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[Howard Day]

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 just have to add Top/Bottom armor displays to all the cockpit status displays. Then I'll be working on further damage modelling for individual components.
Enjoy!

[Alec S.]

Wow, this is looking fantastic. I tried out the alpha and I love the aesthetic you've got going here.  The controls did feel a bit hard to get the hang of though, particularally turning, which felt much to loose, so it was hard to actually aim directly at something (I ended up lowering the mouse sensitivity to around 50% which helped a lot).

Definitely looking forward to seeing this progress.

[Howard Day]

Thanks, Alec S.! We're definitely working on the controls. Both the mouse and joystick controls are going to get some streamlining and fine-tuning.
With any luck there will be some more progress posted soon!

[Howard Day]

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!

[FuzzySlippers]

Oh holy 90s Origin vibe. Just looking at this makes Privateer or Wing Commander tunes pop into my head. I'm curious do you feel your development is made simpler by going for pre-rendered 2d vs actual 3d models? Or does tweaking all the sprites end up more work than dumping in models?

[Howard Day]

FuzzySlippers: Well, it's pretty much the same. At this point, anyhow - on the front end the code to make the ships display properly from a 6-DOF camera was very tricky. Very tricky. But now that it's working, it's actually way easier to make new ships, at least fighters - we can just kitbash stuff together, and as long as it renders nicely, you can't tell there's anything wrong with it in game. This is a huge bonus because we never need to worry about shader complexity or polygon count. I'd say that makes it a whole lot more fun to make art for. Same with the 2d hangars and cinematics...camera angles are limited, but if you plan everything out right, you can get great quality very quickly. 
I have had some experience dropping in actual models, by the way - and since you like Privateer and Wing Commander...you might like this.
http://www.hedfiles.net/ConcordiaHangar/ConcordiaHangar.html
It's entirely unfinished, and it's missing the Epee and Rapier entirely...but it was a good start. :D

[Gregg Williams]

Damnit, how did I not hear about an indie con in Eugene? I'm all of 50 miles from there, would of totally came down. Anyways, game continues to look great, keep up the awesome progress.

[Howard Day]

You totally should have and brought M.I.N.T. down with you! would have rocked.

[Howard Day]

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!

[Pemanent]

Eugene Indie Game Con Recap!

I was there! and it was cool. Played the game. Super nice work!

[Howard Day]

Thanks, Permanent!

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!

[Howard Day]

So yesterday I got a aggregate percentage number displayed for armor and core damage for each target. Depending on where you shoot them, you may only get the armor to ~66% before their core starts taking damage. Once the Core reaches 0%, the ship explodes, triggering the armor/core display to read TARGET DESTROYED. It's kinda a neat touch, and more info is always good!

I also attempted to help work on the Navpoint system functionality - having well defined exit points into each area from each other area is a bit tricky. We've got it locked down, with only one error - sometimes having a script set another script's public variable to "this" totally and utterly fails.  Not really certain why. more investigation is required.

[Howard Day]

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.

Enjoy!

[Howard Day]

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. :D

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.

[Howard Day]

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 the human fighters. there will be variations for all human pilots, capitalships and contacts.  
Many thanks to Ben Chandler for the character artwork!

[Howard Day]

So I upgraded the voice synth used for the lip sync, fixed a bunch of art errors, and made the motion more consistent across different sound files.
http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com/FaceAnim/FaceAnim.html
Looks pretty convincing, in my opinion - any one else got any thoughts?

[ViktorTheBoar]

I just tried to play the demo and OH MY GOD IT'S PERFECT!!!11

Well, the only big problem I have with it is that I'm never sure if my bullet hit or missed the enemy. If you made bigger explosions from things getting shot

Also, minor and mostly unimportant detail: I'd love to bind the acceleration to my joystick's wheel thing. In this current state, I push the wheel a bit up to get MAXIMUM SPEED and a bit down to stop completely - it makes my attempts to match speed with target somewhat comical

Other then that, I can't believe this game exists, it's so pretty and action and I finally have an excuse for buying an analogue joystick which I practically never use, go go go, make more of it, moooore

[pablomon]

This is so awesome!

[Schrompf]

Looks amazing. Keep pushing, Howard!

[StoneTide]

This looks great guys!