Pheonix Saga development
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Pheonix Saga development
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| Hi Guys! Been ages since I've been on here. My computer died on me, and my last project was entirely lost. Then I had a lengthy stay in hospital. I've only just gotten back into the whole game development thing, and after my brush with the doctors I decided it's time to focus my attention and actually try to finish a project. So, I've been learning some more techniques in forums and web tutorials, and am working on a new project called Pheonix Saga. It's a blend of rts and rpg, and is only early days - I'm still putting the level/map editor together. Today I thought I'd do the main menu for the game proper, and I've made it a slowly spinning 3D game environment, with a masked bitmap on top to show the text. The terrain for my game is a blitz3d terrain mesh, with a tiled ground texture across it. On top of that I have another terrain mesh copying it exactly, but with an alpha mapped png applied to it - so that 'cloud shadows' will slowly scroll across the map. Then there is a layer for shadow objects. I haven't been happy with real time shadows, trying to keep high frame rates with my numerous polygons and large map sizes, so I've made small rectangle planes that sit beneath all 3D objects. A masked, pre-rendered shadow image of the object is applied to the shadow rectangle below it, so that when the 3d object are placed on top of the map, the shadow images are underneath them, looking like real shadows :) Because I can't do detailed, rendered shadows for the units using the same technique, I've decided that units in the game will have simple 'blob' shadows underneath them - again, a masked, alpha'd png applied to a rectangle that floats beneath each unit as they move around. Anyway, here's a youtube vid showing the main menu for my project, and a screenshot showing how the interface is looking at the moment. I'm trying to do a bit of work on the project daily, so while I'm not very far into it, I'll hopefully post some more updates now and then. screenshot of interface (shrunk for web viewing)  youtube vid of rotating main menu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fZu5LprIEU |
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| looks interestin so far |
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| Inspired by shows like Gundam Wing and Voltron Force, I made an opening title-sequence movie for when the game launches! Found a free 'evil laugh' wav file for when the alien bad guy's face is on the screen :) I also was informed by someone that I spelled Phoenix wrong!!! I had the e in front of the o, so I'll have to go through my program, blog, movies, etc, and change all of that... Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OOOxaQbJJw Here's a screen capture from a moment in the video, showing my current cartoon/animated style:  |
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| Looks good but it is very noticeable that they are the same model with different hair/color. I don't know if that is important really for your game, but it would definitely bring more character if the actors had slightly different build, posture and facial structure. |
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| Thanks for the feedback! Lost all my old art assets when my computer crashed, so I've only got one male mesh at the moment, and I've just been changing it's colouring/hair, etc to make different people :) But I'll definitely look into making more people models later so they don't all look like clones. (The characters aren't really important to the actual gameplay, as the game scale is zoomed out, so characters aren't visible battlefield units moving around the screen, but just for dialogue portraits and such.) |
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| r u the same bloke who made a buck rogers game? |
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| Looks interesting, but the first video is poorly done. Just having a long video of a spinning scene is not good enough. For that length of video, you should do a fly-through, or include a narrative sound track or text overlay detailing the development work in an interesting way, or have something more dynamic going on in the scene. You need to engage the viewer's interest more. The second video looks far more interesting. |
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| howd you get them to look cell shaded? |
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| Bill: Thanks for the feedback. Some good points. In that first vid, I was just screen-capturing what the main menu of the game looks like. Most people's main menus are just static images with text, so I was trying to make my menu look more interesting. Once I get further along with the game engine, I'll try to have more units in the background scene, walking about, turrets rotating, and that sort of thing, to make it more interesting. Next time I do a vid capture from the program, I'll add some comments to talk about what I'm doing, for anyone who's interested in the details. Slenkar: I'm just doing full-bright, with outlining, on the models. Basically, the unit, character and building models are a bunch of seperate polygons. Each polygon has a full-bright single-colour applied to it. No textures required. Then I copy the mesh and use the 'push' modifier in 3ds max to move each vertex outwards in it's current facing, and colour this new mesh black. I then reverse the normals of the mesh, so that it is inside out. The result is that you always see the original mesh in front of the inverted mesh, making it look like the original mesh is outlined by the inverted mesh. I outline coloured shapes in black, and black shapes in white. Sometimes you have to play with the 'outline' mesh a little, so that it doesn't jut out in odd places on the model, but mostly it works well, especially at a fixed distance. Slenkar: Yes, I'm the guy who was working on a Buck Rogers game last year. Lost everything when my computer died on me. Models, textures, research, program, music, sound effects, etc. I decided to start fresh with my own setting, so I would have the rights to everything I am doing this time around. (and back everything up daily this time!) |
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| may i suggest dropbox.com ? the graphics all look very good |
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| Slenkar: Thanks for the suggestion! I had never even heard of dropbox.com before. I checked out the site, and it's exactly the sort of file management thing I need. And there's 2GB storage for free! |
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| yah its very useful quite a few people round here use it i think |
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