Game Design Video

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elfprince13
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Game Design Video

Postby elfprince13 » Fri Feb 17, 2012 12:56 pm

I don't know if any of you are interested in video game design, but I made this video showing off the game I've been working on in my spare time (yes I know, spare time SHOULD be for PWeb ;) ) for a contest on the website of the company that made the engine. If you are interested in the subject, or just want to see if what it's all about (if you're not a techy, skip ahead to about 2:30), I'd appreciate the views.



What do you think?
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Mich
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Re: Game Design Video

Postby Mich » Fri Feb 17, 2012 5:49 pm

I started skipping ahead once I saw that the first seven minutes were mostly you showing off code, so forgive me if I missed any important bits.

First of all, I've played around with Torque (even took an entire semester with it in which I learned very little), and what I saw was mostly pretty impressive. I'm assuming the stuff that looks LEGO-y was made by you, as well as its actions and such, and the rest was default Torque stuff, such as the sand dunes. Pretty impressive. I enjoyed the car physics a lot, and your LEGO guy's animations were pretty decent. What's the deal with the textures, though? And what is the exact concept of the game?

I'm going out on a limb and guessing from the name that users will be able to build LEGO objects like cars in-game and then drive them. It would be cool if all of the physics of the objects were dependent on how well built the stuff is, but there isn't too much to learn from the video.

Basically: more information would be very interesting.
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Re: Game Design Video

Postby elfprince13 » Mon Feb 20, 2012 12:08 am

I started skipping ahead once I saw that the first seven minutes were mostly you showing off code
Hmm, I guess 2:30-->7:00 were worse than I thought. Sorry about that :P
I'm assuming the stuff that looks LEGO-y was made by you, as well as its actions and such, and the rest was default Torque stuff, such as the sand dunes.
More or less. I also showed off a chat system in the intermediate portion that hooks up to a tech website (and associated IRC channel) which is my "Internet homebase", which is not stock-Torque.
I enjoyed the car physics a lot
The ironic thing about this statement is that vehicle physics are probably the single worst feature of stock Torque (which this was). Cars are okay, but their homebrew physics engine crashes as soon as anything stars flying. But I'm glad you enjoyed the show
and your LEGO guy's animations were pretty decent.
Thanks =) I've had a friend whose an aspiring digital artist put a good amount of time into them.
What's the deal with the textures, though?
The Lego models are in a special format called "LDraw", which is not native to the game engine, but which is pretty much the standard for Lego-like CAD software (evidently there are also parts libraries for Lincoln Logs and K'Nex too). Unfortunately the material system for this model format is not well suited to texture-based rendering, and is particularly bad if you want to make it material based and keep a reasonable number of draw calls. I've played around with some different shading techniques, but I haven't gotten why I really like yet, so for now I'm ignoring that aspect of the development.
And what is the exact concept of the game?

I'm going out on a limb and guessing from the name that users will be able to build LEGO objects like cars in-game and then drive them. It would be cool if all of the physics of the objects were dependent on how well built the stuff is
You've pretty much got it. The meta-game is "build whatever you want, and if it's a vehicle you can then proceed to set the performance specs and pilot/drive it", but I've been designing it to be pretty modular to make it easy to add in different game-modes that server operators can run on their particular games (role playing, racing, death match, dog fighting, capture the flag, building contests, whatever). I'd like to set up the default game to have a system wherein the build quality can be analyzed and used to allot customization points for vehicle weapon systems/engines/performance specs. I'm not sure exactly how I'll go about that, but I have some thoughts based on analyzing a normalized mean voxel density (where a standard 2x4x1 is one voxel) as a baseline for "well-builtness". The tricky part will be tuning the distribution used to allot points to recognize good builds, while penalizing "this 4x8 plate is a magic carpet with death-star lasers" and "this star-destroyer is a solid mass of 1x1x1/3 plates" type builds. But that's getting pretty far ahead of where I am now.
"But the conversation of the mind was truer than any language, and they knew each other better than they ever could have by use of mere sight and touch."


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