chainWorks Development & Media Update (Video and Images)

Hi all,

Well it's been a long while since I started the complete rewrite of chainWorks. I released the old demos over here, and since then have been scripting away like crazy! The main aims for MS1 of my project were : Basic game loading, seeding, and playing, Level system, score tracking, saving/loading and a confident GUI system developed.



I first of all added the basic gameplay mechanic, and toyed with a few item ideas. Then came some ideas on my own GUI system. What finally came around was a set of about 10 flexible functions which load/animate/destroy/link and track GUI's which can be built in the level builder. I put so much effort into actually scripting the system I haven't had time to play with it enough to show it off completely but you can see it in the video (!) down below.... The gui's you see are all completely script created and driven..

Next came my own method of text output. I haven't really read into the torque ways of doing this, but it seemed to me that seeing as though id bypassed the standard torque GUI system, getting text ouput onto the screen may be a bit more difficult than first envisioned. So I made a few more functions (inspired by the available T2D resource) which load a font imagemap, and outputs strings of characters to the screen. It can left, centre or right align, have multiple colours (using the scripted blending functions), be integrated into the gui system and can be an size, colour or orientation... again you only see this briefly in the video but it makes a small appearance on the campaign screen.

I've also been working closesly with an affiliate to create a GUI scheme. You can see the workings of it in the video, we decided quite early on to not have anything too snazzy or extreme for the game, keep it simple and efficient for our target audience. The simple blue borders and boxes make a nice scheme, and focus the attention on the gameplay at hand.

Finally the other component of my first milestone was a persitant saving/loading system as well as a score tracking and updating method. This has all been handled now and the game will save/load scores automatically, and is ready to be integrated with network and encryption in MS3.

And that brings us to the end of MS1! I've been toying with the particle engine (got to escape code sometimes right??), not much to show at the moment but the effects can be seen in the video, and they look pretty sweet :) They are far too expensive at the moment and we will be adding a scaling feature, but the first effect looks nice, and you can see it in all its glory below.



This video was produced at first to show off to a few contacts, friends and family just for that needed morale boost we all enjoy ;)! When it was created however I figured why not post it up here? I was in two minds at first as MS1 is all about scripting and not artwork or visual polish, so a video does it little justice, plus it may be miss interpreted as a video intended to demonstrate the final game, for the record its not. It shows some quite random and unlinked parts of the game, its just a collation of the work through the last month :)

Anyways! I hope you all enjoy it!

chainWorks Concept Prototype Demo Movie - Quicktime Movie (13mb)