Sunday, August 29, 2010

Prototype available to friends soon

Ok so I bought Unity iPhone License, and added the enemies and made them shoot. However I didn't bother with optimizing the draw calls just yet.

Instead I concentrated on adding the fun elements in the game. I improved the sensation of speed by adding a stretched particle system just in front of the player's camera and I enable emitting only when the player is boosting. I also added the rotation of mothership to align firing the planet off the face of the universe. The player can now go inside the cannon and drop the nuke. He cannot enter the cannon until the mothership finishes aligning, after which the cannon's shaft opens. This may change later on when I tweak the gameplay.

I encountered some problems such as the turret's gun's rotation to shoot at you got screwed after the mothership changes orientation. I thought it was trivial to solve, but after wasting a couple of hours I pushed the task down in my priority list. I also wasted precious time trying to fix a bug with the radar. This is how the rad should work. According to the ship's forward direction and up direction, we project the enemies on a plane (up = normal), but after this projection I want to show the projected enemies on an XY plane and it's the latter part which I've got problems with. The bug that I see is that in some quadrants, the result of the positions on the XY plane are skewed somehow. Haven't figured out the problem yet, but someday I have to face this.

A friend of mine has also started sketching the comic strip for the intro, hopefully I will be seeing the sketches soon. I've also contacted a friend of mine who may give me a hand from the musical aspect of the game.

For next week:
  • Prepare build for prototype testers including intro page
  • Tweak the enemy to be a bit more realistic (current he can shoot even if its not looking at you
  • Make some game over triggers and restarting the game.
  • Tweak the manouvrability of the spaceship
  • Also the timing for mothership aligning and getting the end of the tunnel with some enemies such as turrets and ships coming at you.
  • Cutscene to see mothership shooting planet

Monday, August 23, 2010

Turrets & bullets

This week I managed to get the hang of using a unity particle system for all the bullets by using the Emit() method of the ParticleEmitter. That will ensure just one draw call for all the bullets in my scene.

I have also made a Turret to focus on a target and start shooting at it. I also tried doing a prediction method that takes into consideration the distance and speed of the vehicle. I will need to add also into consideration the bullet's speed.

For Next week:
- re-add the enemies and make them shoot at the player
- optimize the textured enemies to use an unparented bones system (read this somewhere to minimize draw calls in unity)
- buy unity license

Sunday, August 15, 2010

New iphone/ipad game in development

I have just finished doing the game bible for my next game. The work-in-progress name of the game is HyperGlider. The name will probably change later on.

In short it's going to be a 3d space shooter game with intense action. The way how to hold the ipad will immerse the player even more in the game.

I will be using Unity and I will try to push the limits of the ipad to make it as visually appealing as this game: Star Wolves

I will be posting any updates about this game on this blog.