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.

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.

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.