A few progress videos

Saturday

 Sundays progress

Ship design day1

Ok. So I suppose I should post some art seeming as the code is “flying” along….

The idea for the game came from Alice and Josh so maybe they can talk about the influence behind it. My brief for this was that the game is a top down arena based multiplayer shmup in hoverships. Awesome! First thing that popped into my head was GTA (original) meets Wipeout 2097. Again, Awesome! I’m a massive fan of both games and I love hoverships. Something about being able to travel fast and strafe but also go over land and water is very cool. My favourite vehicle in BF2142 is the hover tank, so much fun!…anyhoo. Back to art.

So, I looked at some of the wipeout ships. They are design classics (of the future) imo. Simple shapes and great paint jobs. No fancy silhouettes with pipes and wires everywhere. They look like they are built for crazy speed while being able to take a missile or two.

So I want to get that kind of functionality and believability put into our hovership designs. Also as this is to be a top down game I should think about the silhouette from above. This is what I came up with.

SHIP 1

SHIP 2

SHIP 3

Ship 1 was our favourite of the 3. Ship 2 was too simple and ship 3 was beginning to look “transformersy”, which I’d rather stay away from. As we want this to be a multiplayer game it’d be cool to have at least 2 ships. So it was suggested I make a single fuselage version of the ship 3.

SHIP 3 version2

Which is a lot better. I also made a single fuselage version of ship 1 but I didn’t like that so much.

Ship 1 version2

Anyway, The winners are Ship 1 and Ship 3 version2. Ship 1 has a jet fighter look to it and ship 3 version 2 is more formula 1 racing car. Which is a good balance and gives them quite different looks but both look like they are built for speed and agility with some heavy armour added.

So I began modelling ship 1 and this.

MODEL

Also. I’ll be create the arena. So this needs to be a battle arena but at the same time it needs to be big enough to allow the ships to get some good speed. So I create this testing arena with a sloped velodrome wall around it. Which will allow the ships to reach high speed and pull some G’s around the bends. In the flat area I’ve added some simple geometry, ramps, walls, etc to see how the ships reach to these.

ARENA

Cheers

-rick

Estimated time into project: 3 hours.

We have: basic movement and physics for a simple ship model. 

So far, really very impressed by Unity's user friendly-ness. It did crash once however, that was less good. We have signed up for the free 30 day trial of Unity pro so that we have access to the dynamic shadows, its a bit of a bummer that that's not in the free version but I guess they have to make their money some how.

Next up: proper controls, averaging the ground normals to make the ship more stable on less flat ground, and some sort of follow camera.

Hi there!

Welcome to our challenge blog.

Most normal people will be relaxing and taking some time to visit family or friends and relax this bank holiday weekend... We are not normal people.

We are three Indie game developers who are taking a break from our big project (Bort) to try and create a game in 3-and-a-bit days from the 24th of August 2012 to the 27th.

We are going to be using this as an excuse to learn how to use Unity for the first time, as there is no better way to learn than through pressure!

The plan for our game "LFZ (Live Fire Zone)" is a small arena based multi-player shooter, with a wipeout-y aesthetic and as many of the standard boost/missile/shield/power-up tropes as we can fit in through the time that we have.

I'm going to try to post on this little blog once a day or every time we have a cool feature finished as a log of progress, hopefully the others will too so we will have a neat record to show off at the end. I imagine it will mostly be art assets at first but I'll try to get some game play demo videos on here too and some discussion about how we developed interesting features and what we think of Unity.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy following our developments.

Josh x