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[Jason Bakker]

Shadow Field
               ^{Shadow Field}

Shadow Field is a strategic action RPG for the iPhone. You control four members of a scientific research team as they defend an isolated village from an unnameable horror.

More here soon!

Featuring:
Jason Bakker on the keys,
Alex Andreadis on the tablet,
and Ban Ngo on pencils and mouse.

Ed - Resources!
Game Website
http://shadow-field.com/

Oct 6: Pre-pre-pre-Alpha Video




Oct 13: Concept to Sprite - Pea Shooter




Oct 18: All Structures Operational Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxuM5caN5MI

Nov 30: Pre-pre-Alpha Video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A867Bw1JZw

Jan 28: Pre-Alpha Video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkwCIEDLdNg

[Jason Bakker]

Oh, I'll try to grab some more screenshots soon that will make a bit more sense than the current one... there's quite a lot of debuggy stuff going on in the game at the moment

Ed:

Archiving the old "splash" information here, for chronological interest

Splash 2

Shadow Field
               ^{Shadow Field}

Shadow Field is a story-infused take on the tower defense genre for the iPhone, in which you defend your base against hordes of incoming monsters with towers that blast out light.

The towers are built by your workmen - the quarreling brothers Leon and Terry, silent and enigmatic Dr. Akira and William Wright, the leader of the team.

Your base is in the middle of a large, deserted area – waves attack from all sides, so you need to build your defenses with that in mind. And because the game is set under the cover of darkness, each tower you build pushes back the encroaching night.

Jason Bakker - Programmer
Alex Andreadis - Artist
Ban Ngo - Artist
Splash 1

 
Darkness Falls

Darkness Falls is a story-infused take on the tower defense genre for the iPhone.

The functionality that the player is presented with involves killing waves of enemies with light that is blasted out of towers that the workmen build. (The four workmen are in the top right corner - only one has graphics as of yet though.)

The base that you're defending is in the middle of a large, deserted area - waves attack from all sides, so you need to build your defenses with that in mind. And because the game is set under the cover of darkness, each light tower you build pushes back the encroaching night.



The team includes myself doing the programming, and two artists, Ban and Alex, doing the art. We've been developing the game since the start of June (a bit over three months), and we're aiming to be ready for IGF Mobile in November-ish. As you can see, we've got a lot of work ahead of us

We've only just recently nailed down an outline for the plot/setting/characters that we're happy with, and have two functional tower types in the game, and one generic enemy. I've recently set up a few game flow systems (WaveManager, StoryEventManager, DialogueManager), and the current focus is to get the game playable and fun with the current features, and start an initial pass on the story, dialogue and game flow.

All graphics are either temporary or in progress at the moment (such as my wonderful rainbow base), but the rotating directional tower (the one near the bottom with three legs) is probably the closest to final art.

If anyone's interested in the technical side of things, we're running on top of cocos2d, which handles rendering, image loading, and a few other handy things for us.

I'll try to keep this thread updated with our progress, and I've got a few bits and pieces saved up from development thus far... I might save that earlier stuff for when we're closer to release though

[Jason Bakker]

We've set up a quick website/blog thing for the game at http://dfgame.wordpress.com . Also, I'm going to try to get a video or two up on here, otherwise its kind of hard to see what the heck is supposed to be going on

[iggie]

I love the light tower idea, smoothing the transition from light to dark by a square or two might help. Good luck getting ready for IGF!

[Wander]

light towers is a good idea indeed.  i'm with iggie - some soft lighting will make it look way mo' pro. 

[Jason Bakker]

Thanks guys :D Yeah, what you see there are some results from initial tests with the effect (I was trying to make an animated fog of war "front" that would look good rushing in and out).









But I kind of realised that wouldn't really work So many great games made by people here use really cool lighting effects, so I'll probably study some of those and create some kind of amalgam for the effect (edit: I'll see if I can make a bit of a thread about it when I get up to this process). Will probably have some particle effects added to it as well though.

But yeah, thanks for the encouraging words!

[Jason Bakker]

Should be able to get a vid up this weekend (it's been a crazy week) - in the meantime, Ban put some sketches of towers up - he's kind of become the team's resident concept artist (as well as doing building models and coming up with the original idea ):

You can read some of his words here.

More to come!

[Jason Bakker]

Went to the Digital Distribution Summit yesterday, was pretty eye-opening! Realised that if I want this game to get noticed I'm probably going to have to do some more work on the promotiony side of things. Simon Carless' speech was pretty schweet.

Anyways, inspired by the idea of describing your game in one sentence, I've started on my one sentence description of Darkness Falls... at the moment all I've got is "tower defense in the dark".

Regarding progress on the game, we're moving onto UI and getting the first bits of dialogue into the game. I'll hopefully be able to put up some more info about this later in the week, and maybe finally get that video up on the youtubes

[Wander]

Ya - iphone games are super saturated.  What kinds of advice did they give?  I def need to learn some strategies on that.

I think you need more jazz than "tower defense in the dark" only because there's allot of tower defense in the world. You know?

[Jason Bakker]

For sure. I'm working on adding more to it, but "tower defense in the dark with an engrossing, dynamic story" doesn't have a ring to it yet

As for advice, I think one of the biggest takeaways was to try and understand platform agendas a bit. For instance, what type of games XBLA want changes every few months, and no doubt the guys in charge of the App Store, even though they let pretty much everything on there, would probably be more likely to feature something that fits their portfolio.

The other big thing was featuring - apparently regardless of the platform, your game getting featured IS your game's chance at taking off, pretty much - so try to get in contact with the platform holders (ie. whoever's in charge of the App Store Features) as early as possible, and get them interested in your game.

There were a few other things - the Flight Control guy was there talking about "hooks" into games, offering people something familiar with a twist and stuff... some of it sounded good, but he seemed to be 100% focused on sales as opposed to creativity.

[Jason Bakker]

Finally, long promised and long awaited, here's a gameplay video for you fine folks!





Sorry about the poor quality and my fat fingers

As you can probably see, quite a bit of the functionality is there, but the game part not so much. Making it into a game is going to be the focus of the next few weeks for myself, while the artists get busy making it look pretty

I know its hard to make out anything from the video, but if anyone has any feedback or questions please fire away

PS: As progress goes, I just added in those random walking around enemies yesterday I think it already adds quite a bit to the world - before it was feeling a lot more static.

[Jason Bakker]

Alex, one of our artists, made a 15 second youtube video showing the progression from concept to model to sprite of one of our towers. (It's a redesign of the "pea shooter", the large silo-esque tower from the first gameplay video).

[Hideous]

oh god you're using Bleeding Cowboys for the title font

[Renton]

Eugh. Grungy fonts.

[Jason Bakker]

Haha, thanks for the feedback Yeah, we were just having some fun with that font, it's kind of cool technically how it puts the swirl in the right place as you type

We'll fix it up in short order

[Jason Bakker]

Been working on implementing a particle/emitter system recently. Finally got some working:

(They’re the little bits floating up from the beams.)

Also played around with the beam a little bit, made it shoot (close to) proper from the lil’ towers. You can also see a little bit of the narrative system in this screenshot!

We've set ourselves some per week milestones, to try to prepare a fun, good-looking build by 1st December for IGF Mobile. I'll probably be spending tomorrow on making the fog look nice, and hopefully adding in a few more particle effects, and that should be me done for this week

[Jason Bakker]

Results of the weekends work here:

. ( Youtube is not built for portrait style game display )

Got a nice fog working thanks some helpful hints from iggie. If anyone's interested how it works, I'll put a quick rundown in a post below. Also in the vid is the new pea shooter and AOE towers operational (although the particle effect on the AOE tower needs some more work )

This week will be HUD and control interface... and will start looking into sound.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

[Jason Bakker]

Okay, basically the idea behind the fog at the moment is that each "square" of collision has a light value associated to it. So, off the bat, the collision grid around the base's light values look roughly like:

Code:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

What I have for each collision square visually is a square made up of four inward facing triangles, shaped like so:

Code:

1______2
 |\  /|
 | \/ | 
 | /\ |
 |/__\|
4      3

(but of course, all the same shape/scale)

And then, each corner of the square (annotated above) gets its "vertex alpha" (its opacity value) to be the average of the four squares that it's touching.

Code:

   0      0
 | /\ | | /\ |
 |/__\| |/__\|
 _____=.5_____
 |\  /| |\  /|
   1      1

So in the case above, the corner of each of the four squares that is touching the center all get their opacity set to .5.

The last thing you need to do to get it looking nice is to average the corner values into the center vertex.

Code:

.5______.25
  |\  /|
  | \/ | 
  | /\ |
  |/__\|
 1      0

center == (.5 + .25 + 1 + 0) / 4 == 0.4375

And tada! All nishe

On the technical side, on the iPhone I needed to do some OpenGL calls to draw the tris.

Code:

	glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
	glEnableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY);
	
	glBlendFunc(CC_BLEND_SRC, CC_BLEND_DST);
	
	glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, s_fogSquareVerts);
	
	zeFogSquare* pCurrFogSquare = NULL;
	
	for(NSInteger y = 0; y < m_numDown; y++)
	{
		for(NSInteger x = 0; x < m_numAccross; x++)
		{
			pCurrFogSquare = &m_pFogSquares[(y * m_numAccross) + x];
			
			glPushMatrix();
			glTranslatef(pCurrFogSquare->m_position[0], pCurrFogSquare->m_position[1], pCurrFogSquare->m_position[2]);
			glColorPointer(4, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, 0, pCurrFogSquare->m_color);
			
			glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_FAN, 0, 6);
			glPopMatrix();
		}
	}
	
	glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
	glDisableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY);

I won't go in and explain every bit of that, but if anyone has any further questions feel free to ask (also, if any OpenGL vets see issues with that code let me know! I quickly had to relearn it for this effect )

[iggie]

Lovely fog effect

[Zaid Crouch]

Results of the weekends work here:

. ( Youtube is not built for portrait style game display )

Sweet, looks like a productive weekend :D