And the new Alpha is LIVE! http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com
This update lets you fly 3 of the 5 human fighters. Available are the Boomslang, Copperhead, and Cobra.
Things to note are the adjustment of the the double-tap barrel roll into a tap-and-hold strafe roll, improved dynamic music, the removal of the old testing explosion spheres, Better collisions for the alien fighters, removal of player invulnerability, better enemy wave timing, better text and font rendering, and tuned weapon sound FX.
For fun, try the Gamma Burster weapons on the Cobra. Think of them as dual-mini-deathstar lasers. They will wipe out your gun capacitors, but they will kill most light-to-medium fighters in a singe sustained shot. You have to maintain beam contact, however.
There are many more minor changes, so keep an eye out! Enjoy!
"You have to maintain beam contact, however."
that's the key issue facing current directed energy weapon designs, nice thinking. your latest work looks awesome.
Nice. Youtube version of vid is much better. Alpha was sweet too, I'd just say that the gunship was perhaps a little too slow and sluggish, and it would be nice to be able to map your controls to have turn left and right mapped to keys and roll to additional keys rather than left or right being purely mouse controlled. Also perhaps have escape take you to the menu rather than straight to desk top? Other than that I loved it, the thing has come a long way since last time I played it.
And here was me thinking it was their dire inefficiency.
that's another problem but when you mount it on a nuclear powered (surface)warship you have enough power to spare, some lasers can reach a 20% efficiency. That's poor but when you have a decent power source nearby it doesn't mean the weapon cannot be effective. ofcourse for mounting on a tank, a plane or a spacecraft that terrible efficiency will be a bigger problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5OqQn6gGig
More work done on the landing, tightening up animation, effect, and adding sound effects. Next to come music, and more foreground elements when the camera pans over.
Enjoy!
I'm not sure the forcefield effect is my favourite, but that might be because up until now in my head it's been something like a ripple rather thank sparky effect.
Finished the missile locking system and the Power management systems! Here you can see me quickly locking onto a Dfhertas and ripping off a Phoenix heatseeker. Just before it hits, I manage to lock on and fire a Cyclops Image Recognition missile as well.
Here, I just hit a Dfhertas with a Phoenix and then mess with a bunch of power settings after it explodes.
Here's a breakdown of how each power system works. Low is 25% power, high is 100%. Unpowered is < 25%.
Shields: Low 50% recharge rate, high 150%. Unpowered, shields drain.
Guns: Low 25% recharge rate, high 175%. Unpowered, gun capacitors drain.
Engines: Low 66% speed on regular and afterburner, high 133% + 150% fuel consumption. 200% consumption on Afterburner! Unpowered, afterburners are disabled and fuel consumption goes up.
Here's an example of the Boomslang with its engines at 100% over powered. It's pretty much the fastest thing in the game - but it's going to have a hard time shooting anything or taking more than a couple of hits.
Anyhow, now I'll be working on further damage modelling for individual components.
Enjoy!
Eugene Indie Game Con Recap!
(and slight art update)
It was a huge success, and here's what our musician Daniel Hoffman had to say about his attendance:
"Daniel here, just got back from Indie Game Con in Eugene. It was a blast! Thanks to everyone who came out and checked out the current build of the game.
Some feedback included:
"This looks amazing. "Wow, I really like the colors!" "The art is a amazing" "It feels really great!" "Blowing up ships feels great" "I could blow up ships all day" "feels really natural" "This has a lot of potential."
Things I noticed from watching lots of people play one after another is: On the radar the large ships are confusing, if they could have a different look on the radar than a giant orb I think that would help. People would constantly orient themselves to attack them while actual enemies were wizzing behind them.
Also when you come out of the launch bay the first thing you see are friendly ships. so the first thing people do is shoot them and then feel embarrassed that they shot the good guys. If you could see enemies first then your guys swoop in would be cool.
Of course everyone knew it was Alpha and that little things like that will be tweaked.
Also Ashley who has worked multiple cons said that was the busiest table she's ever been at.
Oh and a little kid wanted to be able to ram other ships with the big tank ship. I told him I'd pass that on.
My favorite was a very young girl who had a bunch of buttons who started playing then said "I'm going to be honest, I'm just playing so I can have one of your buttons" Then after when we gave her a button she said "And I liked your game too actually."
(Ashley: Knower of Lore, and Daniel: Maker of music)
This feedback has been invaluable, and we've added the critique to the Todo list, and hopefully the next release will have it implemented.
(Art update)
In the meantime I've re-implemented a trick that somehow got disabled. It's a method to add pseudo-3d lighting on pre-rendered sprites. The trick is this - all our sprites are displayed on planes. These planes aren't merely 4-vert polygons, oh no - they're a bit more complex.
What we have is a 4x4 grid - and each of the vertex normals are bent around the edges of the plane, until they're facing the back of the plane entirely. This simulates a spherical surface when lighting is applies. And since these ships are roughly spherical (very, very roughly) this actually works very well!
Here's an example of it in action:
Pretty convincing! Especially so for quick bursts of lighting like laser bolts or explosions.
Enjoy, and thanks again to everyone who checked out the booth at IndieGameCon!
Nice, it's little smart touches like this which will take your game from mere greatness to total awesomeness. Congrats on the successful con attendance, totally unsurprised by how well it went down, still, good for you to get some confirmation from the public. Always nice to find out that what you're working on isn't a total waste of time and get positive feedback.
I second Talon's comment. We've all seen that you put a great deal into this project, and I'm sure it is fulfilling to put the effort into something like this and be rewarded with great feedback. It'll definitely help give the game even more of an edge
Thanks, TALON_UK! It is indeed good to know that other people are enjoying the game - and liking the direction it's headed. Sometimes when you're too close to your work it can be hard to keep that in mind.
ryo80: Thanks, sir! I hope you keep liking what you see.
So, yesterday I added shield read-outs to the targeted ship display. The day before, Jan had helped me get the armor/ship damage looking right - before it wouldn't show the proper damage for the proper angle of hit.
You can also see the updated player ship status display - it now also shows readouts for your top/bottom armors. Next up, fixing some ship damage bugs, adding more damage effects to the ships (arcing lightning, sub component explosions, engine sparks)
Until then, Enjoy!
Hello, everyone. Tonight I set up the missile code to only let you fire one missile per slot (limiting the Copperhead to 5 total missiles, for example) You no longer get a new missile every 10 seconds. Sorry!
I also set up the status display representation of your missiles to do a little animation when they're fired. Enjoy!
Hello! Tonight's update brings you the working retro boosters, in the game, finally! You can now boost backwards! (At 60% of your max forward, non after burning speed) Jan finished the code for the movement earlier this evening, and I added in the effects and some tweaks in logic.
Still to do: Custom throttle animation for RetroBoost, add boosters to all ships, human and alien, not just the Copperhead, enable the AI to use this in combat, and smooth out the transition from forward movement to reversing slightly.
We've also added a bunch of new damage VFX to both enemy fighters and your own, all players now take the same damage as the enemy fighters, and the enemy damage sensing has been cleaned up, fixing numerous bugs. We also solved the issue with navpoints, making that entire system completely functional. Next up for me is the autopiloting cinematic between navpoints.
Hello, everyone! Over the last few days I've been working on polishing a rather stale part of the game - the orbit camera. As most of you know, you can trigger this by holding down tab, and then rotate around your ship. It's very pretty, but the motion of it and the general feel was very, very basic. So I took some time away from extremely frustrating bugs (more on that later) to build myself a better, more dynamic system. I focused on making the motion smoother, having the camera react to the action around it, and generally tying to make it feel more exciting. Here's where I landed!
As you can see, we also have reverse thrusters working on all the fighters, now. It definitely adds another wrinkle to the gameplay, and I know I will have to revise the missile AI so they aren't constantly fooled by it.
The other part this Orbit camera revamp allowed is more cinematic external shots of your ship. That being so, I took the opportunity to add a long-missing part of the game... Autopilot cinematics. These play when you transition from one nav point to the next. I'm pretty proud of how these are looking. I still need to add some trail/engine effects to the whole shebang, but it's still really neat looking.
I love the homeworld style cinematic black bars, and I always have.
Anyhow, I'm working on polishing this up, and then building the first actual demo mission! the only cinematics/gameplay loop left to do is the landing sequence, and I have a pretty good idea what needs to happen there.
Till next time!
(P.S... Those frustrating bugs were fixed within 5 minutes of Jan signing on yesterday, making me feel like a right moron.
What's this? Procedural facial animation and lipsyncing in Unity on a character? Yep, actually it's very simple. Now I just need to con someone into doing voice work for me. http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com/FaceAnim/FaceAnim.html
This system takes any audiofile and turns it into an animated face. I'm adding support for emotions based on the name of the audio file being played.
This will be used as the comms screen in Wings of Saint Nazaire. There will be variations for all human pilots, capitalships and contacts.
Many thanks to Ben Chandler for the character artwork!
Why make your own stuff when you can simply take work from Howard?
not sure if 'SgtMarkIV' has permission to use this in Brutal Doom and he has a reputation of cutting and pasting others stuff without any permission or credit. Anyway I instantly knew this cockpit graphic was taken from this very thread as soon as I saw it!
Howard I hope you don't mind, I completely forgot about it but when cleaning out old projects that I worked on I remembered I used your cockpit image. The project was a 3D Asteroids clone developed in Unity that you can find below. https://github.com/Renari/Asteroids3D/
Posts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZalqNSGfHE&feature=youtu.be
Armondikov: Thanks!
And the new Alpha is LIVE!
http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com
This update lets you fly 3 of the 5 human fighters. Available are the Boomslang, Copperhead, and Cobra.
Things to note are the adjustment of the the double-tap barrel roll into a tap-and-hold strafe roll, improved dynamic music, the removal of the old testing explosion spheres, Better collisions for the alien fighters, removal of player invulnerability, better enemy wave timing, better text and font rendering, and tuned weapon sound FX.
For fun, try the Gamma Burster weapons on the Cobra. Think of them as dual-mini-deathstar lasers. They will wipe out your gun capacitors, but they will kill most light-to-medium fighters in a singe sustained shot. You have to maintain beam contact, however.
There are many more minor changes, so keep an eye out!
Enjoy!
that's the key issue facing current directed energy weapon designs, nice thinking. your latest work looks awesome.
And here was me thinking it was their dire inefficiency.
More work done on the landing, tightening up animation, effect, and adding sound effects. Next to come music, and more foreground elements when the camera pans over.
Enjoy!
Here, I just hit a Dfhertas with a Phoenix and then mess with a bunch of power settings after it explodes.
Here's a breakdown of how each power system works. Low is 25% power, high is 100%. Unpowered is < 25%.
Shields: Low 50% recharge rate, high 150%. Unpowered, shields drain.
Guns: Low 25% recharge rate, high 175%. Unpowered, gun capacitors drain.
Engines: Low 66% speed on regular and afterburner, high 133% + 150% fuel consumption. 200% consumption on Afterburner! Unpowered, afterburners are disabled and fuel consumption goes up.
Here's an example of the Boomslang with its engines at 100% over powered. It's pretty much the fastest thing in the game - but it's going to have a hard time shooting anything or taking more than a couple of hits.
Anyhow, now I'll be working on further damage modelling for individual components.
Enjoy!
also i like your idea of making managing the power an important part of the game.
:thumb:
Eugene Indie Game Con Recap!
(and slight art update)
It was a huge success, and here's what our musician Daniel Hoffman had to say about his attendance:
"Daniel here, just got back from Indie Game Con in Eugene. It was a blast! Thanks to everyone who came out and checked out the current build of the game.
Some feedback included:
"This looks amazing. "Wow, I really like the colors!" "The art is a amazing" "It feels really great!" "Blowing up ships feels great" "I could blow up ships all day" "feels really natural" "This has a lot of potential."
Things I noticed from watching lots of people play one after another is: On the radar the large ships are confusing, if they could have a different look on the radar than a giant orb I think that would help. People would constantly orient themselves to attack them while actual enemies were wizzing behind them.
Also when you come out of the launch bay the first thing you see are friendly ships. so the first thing people do is shoot them and then feel embarrassed that they shot the good guys. If you could see enemies first then your guys swoop in would be cool.
Of course everyone knew it was Alpha and that little things like that will be tweaked.
Also Ashley who has worked multiple cons said that was the busiest table she's ever been at.
Oh and a little kid wanted to be able to ram other ships with the big tank ship. I told him I'd pass that on.
My favorite was a very young girl who had a bunch of buttons who started playing then said "I'm going to be honest, I'm just playing so I can have one of your buttons" Then after when we gave her a button she said "And I liked your game too actually."
(Ashley: Knower of Lore, and Daniel: Maker of music)
This feedback has been invaluable, and we've added the critique to the Todo list, and hopefully the next release will have it implemented.
(Art update)
In the meantime I've re-implemented a trick that somehow got disabled. It's a method to add pseudo-3d lighting on pre-rendered sprites. The trick is this - all our sprites are displayed on planes. These planes aren't merely 4-vert polygons, oh no - they're a bit more complex.
What we have is a 4x4 grid - and each of the vertex normals are bent around the edges of the plane, until they're facing the back of the plane entirely. This simulates a spherical surface when lighting is applies. And since these ships are roughly spherical (very, very roughly) this actually works very well!
Here's an example of it in action:
Pretty convincing! Especially so for quick bursts of lighting like laser bolts or explosions.
Enjoy, and thanks again to everyone who checked out the booth at IndieGameCon!
:thumb:
Keep it up, man!
ryo80: Thanks, sir! I hope you keep liking what you see.
So, yesterday I added shield read-outs to the targeted ship display. The day before, Jan had helped me get the armor/ship damage looking right - before it wouldn't show the proper damage for the proper angle of hit.
You can also see the updated player ship status display - it now also shows readouts for your top/bottom armors. Next up, fixing some ship damage bugs, adding more damage effects to the ships (arcing lightning, sub component explosions, engine sparks)
Until then, Enjoy!
I also set up the status display representation of your missiles to do a little animation when they're fired. Enjoy!
Still to do: Custom throttle animation for RetroBoost, add boosters to all ships, human and alien, not just the Copperhead, enable the AI to use this in combat, and smooth out the transition from forward movement to reversing slightly.
We've also added a bunch of new damage VFX to both enemy fighters and your own, all players now take the same damage as the enemy fighters, and the enemy damage sensing has been cleaned up, fixing numerous bugs. We also solved the issue with navpoints, making that entire system completely functional. Next up for me is the autopiloting cinematic between navpoints.
Enjoy!
all awesome
Frequent updates at our Discord channel!
As you can see, we also have reverse thrusters working on all the fighters, now. It definitely adds another wrinkle to the gameplay, and I know I will have to revise the missile AI so they aren't constantly fooled by it.
The other part this Orbit camera revamp allowed is more cinematic external shots of your ship. That being so, I took the opportunity to add a long-missing part of the game... Autopilot cinematics. These play when you transition from one nav point to the next. I'm pretty proud of how these are looking. I still need to add some trail/engine effects to the whole shebang, but it's still really neat looking.
I love the homeworld style cinematic black bars, and I always have.
Anyhow, I'm working on polishing this up, and then building the first actual demo mission! the only cinematics/gameplay loop left to do is the landing sequence, and I have a pretty good idea what needs to happen there.
Till next time!
(P.S... Those frustrating bugs were fixed within 5 minutes of Jan signing on yesterday, making me feel like a right moron.
What's this? Procedural facial animation and lipsyncing in Unity on a character? Yep, actually it's very simple. Now I just need to con someone into doing voice work for me.
http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com/FaceAnim/FaceAnim.html
This system takes any audiofile and turns it into an animated face. I'm adding support for emotions based on the name of the audio file being played.
This will be used as the comms screen in Wings of Saint Nazaire. There will be variations for all human pilots, capitalships and contacts.
Many thanks to Ben Chandler for the character artwork!
61rvlAfsPDL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-v3-big,TopRight,0,-55_SX278_SY278_PIkin4,BottomRight.jpg
http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Panthers-Battle-David-Guenther-ebook/dp/B00RF4ZHHA/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?ie=UTF8&keywords=david%20guenther&noEncodingTag=1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&qid=1428860540&redirectFromSS=1&ref_=mp_s_a_1_1&sr=8-1
not sure if 'SgtMarkIV' has permission to use this in Brutal Doom and he has a reputation of cutting and pasting others stuff without any permission or credit. Anyway I instantly knew this cockpit graphic was taken from this very thread as soon as I saw it!
https://github.com/Renari/Asteroids3D/