DestructoPod is a third person trench flying game.
Abducted by aliens, you are forced to fly a pod through a trench course inside the DestructoDome arena. Giant aliens watch (and sometimes get involved) in your flight around the course. Your pod's speed will slowly increase during the game making obstacle avoidance more difficult. However, the pod can be run into the sandy ground to slow it down. Sentinels try to destroy you, and collapsing structures will try to crush you, and aliens may occasionally toss a building at you.
LEVELS:
DestructoPod is designed to create procedurally generated levels that increase in difficulty. However, Ill be designing the first ones by hand in order to experiment with different layouts.
Level difficulty is determined by:
- Pod Speed
- Course curviness, shallowness and narrowness
- The number and type of attack sentinels
- Crumbling structures designed to crush the pod
- Mines
- Alien intervention
WIN/LOSEWith the exception of the sandy ground, any impact will affect pod health. When health goes to zero, pod will blow up. Complete the course and move on to next level. Once all levels are completed you are returned safely home to earth.
WEAPONS:The pod has four weapons:
- Cannon
- Grenade launcher
- Rocket launcher
- Bombs
The pod has an unlimited number of cannon balls. Launcher and nuke ammo must be picked up along the course by flying over ammo boxes.
GAME DEVELOPMENTInitially the aliens were ghosts you lassoed, but I felt the game play wasn't very interesting. I like fast paced arcade style action and so DestructoPod was born. I than merged everything in the ghost wrangling game in to this.
Third party software used includes: Maya, Filter Forge, TimelineFX, and Wwise audio.
This game is also a test for a new destruction engine Id like to release to other game developers to use.
MOAB DESTRUCTION ENGINEDestructoPod is my first game developed using a new destruction engine called MOAB.
While the engine has most of the basic functionality needed for the game, it is primarily focused on destruction. Ideally it should be connected to a more full featured game engine such as Unity or Unreal. But before that happens, I felt it was important to go through a full game development cycle in order to make sure the engine components are capable of being utilized in a production environment.
Because computer performance varies, performance is adjustable. Fracturing resolution is modifiable in order to meet processing restrictions. Destruction load factor is also a big concern. That is how many destructible assets can be loaded at one time. I'm trying to keep that number around five. Of course asset size has a lot of influence over this as well.
Destructible asset creation is probably the most complex part of the system. These assets are typically far more difficult to produce because they require so much additional information (IE rigid body rigging, internals modeling etc) I'm working on tools to simplify the process as much as possible. I welcome any input on desirable work flow.
The engine is written in C++ and uses multi-threading to handle most of the destruction calculations. I opted not to use the GPU for this primarily because it seems most people do not want to give up GPU power for physics calculations.
Ill try to keep this blog as up to date as I can. Thanks for following along.
Cheers,
Helmar
Latest development test video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaF8wVxxUbAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mpjATKfT2Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvc7Z8KEwQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOq-PVUN3mE