Blog for Vincent van Delden at GarageGames.com

Robot Game: Day 1 and 2

Vincent van Delden — 2008-04-23T12:22:43+00:00

I had to read my last blog to see what it was about and luckily what I'm going write about follows up nicely, even though the last blog was posted more than half a year ago. Almost like no progress was made at all. There was of course progress made but not that much, at the robot survival shooter game 'thingey'.
BUT......Time has finally come for us, Florian van Damme and me, to continue full-time for at least 5 days, which in our case is will be something around 55 * 2 man hours.
We didn't plan to work on the robot game this week. We first had in mind to create some sort of content pack, like a spaceship pack or (tactical) shooter pack, but eventually we decided to just make a game.

What we had accomplished, where we had left off
The primary game type was survival, where hordes of brain-eating robots came on to a group of players, who had to defend their mechanical brains, by shooting everything that moved, in a relative small space, was pretty fun. There also was a deathmatch gametype, which wasn't very exciting/interesting.

Our goals
Simply said; try to finish the game by this week or a couple of weeks later. I personally wouldn't bet on us finishing the game in this or a couple of weeks, but do think we can come a long way, so eventually only some small details will have to be taken care of.
The plan is to create a solid co-op gameplay gametype, where players will have to fight side-by-side against the enemy robots.

What we have accomplished so far
Monday: We came together to discuss what we were going to do this week. After lots of research into various ideas we concluded, like I said before, to just work on the robot game. We also decided to port the game, which used the TGE 1.5.2, to TGEA 1.7.0.
Tuesday: Florian, as far as I know, designed a level and made a gun model. I had to some boring tasks to be done like porting, code weapon functionality, and more minor tasks. So nothing special to talk about.

That's it for now. Back to the game making.

Starting to look like a game

Vincent van Delden — 2007-08-22T23:17:01+00:00

Here it goes.

Ive been planning to write a new blog for some time now but I just couldnt push myself to free up some time and do it, until tonight.
So many things have happened and so many times just nothing happened and everything was quiet boring. Ive been working from time to time on 'our' gameprojects. Some times I really couldnt stop working and wished for summer break so could focus even more on the game making and as always when the time has come I got distracted. Its not that I didn't do anything. I just didn't spent the amount of time I wanted to spent. Except for the last 2 weeks. The last 2 weeks, or maybe more, i got myself some motivation and the good thing about that was that once I started the game making again, it motivated me even more. It got even better when the things I did payed off, looked good and felt good. I got that feeling that you get when you play your own game and think 'wow' this is starting to look like something.

(skip this if you would only like to read about (more) 'recent' things)
In juni, when summer break begon, I started prototyping a gametype idea I had for some while. The goal was to have a more tactical gameplay and make it a standard for players to work together. The 'basic' idea was to have two teams and two basis. Players have to defend their base and attack the enemys base. They can also capture/setup forward observation bases on the map to aid in destroying the enemys base.
Players cant just go everywhere. They first need to create a mssion before they can leave the base, or join one if they dont have a high enough rank to create one. This brings the first problem. How to prevent players from leaving the base? Some kind of invisible wall with a message "You need to select a mission before you can leave the base"? That wouldn't be very realistic and players should be able to defend their base without mission. There could be a situation where they must leave the base to defend it. Because of all the freedom I had in mind for this gametype its really hard to decide where the borders are. This was just one example but i could give alot more. I just hadn't put enough thought in the gametype yet.
I began coding the mission creation and join GUIs + functionality and eventually stopped working on the gametype prototype because I had some problems with the CommanderMap and Unproject(), which I needed to create new waypoint by clicking on the map. I did get (half) around the problem, I just got a incorrect position when zoomed. Maybe I will post a question about this in the forums sometime.

Now over to the last 2 weeks (or some more) and the reason for writing this blog.
The first week I mainly worked on the game with the 'forbidden name' talked about in my previous blog. We still havent decided what the new name is gonna be... I fixed some bugs, tweaked a few things to make the game more playable, added support for gametypes (before there was just one 'gametype') and worked on the very first map. The new map (its not yet finished) really does change things. Before the only map in the game was the default starter.racing map which functioned as a test map. Now it already feels more complete.

(screenshots show work in progress art or placeholder art)

And now about the last week. Some time ago we decided we should do something like GID or 'game in a weekend'. So 14 and 15 august we got togheter (normaly we do everything online) to do our own little 'game in two days'. We started at 3pm and worked till 5am in the morning, then slept till 11am and continued till, I think, 10pm. What we have accompleshed in that time? First we had to decide what kind of game we wanted to make. We already had some ideas ofcourse but we had to make sure we weren't fooling ourselves, that we could make that game, or atleast a nice beginning, in 2 days. We scrapped our first idea because it would have involved many physics. So then came the Zombie killing game idea, but arent zombies a little hard to model? "yes" my friend who does the art side thought. So why not use robots instead? "I already have a nice robot model we can use" he said while scrolling through his art map. So it got to be a robot killing game.
After setting everything up for a new project I began with coding some basic AI which would attack the player so we had something to shoot. Then added waypoint following code. Unfortunaly I then encounterd this bug where players diff walls werent found so if i checked if a players was in line of sight of an enemy it would return true, while there was a wall in front of him. And even more unfortunally that bug still hasn't been fixed... Im planning to rewrite the complete AI code someday.
So did we finish the game in just two days. No, but we did have a nice beginning and in no way did we fninish everything we planned but when we played the game we got a really nice feeling. It was fun.
The days after those 2 days I really worked hard to get bugs out and the game feels really solid now. In one testing session I came up with a new gametype, aside of deathmatch and Survival (hordes of robots attack you), you have to shoot each other out of the map, which often means shooting each other over a wall, using a explosive weapon.
Im really looking forward to releasing a demo or something.

F@#$head Racer progress

Vincent van Delden — 2007-02-12T17:19:49+00:00

Lately ive been working some on Fuckhead racer, the project i talked about a bit in my last blog. And a few things are already falling together, like the inventory system with slots. Ive done this kind of inventory system before and it really isn't a big deal to change the standard inventory system to a slot kind system. But this time i had to change it so that it gets the inventory of the car for the gunner and the driver and create a "temporary slot". When the car picks up a weapon or powerup it will first be in the temporary slot. Then the driver or gunner can deside to put it in a normal slot or discard it. Until they decide to discard it or keep it the car wont be able to pickup any other weapons/powerups. If they choose to keep it and all slots are full another weapon/powerup will be discarded.
I also finished the target selecting another way as planned but still good enough for now. The first plan was to right click on an enemy vehicle and then set that as the target. But i couldn't make the raycast not collide with the gunners own driver or vehicle... so i changed plan and made a function that switches between all the enemy cars to lock on. Not as good as the first plan but as i already said good enough.
Ive come up with an idea to make the gameplay a bit more interesting for the gunner. Put some "targets" around the track and if gunners hit it with a certain gun they will receive a powerup, weapon or ammo.
Further ive fixed some bugs, added alot of smaller things and cleaned up some code.

So some things are pretty much done while other still need some more work. Also alot of "smaller" things still need to be done like adding all powerups and weapons. Im only talking about code now. Most artwork isn't ready yet or even started working on (not that it's that much). Thats pretty much it... till next blog.

Projects Info Update (+ some screenshots)

Vincent van Delden — 2006-11-26T15:54:17+00:00

I bet most of you know what I'm talking about when I say, so many ideas and things to do but so few time. It's been awhile sinds my last blog. Thats also because of that reason, but for some things you just have to make time and today I felt like writing a blog so i made some time free.

Alot has been going on for our game D.O.R.C, we have set out milestones and are already behind schedule :) and last test we noticed that the game didnt feel like "one game" so we decited that we may need to cut a few things out. Anyway we're hoping to complete the D.O.R.C beta around January 2007.

ingame D.O.R.C screenshot (more)

I can also tell you something about Veni Studios' new games( /projects )

A (still) nameless racer, players will be split up in pairs of two (a team); a driver and a gunner. Teams can pickup up powerups and weapons. Some weapons and weapons can only be used by the driver while others can only be used by the gunner. It's about finnishing first, like any racer but the gunners have to shoot at the other cars or the gunner of the car. When the car is "destroyed" it will be inmobile for a few seconds. When the gunner has taken maximum damage he will be paralized and unable to shoot for about 10 seconds. This is the basic idea and I'm working on a prototype what is about 60% done.

some prototype screenshots:

playing as gunner

startup screen (2 teams to test)

playing as driver

A (still) nameless "realistic shooter", we call it CSP (combat simulation project) though it isn't gonna be a simulation. Can't tell much other than that we will be trying to create a "more" realistic combat game.

Some screenshots of really early, in progress, prototype

And then we've got another game in mind but the idea needs much more work and I want to be able to show something with information and there is yet nothing to show. I will only tell its a MMORPG.

Alot of works needs to be done and its gonna take a while but better many ideas than no ideas and we can always decide to put a project on hold or cancel it if we feel it won't be fun or cool.

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Veni Studios is looking for a webdeveloper, want to help us out? Then e-mail me (Want to help with something else? then e-mail me too :-) )

D.O.R.C?!

Vincent van Delden — 2006-05-04T10:52:04+00:00

This is my first blog, I thought, ok let's do a report what I'm (more like We) doing at the moment ( = the last 6 months).
We at Veni Studios are working on our latest project; the game "Drunk or Real Coalition" or just "D.O.R.C", now i see you thinking "huh?! what the fuck!", but I know the name doesn't make any sense and it's supposed to don't make ANY sense. Actually the game doesnt even make sense, a lot of games these days are way too serious to our opinion so we decited to create a game that has more humor but that still has the shooter element in it.

So what is DORC about?
DORC is about killing your enemys with exploding balls, nails, airstrikes and much more. This can be done way too many gametypes. I guess some gametypes will have to be removed or merged with another. So far we have:

- deathmatch. Everyone vs everyone with no spawn time.
- team deathmatch. Two teams fight each other in relatif smaller maps. The gametype is Round based, so the first team who kills the entire enemy team wins and then everybody spawns again.
- capture and hold. Two teams have to capture stratigic positions. When a player dies there is a spawn delay.
- capture the flag. Two teams are fighting for one or two flags and bring the enemy flag, or neutral flag, back to there base.
- cooperation. A game were a team of players can fight bots. This is at the moment really simpel but could be improved to a game were the players have several objectives.
- capture the hamburger. This is like deathmatch but with a hamburger somewhere in the map that players can pick up and bring to a certain location to score some points.

We have some nice ideas for more gametypes like a VIP gametype, a search and destroy gametype and an attack and defend gametype. Some of these gametypes are pretty the same so maybe they will all be merged together into an "Objective" gametype.

When will DORC be finished?
We don't know yet, DORC is a spare time project but we do know that a public release is nearing.

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We are looking for an extra level designer, would you like to create a level for DORC then drop me an email v.vandelden@veni-studios.com

BTW screenshots will come next blog