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Game Looking Very Much Like A Game

by Steve Acaster · 07/15/2013 (11:25 am) · 18 comments

Quote:
*wheeze * wheeze * It's been a hectic old month, and that is of course, one month more than I had wanted. But now we have music, instructions ... which players will probably just ignore ... and a fair few other things. It's finally looking quite "game" like.

yorks.deta.in/pics/mainmenu_screen.jpg
Gameplay instructions are done, and that was quite a task to get the neccessary information across without it being confusing or overly long winded which is something the British are really great at ... being overly long winded that is ...

The settings dialog got a complete purge. There is now an "environmental audio" channel, so you can turn the wind/rain/ambience up and down depending on how much you want to listen to the music or not.


i.imgur.com/SRVIR7W.jpg
i.imgur.com/yvqXcKB.jpg
i.imgur.com/sKlwLnx.jpg

The whole game has had all of it's user interfaces completed ... apart from a couple of changings I now want to make to a couple of things ... and there's an intro system which isn't overly long and main menu screen.

Video: 0:23 min/sec.


There's also a clickable linkage credits screen.

yorks.deta.in/pics/credits.jpg

And Tactical Battle Mode is pretty much finished. Literally the only thing remaining is some death/pain audio, as currently it's the stock "uhhhghhh" which doesn't sound very dramatic ... :/

And here's a decent play through of a saved game. The music skips a bit due to editing things down and my PC grinding to a halt every so often under the strain of recording ... which is when I realised that I was still using a 3 year old version of FRAPS and could really do with downloading the new one ...

Video: 12:85 min/sec.


The video shows off the various screens and options and my attempts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a battle against the Ai.

Last up a short video showing off my take on "beam" weapons. I wasn't actually going to bother making a video for this specifically but did so to show my method of attaching a staticShapeObject with an animated texture to the muzzle of a weapon and then scaling it along the vector whilst a raycast does the hit detection and deals with impacts, explosions, debris, decals and the such like.

Video: 1:03 min/sec.


I've also cleaned up a whole host of really random, esoteric bugs which I found occur in very specific circumstances. Really, I sometimes wonder where the hell these things come from - though admittedly a couple were clear why did I think doing it that way was ever a good idea issues.

The strategic hexes have been finalized and recreated. This time they are actually using the textures of the environments in which they are based. The whole "Citadel Campaign" has been fixed and is now finished.
This is the "bonus" campaign, which was supposed to be the "short" campaign but actually ended up being pretty enormous in it's own right. Captured territory in amber.

yorks.deta.in/pics/path_yorkshirerifles.jpg


The player has to blast a path through occuppied territory, building up their core of veteran troops as they go and storm the pirate Citadel at the other side of the board. Capturing forts as they go gives upgrades to weapons. All hexes and fort locations are randomized on start of the campaign, and all other hexes have a randomized enemy force defending them to give a little variety of opponents during tactical battles.

There's still a few more things to sort out, some coding to do, 2 more dirigible models to complete, the instructions for the main campaign to write and I have 1 post-it note of bugs for the main campaign to fix.

yorks.deta.in/pics/pangea_new.jpg

#1
07/15/2013 (3:09 pm)
Looks great Steve! I also really like the name. :)
#2
07/15/2013 (3:46 pm)
The ambience has much improved with the new visual effects and the music.
#3
07/15/2013 (4:14 pm)
Bloody Marvelous Mate!

Love your way of dealing with beam weapons, may have to experiment with that myself, sure beats modding the engine to do the same :-)
#4
07/15/2013 (4:41 pm)
Wow Steve this is looking great! I really like the feel of all the menus and the flow of it all. It really does look like a game now :-). Very polished... Keep it up!

That beam is a thing of beauty, its nice to see good effects like this being done.

I see you got a blogspot, going to have a yorkshirerifles website too?

What are your plans regarding how you are going to release it? Greenlight?

I really want to play this :-)
#5
07/15/2013 (5:47 pm)
Looking very awesome Steve. That sky is amazing! I'm sorry... I know the sky is nothing compared to the rest of it, but I still noticed it first. Is it your own or did you buy it? If the latter, can you hook me up please, mate?

Looking very polished at this stage. Good work, as always.
#6
07/15/2013 (6:12 pm)
Just a note on the beam laser thing - a better way of doing it would to have the normal always face towards the camera. My "beams" are really nothing more that 2 rectangular double-sided polys making a cross (with some fancy flash stuff at the muzzle and impact point).

I'll get on to sorting a website out soon ... soonish ... I've been looking at payment plan options. www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-payment-processors/ I was thinking BMT Micro, though I know that Mode7 use FastSpring. And yeah, Greenlight, but not moving on that until it's complete and for sale elsewhere.

@Dan
The sky is a predone skybox (back from when cgtextures.com did them some years ago), and the filter is a stock one from Gimp. Inside the material files is a comment:
//GIMP cubism tilesize=2 saturation=5
So I guess that was for me to remember how I did it! ;)
So long ago I couldn't remember. I think I sorted the edges out manually with copy, paste, 50% transparency or something to merge them.

I've got a few more things to sort out and then I'll release a demo. Might be by the end of the month, will be before the end of August.
#7
07/15/2013 (6:15 pm)
Fantastic stuff, mate. Congrats on getting to this point! The beams look great, though the blue charge-up before non-blue beams seems a bit odd.

For possible future reference ;).
#8
07/16/2013 (2:39 am)
Choice for the zeppelin is a good one;
it has a strong appearance IMO.

Very nice work Steve!
#9
07/16/2013 (8:19 am)
This is looking awesome - but where's the cat-girl game?
#10
07/16/2013 (8:38 am)
Looking good mate!
#11
07/16/2013 (11:37 am)
Looking good! Love the feel of the game.
Good luck to you. I hope your game does well.
#12
07/16/2013 (1:21 pm)
Looking great Steve, looking forward for the demo.
#13
07/16/2013 (3:54 pm)
@Steve - thanks mate. That'll do it nicely. ;)
#14
07/17/2013 (2:39 am)
Awesome looking ! Like the beams also.
#15
07/18/2013 (6:02 am)
nice work :)
#16
07/19/2013 (8:40 am)
droooling all over my keyboard right now!!! utterly awesome game you have done :o)
#17
07/19/2013 (10:42 am)
That looks really cool!
#18
07/25/2013 (2:57 pm)
Hey Steve! I'd like to write about this game in the 1st edition of the T3D Magazine I'm working on! Could you contact me on ljorgensen@winterleafentertainment.com ?