Too Busy

I've been too busy with my full time job (lecturing at St.Martin's Institute of I.T.) that I didn't progress anywhere with the balancing of the weapons.

I will probably rescale down the project into just a shooter without any storyline for the time being. Then we see how it will be received by the public and guide the project accordingly.

The major problem I'm seeing is that I had envisioned the big screen of the ipad to be a big plus when navigating and directing the shit with the accelerometer, however people get their forearms tired quite quickly. I had introduced the touch-joystick as well, but it's not the same feeling.

New weapons done but not balanced yet

So this week I have added the ray-gun (previously I was referring to it as the BFG, but decided that the ray-gun has more potential) and also the missiles.

The ray-gun fires for a couple of seconds and you just point it to your enemies and damage would be given to the enemies. I have to tweak the recharge time and how much it stays on.

The missile will follow an enemy if you lock on to him. Right now it will lock immediately. Maybe I will add a couple of seconds before it locks. I will also need to make it more obvious that it locked on the enemy. Again I need to tweak the recharge time and also have a limit of missiles and add pickups for missiles.

I have added something which wasn't in the sprint... Actually three things. A crazy boss level where you have to chase an enemy and an alien structure made of smaller pieces that follows you. Still need to balance everything but it's looking good. The other thing is customizing the controls and placing the buttons wherever the user wants, although on a grid. And the last thing is to optionally seeing your vehicle, ala AfterBurner, but I need to add collision with it now.

I have noticed a slow down since I added more HUD stuff. I'm already using SpriteManager, but something is slowing down the framerate and narrowed it down to the HUD. It's not number of draw calls though. I will need to investigate more. If the worse comes to the worse, I will add an option for less details. It didn't effect the framerate on the iPad though.

I wanted to push out this sprint's prototype to the user but it doesn't feel right yet. So I will push it later during the week when I have sometime in the evenings.

What's next?

Balancing

Collider for your visible ship with checks for camera not penetrating objects

performance tweak

minor bugs with ray and missiles

Next sprint

I have redone the tutorial level. We'll see how it goes from the feedback this week.

The Touch (Joystick) control system is in place. I don't like it much, even because the game is now easier IMO. I prefer the Tilt control mechanism.

I have also done a survival mode level. I noticed that people just wanted to shoot down stuff. So I added that even if it wasn't planned.

I also met with an old friend of mine, who is going to have a go creating some 3d models. Cool.

So my next chunk of energies will be dedicated to

- adding pickups

- BFG which will give a short burst of energy after it charges

- Missiles where you have to lock on to an enemy and then fire away

- Adding the above to survival mode

Last sprint was hijacked :)

The last sprint was completely changed. Some valuable feedback was coming in and I found it more important to address them rather than the features in the last sprint.

I implemented an auto locking system. It's now very easy to shoot down enemies IMO. I will probably put that on for Easy mode (whenever I implement difficulties that is)

I introduced a tutorial level instead. Still needs a lot of rework. In fact I got some more feedback on this too. The tutorial should be really small. The next iteration, the tutorial should be incorporated into a level and shooting should be very early in the tutorial. Navigation is not the fun part of the game but shooting is.

Also I should add a touch control system ASAP since I got some complaints, especially when playing on an iPad, that they get tired. Wimps! :)

So my next iteration will basically be

- get tutorial level right

- touch controls

Next HyperGlider sprint... BFG, Missiles, Overshield + gameplay tweaks

I'm releasing the first prototype to my close friends to play test it a bit.

I encountered a couple of problems, namely the framerate drop due to draw call for each sprite. So I started using SpriteManager for the HUD. I also implemented properly the radar. I will be posting a separate post on that. I also introduced an simple intro, where a draft comic strip is displayed and then a dialog is presented. All the graphics are drafts and will probably not make in the final version

While I will be waiting for some feedback I will be working on the next stuff:

- BFG... a huge blast that needs to recharge

- Missiles... lock on an enemy and shoot away

- Overshield... you can boost and blast into enemies

- tweak the gameplay to make it highly action packed

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

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

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.