This blog is me talking about my stuff, what I do and from time to time, in order to improve the state of the internet and promote better content and google hits for other people, I will also post solutions to various other problems I’ve found.
Enjoy!
Bought myself a stylus and installed sketchbook express on my nexus 7 and sketched some lander ships, this is the result:
I have started implementing the basic controls for both the keyboard and joysticks and to test everything out I added basic thrust and torque controls, and while this is really hard to control as each torque requires a counter torque from stopping to spinning I started thinking. The WebGL version of lander and I recall the original (I still can’t get it to play on my win7 system) let’s you enter the desired orientation and let a AI controls the torque thrusts. This is a much easier control scheme as you don’t have to compensate for the rotational adjustments.
I’m working hard, soon I will have input partly completed but in the meantime have a look at the physics in action on these stand-in graphics:
Development on the game engine has been slow this past week so this week I’ve been thinking about the background music for the game. I don’t know the actual graphical style of the game just yet but I think I narrowed down the musical style to either some slow form of swing/jazz like this:
Or some some ambient 80’s style electro music like this.
This week instead of talking just design I thought I would be nice to share some development ideas that I’ve been brewing for a while, and it has to do with distribution of the game. The obvious choice is steam, and probably the equivalent to the appstore on ubuntu(if that still exists and is flourishing), but a part of me wants to sell the game to all linux distributions and I can’t test that at all.
I though this is good time to talk and clarify a little about the game and blog title, and how misleading that title might be.
First and foremost the game is not set in space. The game might take place on different planets and you might travel from these places, but this is not part of the game.
Neither is hustling of any kind. You are a soldier/mercenary/technician for hire, you do your job and you get paid, so no hustling whatsoever.
I never really liked the cockpit view of flying and driving games. It provies a sense of realism for sure, but I never believed it provided me with a view that I liked. Enter E3 2012 and the demonstration of the Oculus Rift. Together with a helicopter like transparent sphere like cockpit the cockpit view field of view that the rift provides and the slow speed of the craft it provide a sense of realism few games can match. the oculus rift
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the different skirmish and mission types. The original lander basically had fetch an object and destroy missions. Hopper introduced “challenges” in the form of land without taking any damage and races, and while this could be expanded upon with acrobatical challenges(move through a narrow gap) and survival challenges (survive a meteor rain) I want to expand further in the mission and challenge/skirmish varieties.
Since I started working on Space Hustler I’ve been thinking about what art style the game should have. The original lander had a sci-fi style and while that will work there are a lot of sci fi games and sci fi shooters especially are a dime a dozen. Partly because of this I’ve been thinking about designin a little bit different.
One idea I’ve been tossing around is the World War 2 with jet engines.
I attended the nordic game indie night , and got to play flowstorm (that did a kickstarter ) and realized 2 things: It’t a really hard game and that it’s also a lander-like 2d game. Check it out if you haven’t already.