Plan for Brad 'fragbert' Shapcott

Game progressing on schedule (and budget ;) ), which has become (basically) 3D hoverball.

The screenshots aren't good enough for a Dev Snapshot because of all the ugly programmer art, but they illustrate development progress adequately.


You can see how bad the art situation is when the demo rifle and crossbow are appropriated for vehicle weapons :) . The hoverjet model is mostly by N.R. Bharathae with some meddling by me (mostly to make it round, so that the physics are intuitive).

The team has been working to a plan which dictates developing a very basic playable demo for end of August. The game shown uses a puck and plays a lot like air hockey where the paddles are hover vehicles that the players ride in (controls resemble the old classic Asteroids). At least two other ball games are planned, one resembling European football (soccer) and the other American football or English Rugby, and there is a strong possiblity of a non-sport game that consists of trying to bump the other players off a playing surface.

I think the nets are recognizable, and in the distance mounted on the wall are the faceoff turrets that fire the puck/ball into play. Arenas will be much more feature rich with ramps, bumpers, scoreboard, advertising billboards, etc. The team has bandied around the idea of trading in-game ads for banner ads on web sites, or using the in-game ads to promote other GG titles or even other shareware or indie titles.

The game evolved (or at least changed) from its original concept, which started as a sports-themed FPS mod (for Unreal Tournament), briefly was going to be hoverboarding (but the estimated animation workload was too high, and too risky with no animators on the team yet), and finally became hoverball. It's a recognizable classic game that is surprisingly underrepresented in the marketplace.

Work so far has involved adapting vehicle physics for the puck/ball, writing a custom vehicle for the hoverjet, modifying the vehicle collision physics (mostly simplifying them), stripping away the demo gui, adding in the team management and scoring code, and creating some new weapons. Oh yeah, and writing a generic event system with publish/subscribe.

The intent is to use the basic demo as a recruiting tool to attract a few new team members. When the demo is ready the team will release some public design documents and potential candidates can read the full docs by agreeing to a standard NDA. A sophisticated system for assignment of royalties was created that assigns a fraction of royalties to each line item in the design. This hopefully not only divides royalties equitably, but allows team members to scale their participation in the project.

Currently I'm writing the basic bot AI. There is a sophisticated AI system in the design, but only the basics will be implemented for the first demo, which again is scheduled to be around the end of this month. The web site will also be prettied up as part of the recruiting process.