Rendered in Max, Photoshop’d, now to start on the game.

Since the success of the Mindmelter 360 project I’ve been thinking of another small scale game to create on the Xbox.

My idea is to do a version of Space Invaders with completly over the top modern graphics, post processing glow, ripple shockwave effects, huge solid polygon explosions (should be able to use the algo from racer).

This little fella to the left is the first draft of one of the 3 enemy models, I want to achive a slightly spooky yet thunderbirds like style with them.

He’s based off the ones on bottom two rows in the original game, there’s not much to go on with orginals being so low res but I’ve enjoyed extrapolating it out into my own vision.

Stay tuned there’s more to come.

on the weekend I came up with this idea for a tiny XBox 360 XNA project, tonight I managed to get the initial implementation working.

It’s basically an old school tunnel effect wrapped in an old school plasma effect covered with a new school post processing glow effect.

The clever parts are that the tunnel movement is all done in a vertex shader, the plasma is generated in a pixel shader and the palette for the plasma is dynamically re-calculated on the fly and passed in as a 1 dimensional texture.

The end result is a modern day Kaleidoscope, you can manipulate the palette and change the tunnels rotation and movement speed, it’s fun to muck around with colour!

Next job is to knock up an XBox project and fry my brain with colour on the big screen!

 There’s been no extracurricular coding happening at the moment, I’ve been seriously burning myself out at work… I’m still at work writing these as a matter of fact.

Matt and I have been pairing up testing out the new Business object model with WPF design we’ve been working out recently, the most recent results are pictured below.

 I’m really starting to understand this stuff now, the design is really quite gracefully and the code is looking very nice.  It far outdoes anything I’ve written before. With any luck the bulk of it will be out of the way this week and I can take things a little easier, I can’t seem to help myself with learning new tech.

Had a brainwave today amongst all the other stuff I was doing at work… “Build the levels out of physical objects!”

It works pretty well, certainly adds a whole level of emergent activity, I wouldn’t really call it gameplay as such… yet… still trying to work out fun ways to destroy the bad guys.

One idea I had was some sort of king of the hill type thing bonus points for the player who finishes on top of the stack.

I think the key will be to dig into the bowels of the physics system and record the forces acting on the rigid bodies and turn that into damage, at the moment I’m using the difference in the final velocity and it doesn’t really work for stationary objects that are getting squished!

Any hoo I’m off to New Zealand for a week of snow skiing and partying, see you all in a week.

Since I implemented the physics system into the “Ride the Fury” engine I’ve been thinking of gameplay ideas that might suit it. Mostly because programming the gameplay within a physically modeled environment is pretty hard.

There’s great emergent gameplay inherent in physics systems, the problem is your expectations of everything else becomes escalated, you expect to be able to bonk buster in the head and have him jam his mouth shut… easily done when he’s always standing up straight… what if he’s bouncing all over the place off walls and other busters?

 Anyhow this stupid idea has been bouncing around in my head the last couple of days and the inspiration for the digital drawing on the left… Clam jousting!

It’s basically the same as Williams Joust (right), with chicks riding flapping clams in a physically modeled world…it’s a million seller for sure!!!!

Managed to get Buster here texture mapped over the last couple of nights, last night I spent unwrapping his UV co-ordinates and tonight I photoshopped up the actual texture.

I’m happy with how he turned out, he’s far too detailed for how big he’ll be on the screen… but it was fun. I plan to have the top part of his head chomp down and his winder turn as he jiggers around the levels, shouldn’t be hard in code as they are all separate elements within the model.

The robotic versions of classic computer game characters idea for the enemies looks like it has some great potential, stay tuned for Buster staring in some in-game screen shots!

After spending last night extending my base collection class to allow any collection of objects to be rendered as 3D objects in my game engine, I’ve been thinking of ideas for 3D enemies all day.

Tonights effort has rendered the little fella to the left, he’s untextured as of yet but I’m happy with the result.

If you didn’t already recognise, he’s a slightly meaner version of the “Bubble Buster” bad guy from the arcade classic “Bubble Bobble” (the original is the little animated guy to the right), i was thinking of doing a robot version of Bub or Bob but eventually thought this guy was more fun.

I should get him textured later in the week, then I’m onto building a big kick ass shock shell firing canon!

I think he’ll be a more effective target with that face.

It’s not a mind blowing model by any means but I’m pretty happy with the result, about 2 hours work in max and photoshop, my modeling is pretty rusty but it’s coming back.

Next I’m thinking some sort of VB based enemy… stick around there’s more to come,