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[a1studmuffin]

Hi everyone,

Michael from Space Dust Studios here - we're a Melbourne-based indie video game developer made up of ex-devs from Dead Space, Battlefield, Need For Speed and Silent Hill.

Last year we broke away from the AAA corporate world to start our own game dev studio. We spent some time in pre-production on a few concepts, and just received a chunk of funding from Film Victoria (a government assistance program) to develop a vertical slice for our new game Obliteracers (formerly Space Dust Racers).

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/368740
PSN: https://store.playstation.com/#!/en-us/games/obliteracers/cid=UP0895-CUSA05428_00-OBLITERACERS0001

It's a love letter to games like Micro Machines, Mashed and Circuit Breakers, except we support a stupidly high number of couch co-op players with some novel controller tech.

We've decided to make the entire development process transparent from concept through to final release, and we'd love to get your feedback on what we're doing! If you're interested, you can take a look at our dev blog here:

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/intro-dust-ions/

Thanks for reading!
Michael

[The_Otherworld_Agency]

Haha hey Michael! Great to see you starting a dev log for this. Looking forward to all the updates.

[sidbarnhoorn]

Artwork looks awesome. Looking forward to seeing more! :-)

[a1studmuffin]

Thanks guys, can't wait to get rolling on it! Let me know if you have any suggestions for stuff for us to talk about in the dev blog. First up we're going to talk about our tools and processes for working remotely, after that we'll probably get rolling on some concept art and early gameplay videos, but any topic is fair game!

[a1studmuffin]

New blog post is up. I'm starting out by covering the basics of how we work together as a team, hopefully it's helpful to indies starting out!

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/tools-and-processes-for-remote-game-development-part-1-communication/

[a1studmuffin]

Part 2 is now up - this week we cover collaboration. Feedback welcome!

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/tools-and-processes-for-remote-game-development-part-2-collaboration/

[a1studmuffin]

The final part is now live - focusing on security and backups: http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/tools-and-processes-for-remote-game-development-part-3-security-and-backups/

What else should we talk about?

[a1studmuffin]

New post is up - this week Nathan runs us through the character design process for Space Dust Racing.

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/space-dust-racing-character-design/

[a1studmuffin]

Our first development update is here, in which we discuss multiplayer and networking:

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/dev-update-june2014/

[a1studmuffin]

Glen Stuart (our Lead Technology Developer) is writing a series of articles on why we went with Unreal Engine over Unity. Hopefully of some interest:

Part 1: http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/unity-vs-unreal-choosing-engine-space-dust-racing-part-1-adventures-unity/

Part 2: http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/unity-vs-unreal-choosing-engine-space-dust-racing-part-2-unreal-deal/

Part 3: to come...

[danieru]

How are more people not subscribed to this? 

[a1studmuffin]

Hahaha thanks danieru!

We've just finished our 3 part article on Unreal vs Unity, focusing on source, community and the future:

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/unity-vs-unreal-choosing-engine-space-dust-racing-part-3-source-community-future/

I'm pretty excited about the next update, where we're finally going to share some gameplay footage from our first milestone build, complete with trash talking each other.

Thanks for the support!

[a1studmuffin]

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/space-dust-racing-first-look-early-gameplay-footage/

We've just posted a first-look early gameplay video, showing 2 months of dev work demonstrating 7 players over 5 locations playing online PC multiplayer against each other. We're very happy with how it's progressing so far!

[Bombini]

This looks awesome!
I am looking forward to see the weapons in game!

[a1studmuffin]

Thanks Bombini! So far we've got the following 4 weapons:

Mine layer: drops 2 proximity mines on the road (can be jumped over by other racers)
Smart missile: homing shark missile that chases + chomps onto a victim, then explodes
Turret gun: a machine gun with 20 rounds that locks onto racers in front of you with a targeting laser
Oil slick: pretty self-explanatory
Dumb rocket: Fires 4 rockets in a row, no auto-aim so spray and pray!

We're also planning on adding a few more for the vertical slice in September:

Shock shield: an electric shield that temporarily makes you immune to damage - you can also ram other players to discharge the shield on them, causing their vehicle to take damage and steering to become erratic temporarily
BBQ: flame side-jets



For the full game we're looking at 12 weapons all up. If you've got any ideas, throw them at me!

[a1studmuffin]

In our latest Space Dust Racing development update we discuss playtesting, the evolution of Clawtopia, and showcase Herman's skiff from concept sketches through to final 3D mesh:

http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/development-update-july-2014/

[a1studmuffin]

Nathan our art director whipped up this promo shot today... Sarge sure looks annoyed at that shark missile:

[Savick]

Gorgeous looking art. The sarge guy reminds me only a little bit of master chief. I want to see it in mooooootion.

[danieru]

This might be a trade secret, but how did you guys handle animating the tank treads? From the gameplay video it looks to be some sort of animated texture or maybe animated UVs?

[a1studmuffin]

Thanks for the kind words guys!

danieru: You're spot on, it's based on the forward distance each frame, and we just scale that by some magic factor (I think it's 0.021 from memory) and update the UV positions on Sarge's tank treads. Fun fact: When we first implemented it, the artists authored the inner tread UVs backwards, so the outer UVs were animating in the right direction, but the inner UVs were going the wrong way. Okay maybe not such a fun fact, but hey, it's a fact.

If you want to see it in motion Savick, you're in luck! I just made a video rundown of the general principles used for the arcade-style vehicle physics.

Space Dust Racing (Unreal Engine 4) Arcade Vehicle Physics Tour:
http://blog.spaceduststudios.com/space-dust-racing-unreal-engine-4-arcade-vehicle-physics-tour/

Thanks again for taking an interest in what we're doing!