Monthly Archives: August 2012

I’ll probably show off the work I did for the last milestone some more, but in the meantime I wanted to show a little bit of what I’m working on for the next milestone: Interface and Ship Customization. For this milestone, I’m working on the menu system, and my menu proof-of-concept will be to complete at least the “Ship Layout Menu”, which will allow the player to design their ship interior.

So far none of this is designed. The menus aren’t functional, I don’t have the Layout Menu designed (though I have an idea how I want it to work) and the procedural ship interiors, though functioning, are set for a total overhaul. I want to redo how they work to make them more functional and flexible.

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OK! Here is the first trickle of screenshots I promised. One of the things I implemented recently was anti-aliasing, but for some reason I couldn’t get the screenshot function to work with it, so these pics have some jaggies! It’s funny, I didn’t really notice the jaggies until I turned on anti-aliasing, and now that I’ve turned it off they are driving me crazy :) I guess that’s progress for you.

What we’re looking at here is my programmer-art version of one of the new ships. Keep in mind that I’m going for a kind of abstract look here- these aren’t meant to look like your typical space ship. You can probably see what I mean by “SNES Star Fox aesthetic”.

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This milestone was a significant one: my goal was to have a complete prototype of ship to ship combat in the game, including models, AI, advanced ship controls, multiple weapons, and special effects. Let’s see how I did!

• New Ships
  For this milestone I created some new ships for the AI to control. These models aren’t necessarily final, but I am starting to firm up my idea that Rodina should go for a kind of modern SNES Star Fox aesthetic. It’s simple enough to leave something to the imagination, but not so simple that it looks ugly. They aren’t bad for programmer art, but I may have a real artist rework them in the future.
• Ship AI
  These new ships aren’t just for show- they will chase the player, evade her weapons, and try to shoot her out of the sky. Enemy ships are capable of doing everything the player ship does, including:

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Elliptic-Games.com has been updated! In anticipation of a new milestone update coming out, I figured the time was right to convert the site to a blog.

At the moment, it’s very “bloggy”, but I intend to massage it over the next few days / weeks / months to strike a balance between showing updates about the game and having a nice front page for those who are visiting for the first time. I’ll be putting some other good things on here as well, such as a page for screenshots / videos. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!