Some concepts for the Player’s vehicle

It’s about time to start working on some of the steampunk aesthetic. Here are a few concept sketches I’ve started to toss around for the player. Some type of vehicle that doesn’t ride too firmly along the surface of the ‘tube’ and also has the ability to ‘phase’ through to the outside and vice versa. So it has to have some sort of extra tech. Nothing is final at all at this stage, but here’s a few excerpts from my sketchbook from this week:

Some thumbnails:

Colored sketches:

Larger sketches (w/ some jacked perspective):

Aaron is working on some stuff for the tube and I’ll continue w/ the sketches/concepts for the player. Next time I’ll post some sketches of enemies.

-seth

Meeting #5

Well we are finally starting to move forward. We made a lot of progress this week. On the art side, the artists came up with an art style and a theme. Its going to be a steam-punk theme with a non-realistic look. The concept work looks cool, especially some of the enemies I saw. I’m excited to see this all come together on the screen.

On the design side, we solidified some of core gameplay mechanics. We still have some enemy and weapon design left to do but thats about it, until we start designing the levels.

On the programming side, the prototype is moving along nicely. Brandon is kicking ass and hopes to have a first version ready by next weeks meeting. Bill is working on the core engine and is also making a ton of progress, including work on resource management, asynchronous asset loading, some custom pipeline components, and the basic render.

Prototyping is something we are focusing on this time around. We want to get our key gameplay ironed out as soon as possible. To do this, we want to get the game in the hands of a lot of people quickly, so we can get feedback and start iterating ASAP. We’re developing the prototype independently of the core engine to get it up and running quickly.

Meeting #4

We have a game idea … again ;-) In the process of refining our idea from last meeting, we pretty dramatically changed course.

We spent most of the meeting debating one key mechanic – the rail system. In the end we decided to cut it and go in a different direction, to achieve a more fluid navigation and control system. With that decision made, we adjusted and modified a few of our ideas to better fit the new direction. We did this by creating some rules that our game will follow. Here are those rules:

1. The game is a shooter. The focus is on shooting enemies to achieve a high score.
2. The game is played in a tube that has both an inner and outer surface.
3. The player has the ability to switch from the inside to the outside of the tube and vice versa at will.
4. Speed is not controlled by the player (he just controls left/right movement).
5. Its a level based game, which has a difficulty progression. Levels are completed by killing a certain number of enemies.
6. A binary color scheme is used to denote the inside and outside of the tube (all enemies inside are one color, all enemies outside are a different color; the energy strip also follows the binary color scheme).
7. There is a special meter that is filled by driving over the energy strip. Each time the special meter is filled, your points multiplier for kills will increase.
8. At predetermined point thresholds, the player will be awarded extra men and bomb power-ups.
9. There is no co-op or multiplayer.
10. There are environmental obstacles, such as walls.

As you can see it’s going to be a pretty crazy shooter game. The player will be continuously racing down a tube, while shooting enemies, collecting “energy”, and avoiding obstacles; all while “jumping” between the inside and outside of the tube.