Hello Since this is my first post to these forums, let me introduce myself first. I am a 2d/3d-artist/writer/designer for a game developement group called Neontide Entertainment. Computer games and making them is my passion and I would like to someday be a professional but for now it's just a hobby. Neontide is a rather new group, we've been making a game under that name for 2 years. Our motto: "What we can't do, we'll learn to do." We don't have a website or anything and our game making is kind of on-and-off since we are all busy with our studies most of the time. Currently there are 2 programmers, 1 graphic artist (me) and 1 music artist in the group. We try to make our games as professional looking as we can. Okay, here are a few screenshots of the game we are currently working on: http://koti.mbnet.fi/marwer/nowa2/terranheavycorvette.jpg http://koti.mbnet.fi/marwer/nowa2/redsfrigate.jpg I would like to get some opinions on the graphics. Bear in mind that when we started making this game I had no experience what so ever in 3d-graphics and only a little in 2d-graphics. Has all the self education gone to waste? I'm using 3d Canvas Pro for modelling, Ultimate Unwrap 3d for texturing and Paint Shop Pro 8 for 2d-drawing. Someone might think that those are crappy programs but they were cheap. We have spent only about 300eur on this game so far (not counting the thousands of bottles of coke). Oh yeah, here's an old video from around last xmas, the music in it was made by our own musician: www.students.tut.fi/~karkela2/novawar2.WMV I Guess I should tell you a bit about the game too. It's called Novawar 2, but that's due to change to Novawar: [something cool that's related to the story here]. Well, as you might have guessed from the screenshots, it's a space combat simulator. We didn't want to make just a space combat sim, so we mixed it up a little by adding elements from the RTS genre. Think about Battlezone in space and you are pretty close to what we have in mind. The game is set in a huge asteroid field so you won't be seeing very big ships, the largest are a little over 300 meters in lenght. Both humans and aliens are involved in the story, which is way too complex to explain here, believe me. Of course I won't be saying anything about the single player campaign story, but I might post the background story to the writing section if anyone's interested. Multiplayer will be in the game too, and we are giving both multiplayer and singleplayer modes equal attention. Our main concern however is playability, not graphics. The flight model is pseudo-Newtonian (you need to thrust to change your ship's course and it keeps going to that direction until you thrust to another direction, but there is a top speed which varies between different ships) and we are quite content with how the ships handle. Since someone is bound to ask when the game is completed, I'll just say it'll take at least 2 more years. I don't know if it's ever going to be completed. We are making a demo for christmas, but we don't know if we're going to make it available to the public. The programmers are making it for a game programming course in the Tampere University of Technology. The game is probably going to be shareware if it's ever completed. If anyone is wondering what Novawar 1 is, check this out: http://koti.mbnet.fi/marwer/novawar Our first game worth sharing with other people. A little buggy though. It's even supported by the All Seeing Eye server browsing program. I would appreciate it if someone dropped me a line commenting my use of the english language, I feel it has deteriorated a bit from what it has been. Okay, that's all for now. This was the first international appearance of Novawar 2.

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Original post by Werty I would appreciate it if someone dropped me a line commenting my use of the english language, I feel it has deteriorated a bit from what it has been.

Your English is great - except English should be capitalized. ;)
At the mention of 300eur, I figured you were from Europe, but I would never have thought English wasn't your primary language if you hadn't said anything.

As far as the game, looks and sounds great - though I'm no art expert. I wish you luck!

First post eh? well welcome!

Right off I must agree with reana; I am thoroughly impressed!! Nice work (thumbs up).

Your development team sounds a lot like mine actually, only with more progress =P. We have the same strategy of continual learning, the desire to make a professional looking game, and we too have limited progress due to our studies. Glad to know there's a group out there that's doing well even with these strategies lol... it keeps our hopes up.

Anyways I like the graphics, although I'm not a big fan of the genre of games, it looks great to me. One suggestion would be that if you plan to make asteroids important, to have some larger or more clustered groups of them. Right now it looks a bit like they're organized, difficult to avoid but nicely spaced out... it could just be the limited angle though.

I'm also glad that you sound so happy about it. You should be, it's quite an endeavour you're out on, so a good attitude goes a long way.

And english is good. Keep it up.

As ever,
*****Cosmic*****

Yes, your English is very good. :) For the spaceships, the shapes are good, the only thing I would suggest is a higher-contrast colorscheme because the ships blur into the starry bckground a bit. Either make the ships brighter colors, or if you want to keep the ships dark you could try putting a bright glow around their edges.

Yeah, I've noticed too that the ships get a bit blurred if you look at them from the dark side. Maybe I can fix that by increasing the ambient on the textures a bit.

As for the asteroid fields, they aren't very good looking yet because they were hand made. We plan to make an editor for the game that can be used to generate random asteroidfields, so we don't have to add all the asteroids one by one. We've also been thinking about making the asteroid fields a bit cooler by adding in space colonies, mines, hydroponic farms and other such decorations. It would also be cool to have different environments, like in some places the fields are much more dense than in others, dust clouds floating around and so on.

And yes, I am happy about making games. I actually feel lucky that I know people who can do the programming. I've seen many posts on other forums from people who would like to make games and have good game ideas but who can't do the programming themselves. And it also helps to actually be able to meet the people who you are working with face to face. I think many projects such as this fail because the people working on them don't have the possibility to speak face to face.

Oh yeah, does anyone know any good tutorial websites for Paint Shop Pro? I would like to learn to make better looking metal surfaces and explosion textures.

Hey,

The idea of the game in the asteroid field is cool, but you can't start throwing buildings in there. Nothing would survive, you couldn't provide it with adequate access, and it would be virtually impossible to build. Ships flying around is one thing, they're only at it for a while and have good maneuvering. Structures, no.


As a side note, I wondered if your group was a team of friends or did you meet after you decided to make the game. Cuz the people in my group, we've all been together since high school, and built up the game idea together long after we've known each other. It's not a bad way to go, in my opinion, but we all have too much ownership over it, the game becomes very personal, so it's hard to get outside help in. Just wondering what ur situation was.

I wish I knew of a good tutorial site specifically, but I don't. However, the stickys in the forum have quite an extensive listing, my first recommendation is them.

As ever,
***Cosmic***

Hmm well, we aren't trying to make the game very realistic. And all the asteroids are going to be stationary so the structures will fit in there just fine. And the buildings will also have shields on them so the asteroids won't be that big of a problem. Maybe we will have some smaller moving asteroids too, but if every asteroid was mobile you'd have to check collisions for all of them and that would be too much for any computer.

I and my brother, who is our lead programmer, started this project. We had a second graphic artist too, a friend of mine, but he bailed out after a while. Then after my brother started his studies he met our second programmer in the univeristy. Actually, we haven't met the music artist, but that doesn't matter so much since music isn't really a critical part of the game. He just contacted us via e-mail all of a sudden (we have a sort of a developement diary on a finnish forum where we said we don't have musics yet) and asked if he could make the musics for the game. He sent us a piece of his work, we liked it and took him onboard.