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[yankee]

barrage-game.com | @BarrageGame | Facebook

Hey!

Barrage is a combination of several different genres, from real time strategy to first person shooter and artillery games. You take on the role of your planet's leaders - economic, scientific and military - deciding what to build, research and when and what to shoot. Your goal? Kill everyone in a race for survival.


Gameplay
The game is focused around multiplayer deathmatch (or team deathmatch.) There are 3 main things to do. Firstly, you need to research new technologies, opening up new and exciting ways to smash your opponents. Secondly, you must manage your economy, balancing between building turrets and restocking the old ones with research and expansion. Lastly, you need to shoot people out of the sky. This is done in a first-person perspective, where you aim and fire in real time, everything from missiles and lasers to moons, black holes and even solar flares at your enemy around your star's gravity well. Will you be able to land that perfect shot? Or will your missiles swing around the star and hit you in the back?

Team
- Matt (Programmer)
- Norman (Artist)
- Laurence (Composer)

Screenshots *updated*


Planet camera


Planet camera with an asteroid mining satellite


FPS aiming mode shortly after firing laser turrets


(Menu menu background)

Thanks for reading so far and I'm looking forward to add more dev blog posts to this thread!

[yankee]

Right now we're full steam ahead for an alpha version of Barrage after approximately five months of converting assets, creating new PBR-compatible texture and rewriting the major part of our code. We have buildings being built, missiles being fired and our own user interface framework is fully hooked up.  The main focus for the next few weeks will be to get all essential features ready for a playable version of Barrage in UnrealEngine4.

The core features we need to finish to actually play the game:

- Make a basic balance of projectile speed, acceleration, planet's gravity so the projectile firing system can be assessed for further tweaking
- Work out how different types of damage (such as splash damage, shield piercing, etc) interact with other objects in the game.
- Implement shield damage absorption.
- Make sure that multiplayer networking works without major problems.
- Tooltips. While those aren't a fundamental part of the core gameplay it would be crucial to explain the game easily to external alpha testers.

[yankee]

https://vine.co/v/MdjD7jUY60v
Super professional smartphone video of our construction animation.
From watching it several times now I feel like it could be slightly faster.

Would really appreciate any feedback on it.

[pluckyporcupine]

This is looking awesome. The animation looks pretty good but the objects themselves look a bit off against the planet like they are.

Looking forward to trying this out. The shots in the OP are pretty impressive.

[eyeliner]

The rocky landscape on the third screen is a bit off regarding the rest, but the imagery on the rest is fantastic!

[yankee]

Thanks a lot!

@Johnki
True, that's actually an issue since we started with our project and couldn't really find a proper solution for it yet. Maybe a more stylized visual design for the planet would help a bit that the scale doesn't feel totally off?

@Eyeliner
Yeah, I actually changed that texture on the 3rd screen already. As a matter of fact the 2nd and 3rd screenshots are directly from an teaser we made in-engine so it might also look a bit weird because during actual gameplay you wouldn't really go that close to the objects.

[StCredZero]

So, like I can actually shoot my own Macross Cannon!?

http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross2/macrosscannon.htm 

[yankee]

Eh, the Macross Canon seems like a "space ship-ish" mecha, right?
You won't really have space ships in Barrage. It will be only planet based (ground and orbit) weapons.

[yankee]

Alright, we got the majority of the turrets implemented so it's about time to start with the visual effects for the projectiles.





First one will be used for one of the solar-based weapons and is supposed to be something like a solar flare. The second one will be probably used as the gamma ray weapon.
Any thoughts or feedback?
Please keep in mind I'm not even close to be a proper visual effects artist.

[yankee]

Solar flare projectile in motion. Those spheres at the beginning are placeholders! :D

[yankee]

New atmosphere shader with a faked backscattering rim lighting effect.

[yankee]

We're currently working on a completely overhauled UI style.

This is a very first wip version.
The left part is the build menu where you select the buildings.


Any thoughts or feedback?

[yankee]

Alright, this is very likely the final version of the technology tree.
It was a ton of work to remake all the icons but I think it was more than worth it.

old vs. new

[yankee]

Wow, it's been a while since the last update. Although we had some downtimes we're actually still on it and had some very busy weeks lately. The result of those weeks is that we just launched our Greenlight page and released the first 2 videos of the game ever.










If you like the idea of an multiplayer Artillery-RTS in space, then we would really appreciate your "Yes" vote on Greenlight

[yankee]

Small update about the work I did the last few days.


I started working on the tier 2 shield generator. I imagined the final ingame version could have some particle effects coming out of the nozzles or maybe the sphere spinning around.
Here's the high poly version:


Also finished the lowpoly and baked the maps. For me it's always super impressive what a normal map can do. Almost like magic.

[karlozalb]

Your goal? Kill everyone in a race for survival.

I like this, following xD

[yankee]

Some of the things I've been working on lately.

A bit of a beauty-pass for the map with a huge nebula in the background.


Trying to hit myself with a solar flare which is one of the experimental weapons in Barrage.

[yankee]

We're almost finished with the trailer for our alpha version.
I continued to work on the planet explosions a bit more and I have to say I'm pretty satisfied with the result (I'm not a VFX artist at all).

[yankee]

ALPHA TRAILER

We’ve been hard at work since our successful Steam Greenlight in March and we’re now very pleased to officially announce the upcoming Barrage alpha version. It’s been a long ride already and we’re incredibly proud that the game is finally coming together!


As we mentioned earlier in the year, the main tasks after our Steam Greenlight campaign were to remove any game-breaking bugs, polish the gameplay but also to take care of backend related tasks like creating a game updater/launcher and organising a proper match server system. As it happens, said tasks have turned out to be considerably more time-consuming than we had first imagined! We’ve spent the best part of the last few weeks adding in-engine demo recording to enable the testers to easily record footage of their testing sessions, as well as various smaller-but-still-important things like the game manual.


We’re now at a stage where we believe that the game itself is ready to enter the first phase of player testing. Of course, it’s still a very early version and is neither feature-complete nor entirely free of bugs or other issues, but we’d like to emphasise that this closed alpha test will play a huge part in shaping the final game and the contributions of keen playtesters will be invaluable in this process.


The most important question, though: when will it start?

As some of you may already have noticed, a sign-up button appeared on our homepage several weeks ago. We aim to release the alpha version within the next 3 weeks, so sign-up now!

[yankee]

It's been a pretty long ride so far but we finally made it to the first public alpha tests. If someone from the TIGforums signed up as well: Please check your inbox with some instructions how to download the game launcher.
For further details please check out our forums.

If you haven't got a mail. It's not too late to sign-up for the next round of alpha invites.


http://www.barrage-game.com
http://www.barrage-game.com/community