spaced jase

A couple of months back I started a new project, and this time it’s not using XNA. I decided that the very limited audience for an XBLIG project would be so limited that my somewhat ambitious goals for quality, content and player experience were simply going to be wasted effort.

I decided to refocus my efforts on a much wider potential audience and a much more ambitious project. Enter: Nycterent: Outpost. It’s a space-based exploration and construction game. The word Nycterent roughly means “Night Hunter” which seems to fit the game given the eternal blackness of space.

More information can be found at the Nycterent project website http://www.nycterent.com

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Categories: General | Gaming

Just a small update with a video to show the recent progress on Galactic Ranger. The video mainly shows space combat including music and sound effects. All the sound you can hear in the video is in-game, nothing was added after it was recorded. There is also some static objects (asteroids, space station) which use the same rendering method as the ships (diffuse/specular/normal/glow mapped). The asteroids use a single sphere for their collision volume and the space station uses multiple Object Oriented Bounding Boxes (OOBB’s) so that the player can actually fly through hollow parts of the station.

So here’s the video, more soon!

Tags: XNA, Galactic Ranger, Xbox Live Indie Games, XBLIG
Categories: Gaming | XNA | General

It’s been just over a month since my last game play update, so I figured it’s time to do another one. No video this time however, just a few screenshots.

First off, the change list over the last month:

• Replaced ship rendering technique. Now renders ships with Diffuse/Normal/Glow/Specular maps and they look great in-game. Nick Gravelyn’s ShaderToy was fantastic for letting me quickly write and debug the shader without having to kick into my game each time I change my shader.
• Designed the mission/level structure. Each story mission will be accompanied by one challenge mission and one Survival mission (to be confirmed/renamed later). A second challenge mission is unlocked when the first is completed. Each story mission and it’s sibling challenge/survival missions are unlocked when the previous story mission is completed.
• Designed a 3-tree upgrade system. Players will be able to distribute points accumulated on levelling-up into 3 areas of ship improvement. The player will need to decide how they distribute those points, they will not be able to upgrade to all items. Final items in the trees shown in the screenshot below have not been finalised. The trees are:
  • ‘Destruction’ – Improve the damage-dealing capabilities of your ship by increasing weapon capacity, fire rate and increasing damage. Also unlocks higher-end weapons.
  • ‘Mitigation’ – Survival by mitigating a lot of damage through hull strength and regeneration, also reduces chances that enemy EMP missiles will have an effect.
  • ‘Evasion’ – Survivability through the evading of enemies all together. Gives scanner jamming, missile decoys, better flares, faster ship etc.
• Added ability for player to be awarded experience points for kills which vary per level.
• Added ability for player to ‘level up’. Each level has a different experience point requirement
• Added Pilots. Basically a character of sorts that you progress with. All experience, levels, awardments and statistics are added to the Pilot you selected to play with. This allows you to continue to work on a specific pilot and have a separate pilot for your friends/family if they wanted to play.
• Added Awardments (achievements) attainable by individual pilots. There are currently about 36 awardments in the game, of which some are:
  • ‘Missile Command’ – Kill 100 enemies with missiles
  • ‘Frankly Flanking Failed’ – Kill an enemy while flying backward
  • ‘Skills Like OJ’ - Be the target of 10 or more enemies at the same time and survive for 20 seconds
• Worked on enemy AI a little bit, improved their handling of the scenario where they are about to fly straight into their target.
• Created a template level for my survival mode, which contains 15 waves of various numbers of enemies.
• Added EasyStorage 2.0 to handle save device selection for saving Pilots.
• Started to add a few things which are aware of if the game is running in trial mode (such as level selection)
• Purchased assets for the small fighter ships, which are shown in the screenshots below.
• Worked on pieces of the interface such as level select, pilot create/edit/selection.
• Implemented dual 1080p / 720p paths. UI elements are designed for 1080p and automatically rescaled if 720p is used (if the display is not capable or if the Xbox is not set to 1080p / 1080i)

And now some screens..

 

To wrap up, You can find me via:

Twitter: twitter.com/jasedeacon
Youtube: youtube.com/user/vereoraus
IndieFreaks: indiefreaks.com/community/jasedeacon/profile

Next update will focus on the various level types and probably some effect improvements as well. Plus video!

Tags: XNA, Galactic Ranger
Categories: XNA | Gaming

Over the past fortnight I’ve been working on various gameplay systems in order to progress to making the first level.

Some of these are:

- FTL system working for all ships. FTL must first be charged to full, then can be used to make a jump. FTL charge is reset to zero on jump completion. Currently AI ships FTL to a specific location if they are following waypoints and they are tracking a “JumpTo” waypoint type. The player’s ship currently just jumps 25km forward. Targetting to come at a later stage when I add all the targetting subsystems.
- Naïve missile tracking. Missiles take a very basic approach to tracking which can often lead to "orbiting" moving targets instead of hitting them. Basically, they determine where the target is going to be in X seconds in the future based on the target’s current velocity, where X is the time in seconds that it will take the missile to reach the target at it’s current location. It’s not great, and it needs work.
- Basic sound testing. Just guns, FTL jump and missile sounds at the moment. Gun sound needs to be more friendly for faster firing guns, it isn't at the moment. Missile sound is too "hissy". But they serve as decent indicators anyway.
- I’ve also started experimenting with Voice Acting, since the Single player campaign will feature quite alot of it. I’m hoping to get volunteers down the track for certain roles of yet-to-be-created characters, but for now it’s just me.
- Basic smooth menu interface. Uses GSM but heavily modified to provide a bit better experience in my opinion.
- Added a waypoint system. This is different to the objective system because Objectives are goals for the player, whereas waypoint sequences are for AI units to follow. There are currently 3 types of waypoints, Move (ignores all units and just moves to the waypoint), JumpTo (same as Move, except the ship Charges FTL and jumps there) and AttackTo ( moves to the waypoint but engages any valid targets on the way). Will be the basis of scripted events for all AI ships, friendly and enemy.
- Flexible UI messaging system. Text can be added to one of 4 predefined regions of the screen (easily changed) and behave a certain way. The left, top and right seconds all float the text up and then fade it out. The bottom text area just shows it and then hides it after a short duration.
- The actual enemy spawning is done by triggering a Sequence stored in the level XML file. The SequenceElement is “SpawnEnemy” and it automatically knows that it should appear as the ship is FTL jumping in. Positions are defined with a relative scope which can be Player, World or Node.
- Also added very basic impact effects for bullets and missiles. Same effect used for ships being killed.
- Uses broad-phase sphere/sphere collision tests then narrow-phase OOBB/OOBB and OOBB/Ray testing. Collision point tests aren’t being calculated correctly for OOBB/Ray collisions which is why the bullet impacts appear to be penetrating ship hulls when they aren’t.
- Motion Star field is working but gets messed up a bit when the player jumps.

As it stands I’m probably about 2 weeks away from getting a playable first level. There’s alot of interface work to get done, mainly around targetting and direction finding.

I’ve uploaded a video showing some of these elements.. embedded below. Make sure you watch it in 720p or you might not see some of the smaller ships flying around :) Direct Link Here

Tags: XNA, Galactic Ranger, Xbox Live Indie Games, XBLIG
Categories: XNA | Gaming

So I’ve moved blogs from Live Spaces to a self-hosted deploy of BlogEngine.NET. Spaces just ended up being too restrictive in the end. I don’t much like the theme, but it’s the spaciest type one I could find, so It’ll have to do until I get around to customising it to fit more with my intent for the blog.

It’s been quite a while since I posted any updates, but progress has been made. I’m just touching up some atmospheric and terrain rendering changes I’ve been making over the past several weeks so when I’m done with that I’ll post some pics up.

In other news, I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 on PC quite a bit, it’s a very good game despite the hackers. I also had a lull in motivation and picked up Fuel and Gratuitous Space Battles during the Steam xmas sales. GSB is pretty good, with some serious fun to be had by customising some weapons and scenario budgets.

Fuel is a good free roaming driver, with the more powerful motorbike being very fun. Though the good job they’ve done on the landscape engine serves as motivational material for me to keep coding..

 

I’d recommend checking it out if you’re interested in seeing a nice terrain implementation.. Granted it’s only planar terrain but they’ve done a good job :)

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Categories: Gaming