Switching Gears

So. Switching Gears again. Yep, we are still on that. Let's see.. what did I write about last time? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be doing a more regular schedule. That seemed to have come and passed while we had our heads stuck in code and art to get this beast of a game up on it's feet. (last post: www.garagegames.com/blogs/45181/12734 )

We are finally (after all this time) getting to the point of pulling all the separate pieces together and making the game playable in all it's textured and animated glory after countless iterations and discussions back and forth of what SG is supposed to be. As you may or may not remember, we had a false start in October last year after which we basically scrapped the whole open city concept and started moving towards a much more linear kind of game. I'm happy to say that it has really worked out, as SG is much tighter and much more focused than it was before.

We are also focusing very hard on infusing the game with humor that we both think that more games could use. I believe Giants was the last game that I actually laughed really hard at. Of course, humor is something very subjective, so we can only hope and pray that other people will have the same sense of humor as we do.

An example would that through out the levels are little help tips machines that you can access, if you so feel like it, and they will pop up messages such as this one:



Some of the more current features that our programmer have implemented are Alpha LOD for not only static shapes, but shapes objects as well which is a huge boon to not only frame rates but how much better it looks when things slowly fade into view instead of snapping with their LOD's. Much kudos to Martin Busse who first implemented this feature and I can't recommend it enough.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1233...

We are currently working towards a mid july deadline for a demo and things are looking pretty good so far, but I am pretty hesitant to show off any of the game before the deadline is done and over with since there are still some things that need to be implemented, so I'll just stop here.

Fredrik S