3DDark Forces inspired game art

Howard Day

Hey, guys. Been working on some Dark forces inspired game art! It's all simple diffuse maps with Beast lightmaps on top, running in unity.



I'm planning to have this be a quickie demo of a 3rd person retro shooter on mobile devices. I also got started on a custom Corellian Transport that'll be sitting in the Imperial hangar of the base - something that's taking a lot longer to finish than the hallway test did!



When that's done, I've got a plan to do a Sentinel Class landing craft in the same style, and then start piecing everything together into a playable level. I've got no grand plan for this - I just want to see how much cool stuff I can pack into one mobile shooter level. I do plan on releasing it for free when I'm done.
Enjoy!

TALON_UK

Nice, great retro feel to it, and happy memories of that game.

:thumb:

evil_genius_180

Sweet stuff. I like how everything looks newer, but it still looks low-ish quality, like the games from the '90s. I love Dark Forces, it's one of the best SW games from the '90s, in my opinion. (though, there are a lot of great SW games from the '90s)

Howard Day

TALON_UK: Yeah, totally! I have some incredibly fond memories of this game - and I played through it not too long ago, and it's still really awesome.
evil_genius_180: Thanks! That's exactly what I'm going for.
Here's an update! Got the thing running on android. If anyone wants to give it a shot, PM me.
Enjoy!

evil_genius_180

It's looking great. :thumb:

I agree with you on the game, it's easily one of my top 10 FPS games. One of the things that I love about it is that it's all FPS, at no point does your character use a lightsaber, unlike the sequels. I think it was one of the first, if not the first, Star Wars games to not have any lightsaber or space ship combat. I have it on Steam. Unfortunately, their version isn't Linux compatible, though. (which is stupid because it's a DOS game) However, I can download it on Windows (or WINE) and copy it to my Linux drive and play it by using DOSBox to load it, without Steam. In fact, I may have to do that later. Talking about it is putting me in the mood to play.

Knight26

Looks awesome howie

Howard Day

Thanks guys - here's the link to the current webplayer build. Be warned, it's pretty rough.
http://www.hedfiles.net/DFMobile/DFMobile.html

Wiz

Wow that takes me back, great stuff!

IRML

this is awesome, I LOVE dark forces

I don't know how you do it, playing old games was like playing with lego, very blocky but you used your imagination to fill in the details, somehow you have improved it but retained that old feel so you still use your imagination, that transport in the first post is the perfect example of this

homerpalooza67

I loved the earlier Jedi Knight games, those were fun!
Then when you finish, you go back and put in cheat codes so you can dismember stormtroopers with your lightsaber....

Tralfaz

Absolutely loved playing Dark Forces when it first came out (yes, I'm that old). Some people and I were all playing it to see who could get the farthest first. Spent many a lunch time playing it. Unfortunately, I can't play video games any more due to a vertical imbalance in my eyes and difficulty seeing through bi-focals, the game play makes me very nauseous. Miss the good old days of networking two computers together with a null cable and competing with my son, who even at that young age would whip my butt!

Road Warrior

This made my day. Brings bad fond memories.

Say- hope you do more star wars stuff- as everything you do turns out great.

stonky

Wow, that's fantastic! I absolutely LOVED Dark Forces when it first came out - it was the first time that you could really run around in the Star Wars world and shoot stuff Funny, I just installed it again about a week ago. You're implementation looks perfect, the juxtaposition of the low-res textures and 2D character sprites with modern day reflections and light sources really works. :thumb:

homerpalooza67

I'd love to give it a spin. Sending you a PM

Howard Day

https://build.cloud.unity3d.com/distro/install?id=ZkiXeG5R3 <- New Web build. For those who'd like to try it on device - try this link instead!
https://build.cloud.unity3d.com/distro/install?id=byTfXZ5A2
Please let me know how it works for you.
Enjoy!

evil_genius_180

Well, on my Android tablet, it tells me that it can only be installed on Android devices. :shiner:

The other link does nothing, all I get is a white box.

homerpalooza67

The android version is straight out of the '90's, so great work there! control is a bit rough, i cant shoot anything and moving took a little to figure out. Nicely done!

Howard Day

evil_genius_180 wrote: »

Well, on my Android tablet, it tells me that it can only be installed on Android devices. :shiner:
The other link does nothing, all I get is a white box.

Oh, shiiiiiiiiit - so what's your tablet type? Is it very recent? Or very old? I will get an actual .apk link up so you can grab that.

homerpalooza67 wrote: »

The android version is straight out of the '90's, so great work there! control is a bit rough, i cant shoot anything and moving took a little to figure out. Nicely done!

Thanks! Still really working on the controls. Hopefully they'll be better soon.

evil_genius_180

Howard Day wrote: »

Oh, shiiiiiiiiit - so what's your tablet type? Is it very recent? Or very old? I will get an actual .apk link up so you can grab that.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, 2012 version. So no, not very recent. "Very old" depends on your point of view, I guess.

Howard Day

recently built, non-cloud APK, give it a shot!
http://www.hedfiles.net/DFMobile.apk

And let me know if it works for you!

evil_genius_180

It's acting stupid on the tablet. (not downloading properly) I'll download it to my desktop later and then transfer it to the tablet.

evil_genius_180

Hey, that's really great so far. I finally got it working, after I downloaded it to my real computer and transferred it via the USB cable to my tablet. (remember, a tablet can replace your laptop :rolleyes:)

Howard Day

Yay! Okay, I'm glad it's not completely borked. What kind of frame rate were you seeing?
Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

evil_genius_180

60 FPS. It ran pretty smoothly. Great job so far. :thumb:

By the way, I figured out my issue with downloading the .apk on my tablet wasn't limited to your link. I was trying to download something from another site last night and it didn't work there either. So, it must be an issue with the latest version of Firefox for Android, because it worked the last time I tried that before I upgraded. :rolleyes:

Howard Day

So! Some updates for you - I added a hangar, a Tie Fighter, and put the Rebel Corellian in the scene as well. It's now in Unity 5, and after much fiddling, I managed to get the lighting working like I'd like. It's still ages slower than the old Beast Lightmapper (This scene would take 5 min in that, it takes almost 45 in Enlighten), but at least the quality is there.











Anyhow, if you'd like to play the latest build, here are the links:
Android: https://build.cloud.unity3d.com/distro/install?id=b1eKEIdha
Webplayer: https://build.cloud.unity3d.com/distro/install?id=b1MP48_2p
Enjoy!

Road Warrior

These always bring a smile to my face.

Thank you for your time and effort Howard Day.

evil_genius_180

It's looking awesome. I love the freighter.

TALON_UK

Absolutely gorgeous, these shots look great, some serious detail you've managed to get in there too.

Howard Day

Here's an update - I've buttoned up the hangar, added front and back walls, reflections and a bunch of other good stuff. I also figured out how to get the Lightmap bake times in enlighten down to a reasonable number. in beast I was looking at 4-5 minutes tops... Enlighten was taking almost 4 hours. I've gotten that down to 25minutes - which is something I can live with.







And for those of you curious, here's how I did the reflections!


Enjoy!

evil_genius_180

Great stuff. It's really looking awesome.

Road Warrior

You are the MAN.