Indie Violent Games

Hello Irrlicht!

2009-02-27T13:29:00.000-08:00

Some programming details.

We're using Git for source control. Its a bit more complex to setup than say SVN, but has a few features that are very nice. First off, its free, which obviously a huge issue for an indie project.

The major difference from most other source control products is that everyone is a repository. This is great because it allows you to locally checkin parts of changes, while the rest of the development team stays on an older version. When you're ready to publish, you run git push which moves your changes up to the shared repository. Additionally, you can locally create and manage branches.

The second major piece we decided to use was Irrlicht. While you can get pretty far using bare bones Direct3d + D3dX, you end up having to write a few systems, and you are tied to D3D.

With a good engine like Irrlicht or Ogre, you get a number of great helpers like particle systems, terrain systems, reading / writing packed files, multiple renderers and file format readers.

Irrlicht has some things that make it a bit more appealing than the larger Ogre. First off, the license of Irrlicht is ZLib rather than Ogre's more restrictive LGPL. ZLib is a very free license that has very very few restrictions on it. For example, with ZLib, porting to the XBox or Ps3 is fine, while under LGPL we would have to renegotiate with the people that run Ogre or release all our source. Since this would include proprietary Microsoft or Sony information, we would not be allowed to release our source, so we would have to either not port, rewrite or agree to any terms the Ogre team have.

Ogre seems to aim for being well designed and complete, while Irrlicht seems to be more concerned with speed.

They both have scene graphs. Im not a fan of using scene graphs for game projects; typically they provide way more power than any game ever needs. At odds with that, is that scene graphs often have wierd restrictions because of people's slave-like devotion to them and other problems that come from having a single heirarchial tree to control different things like collision, particle emitters / affectors and even materials in some.

Otoh, its a 2d (gameplay) space shooter. We could use JavaScript and be fast enough.

Vectorize It

2009-02-26T15:22:00.000-08:00

So I've had some ideas how we should approach the visual design of our "game in question." Since we are short a dedicated artist and its clear that visuals trying to be something they are not distract from getting proper feedback I purpose a more simplistic but very stylized approach.

What I'm thinking is trying to do a vector-style approach where objects are very simple shapes with numerous effects (glow, etc) added to make it look pretty. This would end up very much like geometry wars but what I'm thinking is adding a more "military" overlay so that it ends up feeling more like you are looking at the game through some high-end sci fi radar like the Dradeus of Battlestar (excpet using better things then dots).

Here is a shot of Dradus from BSG.

Here is a shot of a game called Defcon. This game does the same thing but is a little clearer then Dradus. Something in the middle is what I'm thinking for either of the games mentioned before (shooter or rts).

Here is a shot from Geometry Wars. So taking this and sort of merging in with the above two is what I'm thinking may be worth a test.

Now Defcon uses icons where in our case we would represent ships with certain shapes (like triangles for fighters).

Space Caravan

2009-02-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

Basic Idea:
Your task is to move across several interlinked "jump-gates" in a region of space and gather as many refugees as you head towards New Terra (final gate). Each jump-gate opens into a small level that will contain other ships for you to fight. The game is controlled in a RTS style fashion. As your caravan increases in size, you will gain considerable more power but attract greater threats.

The game is actually meant to only take a few hours (maybe shorter) to complete and is actually a lot about your overall performance once reaching New Terra. How many Refugee Ships survived? How many pirates did you kill?

This ends up being a fast-paced RTS campaign with each Jump-gate only lasting about 10-15 minutes (with maybe 15 gates in a game) that is meant to be played over and over again to achieve better rating and possibly find new things.

Development would be a lot about designing how single jump-gate levels work and pacing the collection of ships and management of those. If we can pin this down and develop an easy system to append new jump-gates to the existing world (even randomize it) we could potentially make a game that keeps creating new challenges.

Ships are divided by size class. Each class has a shared set of abilties and certain ships have extremely unique abilities. Abilities are a mixture of passive and player-triggered ones.

Ship Classes

Fighter - small size craft that excel at dog fighting.
Cruiser (Combat) - medium size ships that are centered on offensive. Usually are slower then fighters but contain bigger weapons
Cruiser (Support) - mediums size ships just like combat-carriers but contain support-centric abilities. These include heal and shield bonuses.
Battlestar(Command) - big mother f***ers that can provide safe points for Fighters to dock and resupply (heal) and contain massive payloads of destruction. Extremely vulnerable to being overwhelmed.

Types of Enemies

Raiders - basic fighter craft with low-med rate of damage and speed. Easy to kill with basic weapons
Heavy Laser - slow moving platforms that fire long-range high damage weapons
Drone craft - releases several small ships that act like a "flock of birds" and tie up ships to temporarily disable them. This actually done little damage but is used to take out your heavy hitting ships

The player controls several ships (RTS style) and based on ships in the caravan, other ships are granted special abilities as well as global abilities. These are only active if those ships survive in the caravan.

Caravan Ships (Players)

Strike Craft - starting ship. Contains decent agility and guns. Can do okay alone against a few raiders.
Command Ship - large slow moving ship with jump capability. Has broadside guns which means it requires much more precise steering to make it effective. Highly centered on supporting others ships.
Tankers - provides Speed Boost (temporary burst of dogfight speed)
Repair - provides increased healing to all ships (except Fighters)
Power Cruisers - provide different types of shield for ships in caravans.
Scout - sneaky ship that can go ahead of caravan and detect enemies without being seen.

This may be a bit much for the game but the idea is to present relatively short game that allows for two different players to make up different mixed caravans and come up with different results when reaching the end.

Some difficulties with this game will be AI that effectively targets player ships to provide increasing challenge (versus just being harder to kill). Making sure each ship type has strength and weaknesses that prevent from having one ultimate caravan combination.

Ship Mechanics and Parts

2009-02-23T20:42:00.001-08:00

So to better aid the previous post, I figured I'd throw up how I envisioned the relationship between game mechanics and parts.

There would be a specific list of mechanics and parts would relate to that group.

Bullet - all components provide bonus abilities that relate to guns. This includes small machine guns to large scale BSG style cannons.
Missiles/Bombs - different types of missiles that can be selected and fired with different effects
Grappler - tethers that shoot out and grab ships. Abilities provide bonus effects to this including grabbing multiple ships, disable grabbed ships, etc.
Command - providing unique close-range weapons like "ship-to-ship" boarding. Also includes short range fighter drones and abilites to support them.
Energy Transferance - see the previous post. This uses a energy meter that is built up from taking damage.

The key here is that each of these categories relates to a mechanic that the player would need to learn how to use. This also limits the controls we have to come up with since some abilites may not operate on the same "click the button" mechanic.

Ship Rage

2009-02-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

One category of ship parts can be called "Energy Transference".

This is essentially Rage from WoW. When the ship takes damage, it builds up a ET meter which can then be used by abilities.

ET generators are needed to build meter. These can stack to produce more ET from incoming damage.

So for example:

Reflect Shield : powerful shield (probably the most) that lasts a set duration but it stronger based on the amount of ET when activated so the player is better off using this after taking tons of hits.
Reverse Osmosis : This will cause the next attack to be absorbed and fired right back at the target. This shot will be a seeking shot. Effectiveness of rebounded shot is based on how much ET is in meter.
Overload Engines: ET meter drains while providing a considerable boost to engine power allowing for a quick escape.

Shooter - RPG

2009-02-23T19:30:00.001-08:00

Basic concept:
Top-down "two-stick" shooter (Geometry Wars) where player controls a ship that can pick missions. Missions involve exploring a given level and completing some objective (like kill enemy x, etc). Combat-centric game. Players collect parts for their ship that they can freely customize buy putting parts together. Parts grant unique abilites / bonuses that player can then use to complete objectives.

Notes:
Good idea would be to focus on the major groups that parts come from and the general ship types that you can assemble (agile fighter / BSG).

This is an arcade game and should have short play-times and should be limited from any kind of "campaign".