I’ve been working on a third person space based shoot’em up for a little while now and I felt like now would be a good time to share a bit of what I have done. Originally I was developing the game in the BGE, unfortunately I was having trouble achieving a speed I was comfortable with so I have since been developing this with Unity 3D.
All of the modeling and texturing is being done with my favorite app Blender!
C/F 310:
This is going to be a dual role front line enemy fighter and transport.
There are three method’s of space travel in this game universe. The first is your space ship’s engines. For short distance travel you’ll use what I call a RailGate. The RailGate is similar in principle to a rail gun or maglev train. The RailGate uses a series of powerful electro magnets to accelerate a spaceship to a destination gate which slows the ship down with a reverse process. The RailGate will be used for travel from a planet to it’s moons or other similar distance travel.
For long distance travel there are SlamGates. The idea for the SlamGate came from today’s current Large Hadron Collider. Ships do not actually travel through a SlamGate as it’s name might suggest, the SlamGate is a powerful particle collider, it shoots out two particles that collide in front of a space ship creating a small short lived black hole. This black hole pulls the ship towards it, when the ship arrives at the black hole’s location the black hole has dissipated allowing the ship to continue it’s forward motion. The SlamGate creates a series of black holes in front of the desired space ship accelerating it to great speeds. A SlamGate at the destination slows the ship down by creating a series of black holes behind the ship.
RailGate:
SlamGate:
To round things off a bit here are a few in-game shots. Please forgive that these are running inside the Unity editor, I haven’t programmed a screen shot method yet and print screen does not work in the standalone build.
Main Menu:
Main Menu Control Options:
LVL 1 Training:
Ah yes, as for the game’s progress so far…
The main menu is just about finished, the only option not yet functional is the ‘Credits’ option, though eventually the ‘Play’ button will bring up a lvl select window that is not yet implemented. Profile’s are fully implemented as well as the profile creation/deletion menu. The in-game and main menu options panel is entirely finished, display options include screen resolution (all supported resolutions above 1024x768 are available), anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, particle detail, texture resolution and number of pixel lamps. So far only the first level, training, and it’s associated briefing screen are finished, though there are no victory conditions for the first level yet as the final objective regards a feature that I am not entirely sure will be included in the final game.
As stated before all models are created in Blender. I use 2.49b for modeling because I like to use Bmesh features, 2.58a is used for texturing, texture baking and model export. All texturing is done with Blender and almost all of the textures are created solely with Blender, I download a few textures from www.cgtextures.com, mainly just scratched metal and such. All of the menu items such as buttons, windows, slide bars, tabs, and backgrounds are rendered in Blender, though some are touched up with GIMP.
Edit: I meant to say all resolutions above and including 1024x768 are supported. By the way the game will be made available for free download upon completion.
This is really awesome!
Especially liking the gate-to-gate traveling concept; I really like when everything is thought out and (theoretically) possible, that’s what separates real sci-fi from mysterious fantasy worlds.
Best of luck and persistency to finish this project!
Whoa! this looks like a professional game. The gate to gate thing reminds me of the mass relays in mass effect.
I was gonna say the same thing, the menu also reminds me of mass effect for some reason, the colour’s maybe.
As an aspiring game designer myself i find it really impressive how much you seem to understand your own games universe, you are definetly off to a great start, and those models are really cool.
Never tried unity out though , keep up the good work!
Thanks for the words of encouragement! I’ll need to look up this Mass Effect stuff, I don’t want to copy anyone. Pondering the universe and its workings is one of my favorite past times, that’ll probably help out with making theoretically possible future technologies.
This is my first ever video game and I’ve been working on it in some form for a good while, about two years ago this game was a turn based 2D birds eye view programed in C++ using SDL, at that time I was using a friends beat up old hunk of junk work laptop. After receiving a shiny new midrange laptop for Christmas it was upgraded to a 3D real-time experience which was an exciting time for me. Over these last years I have been using this game to teach myself the art of 3D modeling and programming. My skills in 3D modeling, texturing and programming have really evolved since I first started not long ago and I am confident enough that I can show the above shots believing that I won’t be letting anyone down with an unreleased game.
I can’t say how much time will pass until I push out a playable release, there is quite a bit left to be done. The game has gone through several incarnations and been rebuilt from scratch numerous times. The latest redesign came when I made the decision to move from BGE to Unity. My original thought was to go with the UDK, but every version of the installer crashes on the splash screen. I also tried out Ogre 3D and Crystal Space until I finally arrived with Unity. Unity doesn’t use Python so I had to learn a new scripting language. Unity utilizes three languages and I have chosen to use Boo script as it’s the most similar to Python, basically C with Python syntax.
Anyway I look forward to continuing my work on this project and I am sure I’ll keep Blender Artists updated from time to time.
Edit: As for the colors in the main menu, well blue is my favorite color 
I’m amazed you’ve stuck with this for so long and still obviously feel just as enthusiastic as when you started - so many of my games have crashed and burned over the years cos the scale gets too daunting and i’m mainly working alone.
Its really inspiring to see someone making so much progress and you’ve just motivated me to do some more on a DarkBASIC project I’ve been working on - keep up the good work bud! 
@paul1980: I am honored to hear that I have inspired you to get back in the “game.”
One of the things I find keeps me going is changing it up a bit. Working on the same thing day in and day out gets far too monotonous to keep my attention so I like to switch it up a bit here and there, when I find myself getting bored I know the quality of my work will suffer so there’s no point in pushing myself to do something my heart’s not in. One of the advantages of doing this alone is the ability to work on different aspects, if I become bored with programming I can move on to modeling, when I’m bored with modeling I can move on to sound effects or whatnot. When that’s not enough I find a good video game, like Diablo II, to captivate myself for a couple of weeks until I become re-interested in my work.
True it’ll probably take longer for my game to come to a release point if I keep taking a week ‘off’ here and there, but I’m more of a quality over quantity type of person anyway.
Edit: You know it almost feels a bit arrogant to say that I am working on this game by myself. Truthfully there is an army of people out there making tutorials and such, not to mention all those who have worked on Blender, Unity, Python and Boo, etc… Without them this would not have been possible. If any of you are reading this… THANK YOU!
Ultimately the entire human race has a hand in helping me with all that I do. Without the farmers I would have no food, without the scientists, miners and manufacturers I would have no computer. Thank you all!
Okay so I hitup Wikipedia for some info on Mass Effect. That game has one heck of an in depth story! Anyway I think the underlying technology between their Mass Relays and my jump gates is different enough. There isn’t any type of inertial dampener on my technology. My game takes place exclusively within the confines of our home solar system so long distance travel would be considered from planet to planet rather than star to star so I think faster than light travel isn’t really necessary.
As far as reality is concerned I think that faster than light travel is a hurdle we, as a race, will need to overcome, but probably not until a great deal of time passes. Feasible travel within our own solar system is probably our next major hurdle and I think the technologies in my game depict a realistic manner of travel for that purpose.
At any rate if anyone is interested I have uploaded the C/F 310 model to blendswap.com so anyone can enjoy it for whatever use they like. I am still waiting on approval from blendswap so I will post a link once that is received. Eventually I’d like to share all of my game models with the rest of the world, but I’d like there to be an element of ‘newness’ to my game so many of the models will probably not be made available for download until after the game’s release.
