Monday, December 30, 2013

We hope you had a nice Christmas!

Our meeting last week was much fun, but also productive. We discussed some things and I worked on connecting our game to the database. The others made a lot of progress and soon we will release the blogpost on the demo that should have been released. We weren't pleased with how everything worked at the time so we will work hard and soon there will be a better demo that we will show you guys. 

Also I have worked on a website, it's still under construction. When most of the bugs are solved we will post the link on our blog and we will also have a facebook page by then!

Martijn ~ BulletProof Games

Friday, December 6, 2013

GameArt Update

I have been working mostly on the game art in the past few weeks. I started by deciding the art style we where going for. This really depended on the fact if we wanted to make everything ourselves or not.

I started by using my own made model of a space ship. I made this model in Maya.

I realized that making all the models and textures would take too much time. That’s why I started to search for model under the license of Creative Commons. I found a lot of really good models on tf3dm.com, for instance, the space ship models of tf3dm.com/user/herminio. I then tried to implement one of his spaceship models, but this turned out to be more work than expected, because the models had lots of problems in a game engine due to wrong backface culling. I fixed this by editing the model in Maya and manually reversing the normal. I also separated the weapons from the model so they can be controlled separately. Here's a picture of the space ship I am talking about:

A lot of the other models for the spaceships we want to use are of the same artist, so most likely I have to spend a lot of time on them to be able to use them, as I expect most of them will have the same backface issue, but in my opinion these are the best free models I could find. They look absolutely great and fit together too, and it takes up much less time than making everything ourselves. Next I looked up some asteroids and made a Unity package of them, this went quite easy.

I also worked on the logo of our company BulletProof games. This logo is now visible on top of the page. The font I used is Airstrike by Iconian Fonts - Daniel Zadorozny, and is free to use for anyone.

Brian van Nunen ~ BulletProof Games

My update

Hey!
Here my update on our progress of our game. I think we are doing a really good job, not only on making the game, but on the team building as well. We're really becoming a good team. Last Monday we celebrated Sinterklaas (with some other Game Technology students), it was really fun and it was nice to chill with each other without having to think about the game. Last Wednesday we had our first beer WITH pizza while we were working on the game, although I had a little bit slow start because I left my laptop at a friend’s house. Now I’m working on making a game world with some asteroids. The fun thing is, while we're working on the project if we see or think something we can directly think of something awesome we can do with it, because our team is really enthusiastic about the project. For example, I wrote a piece of code that puts a gameobject at a random position at a circle. To test it a put 100 cubes in a circle. It created something really nice, which looked like an asteroid ring around a planet (like Saturn has). So now we can use that piece of test code to make similar structures in our game! Anyways back to work, talk to you later!

Philippe ~BulletProof Games

First Impressions


It's an honour to publish a first impression of our game! :D I've created this scene yesterday to test the effects of Unity on the game environment we're creating and to provide ourselves with a base which we can use to develop the awesome features we have in mind. In the scene we can see a planet, two asteroids, a star and our spaceship. The light of the star also casts shadows over the object in this system and creates a flare in the player's camera. I've found the texture of the planet on a site which has a lot more planet textures to offer freely, we'll be sure to use that site to its full extent to create some diversity. The spaceship and the asteroid were delivered by Brian, who has been spending his time searching the web for some awesome models. In this particular scene you can move the ship around, it doesn't move very naturally, but we have improved it a lot already. In the actual game we will create a couple of random planets, possibly with asteroid belts and/or atmospheres. We do this to give players the feeling they're flying in an actual solar system. Philippe has made some progress with the asteroids, which will spawn outside the playable area and slowly float through it. Hitting an asteroid with your spaceship can have desolating consequences! After finishing the planets I'll see if I can add some shooting to the spaceship and I'll start making the game playable online.

Mathijs ~ BulletProof Games



Team Meeting December 4th

Last wednesday our team came together to work on the game,
the meeting was at Emile's place, which at first was small and clean, but afterwards was still small but not so clean...


Our setup
The host!
When everyone had finally arrived and settled (because certain people are always late, and Emile had just woken up), we started programming and modelling. Emile began on the movement script, which is used to move your spaceship trough space, and this movement has to feel perfect. Philippe watched some tutorials to learn how to use unity to it's full extent. Mathijs and I, Martijn, oriented on some different ways to implement an online multiplayer interface in our game. Brian fixed a pretty nice model, and looked up some other models to use. But because you can't work on an empty stomach, we got pizza and beer (of course) to refill our tanks and work even better. 

We're planning on completing our demo at the end of next week. There will be a blogpost about the demo around that time!

Martijn ~ BulletProof Games

Brian working on our spaceship