It's all about sucking!

The TorqueX editor sucks for a couple of reasons. To name but a few:
- camera name is not serialized on level load - so you have to manually type it every time you load a level or editor decided to refresh it after significant changes in the source code of your game
- it looks like you can't mount object on other objects in the editor - but it works OK if called from your game's code.
- All scripts used by editor are pre-compiled, so you can't change / fix / path it :
- There is no source code for the editor - so you can't... see the previous point

From now on, the game 'sucks' as well. A C# version of sucking tractor beam has been officially implemented and it works well - this time with the full physics! (No video this time, as I decided to limit media posting to weekly 'eye-candy' posts, so the progress will be more noticeable)

And last point in the topic of sucking... Apparently all games written for Andorid will be in... Java. Does not sound like a solid platform for mobile game development!

Scope Creep continues...

I've just added an unplanned feature - "disappear on touch", which may prove usable. Implementation time: about 15 minutes.

HUD is soo last century...

Rather than adding a 'standard' HUD to show current throttle state, I decided to try something different here - two pulsing 'gravity' rings indicating available power. The result is quite pleasing, but would need some more attention in the future. Also borrowed some art from Platformer Kit to make the game visually more appealing. The current list of features is growing quite rapidly - including features that I haven't initially planned to add. But then again, the better polish, the bigger sales :D

Tweaking physics - night two ...

The other night I watched couple of videos from B-class UFO movies from the '60s. One thing I noticed is that in all scenes flying saucers tends to wobble a bit (or a lot, sometimes you can even see attached strings). Since I like this 'effect', but don't want to make B-class game, I decided to add a 'wobble' effect for all collisions.

The easiest way to implement it in TorqueX  would be by exploiting angular velocity, which is handled by the engine off-the-shelf, the trick was to make the wobbling disappear after a while. Let's call the trick AWS - anti-wobble system ;)

This this "AWS" in action with minimal damping 1/10th
[video #1]
Doesn't look too good. Let's try it with damping factor set to 5/10th
[video #2]
Looks much better. But how about strong damping, 9/10th?
[video #3]

1/10th is a 'no' for me, but 5/10th and 9/10th looks equally interesting. Can't decide.

BTW: 10 Best UFO Hoax Videos on YouTube (mashable.com)

Introducing FSS (flight stabilization system) :P

Not a final solution yet, but I've introduced changes in how the ship behaves during and after collision. This is a new piece of technology after I had to abandon the Torque Game Builder.


#1 FSS disabled:






#2 FSS enabled:

XNA Game Studio - manual installation

A useful information on how to install XNA Game Studio without the setup bootstrapper.exe which tends to crash way too often:

Porting Toruqe Game Builder to Torque X

Rewriting stuff from scratch actually! Since Torque X (with XNA 3.1) allows you to create PC, XBox & Zune versions, the TGB seems to be a dead technology for me. Wish I checked that month ago. Still more bad news to come: Upcoming Windows Mobile 7 will apparently be addressed with different version of Torque! What you really need is a single version of source code for everything really - Unity 3D anyone?

Still I indent do finish this game first using Torque and then see what next.

Technology 1 : 0 Developer

Struggling to install XNA Studio on my machine. Bootstrap loader goes ballistic just at the start of installation and the log file says nothing interesting. Uncle Internet says the easies way to handle this is to reinstall the OS and start from scratch. Start from scratch MY EYE!

Update:

Technology 1 : 1 Developer

Managed to embeed a better quality video from photobucket. The day (night actually) is not lost after all

Anty-gravity and even-more-gore

Tried two new things this time:
1. Switched off the gravity. My assumption was that is should be easier to navigate, as you don't have to constantly compensate for the gravitational pull. Well, it was easier to a degree, however because this allowed to reach higher speeds the final outcome was: more crashes.
2. Added more gore - this seems to be a move in the right direction!

I am also trying different thing with game play, but nothing seems to positively impact the user experience. Except one thing perhaps: after a particularly heavy collision impact, reducing the UFO's engine power for a short period of time seems to work quite well.

Still researching the ways of getting good quality graphics into the game. Hiring a pro seems to be the way to go. And since I am writing about researching... I need to f**k off and start writing a spec for my dissertation, which is due (the spec) in two weeks time.

Current state of affairs: Pixel-wrangling artist needed!

In theory I have implemented all initially though-of features. I still have two or three more features on my mind that need to be fleshed out, implemented and perhaps included in the final game.

Not sure what would I do about the graphics. The Internet seems to be full of crap, but nothing appealed to me so far. I am not ready to invest in a 2d artists at the moment (both financially and mentally), as I don't have enough faith in that game (call it "a critical approach" if you want).


P.S.: My Dissertation Proposal has been approved a few hours ago, which can be translated as "even less time to spend on the game". Considering that I am already not able to function without my morning dose of double RedBull (no vodka!), the game is not going to leave the pre-production phase any time soon.

P.S.2: An interesting article to read (I still believe including zombies in the game is a MUST!)

• Best Zombie Games for Android (brighthub.com)

Gore!

A slight deviation from my initial idea, but the effect (once polished) could be a pleasing one:

This rises a question however. Should I limit my audience to +18yo by adding red dots?

Another late nite with behaviours...

No text, just pure action:

Behaviours - you gonna love (and hate) them

I think I finally came to terms with the behaviours.Here is one responsible for camera shaking during collisions:


That's what your see in the editor:

And that's what you see in the game:

Unfortunatelly it is all torque-script... it's gonna be sloow on low-spec hardware (iPhone gonna hate it). On the other hand, let's face it - script is perfect for rapid game prototyping. Once you know how to use it, creating shaky camera with some "BANG!" effect takes no more than a few minutes.

The day wasn't fully productive, firstly my game plays differently in stand-alone mode and when started from editor. Secondly, my Windows 7 OS is having some weird issues:

Could iPad MINI run this game? Smaller iPad 'Mini' and iPhone 5 details whispered online (intomobile.com)

Good music for an intro screen

I found a good musical piece, which could nicely fit for my game's intro screen. Not sure it is worth $9 though.
http://audiojungle.net/item/ufo/42981

FAIL #1

Trying to do a 'correct' thing by creating a behaviour responsible for initiating particle emitter during collision. The syntax for the behavious seems to be rather simple:

%template.addBehaviorField(particleEffect, "The effect to use", t2dParticleEffect, "", t2dParticleEffect);

but at the end my list of particle effects for this behaviour is not populated (except the "None" entry, which I am not interested in ).

Particles with Torque - piece of cake!

I remember a good few years ago, Torque was featuring quite an impressive particle engine. Right now it is even more powerful (I'd say it could easily compete with Unreal Engine 3), pulling a decent effect takes just a couple of minutes (mainly to create a bitmap)

Creating this kind of stuff from scratch would require a dozen of working days to create and than a few to polish.Actually that's what I had done for my first PS2 demo reel GravaStar back in 2005.

Anyway, the idea of adding comics style exclamations seems to be working fine (it looks way better in motion, static screenshot may be not that impressive).

Not particularly fruitful night

Not particularly fruitful night. I tried a few ideas (including some invisible, hidden places), but none seemed to fit into the initial idea, or even work in general :/  A few tweak here and there slightly improving the steering, but I feel like I am still missing the sweet spot of handling. Well this could be improved later on.

For now a few ideas I would like to try:

-          - One largish level with respawning creatures– survival / attrition mode. This could be done along the initially planned ‘career’ mode.

-          - Camera rapidly zooming in and shaking on stronger impact.

-          - Some comics style exclamations on stronger impact (“kaboom!!”, “bang!”?)

Some ideas I've been trying...

TGB - some more tweaks in physics.

A lot actually. Good progress this time, the abduction ray is finally able to suck in some unfortunate beings, but it can also lift other light objects. Not sure if I'll ever use this feature though. This is still an early pre-production phase, so I am facing a lot of changes and improvements in game mechanics.

Also I started toying with the idea of creating XBox 360 version first. The sales of indy-games for this platform are said to be really bad, but in theory this could bolster my finances before the hefty investment needed for buying a Mac (the iTorque does not come for free as well).