Jar Of Eyeballs

Okay, time for another update! I’m not gonna post a screenshot today, just a list of features I implemented. Here they are:

• Player graphics are done. This means the ship, weapon animation, rockets, cannon shells, flames and explosions. Interesting detail: the rocket flames are animated sprites and not particle effects. Moving particle effects are a bitch to make. The cannon also ejects empty shell casings.
• The camera tracking has been improved. The camera follows the player, but the connection between the player and camera is a bit elastic, so the movement is smooth. The disadvantage is that the camera always trails behind, so the player is too close to the wrong side of the screen and you don’t even see your target until you’re too close. I have solved this by mounting an invisible object to the player and positioning it in front of the player. The camera follows this object instead of the player, so you always have a perfect view in front of the player.
• I have implemented a zoom functions. You can now zoom in and out, wich can sometimes come in handy if you want a better overview of the battlefield.
• Explosions! The projectiles you fire explode when they hit.

The next step are decent graphics for the player launch platform, and the level building blocks. When these things are done, I hope to get rid of the prototype look so I can finally publish some actual screenshots.

After a skipped week, here’s a new dose of cool links for you to check out:

• The game design process; An excellent article from Gamedev.net describing the different elements of the game design process.
• A showcase of astonisihing spaceship concepts; Almost every idea I have in mind involves spaceships, so this would be an excellent source of inspiration.
• Quad tree design; A core technique for high performance collision checking. I don’t need this at the moment since I use Torque Game Builder, wich has built-in collision checking, but it will come in handy once I start using XNA. Also very usefull: the Wikipedia entry for quad trees.
• Program like a Quake developer; A free book by Michael Abrash, one of the developers of Quake. The book is quite outdated, of course, but it’s still a very interesting read.
• Anatomy of an MMORPG; Unless you’re very experienced, very rich and very crazy, don’t even think about developing an MMORPG. This article should do a fine job of explaining why.

I have done some work on the graphics, and like I said before, I have tried something new! With my previous projects, I made some rough sketches on paper and then started drawing on the computer. I did everything with Inkscape, from lineart to coloring. This time, I followed a different approach. I started by drawing everything on paper. Not just a rough sketch, a complete, inked drawing. Here’s what the drawing of the player’s ship looked like after scanning:

The scanned drawing was then imported into Inkscape for tracing. I imported it as a bitmap image and used it as a background for drawing the ship. You can’t see it here, but this image contains about ten layers!

The biggest difference, however, is th way the image is colored. Previously, I used Inkscape for this as well. I found this a bit difficult, though. Smooth gradients and solid colors are no problem, but effects like inner shadows or anything that uses blurred lines or fills. Blur effects slow the program down like no other! So this time, I imported the line art into Gimp and used that to color everything. The colors are all separate layers, so the final image contained about twenty layers!

This looks already pretty sweet, but it’s not the final image just yet. First of all, the player will be a lot smaller than this, of course. And I’m gonna try to add some surface textures to the ship. Yep, I think this is a pretty good method!

Oh, and for the weekly link roundup: I haven’t found anything worth mentioning this week.