Friday, October 5, 2007

Backstep to save the project

Lots of things have happened to BRAVE. I got the FGE (Flight Game Example) integrated into the game (or vice versa) and I have started working on the gameplay a bit more. I've dropped back to TGE 1.5.2 while the TGEA LOD bug in 1.0.3 is worked out. I really want the game to run with shaders and if TGEA isn't going the way I need in Jan next year I will implement the Modernisation Kit and just use TGE.

My humans are still using the job system, but I have introduced landers (just mock ups) and have created some spawn points to work on the waves. I did a mini crunch to get the game playable, but there is still heaps of work to do before I can nail down a tech demo.

Here's some screenshots of the game so far. I have put in Defender sounds as placeholders until I can create my own sounds. I was playing Bosconian the other day and when the action gets thick, there's lots of sounds going off. The sounds you hear in the old arcades is the sound design I want to create for BRAVE. They are simple sounds which you learn to know what they mean, a human is being picked up or killed, you get a free man, an alien shoots etc. I also want them to be synthetic so they are just like the old arcade games.

I have to hand it to Decane for the excellent FGE kit. It has saved me heaps of time in development, and the flight model in it is almost perfect. I want to add straffing to the flight controls, and I am going to change the aiController of theirs so I can tell it which ships should not fly like planes, but like floating platforms. The landers for example float down the ground looking for humans. They don't pitch and roll like planes would.

Next I am going to get the landers pickup the humans, get them to rise to the stratosphere and convert to mutants, add scoring and level complete. I'll post an update mid October. Of course it all sounds like a big rip off of Defender - that's because it is. I want to make a 3d Defender as the basis and then derive my own game from that game play dynamic.




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