Phew! Made rather excellent progress in the weekend's glorious sunshine (huzzah for improvised monitor hoods).
The game and pace is starting to really come on now, a good job really as there isn't all that much time left.
Not much progress on the art this week as we've been focusing on fleshing out the game modes and scoring system. We've dropped a couple of modes for the sake of realistically being able to make the submission date, but depending on how things go, we'll look at putting them back in afterwards.
Beforehand, we just had a simple co-op game running. Since the last post we've got:
A functioning frontend with sign-in and Avatar support! (and it's rendered onto the cockpit screens)
Stacking combos and scoring system
Specific font graphics for the various bonus and combo messages
Infrastruction set-up so that we now have selectable game modes and scripted waves and cycles
Single screen 4 player co-op
Split-screen 4 player vs.
Music (courtesy of Kevin MacLeod)
Some sound effects
We had some rendering issues with the blocks, but after messing with all the mip mapping settings, and re-jigging the textures, it turned out to be mis-matching meshes due to a mix up in source control (we only recently switched to a shared home Perforce server). So now I've got to go undo some of those texture changes...(and re-assign the materials and re-export all the meshes).
Working remotely from each other is damn handy, but being able to bounce ideas off each other on a whim when you're sat in the same room should never be undervalued.
The music going in was cool, XACT is rather brilliant, within minutes we were all humming the in-game tune, and within a few more minutes Minifig was planning a mute function for it =)
Here's a grab from an early build. Placeholder backdrop with the old ship and the first pass at the blocks (the res on this will probably be too low to tell, but the textures were way too busy).
Early Days
It's a puzzle game meets shoot-em up!
Here's a shot of the frontend...kinda ;-)
Whoops
The actual cockpit shown here is rather half assed, the UVs and AO map are completely screwed up and it doesn't even have a colour or spec map. However, I like this shot as it's from when Minifig was first getting to grips with rendering stuff to a textured poly and we ended up with the game running on the cockpit monitor!
Oh. And the name of our game is there too. Neo Smash!
Finally, here's a shot of the concept of the co-op gui. That's one of the actual backdrops in the game (for now, not sure if we'll run it alongside the new one or just drop it).
Gui co-op
This just shows the layout, your team's score in the top left, your "target to beat" in the top right (thank you Geometry Wars 2), repulsor energy bar on the top with the multiplier bar beneath it along with your current progress wave/cycle wise. Your progress through the current wave is shown on the bars to the sides of the screen. Oh, and power ups you activate appear on the bottom there.
The blurry bits are the gamertags of the participating players (left), and the player gamertags of the team whose score you're trying to beat next (right).
Power ups and downs are probably the next big thing on the to-do hit list for us. Getting the vs. splitscreen mode working this weekend was brilliant, it's really starting to feel like a proper game now.
Mkm
