Took a break from menu work over the past week in order to do something long-overdue: set up the game world. I created the various planets you can visit, a few dwarf planets, even a handful of test asteroids. I’m very proud to say that the single terrain system can be used to create huge super-Earths as well as tiny bumpy asteroids only several kilometers across. Here you can see the ship over an asteroid with a dwarf planet in the distance (lighting is turned off for these shots, so they don’t look their best)

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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!

Since I released the Rodina tech demo video a month and a half ago, I’ve been overwhelmed by the response and positive feedback the game has received. What was a quiet, personal project one day suddenly required tweeting, communication, and updates. It’s been a lot to take in but it’s also been quite wonderful. Thank you to everyone for your interest in the game!

I thought that the best way to balance these two responsibilities (creating the game and communicating with the public) is to organize my game updates the same way that I’m scheduling the production of the game itself- around milestones. Since a milestone is a big set of high-level features, this means that I won’t be giving out weekly updates on every little thing I make. But it also means I can focus on production without distraction. The first official milestone that is now complete is based around engine features, so without further ado, here’s what I’ve been working on!

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This is the original tech demo video that was released on April 16, 2012, to explain what Rodina was all about.