Holiday Project

[Sarevok]

Wow. This game is seeing a LOT of polish. I really hope you find great success with this Starglider.

[Starglider]

I really hope you find great success with this Starglider.

Thanks, although bear in mind that 'great success' for Xbox Live Indie Games would be 10,000 copies sold.

The tornado attack is really quite amusing to use on tightly packed enemy formations, the creatures go out of control and crash into the ground, and their projectiles spray everywhere and sometimes cause friendly fire casualties;

[weemadando]

I really hope you find great success with this Starglider.

Thanks, although bear in mind that 'great success' for Xbox Live Indie Games would be 10,000 copies sold

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/20/steam ... ath-vii-o/

XBL indie games is so ghetto which many regions don't even have access to and MS has no interest in.

No point publishing there for any business reason.

[Stark]

There's no XNA in AU just because MS can't be fucked dealing with the OFLC on behalf of a bunch of stupid zombie games. Given the size of the AU market I doubt it'd add more than 10% to sales anyway.

[Starglider]

XBL indie games is so ghetto which many regions don't even have access to and MS has no interest in.
No point publishing there for any business reason.

It is possible to sell over a million copies on XBLIG, but the only known way to do that is to clone Minecraft. The annoying thing is that is was one of the worst (minimal content/features) minecraft clones that got the most mindshare and sales, although some of the other clones are doing pretty well as well. Of course I'm not making this game for commercial reasons, a lot of the design decisions (e.g. hard to learn control scheme) make no sense for a casual indie cash grab.

[Sarevok]

It's all about marketing and distribution. The game is awesome but most people may never hear about it. You need to bring this game to PCs. Also consider WP7,it's XNA so should be easy to port and a game of this depth will create major buzz on the WP. You will also need to start bringing focus from gaming press to this project asap instead of just catering us folks on a small niche forum like this. Even though you are not doing this for profit Windhaven could be like Braid or Osmos - both highly original,innovative and be renowned.

[Starglider]

You will also need to start bringing focus from gaming press to this project asap instead of just catering us folks on a small niche forum like this.

Well, for what it's worth I have 84k views on YouTube.

Proposed trophies for the 'Accomplishments' screen (these are like Xbox Achivements but with three levels brone/silver/gold and without gamerscore);

Code: Select all

(medals on ribbons of various different shapes?)
 * Monsters Not Welcome : Survived the first encounter with no island damage.
 * Guardian Angel       : Saved all the airships in the Taahay Evacuation.
 * Tower Defence        : Destroyed all enemies in mission five using obelisks only.
 * Held The Line        : Destroyed the entire enemy convoy in mission eight.
 * Admiral of the Fleet : Didn't lose any friendly ships in mission eleven.
 * A Whisper of Wings   : Didn't wake any enemies in mission fifteen.
 * Legend of Windhaven  : Completed the story campaign on Hard

(tiny models of monsters?)
 * Early Bird           : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Shadow Worms
 * Cleanup Crew         : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Phantom Rays
 * Exorcist             : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Claw Fiends
 * Exterminator         : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Void Slicers
 * The Harder They Fall : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Ether Breeders
 * Apex Predator        : Shot down 100 enemy birds
 * No More Nightmares   : Destroyed 10,000 pts of Nightmare Stars

(medallions with weapon symbols on them?)
 * Tesla's Parrot       : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Ball Lightning
 * Bubble Bird          : Spent over five minutes in Crystal Egg
 * Deep Impact          : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Meteor Storm
 * Honorary Dragon      : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Dragon's Breath
 * Great Balls of Fire  : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Fireball
 * Warp Nine            : Spent over five minutes in Ether Flight
 * Bolt from the Blue   : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Chain Lightning
 * Hard Rain            : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Monsoon
 * Twister              : Destroyed 10,000 pts of enemies with Typhoon

(themed cups?)
 * Fly Like The Wind    : Got an X rank on all racing challenges
 * Above The Clouds     : Got an X rank on all soaring challenges
 * Hawkeye              : Got an X rank on all shooting challenges
 * Unstoppable          : Got an X rank on all survival challenges

(freeform sculptures)
 * Stone and Water      : Flew under 12 different bridges without crashing.
 * Ooh, Shiny!          : Found all 32 golden nests in free flight mode.
 * Ornithologist        : Flew all 8 playable birds.
 * Aboreal Waterfowl    : Managed to perch a swan in a tree.
 * 100% Feathery        : Completed all challenges.

[LaCroix]

Aboreal Waterfowl

This is sooo.... WRONG!

[Starglider]

The monsoon attack looks kind of weak, as it just summons rainclouds. However these clouds dump about ten tonnes of holy water into the air, which dissolves enemies like acid, puts out fires, washes away toxic waste and heals any birds that fly through it.



I find it amusing to imagine my characters getting into the World Of Darkness and giving all the vampires a pathological fear of rainy weather.

Generally though, alas slow progress recently due to commercial workload.

[Starglider]

Upgraded the look of the menus to make a better first impression;





Also here are some action shots of the monsoon attack

[D.Turtle]

The first menu's layout looks terrible, IMHO. I'm guessing the entire menu is "Challenge Mode(s)", and then Racing, etc are the different ones available. The different choices look to squished together (especially the Arcade/Survival next to the back button). In effect, it looks like you just tried to somehow fit them all together on one screen.

Maybe just put each type of the challenge modes on its own screen (of course then you have lots of menus, or maybe put racing & soaring on one screen and shooting & arcade on another one.

[Starglider]

The first menu's layout looks terrible, IMHO.

A fair point, I have tidied it up a bit;

In effect, it looks like you just tried to somehow fit them all together on one screen.

I prefer to minimise menu depth. There is a submenu on each challenge anyway (with best time, rank, bird, name etc).

[Dave]

The first menu's layout looks terrible, IMHO.

A fair point, I have tidied it up a bit;

That's much better. Was just about to comment along the lines of D Turtle, but you fixed it already.

[D.Turtle]

A fair point, I have tidied it up a bit

That looks a lot better.

I prefer to minimise menu depth. There is a submenu on each challenge anyway (with best time, rank, bird, name etc).

Yeah, lots of menu depth sucks, and it seemed to me like you were trying to somewhat harmonize the different menus (same sized writing, pictures, back button at the same spot, etc), so I was trying to think of a way that that could be done.

[Starglider]

Yeah, lots of menu depth sucks, and it seemed to me like you were trying to somewhat harmonize the different menus (same sized writing, pictures, back button at the same spot, etc), so I was trying to think of a way that that could be done.

My original design document for the UI did have a 'challenge type' menu where this menu is with artwork for the activities, and then a challenge list with a map of the course, silhouette of the bird species used and tiny video preview to the side. With the amount of time I've had for this project that would take at least a month to implement though, and it just wasn't worth it compared to gameplay-relevant features, so in the end I just improved the shaders (and now layout) of the original prototype GUI.

[Starglider]

Some more bits of story art;



Everyone hates games with endings that are just a few lines of text, so Windhaven has six art panels with voice acting for the epilogue, plus if we have room I will have the actors do a VO for the credits. The final pieces of art for the main story are held up by final script rewrites, but the epilogue art is in production now.

[Starglider]

Completed the mesh for the final monster type: ether breeders. These are the only enemy that weren't in the original design document (two years ago); I added them because I wanted to hold the spines until late in the story campaign, and the middle part needed a bit more variety. They don't directly attack the island but they do drop clusters of eggs that hatch into shadow worms. Those spikey tendrils will shoot giant laser beams at the player if they get too close; I will animate them to writhe hideously and then point at you when you fly in range. When destroyed they will fall apart into five separate segments with explode individually. Also they permitt yet another Ace Combat 'homage' in that if you're very good you can fly down the middle of them the way you can with the SOLG (in AC5).



In my defence I would like to say that I honestly didn't intend for them to be that suggestive. With procedural content you just start typing in plausible cubic curves and trig matrices, and sometimes it just comes out as a giant flying sperm/penis/vagina thing. I blame Shroom for corrupting my subconsious somehow.

[Shroom Man 777]

Bravo.

[Starglider]

Currently implementing character switching during story mode. I have added a little graphic to aid with memorising which D-Pad direction selects which character;



(orientation varies with the transition direction). If the birds are close together the camera pans over to the new target, if they are far apart the engine crossfades to the new view.

[Starglider]

Not much progress on Windhaven because I have been too busy playing with GPGPU on my new 7970s. I wrote a little test app that uses Sphinx 4 (open source voice recognition) and components of Bitphase APEX (research AI) to make shapes based on voice command. You can say 'computer create a blue cube attached to a yellow pyramid' and it makes the appropriate wireframe. The 7970 has the same architecture as the Xbox Next GPU, so if XNA/XBLIG is available to that platform and it has Kinect integrated then I might make a simple 'holodeck' app (e.g. voice and motion controlled 3D Scribblenauts). It would support things like 'create forest create clearing create house make roof thatched' (wave arm - open hand -> place house - point finger - trace path) 'create path'.

In the short term though, I should actually complete this game.

[Starglider]

Smoking chinmeys and volcano; the volcano damages and sets fire to your bird if you get too close now. I had to reduce the realism to get a decent amount of smoke on the X360 without killing the framerate.



Graeme did an excellent job of recording the leader of the vulture cult, so much so that I've adjusted the script to give him some extra cutscenes. His interpretation of the disgraced politcian as a ersatz-scottish lord hell-bent on destroying the southern establishment that constantly frustrated his ambitions was really quite gripping. Generally all the voice actors raised their game for the second attempt at recording the script, I think we have some actual characterisation now.

[Sarevok]

Out of curiosity Starglider how much time are you devoting to this project ? I understand this is a hobby project,but any rough idea about how many man-hours it took the game to reach current state ? Also you mentioned you used procedural generation for the terrain and some of the meshes. But what about the code ? Any luck generating some of that as well ?

[Starglider]

Out of curiosity Starglider how much time are you devoting to this project ?

Somewhere around 8 hours a week.

I understand this is a hobby project, but any rough idea about how many man-hours it took the game to reach current state?

About 500 hours.

Also you mentioned you used procedural generation for the terrain and some of the meshes.

All of the 3D geometry and about half the textures are procedural.

But what about the code ? Any luck generating some of that as well ?

That would be pointless, because it's all custom hand-optimised logic and calculus and it would take me much longer to write the spec and the generator than the actual code. Also the point of this project is (relatively) easy recreational coding, it is what I do when I am too burned out to work on difficult AI code.

[Sarevok]

Don't people making business apps have various UML based tools that can also generate some C++ or Java ? Something like that for game development would be cool. I was wondering if you considered making something like that.

[Starglider]

Title art for F/A-18 AGGRESSOR. I think it needs some retro postprocessing to match the game (e.g. colour palette restriction, light scanlines);



This is for the retro combat flight-sim that I intend to make a mini-game in Windhaven.

Don't people making business apps have various UML based tools that can also generate some C++ or Java?

Yes, but they only give you the class outlines, the DB persistence boilerplate and the GUIs. Sometimes marshalling/unmarshalling as well. Bitphase has actually produced more advanced code generation tools, although still in house at present (we switched focus from commercial release of those to algo trading a while back).

Something like that for game development would be cool. I was wondering if you considered making something like that.

The demands of game development are quite different to business apps and auto code generation is not appropriate; the equivalent is licensing libraries and engines / engine components. IMHO there is huge scope for use of AI in game development, but I would focus on the content generation (both offline and online procedural generation), which is where the majority of the costs are in (most) modern games. Licensing the engine and paying coders to do game logic is cheap by comparison.