Archive for the ‘M:A:D’ tag

Sorting out some random thoughts

I’m cleaning up my brain today. It has been cluttered with code and projects and today after almost six months I’ve managed to stop and think. At first my objective was to code but while I was pulling some design decisions I noticed I was also organizing my own brain.

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading

Pulling it appart

Some of the art of M:A:D has to be done following rules from the coder’s side. Even though this may sound limiting, in some cases it helps the artist reduce the image number and keep his assets organized. For the case of the units in M:A:D, we created a hierarchy based movie clip. The mechs have legs, the drones don’t, because they… OOPS, best not say everything.

The unit is made up of a body, a set of legs and the weapon. Reason for this is that the weapon should rotate independently from the body and the legs are just a 10 frames animation. The body was created in 3D and animated to rotate in order to have a realistic depiction of the lighting on the unit, to make it the same as the structures. as the unit rotates the rotating body moves along the frames to match the frame to the rotation, while the legs are a movieclip being rotated.

The other element on display there is the the structure being slightly damaged and we used smoke to illustrate that. Dents will be added later. The smoke is done with on 16×16 particle being scaled rotated and having the color and transparency changed.

Hope you like the little sneak peek inside the backstages of some of the art in M:A:D.

A level mockup of M:A:D

Another shot we took somedays ago. Here you can see a full level mockup with both player and AI positioned and some terrain detail.

The destroyed cities are part of the game by the way… we just won’t tell you what for, that’s how evil we are, muwahahahahah!

Images courtesy of Marco, general bla bla bla courtesy of Vlad!

See you all soon…

M:A:D Screenshot #1

Hi,

Sharing a simple screenshot we took some days ago showing buildings, units and the first version of the GUI.

All feedback is welcome and see you soon!

Marco

Going slightly M:A:D

Hi everyone, Marco here.

Me and Vlad decided to show you our current project. We don’t know how it will evolve (read previous post) but since we like what we see we decided to share it with you and get some feedback.

It’s the first time we are disclosing any info about a yet to release game publicly, so this is kind of a new experience for us.

Game name is Mechs and Drones: Annihilation or M:A:D for short. It’s a real time strategy game and we have been around it for sometime now but in the middle of contracts and even Atomik Kaos 2, it only got the deserved attention in the last couple of weeks.

When I posted about conceptual design, I was talking about M:A:D. Right now we have all structure and unit micro AI working along with path finding. Enemy AI is the current step.

Here’s a huge logo pic, more pics (and screenshots I heard) later on.

See you soon for more M:A:D stuff!

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