Sunday 31 August 2014

Progress Report

Unfortunately my Game Dev work has slowed to a crawl as I have several assignments due for University, but I should be more able to work on On Call Updates and new games soon.

I've done some planning for On Calls future updates and I've even started implementing them.

Stuff to expect in an update for On Call within the coming weeks:

  • Hold L1 to look down sights
  • Fully re-balanced and tweaked controls for faster, more accurate and tighter movement on foot and in space
  • Triple the amount of asteroids
  • Cleaner Pause menu
  • No more performance or quality mode. Ive rather optimized each level for individual levels of MSAA to maintain 60fps
  • FoV changes when you look down sights
  • Faster Bullet speeds
  • Added textures
  • Added more reflective substances
  • Fixed bugs
  • Improved performance
  • FoV is dynamic in space and gets larger when you are moving faster and slower when moving slower
  • Took out annoying turrets (will replace them with story content)
  • Ship now takes damage on collision with objects in space

Stuff I'm working on for this update and future updates (In no specific order, expect quicker things in the sooner updates)

  • Multiplayer (at first it will be simple dog-fighting in space, later on foot)
  • optimizing again for even more stable 60fps
  • A prologue of before the Officer is sent to space with 2 new levels where the enemies are rebel mercenaries with several AI routines for on the ground combat
  • 2 new weapons, an assault rifle and a shotgun
  • Replacing the spiders with rebel mercenaries
  • Redesigning the Crew and engine levels
  • Adding more story content, such as events that happen in space and on nearby planets
  • 2 Planets with larger levels, one reminiscent of Ratchet and Clank, an open level with multiple spokes and one reminiscent of Far Cry 3 (but on a far far far smaller scale)
  • A bar level where the player will get Intel for the side story
  • A side story
  • Replacing the target practice areas with better side missions (As they suck)
  • Adding more things to do at the Space station, like playing mini-games on a tv and a target practice area there
  • Overhauling the Upgrades to rather let the player pick how to spent them, as its currently automatic and thus doesn't feel rewarding or like it does anything
  • Adding a new level to the arcade mode, this time on foot instead of in space. It will be like a hoard mode using the new AI system that Im writing for ground combat with the rebel mercenaries
I hope to have the next update Uploaded to Sony within a week or two, which means that Sony will have the update for 1-2 weeks before they will upload it to you guys... I hope you enjoy the update when it comes out. Let me know if there's anything else I should look into adding / changing. In the end, these updates strive to make On Call the game I envisioned it to be, but since with have no budget, a tiny team of just me and a story / sound guy (my brother) and hardly any time, progress is slow. Hope you understand.

Some shots showing the new dynamic FoV in space according to speed and larger asteroid population:

Small FoV, LOW speed:

Large FoV, HIGH speed:

2 comments:

  1. One other thing that might look nice would be fog in the asteroid belt area. I've seen other games use it and it looks quite nice, but I dunno how possible it'd be with PSM/Vita.

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  2. Thanks for your input, over the last few weeks I've been looking into several ways to introduce fog or clouds within the asteroid belt, one approach I've fooled around with is beautiful and matches the look of the clouds in the skybox. However, it is hard to implement with our target of 60fps.

    We are already using a particle system in front of the Ship in the form of a star field that the Ship continuously passes through which is essential in creating a feeling of depth and speed, and adding more particle systems decreases performance drastically.

    I will continue until I find a way to implement this feature though, as its no longer just me that wants it in the next build ;)

    Thanks again for your input, it helps greatly in our mission to make this the best game we can ;)

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