Steinmetz and Hansler

Earlier today, I decided I'd work on the Steinmetz and Hansler. The Steinmetz is an electrical beam weapon that features quickly regenerating ammunition, and equally fast drain. I also finally decided to go back and make the Hansler as well, seeing as I had neglected to take care of it until recently.

Here's a screenshot!

Working on some lighting changes as well as increasing visual contrast to improve projectile visibility.

Also added a moving emissive 'pulse' to the material shown in the screenshot. It adds some level of visual differentiation and dynamics.

Currently sick, so progress is a tad slow. We've been out of commission somewhat for the past couple of weeks, so... yeah. May be adding in a new beam weapon soon, by next week's little milestone.

Project Whitehat Early Screenshots

So this is at the start of Level One, I was asked to test some different particle colors against a shadowed background and a lit background. Currently we have 8 different weapons in the game and I am to work on some weapon variants for the enemies.

We will be using a four-color scheme, blue, orange, red, and green.

Blue and orange are environmental colors, easy to decipher and read, whereas green and red are player/mob colors respectively. This will create an easy-to-decipher environment as well as distinguishable visuals that are extremely simple, but stylized.

Color Scheme: Tetrad

The team has been meeting up regularly, but making content at irregular intervals, adding to the game slowly. We are in no rush, but are very interested in continuing to nurture its development along. Overall, we plan on having a content complete game by the end of August or September, and start playtesting and polishing in October.

Narrative will be all VO's done by ourselves, and music will be done by Ghostlight.
https://soundcloud.com/ghostlightproductions

We are hoping to get sound effects that are nearly musical in nature that match and harmonize with the game's music.

Finished with school, now working on and off on Impact Event, an Independent Title

For the infrequent updates I do post here, I'd like to say this: I'm done with school as of one month and a couple days ago. I am now on the hunt for potential positions at various studios across the country and maybe even around the world.

About Impact Event: I had worked with three other individuals on producing a game in three months' time. Given the time constraints, you can imagine the game itself is simple. The premise of the game is guiding an asteroid through a solar system to hit a target planet (whose inhabitants will be screaming in terror by the time you get there). The player is given a single axis of control, and a mouse reticule to aim with. The player collects mass and gains speed throughout the level to hopefully cause as much destruction as possible. The player slings asteroids with the left mouse button, and these gathered asteroids (if kept) add points to the player's score. The gameplay of the mass collection mechanic is to gather the mini-asteroids and add them to your potentially devastating space rock of impending doom. With each asteroid collected, the space rock grows bigger and deadlier. The next important mechanic of the game is to gain speed via gravitational boost zones surrounding planets. At this point in time, we have yet to really refine the boost zones, but they are functional as well. In the end, the player's asteroid should be massive and highly destructive.

The art assets of the game are crude, since we were primarily focused on getting the gameplay functional. A term I had coined while in school for ugly artwork but functional gameplay was "fugly", or functionally ugly. It's easy to remember since you don't want to make something pretty before it's playable.

The Game Design Document for Impact Event should be updated with our future plans soon. I hope to keep this updated a little more frequently than I typically do.

Update: I've chosen to work on another project with other individuals, so here's what I would call an early alpha build of the game:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mczbak3ss9sg9pu/Exodus_FP3_WK4.exe

I did the particle effects, asteroid model, and designed the turrets.

DM-Kinesis released!

So I've completed DM-Kinesis, a TDM-focused UT3 map with various pathways and skill jumps for a semi-quakish feel. Some weapons are high risk/high reward such as the Rocket Launcher's placement in a lowered dip.

Here's a link for those interested.
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/907319-DM-Kinesis

DM-Kinesis Beta Phase

I'm mostly tweaking the lighting at the moment, but it's coming along. I have chosen to go towards the secondaries on the color wheel, though avoiding the oversaturated lighting that it was before. The lighting from the moon is a little less colorful, and a little less blue, producing a more believable night effect. I can't say for sure if I'm satisfied with the way that the sterile 'greenish' lights turned out, but as time goes on, I'm sure I'll think of something. It complements the orange-yellow well enough, I believe, but I need to balance the lighting a little more. Fewer 'pointless' lights might be in order.

Turns out that Fez is host to a really cool concept. Glad I got the suggestion.

DM-Kinesis Alpha Phase

I've been working intermittently on this over the course of the past several weeks, and have logged about 40+ hours getting the BSP layout hammered out. I've completed the trimming and have just started deciding on what to do with it as far as visuals go. I believe I will populate the map with some yellow-colored light sources and will have tanks of water that fill up until the U-Damage has become available. This should provide an audiovisual cue that players will quickly begin to associate with the U-Damage's availability on the map. When the U-Damage spawns, queue a sequence that triggers the release of the water into several shallow pools in the map to be drained. It's a fairly expensive sequence according to one of my friends, but I think it shouldn't be too costly if I minimize usage of emitters and other particularly expensive things.