Recent content on Madrigal Games

 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…
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. 
 
 
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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…
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: 
 
 
 

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. 

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…
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.…

 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…
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. 
 
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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…
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…
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. 
 
 
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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…
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. 
 
 
 
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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…
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…
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…

 
 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. 
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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…

 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…

 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…

 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…
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…
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…
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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Hi there! 
 My name is Sebastian Ahlman . I have been working as a programmer at various Finnish game companies since 2009, and as a professional programmer on non-game software long before that. In 2018 I founded Madrigal Ltd., an independent game development company. After being a side project for a while, it is now my main focus. 
 We (at the time of writing, me and a few freelancers)…
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