Synnah

[Release] Nineties Cockpit Freakout

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Yessss!! That cockpit is looking real good.

 

How are you handling highlighting on the material side of things? You'll be able to save some time if you use parameters in your materials to control highlighting instead of making separate ones. Hit me up if you want to know more or need a hand.

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Thanks!

 

At the moment I'm literally just swapping to a separate material; changing parameters definitely seems like a better idea, though! I've got this page about material parameter collections, which I'll go through when I'm setting up materials for ever, and hopefully it should make sense. I'll let you know if I need help, though!

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So, thrusters are in and basically working, and- oh god help!

 

OHGOD.gif

 

I haven't hooked up the logic for translating the slider positions into an amount of thrust yet; at the moment they're just turning the thrusters on or off. Shouldn't be too difficult, but it's going to require a lot of faffing around to find sensible values. I've also got seven buttons there that probably aren't going to do anything before the end of the competition. After I get thrusting working, I think I'm just going to focus on making the environment, and anything else I can do after that is a bonus.

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Because my priorities are all wrong, after modelling my environment objects, the first thing I did was obviously not to import them into UE4 and make a damn game out of them, but to render out a high-quality ray-traced image that I would downscale to 320x160 to make this title screen:

 

TitleScreen640.png

 

Here's the original render, if anyone's interested:

 

TitleScreenRender.jpg

 

So, uh, let's see if I can get everything in-game before the end of today.

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Because my priorities are all wrong, after modelling my environment objects, the first thing I did was obviously not to import them into UE4 and make a damn game out of them, but to render out a high-quality ray-traced image that I would downscale to 320x160 to make this title screen:

 

 

So, uh, let's see if I can get everything in-game before the end of today.

 

I like that title screen! Makes me wish someone had done Free Macintosh Warez for this jam.

If you're going for that visual style, you may or may not be interested in a quick post process effect that emulates a low res pixellated look:

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This is cool, but tough - I've become a master at flipping the craft upside down!

 

Would be nice to have some simple sound fx.

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Totally love the title screen and world graphics. I had a lot of trouble mapping what a control did to what the effect was, do you think you'd benefit from less obfuscation? You're certainly successful in confusing me! 

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God, I love the Spectre-esque look of that title screen. I can't wait to try this out.

 
You're the second person to mention Spectre! I hadn't heard of it before, but it seems to owe a debt to Battlezone, which was the kind of thing I was going for with the environment.
 

This is cool, but tough - I've become a master at flipping the craft upside down!

 

Would be nice to have some simple sound fx.

 

Flipping the craft is way too easy! That was kind of my intention, as I positioned a thruster underneath the ship and then gave it collision, so you're never very stable when you land. I do like that, because I wanted the experience to mostly be "How the hell do I fly this thing?!", but I might play with removing that collision and making the base more stable. If you do find yourself upside down, you can fire the front thrusters (The top left slider) to flip yourself over. And yeah, I feel bad that I didn't get any kind of audio in. I spent Sunday in kind of a fugue state, and by that point I'd given up on learning new things and was focusing solely on things I already knew how to do (Building the environment and getting it into UE4).
 
So, here's a list of things that are missing, and which I plan on adding:
 
  • Title Screen. I spent ages making it, and then never even implemented it! Probably look into a credits screen and maybe some basic display options (Fullscreen/Window, resolution).
  • Intro story. Nothing flashy, just some dialogue with character portraits.
  • Audio! Title screen and in-game music, and sound effects for the buttons and ship (Thrusters and collision noises).
  • Implement firing. This also means implementing things to fire at; I'm not sure what kind of enemies these should be. Stationary targets, or ships that fly around. The former requires less work, and I figure doing basically anything is going to be difficult enough as it is without adding moving targets.
  • Get the remaining buttons working. Only one of them does anything at the moment, which is the one that turns on the wiper light (It's also supposed to activate wipers, but I didn't get around to modelling them). There are three fire buttons, a button that does nothing, a button to start the self destruct sequence and a button to stop it.
  • Displays. I didn't have time to do anything with these at all; Some of them are going to be easier than others, but I'm going to have to look into doing some clever stuff with materials to get them working. One of these needs to be a radar.
  • A shield/health system; I don't know if I'd want my enemies to fire at you, so maybe this would have to be damage taken from crashing into things. Probably requires some pretty smart logic that will take a while.
  • Mouseover highlights. I didn't make these specific to the objects you're mousing over, and it looks a bit naff.
  • Fix the bug with highlights where they tend to break if you click and release while still mousing-over the same object (i.e. what you do most of the time).
  • Success and fail states, and the screens to go with them (Probably rendered in the same way as the title screen).
  • Make the graphics look a bit nicer. I wanted reflectiveness from the surfaces, and the lines were intended to glow. Should be easy enough to do these in Unreal. Don't want it to impact on the performance much, though.

There are probably a few other things, but I've forgotten what they are.

 

Totally love the title screen and world graphics. I had a lot of trouble mapping what a control did to what the effect was, do you think you'd benefit from less obfuscation? You're certainly successful in confusing me! 

 

Yeah, I think I need to rethink the sliders a bit. My initial intention was that the rear and front thrusters would be obvious when you used them, but because of the way the physics work, rear thrust doesn't actually move you forward unless you also have some amount of upward thrust. Forward thrust causes you to tilt backwards, but this isn't super-obvious. The horizontal slider in the centre is actually changing the balance of the rear thrusters, which allows you to turn, but I don't know how many people will figure this out. Perhaps I need to dedicate one of the displays to this. I want it to be difficult to get the ship to do specific things, but I don't want players to be completely bewildered by it.

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It's a hilarious idea, with some nice execution in places... but I think I really need some sound effects and more feedback if I'm going to invest time in learning how to pilot the craft. Awesome entry for the jam, though...!

 

 --Rev

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