You're the captain, alone on the bridge of your starship. If only you had a gunner, an engineer, or a navigator, you could bark orders to them, and watch as they fiddle with consoles and do their job. Unfortunately, you have to do it all yourself--which means switching frantically from console to console to perform the various ship's duties, while firing at your opponent who is trying to do the same.
The consoles are operated by minigames, much like what you'd expect from a certain perplexing piratical MMO. One minigame to arm and fire the guns, one minigame to realign the shields and keep weak points on the side you're not getting shot at from. A separate console to navigate. The difference is that these puzzles are what your control panels really look like... Of course, not being psychic, you have to rely ENTIRELY on consoles and display panels to know your ship's status. Good thing you can glance up from your station and look around whenever you like!
- Medium-paced online one-on-one combat!
- Your consoles are just another part of your 3D bridge!
- Create combos to devastate enemy sytems, or boost your shields!
- Look out the window, and see the enemy ship past your crackling shields!
- Get distracted by alarms, sparks, and fires in your bridge!
- Press the attack, circle around, or fall back to set up more combos!
- Coded in C# with XNA!
- Uses BSP map format for the ship's bridge!
Progress:2/20/09: Sketching classes out on paper. So far, the engine has 34 classes for the core MVC stuff. Most of the way there! There's a mockup down the thread. I have the latest C# and XNA installed and working.
2/21/09: Oh, man, trying to work with Quake 3 maps is really painful. It kind of renders but I have no idea if this will work any better as time passes, or if it'll work at all with the other stuff in my game. Maybe I should change to using meshes and .scene files so I have a little more control... Meh, need a good format where I can make walls easily, plus stick entities and lights and stuff.
2/22/09: Game Start! I can now load Quake 3 BSP maps! Though I guess they're not quite Quake 3 maps when they have custom textures and custom entities. I can now place entities like control panels in GTKRadiant and they'll show up in the engine. Also, we have our first ship models and they are somewhat textured. Graphics look good but it's time to do lights and stuff pretty soon, not sure how that will interact with the Quake 3 stuff. Next up, more entity spawning stuff, and getting that engine infrastructure worked on. Not sure if network or control consoles will be after that.
2/23/09: Turns out model-view-controller is harder to implement than I thought. I've got a kludge in place. However my system DOES load entity type information from an XML file, then parse a Quake 3 file and get entities data from it, then render the map and then render the entities... It -actually- does now instead of just having the framework like it did yesterday.
3/2/09: Quake 3 maps with lighting! Puzzle displays that render to surfaces, then draw them on control panels!
3/25/09: Aaaaand...I'm withdrawing this from the competition. I'll keep working on it as a stand-alone. Eventually.