Solar Battles Progress (Screenshots)

Haven't blog in a while, since I never felt ready yet with the progress of Solar Battles. But since my progress has been stellar, to say the least. I felt I would show a screenshot or 2 of what is waiting around the corner.

First some progress and how I approach(ed) things.

Being only one person working on this (and being a programmer), I decided to first implement the basic art I bought. Start working on the features. While planning the game I decided that I would need the following things, before I start working on the Art side of things:
- Velocity hud (Showing your speed or a Targets Speed)
- More advanced Health/Energy gui with things like bitmaps, rotation, target health/energy, etc.
- Range hud (display your Radar/Targetting Range) which was simple
- Distance hud, to show you how far you are from your target.
- Updated fxShapeReplicator (which is a resource that needed to work in TGEA)
- Targetting hud, Have a target reticule (hope thats the correct term) on them.

- Commander map changes to allow Capture points and spawn at those points when your team captured them.

This was the results of the commandermap:

Just take note that the art has changed, (even in some screenshots below).

Now these things might not sound like a lot of work, but those weren't the only things. Stuff like LOD's needed to be done on ship. Backgrounds, Stars (which was a b1tch an still not 100% they way I'd like them to be), fixes to TGEA 1.0. It all adds up. I later had to port everything over to TGEA 1.0.2 with the awesome FGE pack by my friend Martin Schultz

Here is what the LODs look like for comparison, and this had to be done for 13 ships:

Being a programmer, I've always struggled with content. And I mean everything; from Models to music. But now that I have met up with a friend from Cape Town, it was quite a coincedence that he creates ambient music as a hobby. After listening to some of his tracks, it was obvious that I have found the perfect person to work with on Solar Battles, being a space game.

By now you'er probably wondering what the game looks like... If you're still interested go have a look at what it once was. A friend of mine and I was just thinking of how far I came in the past months since I started. Take a look at the screenshots at my MyDreamRPG Contest entry.

So here's a pic from a while back (still with FGE noticable):

And here's a screenshot with the latest GUI design (not all working though but implementing it now, and fixing old bugs):

And another one I think looks sweet:

The website will be up shortly, describing more about the game and ship roles/classes. There's a temporary forum up at www.solarbattles.net with some more images of ships. It hasnt't been made public, since it's going to be taken down and changed soon, but you can still go have a look if you're interested.

I'm planning on a beta demo in November to gather feedback, general impressions and maybe a competition. So watch this space!

Comments would be nice :)