This week has been so busy I didn't even have time to write a post in the middle of it. But Game Jam is over and our game is done! It turned out absolutely awesome, and the original idea was a great one. There is talk of continuing to work on it and release on the XBox Live Arcade. I will try to post more info about the game itself soon.
It is Spring quarter here at UCI, and that means another Video Game Development Club one-week Game Jam! The teams are set up and every game must have something to do with shadows. Our team has the basics of a game idea pounded out, and by next Monday at 11:00 it needs to be functional. See you then ;).
Well, it's the second day since my last post. I had a lot of problems with playing two different animations on the same object (for example, making my player's lower body play a walking animation while his upper body pointed a gun). I tried about four different ways, and all of them were bugged in some unfathomable way and didn't quite work right. I fell back on using two seperate objects, one with the lower body hidden and one with the upper body hidden, which I thought would create a terrible seam. Fortunately, it seems to be working okay (just wait 'til I get to crouching).
Anyway, I should show some of those promised screenies:
So, outside of struggling with the animation, I put in grenades and started on the AI. It's gonna be AI for the next few days, I think.
It's noon on Tuesday of Spring Break week, and I spend almost all of my waking hours since Sunday morning sitting here programming. This is the project I've mentioned a few times before. The plan is to make a tactical, squad-based third-person shooter. The game will play in a number of self-contained "missions", each of which will be characterized by an important "planning phase" and then an "execution phase". During the planning phase, the player will complete a scouting mission (perhaps some sort of mini-game) to acquire information about the area the mission is targetted at (blueprints and maps and such), and will use it to lay out a rough plan for his squad members to follow. Then they and their squad complete the mission in the 3PS part of the game. The most notable elements in this part will be the ability to climb on and over walls and obstactles, and enemy AI and difficulty that should enable and encourage the use of stealth.
So far, all of the work has been on the shooting part. I have the basics (movement and collision), some very fun particle effects (flying shell casings, dropped clips, and bullet holes and impact effects), and a simplistic climbing system that allows hanging from and climbing onto map elements (just a few big boxes so far). I will post screenshots tomorrow, by which time I hope to have the split animation system worked out so the player character will stop looking like some kind of crazy contortionist.
School is busy filling my head with binary trees, hash maps, and recurrence relations at the moment, but when spring break arrives I intend to put some more work into Nebula and my as of yet unnamed tech demo. In the meantime, I thought I'd plug a game that has been in progress in DarkBASIC Classic for an impressive amount time: SoulHunter by zzz (Jarl Larsson), a dark Zelda-esque RPG. Jarl started the game six years ago, and it is just now reaching its Alpha stage, so go check it out!
