So the blogs been quiet and there hasn't been a post on IndieDB in a while, but we’re no less busy forging greatness here. The blog is being completely redesigned to be friendlier to the information hunters with a landing page, FAQ, wiki, gallery and linear blog layout planned. That release is imminent we are just tightening up a few bolts.
Meanwhile the latest video portrays a direction change in the art department which will make it a lot easier to start implementing some of the assets that are being produced, highly detailed planets and some more suitable weapons effects on the top of the agenda there. A new musician enters the scene as we dispense with the hypnotic soundscapes and bring in something much more suited to the genre.
Custom ships are now being produced which fortunately fit right in with the placeholder assets. Sure we could have gone for higher-poly models but we like to keep things performant, even though frames per second matters far less for an RTS than say a twitch-gaming shooter we still don’t want things slowing to a crawl during the action for those peeps running older machines.
Feature wise I’ve been busy adding missiles and programming the little buggers to react by shooting them out. Also I've been making the environment a little more responsive by making the asteroids crack and split on collisions, I've also been making the ship movements a little more ‘natural’ and fixing up the UI which had some apparent bugs in that last video.
With Christmas in the way the plans to Kickstart are put on hold for the next few months, as it becomes harder to entice people to part with their cash on that platform I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at successful KS projects and extrapolating best practice – one things for sure, the future of this project will not rest solely on that bundle of uncertainty.
Also, we require help with the following:
· 2D UI designer: designing elements such as waypoint circles and interface icons
· Concept artist: To help realise the vision of the 2nd part of the game: The grand campaign map and help put together art for the Kickstarter
If you can help with that leave a message below and we'll come back to you. Hi-resolution images available on the Facebook page:
Very nice video Mawhrinskel. And those 'natural' elements that you speak about in your posts is what will make Shallow Space rise above the rest of the games. Was wondering in the video if the enemy or yourself for that matter think that all hope is lost can you perform a kamikaze action to try an inflict more damage to the enemy fleet before your ship(s) are destroyed? It should be possible since the bigger ships move a lot slower and could be a tactic for ships with carrier type abilities. That camera view you were showing off was very smooth btw.
Very nice video Mawhrinskel. And those 'natural' elements that you speak about in your posts is what will make Shallow Space rise above the rest of the games. Was wondering in the video if the enemy or yourself for that matter think that all hope is lost can you perform a kamikaze action to try an inflict more damage to the enemy fleet before your ship(s) are destroyed? It should be possible since the bigger ships move a lot slower and could be a tactic for ships with carrier type abilities. That camera view you were showing off was very smooth btw.
Yeah i've been looking into collisions but the local avoidance system we've written is pretty hot on making sure that sort of stuff doesn't happen. So even if I take a battlecruiser and fly it into a capital ship they kind of silently work together in the background to ensure that collision never occurs, the BC will adjust it's heading to fly around the Cap ship and the Cap ship might even strafe slightly if required.
I am intending on making the blasts have area of affect damage to make up for it though. But who knows, I didn't think friendly fire was possible before I managed to implement that or even having hundreds of turrets in play tracking and targeting individually with fully simulated projectiles so... I'm not ruling anything out.
The gameplay is very very smooth now actually, it might surprise you to know that these videos are recorded on a laptop with a Quaddro 1100m - so the target platform will be a Geforce 750m or equivalent as I foresee laptops becoming the platform of choice for casual gamers as they continually come down in price.
Thanks for the continued support sscadmin-dude 🙂
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