Dirigible Development Diary

Apologies for the awful title, first of all.

More work on the engine. I replaced all the handrails. All of them. I’ve also replaced (nearly) all of Valve’s pipes with my own. I’m interested in the approach that they took with pipes. They have standard lengths of straight pipes (128, 256 and 512), but also specific corner sections – left 90 degrees, right 90, up 90, down 90. I just made a single 90-degree bend which can be used in any direction. Then again, I’m pretty sure that Valve made far more models than they actually used in the end, so that’s what they ultimately went with. We don’t have such luxuries, sadly.

I did some work on the interior of the engine. There’s a smallish area that you can go in (and it’s integral to the way this area plays out). It started off with a central, horizontal cylindrical shaft, with blue glowing laser beams, but I was never happy with it – it feels too clichéd and generally a bit dull. So, keeping the shaft, I decided on having some long, helical pipes going through it, diverging at the point where the shaft meets the chamber (stop sniggering). After some experimentation with modelling the helices, it became apparent that they weren’t feasible – to do a helix with enough turns (and with at least 12 sides so it looks cylindrical) would have put each one at around 1000 polygons. With at least 8 inside the shaft, you’re looking at the polycount of a character model. I also really dislike having special-case models – ones that can’t really be used elsewhere.

So, I employed my newly-created pipes and made this. I was very pleasantly surpised by the result:

It’s still not finished (obviously), but it’s a great backdrop to what will take place there.

As promised, some media. This is a starship engine, and it’s big.

Instead of just slapping down some anonymous screenshots, I thought it’d be better to show how it came about, and some of the stages of its development.

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We’re taking a different approach to combat for this game. It’s not a “normal” FPS, where you can take silly amounts of damage, carry 10 weapons (plus all their ammo) and still run faster than an athlete. On the other hand, we’re not going for the awfully-named “realism” approach. Instead, we’re going for a kind of middle ground. In other words, combat is going to be hard. Most of the time, you’re going to be outgunned and outnumbered – probably outequipped as well. If you go for a direct confrontation, chances are that you will die. We have quite an aggressive damage model, and no oh-so-conveniently-placed medkits. Ammo is scarce, and your accuracy (early on, at least) isn’t too good. Oh, and then there’s the enviroment. The last thing you want to do on a spaceship is go shooting up the fragile systems that supply your gravity, your heat, your oxygen…
So why have we made it so difficult? Simple – there are other ways of dealing with combatants. I won’t go into too many details yet, but suffice it to say that your best weapon is going to be the walls around you.

Of course, you could take a stealthy approach, try and take out your opponents in a Splinter Cell way – we’ve made provision for that. You could, if you so desired, try the aforementioned guns blazing method, it’s possible that you might come through unscathed (or slightly scathed – while there’s no medkits, there are ways of “repairing” yourself). We’re leaving it as open as we can.

I’ll put some media in the next update. Promise. Also, being ill and creative simultaneously just isn’t possible. Ugh.

So what else can I say about this project?

It’s episodic.

This is partly due to our development pipeline. We’re only a small team, and it would take us years to complete this game outright. With episodes, we get to stay (barely) ahead of the technology curve. The storyline has been written with episodes in mind, and the setting allows us to break it into episode-sized chunks quite easily. Not that it’s without its own set of issues – we have to ensure that each episode is capable of standing alone, yet still carrying on the overall plot. There also needs to be enough of a cliff-hanger that the player wants to see what happens next, but not so much that the wait for the next episode seems excessive. We also don’t want to leave too much unanswered (I’m looking at you, Lost.)

The main focus of our work at the moment is on a proof-of-concept demo which, in the event of everything working out as planned (does that ever happen?) will also double as the public demo. We wrote a separate storyline for the demo. It ties in to the main plot quite neatly, and does a clever bit of foreshadowing, but isn’t actually required knowledge. It actually casts the player as a different character than in the main story arc, and that’s something that we may revisit from time to time.

The demo itself is being built using Half-Life 2 as a base. Technically, that’s not quite true. We can’t actually say what the actual “product” we’re using as a base is yet, because it’s one of those “up in the air” things that I mentioned in my previous post.

Now, I know what some people will think at this point – they’ll be of the opinion that we’re just a wannabe mod team with ideas above our station. Allow me to firmly dispel that notion right now. Our team, while small, is extremely talented, professional and hard-working. We’ve contributed and collaborated on various commercial projects over the past few years. The simple truth is this:

Funding game development is an absolute nightmare.

We are self-funded. That means that it’s highly unlikely that we can afford to lay down the several hundred thousand dollars to buy an engine licence up front. Using an existing game engine and building your demo as a technical mod is a cheap (free!) way of accomplishing what needs to be done. Obviously, it’s not ideal – there’s technical issues and limitations that you can’t do anything about, but on the upside it means that you have a huge library of premade content that you can get started with, replacing it with your own as time goes on. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

So, when we insert bits of media in this here diary, I still expect to see it pointed out that “OMG! You’re using HL2 textures!!!111″, because people don’t usually get ideas out of their heads once they’ve taken root. Rest assured – any Valve assets in the demo will have been replaced with our own by the time the demo is completed. We have a lovely big “todo” list, and we’re working our way through it by degrees. We believe that the end result will be something a bit special.

I’d just like to add a brief note to the person that stole my bike (like they’re reading this anyway) – HAHAHAHAHA. You moron. Thankyou.

So this is our development diary. It’s unusual, I suppose, in that I can’t actually say what it is that we’re working on – certainly not in any great detail. Quite a lot of stuff is up in the air, and there’s so many elements that depend on other elements and other people, that we don’t want to risk jeopardising anything.

So what can I say?

The game we’re working on is an FPS, although the emphasis is firmly not on combat. There’s a far more strategic element, which I hope to go into in more detail at a later date.

It has a mid-future setting – there’s quite a lot of gameplay on board starships.

There’s stealth elements

It has a very strong storyline.

It has pirates!

I don’t think I’ve upset anyone with that little bit of information. We should be able to reveal more as time goes on, including the name…