Shaders and learning

Well this week I focused mainly on shaders. Learning shaders is not a simply task. We are lucky that in the XNA community we have alot of good tutorial out there to explain the language, the way it work and the relation between Rendertarget and shaders to make awesome next gen effect.

I completed about 10 shaders from blury grayscale to refraction effects so far. The only effect left I need to create are the bloom effects.

I also added graphical goodies on the map editor so that material type can be assign to asset to output hit effects when assets collides with laser, bombs or missiles or any other type of projectiles. This makes the world more alive and interactive.

Well it's pretty late here, more to come soon!

Concussion Gun

I completed the concussion gun, this weapon can be selected for the ship at low level. It acts like a shotgun does doing short range cone effect damage. The really nice feature of the Concussion gun is when use at charge 2 or charge 3, the gun shoot a ball of nails that exploded when it hit something or after travelling a distance.

Upon explosion nails are propulse by the explosion covering almost all screenview. The nails does 5 times the damage of the regular shot so using this weapon at charge level will be a must to do massive area of effect damage.

Enhancement & Fitting

I haven't post in a while but I am still working hard on the project. I completed the enhancement system to upgrade the different parts of the ship. I have an overall of 50 new enhancements including weapons, missiles, bombs and anti-matter powers. This will permits to level up the ship up to level 70 thus permitting players to replay the game at different difficulty level to increase their ship.

I also added the design component for the ships. Players will now be able to select the main and alternate color for their ship using the color wheel that contains all 67 millions color. The design component also support skins for the ship which will be unlocked once milestone are reached.

I completed the fitting component, this is where the players decides which weapon, missile, bomb and anti-matter they wants to equip on their ship. The players can configure up to 4 different anti-matter powers on the A,B,X,Y button or on four keys on PC version.

So the UI for those components, sounds, graphics and logic are all completed an integrated in the game :)

World, mission and factions

During the last 3 days I worked on my mission/objectives system. I created a system that permits to unlock next missions and planets based on the completion of objectives. Further more I added factor factor which permit to unlock missions only when a faction is high enough, thus the player will be able to replay the game without necessarily run all the same levels.

Code for all this is completed as well as most of the graphics for level selection as well as support in the editor to create sequences of mission and then link this to story lines.

To accomplish all this in the game I had to create a scene manager that will handle the transition between different scenes in the game.

So ,now I have 6 planets, one moon and a space station ready for missions and levels.

Dialogues and Story line

My last work on the project was completing the loot system which now works perfectly in the engin and the scripting language.
All art works for the UI is now completed, onyl step left is to produce the font image using the application found on the XNA Hub called BitmapFontMaker_4_0 which explains how to integrated custom fonts. Really nice work on that app!

Afterward I spent most of my time brainstorming the stoyline for more indepth lore and immersion. That when I decided to had some factions in the game, factions will vary depending on decision that the player makes. We to makes decision the game needs a dialogue system where the player can make his choice and build his own story line. I came across a really nice sample / article on someone who already built a dialogue system for XNA 3.1 found here : Catalin's XNA Blog.
Catalin's really did an awesome job and it was pretty straitghforward to upgrade the code to XNA 4.0.
I will integrate this code in my game with little to no modification. For sure I will contact Catalin to have his approval to use this code in my game.

So I will spend most of my next days on story lines and faction impacts and alternate stories. Well I know I am getting myself in something big with this but I want the game to have a personal feeling where the choice made my the player have an impact on the path of the game.

I would like to thank Yan D. for letting me use his face to act as NPC in the game.

Weapons, story and UI

Well, I worked on all weapon code so we have anchor and now weapons will show on the X-factor spaceship so player will see their ship getting stronger.
I also added 3 pages of storyline as well as some dialogue that will need to be created in wav format. Finally I created the dialogue UI graphics so when dialogues occurs an Npc face will be visible as well as the subtitles and the sound to play from it.

I also added some pickups items types, xp pickup which grants more xp, the clue pickup which provides new storyline information and thus the player will have more information and will be able to make the choice of his liking when decision arises.

Powerups and damage.

I worked mainly on the source code lately and completly code the powerups that will spawn of killed Teraz to spawn either missiles, bombs, energy for guns or shield energy to replenish the shields.

I also added code that will display damage on the X-factor ship so player can see when their ship hull is damaged.
Graphic side, a created all the graphics of the various damage hull and also create the plasmagun and railgun graphics that will be attached to the ship when selected as a weapon.

I also got the time to write the prelude of the story and level 1 and level 2 scenario.

That's pretty much it, on a personal note I started to play Eve online to give myself some ideas and also because I like playing mmo :-)