So yesterday (Friday 4th), after Battery finished off his last bit of university coursework, we met at Propellor's and started planning the hackday.
This comes with some sad news; we discussed it, and decided that TurnShip won't be a main game any more. Prop has been arguing that it was just a learning exercise to begin with, which got out of hand, for a few months. There are some serious, ingrained flaws that probably require a(nother) rewrite to fix, and none of us really wanted to debug it all.
How much have we learned from TurnShip?
Enough not to do it again..
I haven't given up on TurnShip just yet though; I'll either carry on with the Python one to get it going, or spend the time rewriting it, in C++ and OpenGL. Other than the basic game, though, it won't be out for a while.
So what did we do for about 10 hours yesterday?
Let's see how far we can get on a full game in a day!
Our design philosophy, if we have one, is that games need to have an interesting idea for feature, which we call the hook. The hook needs to be that one concept that will fire us off into building a game around it.
TurnShip's hook was quite nebulous, a mix of steampunk airships, simple-but-complex battles and a country stealing water.
Platformer's is that the protagonist is a pacifist; his weapons aren't just lasers or plasma bullets, they only immobilize enemies or move them somehow, even though he's in the middle of a very platform-shootery game.
Simulation's is the multiplayer co-op, which will just be awesome.
So. I'm going to be coy about the hackday game's hook. But there are some clues!
- The acronym for the working title is BSOD, which describes it nicely. It's not the blue screen of death, though; we used that acronym because we're nerds.
- It's a two-sided mechanic, in the same way as Portal's guns or Ikaruka's polarity.
- It's a space shooter, on rails.
I'm interested to see if anyone manages to guess. On to photos!
Surprisingly, before the alcoholic ginger beer had been drunk.
Trying to make interesting but non-generic spaceship shapes, experimenting with things.
This generic ship shape didn't make the cut, grappling arms have been done to death. (Grappling "arms".)
So, we decided on the more triangly one at the bottom of the above image (not THAT one, the one above it), but as Prop modelled it we realised we could do some cooler things with it.
Texturing in Lightwave, working out what way up all the UV map stuff is. Not shown: The arrow on the back panel facing down and left. Whoops.
Not sure about the visual look of the game yet, but it may well end up quite pixel-stylized. But this ship will be rendered quite small on-screen, so the texture resolution isn't an issue either way.
While me and Prop were farting about with models and learning how to do UV mapping and textures, Battery was waist-deep in arcane rites to do with vertex buffers and depth calculations. The result, though!
The real thing is
less dithered (thanks, Flash/GIF format). It was a breakthrough moment for the game, but unfortunately happened at about 11pm. Defeated, we retired, but we'll probably have another hackday next week to get more done. We're aiming for something playable that we can upload
HackDay Results:
- The beginnings of a reusable Python+OpenGL engine that runs 3000 polys at 60 fps on an Eee PC.
- Ship and first enemy modeled.
- Learnt texturing.
- Resolved and planned the game's basics.
- Made a small demo of the hook to test, works well.
See you next week!
Author