Jar Of Eyeballs

Not much new links this week. Here’s an overview:

• What every programmer needs to know about game networking; An explanation of peer-to-peer and client-server networking. Adresses the main issues of both methods and a solution named client side prediction, wich eliminates input lag.
• Con Artist Games; A developer that’s working on a cool zombie game. And who doesn’t like to shoot zombies?
• Rokon; An OpenGL-based 2D engine for Android. I bought an Android phone myself a while ago (an HTC Hero), and I might give game development on it a try.
• Android Game Development resources; A short list of Android development resources, including a Quake clone for Android!
• Procedural Content Generation; Techniques for generating game content, such as maps and levels, through automated algoritms. Perhaps the most famous game that used this was Diablo II.

After the cancellation of Gridblaster II I immediately started working on a new project. I have done some serious work on the prototype and now I finally have something to show off. Behold: Omega Arena! Since this is a prototype, it looks very, very ugly; I have started out with dummy graphics.

Like I said before, no more narrow corridors and grid-based movement. Omega Arena features large, open levels and lots of freedom of movement. The gameplay is, essentially, like Asteroids. You pilot a craft you have to rotate and fly using rocket thrusters. The ship is equipped with two weapons: a grenade launcher and rockets. The rockets are very potent, but you have only a limited supply and are slower than grenades. The grenade launcher has a larger capacity, but has one hell of a recoil.
I have decided to limit the weaponry to these two main weapons, but there will be lots of upgrades you can pick up during the game. This is something I was gonna put in Gridblaster II and I decided to keep it. The same goes for the enemies. The game will have spawners that launch the next enemy when one is destroyed. The enemies in Gridblaster II were the main reason I cancelled it. The collisions between enemies were insanely difficult to handle and kept messing everything up. In this game, they will just bounce off each other and the walls using the built-in physics engine of Torque. Besides the regular enemies, the game will also have static weapons, such as gun and rocket turrets. And lots of booby traps.
You might also wonder where I got the name Omega Arena. The very first game I played when I got a C64 (I was 8 at the time, wich was in 1986) was called Omega Race and followed a similar concept. I had been thinking about a cool name for this project for a while. I had already decided it would have to be something with “arena” in it, so it became Omega Arena.

Once again, the holiday for gamers by gamers has begun! If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, head over to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and read the entire archive. That’s right, EVERYTHING!

Okay, done? Great! So, here are my plans for Wintereenmas. One of my WoW characters is about to enter Outland and I want to celebrate Wintereenmas by kicking ass in Hellfire Ramparts. Also, I hope to get some more work on my upcoming game done so I can finally post an announcement next weekend. So everybody have fun and game on!

Okay, so here’s the next round of weekly links.

• The 7 commandments all video games should obey; A nice list of things no game developer should ever put in a game again. My number one pet pieve: escort quests! They are frustrating, boring and most of the time the AI of the character you’re supposed to guard is as dumb as a brick.
• Indie Game Music; No game should be without a soundtrack. This website has a nice selection of game soundtracks in various formats, and most of them can be used for free in freeware games.
• Game GUI; If you need some inspiration when designing a user interface.
• Game Textures; Perhaps not very usefull for 2D games, but the textures look damned nice!
• RB Whitaker’s XNA tutorials; An impressive collection of XNA tutorials. I’m still working on C#, but I hope to use XNA for one of my next projects.

That’s all for this week!