people working with game development, the level editor is one of the the most important tools in their toolbox. It needs to be easy to use but powerful and flexible enough to cater to all kinds of workflows. The user experience most be as fluid as possible. Any friction leads to lost productivity and frustration. Frustration kills creativity.

Ramblings about video game AI - Part 2 - Dissecting the brain

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:02 +0000

Braaains!

Welcome to the second part of our ongoing series about the AI systems in Project Slide. This time we’ll take a closer look at the core of any AI agent, the brain. The brain doesn’t step on the gas pedal of the vehicle, nor turn the steering wheel, nor fire any guns. It delegates all of those things to other subsystems. However, those other subsystems won’t do anything without receiving orders from the brain.

Ramblings about video game AI - Part 1 - Introduction

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:01 +0000

A little bit of background

About two years ago I started working on Project Slide, a 3D vehicle action game. All along, the plan was to keep a blog about the development but I never quite got started writing anything. Development has progressed at a steady, albeit slow, pace. Due to me doing most things myself there could have been any number of topics to cover, from level design to engine code. However, I didn’t feel like I had been doing anything particularily new or noteworthy.

The website is live!

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there, and welcome to the Madrigal Ltd. web site! This has been in the works for some time already, but now that we finally have some content it’s time to make the site available. More stuff coming soon, stay tuned!

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