AirSpace Community LIVE Arcade Game

If you like faced-paced action games, I hope you'll enjoy AirSpace for Xbox360 and Windows by EnvyGames. A demo version of AirSpace was quickly pulled together in about two weeks and submitted into Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition and then later fleshed with a wide array of improvements and new levels. The game is based entirely upon GarageGame's Torque X Engine.

In AirSpace, you pilot 8 different conventional warplanes as you repel an alien invasion across 12 action-filled levels that spread across the globe. The game packs a punch with fast action, rich graphics, and energetic audio, and a traditional boss level at the end of each round.

New Torque X Functionality

Building the AirSpace demo game had really pushed the Torque X Engine to its limits. This is great news for the Torque X community. Many of the improvements that went into the game will be submitted as new Torque X resources that you can implement into your own games, including:

New Game Components
New Shader Effects
Engine Fixes & Optimizations
Blended 2D/3D Scenegraphs
Multiplayer Best Practices

Multiplayer

Since playing along with friends is half the fun, AirSpace features both local and networked multiplayer. The networked multiplayer leverages the best practices of XNA networking described on the XNA Creator's Club website. Multiplayer games are cooperative and you take on even more aggressive enemies. Be sure to connect your Xbox 360 headset to coordinate your action with your wingman.

Visual Effects

AirSpace features a post-process shader effect that combine bloom and motion blurring to result in a greater preception of speed and a shader effect that performs shape replication for meshes and billboards to help flesh out the empty landscapes. Remaining visual effects include particle effects for missile trails, contrails, jet flame, and explosions. The game runs smoothly on a 1080i HD Television.

Audio Effects

AirSpace also went as far as possible with XACT to create fun audio effects, including all game sound effects, background music, and voice annotations. We're still looking into support for full surround-sound audio effects.

Path-Following AI

AirSpace also features a new curve-based path-following component tied to an attack wave manager. Our level designer is able to define the attack waves, types of enemies, number of enemies, and attack effectiveness by customizing and adjusting values in XML. The component also supports dynamic curve creation. The end result should be a balanced flow of increasing difficulty matched with new weapons that become available as the game progresses. The curve-based path following component also lets objects pick a start point and an end point, and then generates a nice curve to reach its destination. This lets missiles follow a nice curved path to hit locked targets.

Rich Game HUD

Although AirSpace is a 3D flight action game, it owes a lot to Torque X's 2D Framework. The entire HUD implementation for the game (which is heavily animated) was implemented ilike a 2D game, using static and animated sprites. By blending the 2D and 3D scenegraphs, the game comes together with a very rich and playful experience.

Torque X Productivity

XNA and Torque X have proven to be an incredibly productive toolset for making games. The learning curve is fairly low and the productivity of Visual Studio, from intellisense to code snippets, can't be matched. Components lend themselves to a very solid and highly re-usable game design and XACT compiles the game audio down to a nice and compact size.

The AirSpace demo that was submitted to DBP took only two weeks to go from concept to submitted demo. That included time to design the project, layout the code, implement the components, create the HUD functionality, integrate the models and audio, and then add the visual effects. Not a lot of time to put together something decent. Once the competition deadline passed, the team was able to press on and add the missing features, additional artwork, and flesh out the remaining game levels. There's still development work going on (especially around multiplayer and visual polish) and a lot of testing. In the end, about two months will have gone into the game development.

Availability

AirSpace is currently going through some final development and testing. The screen captures above are from the demo release and are a bit dated; the polish has really improved since then. We are currently planning to release AirSpace with the launch of Xbox Community LIVE Arcade in mid-November. The release to Windows will come a few weeks later.

John Kanalakis
EnvyGames, LLC