After some mock-up-ing we resume work on the old Monster Mash, adding a scrolling map and dropping the lighting and grey backgrounds. Partly due to me being bored of the glowey sci-fi look we go for a jolly old medieval look…

… but we just couldn’t get arrows to look quite so much fun as blasters, lasers and rockets. Bah.

To be continued…

We’re not really going for accuracy in geographical locations – but should do something about that cactus.

Added and updated a whole load of things recently – it’s looking pretty slick. The HUD now has working ‘quicklaunch’ icons and tooltips on the bottom bar for buildings and powerups, and an alerts panel top right the other right (doh!), that also lets you quickly scroll to the building in question.

Also added new Earth level colours, new explosion particle effects, capacitor effects, powerup collect and activation effects, new extra glowey bullets, monster death effects, mini droid units, and a whole load of new weapons and buildings, and a big bad boss for level 10… all of which I’ll try and squeeze into a new vid soon.

More screenshots… Continue reading →

Sometimes an IM chat just doesn’t cut the biscuit when it comes to describing weird bugs – in this case the bizarre interaction between explosion particles and a floor setting which is meant to make little bits of shrapnel bounce about when they hit it. Instead it acts like a big gluey magnet. But only sometimes. And smoke, which should float upwards generally, has decided to head east instead. Creating a set of test emitters, a few screen grabs and a quick scribble helps narrow down the problem…

Dropbox is what we’re now using to zap these test images back and forth between us, and it comes highly recommended if your doing any kind of remote development thing.

With any luck Cas will get that little pesky fella sorted soon, and then I’ll post some video of things exploding in a gratuitous manner.

… and here’s the state of the vid so far. Plus first hear of game music by Dave Sunerton-Burl!

Been working on a bit of video recently that will hopefully end up in the game titles if Cas can work out getting Ogg Theora decoding onto an OpenGL texture in background threads. I have no idea what that means. If not it’ll just end up in some pretty promo vid kind of thang on Youtube.

Well it makes a nice break from working on GUIs anyway, on which we will be posting shortly. Here are a few rough snaps for now… and in the words of the great Rolf – can you tell what it is yet?

Revenge of the Titans is a game with a long, convoluted and simply amazing history. It is perhaps the most incredible story never told in the entire history of computer games. In years to come a small group of distinguished historians and academics will undoubtedly discuss its development with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4’s ‘In our Time‘.

Okay, that was a lie – got a bit carried away there. But it has taken a long time.

Our tale begins nearly four years ago. Basking in the financial glow of the success of Titan Attacks we devise a plan for a new game, a game that will have all of the great bits of Titan Attacks, like shooting things and buying upgradey stuff in some kind of a shop, but that will be playable completely with a mouse. We hope freeing players from the shackles of using ‘keys’ will make a more accessible game, and spread the joy of making pixelly things explode in a glowy manner to a more ‘casual’ audience.

Work begins in earnest in the spring of 2006, with Cas beavering away in his secret underground base, deep below the Quantocks, and myself working poolside upon my Bangkok penthouse. With multi-coloured spotlights attached to computer controlled turrets tracking a variety of daft pixel monsters, the game begins to develop an odd 70’s disco feel to it. Not a bad thing at all. The below screenshots really don’t do it justice, honest…

And we decide to call the game Monster Mash. A banner is produced declaring confidently ‘COMING SOON!’…

But then, disaster strikes!

To be continued…

Here’s an example of the colouring system we’re using in Titan Attacks 2 – Revenge of the Titans. In this case as applied to a cooling tower, a player building that cools down your overheating turrets. It’s a common problem. Building a load of these little fellas nearby though can increase their fire rate.

Here we have the cooling tower as it looks with colours applied in two schemes – night and desert. On the left we have the Colour Diddler which lets us fidddle away with the level palettes as the game is running. Neat eh?

So how this all work then?

The cooling tower is a collection of static sprites, animated sprites and emitters. The sprites, mostly white, can be coloured by the level palettes, and then this colour is affected by an attenuation colour and % the further from the center of the level they are – black in the case of the nighttime level, and a subtle red tint for the desert level colour scheme. Here’s the various sprites…

First of all we have the base. This defines the bounds of the building making it easier to tell where the player can build things and distinguishes player buildings from other stuff going on. All buildings and monsters and trees and things are drawn from the front, but the map is actually viewed from above which is perhaps a bit of an odd way to do things, but it’s a lot easier to draw poo like that. The next sprite, the shadow, also helps in making the flat front-on sprite look like it’s sitting on the ground and not just floating about in space.

That little black rectangle sits behind the main sprite animation. Inbetween these is an emitter that pumps out steam. This way the steam looks more like it’s coming out of the cooling tower rather than just from behind it. It’s hardly noticeable really. Maybe got a bit carried away there.

The main sprite, unlike the others, has two colours applied to it – a top and a bottom colour – applied as a gradient to the sprite. The top colour is specific to buildings, and the bottom is a general ‘floor fog’ colour which is applied to almost everything – buildings and monsters and trees etc. This helps in the illusion of the flat building existing in the world space wotsit. It also means if buildings overlap vertically there will be a bit of colour difference between them, making it easier to tell them apart.

Next up is the overlay sprite – this is about 50% transparent and is not affected by the level’s attenuation, meaning it’ll seem like it’s a bit glowy or reflective. Then finally on top of all that is the little glowing light animation that is synched up with the pumpy animation of the tower and the steam emitter. This sprite is neither coloured nor affected by the attenuation colour, so it’s always going to be a bright orangey red light thang.

…and if you’re really interested or just having trouble sleeping here’s how the cooling tower appearance is defined in xml…

<sprite layer="4" sublayer="1" colored="floor" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.2x2.base.01"/>
<sprite layer="4" sublayer="2" colored="shadow" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.cooling.ground.01"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="1" colored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.back.animation"/>
<emitter offset="25,0" emitter="steam.burst.emitter"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="3" bottomColored="floor-fog" topColored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="4" colored="buildings-alt" attenuated="false" animation="generic.cooling.top.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="5" animation="generic.cooling.glow.animation"/>

Phew. Any questions? Anyone still awake?