Iteration 13 is available on the main site – http://www.VoidDestroyer.com

Hope you download and enjoy

Doing final bug fixes/polishes and play testing – hoping to release iteration 13 tomorrow or Thursday. What’s left is to create the installer, grab a bunch of screen shots for the website and then create a “promo” video – though I’ll probably release iter 13 first then create the video – damned things take a over a day some times.

Thoughts on the play test: very neat little game. There’s a big gap though when the player waits for resources enough to build the shipyard and the marine ships for taking over the bases. That will definatly need to be repaired with more missions, sub objectives, a iterative attack on the bases (destroy a weapon, or defenses first etc). Also the passive act of bases getting resources needs to be augmented with a bit more active form of mining, and having pirates/enemies take notice and try to grab those resources for themselves. There’s no shortage of improvements to be made, but as usual everytime I release an iteration I’m feeling pretty good

Here’s a very rough – sketch/draft/notes of what I plan on working on for the next iteration – after which the game would reach “beta” stage and then the focus going more towards creating a story.

add colony platform – adds to population limit – if destroyed takes populatin with it – boosts food production
pursue – engage – flee AI
some kind of a free cam to see action better in ship mode – eg: select an object press F6 to view it, some kind of a free cam – potentially as a “probe” or “recon drone” deal
free cam – potential – alt left click in ship mode to look at another target in ship mode

turret AI fixes – close enough to fire – avoid friendly fire
error correction on path finding – eg: marine ships entering in a asteroid base – if they get confused they can find their way again dynamically
billboard missiles
missiles MIRV able to shoot projectiles
skybox enhancements – tactical “see through” – rotation
hud for base and nearby landmarks
enemy base AI – store defensive ships for when attacked, or launch ships to patrol before attacks
enemy base AI – help other’s being attacked – call for help
independent/pirate stations/bases launching attacks
in battle editor – swap sides/take sides button – eg player has 5 ships versus 7 enemy ships – player clicks swap sides – player now takes those 7 ships as own and gives 5 ships to other faction – eg: easily play scenario from other side of the fence.

visualize objectives – eg: if destroy target – highlight target in a different manner, if go to, highlight target or spot on hud and tactical mode

fix turret mode – both single turret and multi turret
repair corvette
re-code transport ships to take advantage of new art (showing pods that they have)
capital ship “maneuver” mode – like in tactical mode
“collision detection” on explosions – leading to flak and area of effect weapons and push backs on death
better explosions – attach them to object hit to avoid an odd trail of hits when the hit object is moving at a rapid pace
better “landing” (use a collision box to detect)
missions/objectives/triggers
command ship abilities
ctrl left click in ship mode to issue command ship ability – in ship mode
rock mining

Working towards it, hopefully within the span of 7 days, working on adding ships to the game, after which will work on getting them to spawn out of the gates, then play testing and bug fixing. Should be fun – looking forward to it

The goal is to release iteration 13 in about two weeks. Things that are left to do: iron out some small issues with the new ship changing interface, and add some of new Outsider ships to the game, playtest and bug fix.

I originally thought I’d update the main game to allow the player to travel through the gate, but upon further thought, I’m not ready for that yet, plus I’d rather release iter 13 and focus on the story elements in iter 14. The basics of the code is there, but I’d have to give the player a reason to do it, and since that is the realm of missiones/story I’ll leave that alone for now.

In other news, the “basic” beam weapons (and beam turrets) have been vastly improved, they are basically ready now, yay. The more advanced “particle fx” beam weapons still need work, but since none of those ships will appear in iter 13 (they will be saved for the commercial version) this portion isn’t a priority right now. There’s also been coding happening on the “shield” system, good stuff.

In other other news, this blog is a good resource for me, I read it and got some interesting reminders of previous challenges and accomplishements. So I’m glad that I took the time to write some of those things down, and hopefully I’ll get back to the semi weekly update schedule of the blog. Ditto on some of the videos, watching the old ones and the newer ones gets me motivated.

But project is moving along – iteration 13 is scheduled for the end of September, though it might cut a week or two into October.

Happenings – gate travel is mostly in – new map loads, and multiple ships can come and go, even some developments on the sound design phase. Here’s a very rough video video – its unlisted on youtube since its so bare bones.

In other news the game engine now supports “beam” (aka “lasers”) weapon turrets (which also allow for multiple beams per turret) – these go along with some very exciting new ships for the Outsider faction.

The past two weeks were very busy “real life” wise. Me and my wife painted the living/dining rooms (including the ceelings) – about a week ago, and after the cleanup and some other real life getting in the way (some of them very nice) of game development deals.

Anyway this weekend was a bit of a catchup on doing “nothing”, partly to blame was the rain all day today weather. But this meant that I had a very good productive game development weekend during which I worked on the “gate travel” system. Basically right now there are “rock gates” in the game out of which ships of the “Outsider” faction come into the “sector” and cause trouble. To add variety to the game and to have a more interesting story and elements I always intended the player to be able to travel via these gates as well. So right now the player is able to activate/deactivate these gates for travel and pass through the gate. Which right now results in a panning back of the camera and the ship speeding off into the void and then the ship is removed form the game world.

This took a bit of a engine re-design, basically adding a collision object class. A collision object (as opposed to a physical object) isn’t shown in anyway on the screen yet ships can still collide with it. Basically its an invisible square/rectangle. When a ship collides with it something will trigger. Right now the gate travel – but in the future other possibilites are on the table, for example mission triggers, objectives (eg: go to position), weapons (flak/granade weapons), and even a push back on a ship blowing up within a certain radius. Lots of interesting stuff I hope.

Next up is having a new map load and the ship exiting the new map’s gate.

Gate travel has a lot of interesting possibilities and it brings a lot of complecities, right now I’m trying to take it one step at a time and see where it leads.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Lots of things have been happening, had two very productive weeks, my focus jumps around, but that’s the state of things right now, many things need improving, adding to etc. Here’s a summary:

Changed how the hud in ship mode to shows the targeted ship’s status, speed, and distance – instead of the “text boxes” on the lower left – it now shows this information in the target’s target box. It also shows 3 “colored diamons” – that light up when certain conditions are met. For example if enemy is in weapons range – the green diamond lights up. The hud also now has a 2d arrow – the 3d arrow is still around but will most likely go away. This arrow points towards the enemy when it is off the screen.

Added a better way of ship changing – basicaly showing you a list of your ships, you can then chose the one you want to switch to instead of the blind < > keys. The “ship switch” screen also has a camera that shows you what’s happening with that selected ship, so you can also use it to see what your ships are up to. You can pause the action or let it continue.

Debris added – when ships die – they can leave behind debris – which will linger for some time and then die themselves.

Certain ships can have guns that recoil, weapons can also push back the firing ship when they fire, and all weapons can now push the target that they hit.

Was actually hoping to add a few screen shots to this, been wanting to do this for a while since its so bare, ran out of time tonight though.

Glad to have put out iteration 12, it feels a bit incomplete and it feels as if it took longer than it should have. There’s a few things to “blame” here, though not all of them bad. First it is summer, and it has been a time of really nice weather (sunny and hot though very dry – so I suppose its reletive if you ask a farmer). Meaning that me and my wife have been going out a lot during the weekends, beaches and other outdoor activities, as well as usually a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. Nights and weekends are my primary time to work on the game, so this cut into development.

The other factor is actually art related, Drew’s friend has been helping quite a lot and so there’s been a good amount of focus on art, I often found myself tweaking textures of ships and other objects, the usual “rule of thumb” that the last 20% of something takes 80% time might not exactly apply here, but it does feel that way sometimes when I’m fiddling with a mesh to get a slight improvement that maybe is only visible to my eye.

So what does this mean to iteration 13 and the future? Well the good news for the project is that once summer is over development will speed up – due to having more time, and even in about a week my wife is heading to her childhood home for about two weeks so during that time I think I’ll revert to my “bachelor” life style of being glued to the computer.

Plans for iter 13 can be summarized by this statement – lots of little stuff and a few big things.

One of the big is coding the game engine to support “gate travel” – so the player will go through the gate and end p ina new sector. This involves putting in “invisible” collision objects – so simply put just physics “bodies” – nothing that ends up on the screen, theese will sit and wait for collisions at which point they’ll trigger things – like gate travel. Other things will be to trigger mission objectives – eg: go here.

Small things:
improved ship switching – show a “gui” that lets you select the ship to switch to, sort by distance, show info such as health, distance, target, class etc.
more hud visuals and tactical – objective visuals, show target health/speed/range in hud marker (in 3d not on the “gui”)
new weapon types and properties
ships leaving debris when they blow up

There’s more here if you are interested.

So I think lots of exciting things to come.

Iteration 12 is released. Hope you enjoy

Doing final testing and bug fixes. Fixed a bunch of save/load bugs and other issues. Had a very strrange bug pop up last week and take up a lot of time to figure out (still not sure the exact cause/solution – but crash no longer triggers).