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[Chewie]

Hi I'm Andrew "Chewie" Vasiliev and I'm a game developer by day...And by night =D

I've decided to start DevLog for this project to keep myself motivated & productive ,also to practice my writing skills.

P.S. I suck at English, I'm sorry in advance...

Monthly reports:

1st month

Before / After (1 month):



Genre
Tactics/Strategy with controllable pause (is it the right term?)
Core of the gameplay is tactical combats.

Description:
You're a captain of the massive airship in a Dieselpunk setting and most of the battles will be one against many.

What to expect as main activities:
 Struggle to keep each module on the ship alive
 Management of the crew for the best performance in current situation
 Planning and execution of tactical maneuvers

Combat mechanics:
- damage per module, without stupid total HP
- crew management
- pause to give orders
- 3d navigation

Engine:
Unity 5.5.1
Physics used for collisions/triggers and not for movement

---------------------------------------------------------

Progress so far
I'm working on the prototype on my free time and here is the results after 6 days:

day 1-2:
It was nice productive weekend. Beginning of the prototype - cannons firing / ships moving / fx playing.


day 3-4:
Updated ship model so it looks a little more serious than a piece of plastic in the air. Also added debug UI to monitor internal modules of the ship, currently there is crew count/capacity and hitpoints/durability.


day 5:
Now ship modules can be destroyed, damage reduces performance and crew can be distributed between modules.
You can see how HP of each module changes during combat, and red slots mean that this module damaged to much to hold this amount of crew members in it -> lower perfromance of the module.

Right after the main engine was dstroyed airship started to fall.



day 6:
Mostly it was slow day, so not much progress. Created Trello to track progress and plan development better. Also worken on some clouds a little.


NEXT TODO:
 Waypoints system for airships navigation in 3d space

That's it for today, need to sleep a little. Next time I'll try to clean up & format this post a bit.
Hope you'll like it =)

You can find me on twitter @Andrew_Chewie

[Pixel Noise]

This looks great for ~1 week! Love the concept art and those last gifs. Definitely want to see more - following! 

P.S. Your English is great! 

[Josessin]

This intrigues me a lot. Managing and controlling one massive ship has always sounded great. It is a fine concept. If you manage to drop in some exploration (without going wildly out of scope) it would be even cooler!

[robgacu]

I like the concept of flying machines firing each other, I'm going to be following this.

[Fat Pug Studio]

Well this goes pretty quickly 

[dotsquid]

Reminds me Last Exile

[I_smell]

I think you should attach the trails to a child object, and then un-child them when you destroy the bullets. That way, the trail wouldn't clip out as soon as the bullets hit, and they can fade out progressively as normal.

[Chewie]

This looks great for ~1 week! Love the concept art and those last gifs. Definitely want to see more - following! 

P.S. Your English is great! 

Thanks, glad that you like where it's going. There will be more for sure =D

Reminds me Last Exile

Exactly! One of the biggest inspirations and visual influences

This intrigues me a lot. Managing and controlling one massive ship has always sounded great. It is a fine concept. If you manage to drop in some exploration (without going wildly out of scope) it would be even cooler!

I've had this idea for a long time, and even started it once couple years ago, but lack of experience and free time stopped me. This is 2nd prototype and it looks more promising.

I'll certainly write more details about battle system / mechanics and overall ideas I have for this project in next DevLog updates.

I like the concept of flying machines firing each other, I'm going to be following this.

Welcome aboard! =D

Well this goes pretty quickly 

Thanks, first prototyping stages always are easy to make, because you don't worry about quality, main idea is proof of concept.

I think you should attach the trails to a child object, and then un-child them when you destroy the bullets. That way, the trail wouldn't clip out as soon as the bullets hit, and they can fade out progressively as normal.

Thanks for advice, will do this in one of the visual iterations. It's quick placeholder anyway.

[Chewie]

Just quick visuals post from today's stress test and overall performance.
Also it's screenshot Saturday =D

1 vs 6

[InterGalactic]

Love the concept and its looking so good. Reminds me a lot about final fantasy as well. Keep it up dude. Have you got a portfolio of games before this one or its your first?

[Zireael]

I love the concept and the art looks awesome! Digging the clouds and the ships!

[Chewie]

Day 8

So today I was working on the Waypoint navigation system for the players airship.
It'll be used to plan ahead your maneuvers during combat. It's first version and it's quite simple at the moment,in next iterations player will be able to move/delete waypoints.

How it works:

Mouse click places initial waypoint on the plane of the airship, mouse movement can be used to adjust height maneuver if it's required. Second click will finalize waypoint, right mouse click will cancel it.

Current movement doesn't represent turning or vertical speed of the airship only regular movement speed. Improvements need to be done in this system =)

Also controllable pause will be enabled while player editing route.



Test horizontal circular grid was added - with circles each 200m in radius. Need to add distance marks on them for easier calcualtions.

[Chewie]

Love the concept and its looking so good. Reminds me a lot about final fantasy as well. Keep it up dude. Have you got a portfolio of games before this one or its your first?

Thanks, glad to hear that it reminds you of a such good games =D
At the moment I'm working on one the Gremlins, Inc. as UI/UX designer/developer and client side programmer.
Before that I was working mostly on different mobile titles.

I love the concept and the art looks awesome! Digging the clouds and the ships!

Thank you

[Garfeild]

Navigation already looks great! I highly recommend to check tactical overview in EVE Online for inspiration

[wizered67]

I've never seen a waypoint system that uses circles like that but it seems like a really cool idea! I also love the concept of giant airship battles.I'll definitely be following to see more!

[Chewie]

Airpship modules

Here you can see different modules of the airship:



Each airship has it's set of internal/external modules installed in it and each of them has certain functions. Each module has it's performance value that affects different parameters/mechanics. Performance decreases if module is damaged or there is insufficient amount of crew assigned to the module.

Modules of the airship:
Main caliber cannons / small caliber cannons - each cannon can be damaged separately.
Armor plates - each plate has it's own HP value, so if opponent aims at the same spot all the time there will be a breach and internal modules behind it would take much more damage.
Main Engine - if it's destoyed ship wount be able to move horizontally.
Vertical lift module - same but with vertical movement and also airship start to fall, as uplift force would be missing to keep it flying.
Bridge - captain and other offices location, damaging it will increase delay for any orders given
Ammunition/magazine - damaging will decrease reload speed and destruction of the ammunition will lead to massive explosion and a lot of internal damage.

Still thinking about other modules to be added, maybe some specific for certain ships or classes.

Damage system

Frame by frame damage demonstration:



Right after cannon shoots,red raycast is drawn to see where it's going to land approximately. Then each update frame projectile raycasts in direction of movement and checks if it hit something. Damage system receives Hit information and calculates damage done to the module hit by projectile + damage system looks what else was damaged by raycasting into the ship insides(distance is limited for inside damage). Later I'll also add spherical explosion check for internal damages.

Bunch of small red lines - full distance projectile raycast, also you can see that there is a visible spread from low caliber cannon. Each cannon type has it's on projectile spread value that can be improved by assigning officer and/or skills.(not sure about it yet)

[Chewie]

Day 10: Test cover

Today I've added test cover object - floating island with small outpost on it with some massive cannons =D

And invisible updates/changes were made to damage system:
 - Added internal explosion damage from big caliber projectiles, if armor will fail and projectile will penetrate it, there will be explosion and all modules in the radius will be damaged
 - Improved controls of Waypoints system, now first click creates waypoint and it can be moved on the horizontal plane, press and hold will provide height modification, release will finilize the waypoint.
 - Ship movement is under construction, vertical/angle speeds are added, but not working properly atm, investigating



As you can see, projectiles expload colliding with the island, preventing direct damage to the ship.


Closer look at flying island outpost



See you next time!
Andrew

[Aloft]

Nifty Project!

It may be worth your time to check out "World of Warships", to get a feel for how they handled various things, since you are essentially making a naval combat artillery game. For instance, a huge part of naval combat involves positioning, anticipating where to have your guns aimed (since it takes time to move them), being able to lead a shot with a 12 second travel time, etc. Looking at how a successful game handles the GUI and targeting featuers of naval combat may also be useful.

Goodluck with the project!

[Chewie]

Day 11: Time scale, pause and fixes

I've implemented test version of the time scale,pause system and it seem to work just fine.
It already helped to find and fix a couple of bugs in projectile hit detection mechanics.

Also now it's easier to give orders, plan ahead and watch in fast forward results.

Here is timescale x10 from the game (not a recorded footage speed up).
This speed is to much for real game play, but useful for tests and quick iterations on future balance.



Also made small navigation UI improvements. Added distance marks on radial grid around the ship. Text auto-scales and always stays the same size on screen.

[Zireael]

The distance markers look great!