My first game (WIP) - Brutal Skies

Hi all, first post here, just signed up…

I first tried Blender about 4 weeks ago, followed some modelling and material tutorials, then wanted to check out the game engine. This is what I have so far, a spartan top-down shooter. Only 2 enemies at the moment, I want to make sure scoring and power-up dynamics are just right before I start duplicating and modifying additional enemy types. The GUI is very rough too, I’ve only been concerned with making sure all the variables are monitored correctly. I can make it pretty later!

Anyway, here’s a (low res) idea of what I’m doing. Criticism is more than welcome. Cheers!

Looks great. Do you have prior game engine experience with other platforms?

Whoa… four weeks and your already better than me, even though I’vebeen working at it for a year now. Nice work man.

Thanks!

No experience with games, a little experience with programming audio stuff with pure data and Lemur.

A bit more detail about what is going on in the demo…

Game mechanics:

The thin bar above the health bar shows your ‘combo’ level. You gain ‘combo’ by killing bad guys, and your ‘combo’ is reset by either taking damage, or failing to kill an enemy within a 1 second timer. All this does at the moment is give you bonus points. The fuller the combo bar, the more bonus-points-per-second you earn.

The thin bar below the health bar is for power-ups. You fill it by picking up blue energy balls from dead enemies. Once it’s full, it will reset and spawn a power up, (health or bullet power in the video, but now shields and missile power as well)

The vertical thin bar on the right, (which only appears when you have a bullet power-up), shows your bullet power-up. This bar depletes with time, but you can boost it by acquiring more power-ups. Bullet power-ups are tiered with 5 levels, and each level increases the fire-rate.

The terrain

The terrain was made by creating a (roughly) 1000x50000 pixel noise image made from ‘Clouds’ in photoshop, then used to displace a subdivided plane in Blender. The texture was made with cycles, (how awesome is Cycles!?!), the baked as a combo texture. I will bake seperate textures for spec/diff/intensity etc later.
The material uses colour ramps mapped to z-axis to divide the landscape up, and each region then uses it’s own version of a custom landscape shader that sets noise-size, colours, bumpiness etc.

Sounds

The soundtrack is a song I made a few years ago, seems to fit the context of the game pretty well.

I made all the other sounds on a Moog Slim Phatty synthesiser, and that was really fun!
I want to replace all the audio and use libpd to drive a pure data patch for more dynamic audio. (I’d LOVE to talk with anyone who has done this before)

Stuff to add

I want to use BGE’s navigation mesh to build a rail/road system for ground vehicles to follow, and some buildings that they can travel to and from. For example, a cargo train leaving a weapons research lab heading towards a military outpost. Kill the supply truck/train, score a sweet weapon power-up. My ultimate vision for the game is an intricate train set that you can destroy.

Better explosions using baked veronoi-cell fracture animations.

MORE LIVES. Seriously, this game is HARD. This should be done now!

Better GUI, move all these bars and make them look more like the console of space-ship.

Stuff I’m pondering, may add, may be too tricky or too much work for little ol’ me.

Parts of the game triggering a switch from top-down view to 3rd person, where the ship can go up&down to avoid obstacles, and the player has to navigate canyons and avoid colliding into the landscape.

A sarcastic female AI voice that chats to you through the game.

A few cutscenes, especially a starting scene where the ship launches from a hangar, or mothership…

Spent the last week porting what I have to Unity. Will still use Blender for modelling, but as a game engine, it’s shite.

Haha, Unity4Lyfe. :cool: