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[Gregg Williams]

Wow hadn't even heard about it. Of course I have no chance of a screening.

[HughSJ]

Before this I'd been vaguely aware that there was this one failed Dune project that was kind of a big deal, but that was it. The more I've looked into it and learned about who was involved / what was planned the more I'm completely blown away. One dreams of building something so spectacular that even unfinished it causes a paradigm shift for a whole industry.

[HughSJ]

Final update for the night:

The last two weeks on my end have been split between overhauling the data as mentioned in the last post as well as creating a new map to test out ideas for how Brigador levels should be laid out in the future, particularly in reference to our new impeding tiles such as grass and oil. To illustrate:


See how the tank gets mired in the oil and to a lesser extent the grass. Players piloting ground based vehicles need to stay aware of the terrain or risk getting caught in a deathtrap


The anti-grav platform on the other hand has the advantage of ignoring terrain as well as low objects such as jersey barriers. While players who pilot agravs need to be careful of their lower armor levels, the superior maneuverability ensures a greater flexibility when it comes to engaging and disengaging enemy targets.

Miring tiles present some interesting opportunities from a level design perspective as they affect both player and enemy ground based vehicles. Most levels from here on out will have at least a small portion of miring tiles to afford players the opportunity to create deathtraps for both the enemies as well as themselves. In this new map below for example, large portions of the level are covered in either grass or oil. As such, players piloting agravs will be able to use their additional mobility to great effect:

[JobLeonard]

Dang, that normal mapping looks seamless!

[HughSJ]

Cranking on the new trailer-- new intro sequence completed as of yesterday. So long as my computer doesn't blow up I should have the full thing done within the next few days. We've got a bunch of applications for things like PAX 10 and Megabooth due in the next 1-2 weeks so we need to get this new press batch ready to roll.

The other designer has been working on improving the game footage capture and compression. The new footage he's already managed to do so far is a nice step up from what we had for the first trailer. Hopefully we'll have something posted for you guys on that soon. Anyway, here's the aforementioned intro:





Damn I love old computers.

-------

On a personal note, just happened to see that a local art theater will be playing Jodorowsky's Dune on thursday night, so I'll definitely be taking time to catch that. Nice to have something to look forward to that isn't work related 

[HughSJ]

Anybody want to see five minutes of new gameplay footage from Brigador? How about two brand new tracks from Makeup and Vanity Set?

[JobLeonard]

Sexy. Both the gameplay and the music.

[Dazm]

Awesome works guys.

[HughSJ]

Getting some love from Rock Paper Shotgun 

[JobLeonard]

 

[HughSJ]

 

crash and burn

[ephoete]

Completely unrelated to this, has anyone seen the Jodorowski's Dune documentary? Because I don't live in a super cool city I haven't been able to get to a screening, but I'm more excited for this movie than anything else on the horizon:

Yes I did! And this is just great but I'm afraid I've such a faith for Jodorowski that he could write an episode of Friends I'd still love him.


Btw, who's composing the soundtrack here?

[HughSJ]

I got lucky and managed to hit a screening of it, and Jodorowski's Dune was just as good as I'd hoped. I'd love to command the kind of personality, charisma, and direction that man has.

As for music, Makeup & Vanity Set are handling the lion's share of the score, and have been doing a hell of a job with it too I might add.

[HughSJ]

Pair:



with this:





or this:





Had a major change in how we build maps-- the downside is that I'll have to build an entirely new set of maps, but the up side is that it's much much faster to do so now, and the new system will allow you guys to build your own maps relatively easily. Once we get all this stuff settled we'll start packaging the map editor with the game so that people can experiment. I'll also do a tutorial video one of these days on how to build and export levels to the game.

[HughSJ]

New track from Makeup & Vanity Set!

[HughSJ]

Been a long time folks, here's a new trailer for your troubles. We'll be at PAX, though not with a booth so if you want to see the game you'll have to track us down at either @hughsj or @gausswerks

Game is coming along well, completely redid our AI and asset pipeline so after a several month seeming hiatus we can finally be back to popping out new content.

[HughSJ]

Haven't posted here in a while, but we're still trucking along.



We've added force to projectile so they can kick back or torque targets based on the location of the impact. Original implementation had it such that the closer to the side you hit the more the force is converted to torque, but we found that was too granular an implementation so we've switched it to just 3 impact zone (left, right, center). Much more readable for the player this way and the binary of a torque or force hit helps delineate gameplay behaviors.




Not much to talk about here, besides that we've got stuff blowin up good now:

[HughSJ]

Had some issues with readability-- one of the main culprits being that all the units and props were rendered with too high levels of color saturation. Fine by themselves, but because we have additive colored lighting we'd either end up with bland lighting schemes or completely blown out colors. So here's the first draft on a new pass with those assets-- we still need to redo the lighting schemes to compensate for the changes in brightness and saturation, but it's progress:

[Howard Day]

Looks freaking gorgeous. And it's a whole lot more cohesive than it was, and the wonder of it is, that I wouldn't have even tagged that as a problem before you demonstrated how much better it could look. Really excellent work. Now, about those explosions....

[HughSJ]

Hahah cheers Howard. Don't you worry, we've redesigned how explosions and rendered so that it's a multistage system-- instead of a limited few giant sprites we can have various elements that can be tweaked to give off a specific type of explosion; there the smoke plume, the fireball, and any gibs that get thrown off, all of which can be repeated as much as we want at a times offset.

Once we actually get that thing plugged in I'll be sure to do a full post on it, but for now we've got all hands on deck focusing purely on gameplay.

As for the lighting, the issue is that the first units and props were added to the game before we had colored lighting, as a result they didn't account for the extra changes in value that would come up. It was just too much color and brightness everywhere, especially for a game that takes place almost exclusively at night. All credit to Harry, one of our programmers, who really pressed the issue. Once we went over everything we realized just how much of a difference it would make.