I've been messing around with an idea for a space strategy game.

The idea is that two opposing fleets start in different orbits around a procedural solar system. The ships and planets all move in an arcade imitation of orbital mechanics, the orbits of the ships being affected by the gravity of nearby planets or moons.

Players use (replenishing) stores of delta-V to adjust the orbits, allowing them to position their ships for destructive passes against their opponent. The firepower for ships will be depend on the heading, so I'm hoping to encourage maneuvers like Crossing the T.

My current plan is something like chess, two set fleets made up of a small selection of ship types with varying sizes, speeds and armaments. I'm hoping the fact that everything is in constant motion, even the "terrain", will be an interesting dimension for players to plan their strategies around.

Hopefully it is a bit different, I've not seen this done before but I rarely take the time to play games much anymore.



Currently, the prototype is focused on making the ships attempt to respect their orbits, that is, the player should be able to specify a desired orbit and the ships will adjust to disturbing forces automatically. I don't want players to have to babysit such things.

There are many aspects I'm not sure how I'm going to approach, such as the control scheme. The visual direction is open too, right now I'm just using some free images I found online to get up-and-running quickly.

Unfortunately my math, game design and A.I. programming skills will all be stretched to complete even the core of this idea. Of course, ideally this would be multi-player too, but I'd think I need to prove some of the basics first.

Did I mention that this was a part time project?

Well, I was writing "C++ game programming for teens." But the project was put on hold.

I updated my website with Twitter Bootstrap (this took a lot longer than I thought it would): http://www.indiegameprogramming.com

Most recently I'm teaching myself pixel art so I can do the next Ludum Dare. See here -> http://www.indiegameprogramming.com/new_blog.php

Not as cool as all of you guys. Just server-side stuff dealing with lots of instances. docker, orchestration, and all that jazz

My latest. More coming soon.

@Hodgman; do you have some shots or footage? Really curious here

The first game using the API - most of the shaders are the same as the earlier PC release, which was using the old engine, but we switched from forward + stencil shadows + runtime lightmap baking to deferred + shadowmaps.

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There's no video of the next game yet, but it's spent it's whole dev cycle being produced on this new engine, for the new consoles, so should look a lot better.
The only public video so far is of the awesome player creator, which is a free download on Steam right now:

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The publisher has released a few in-game beta screenshots:



There's no footage of my own game yet, and the only screenshot is an old photo of a screen :P

Working on a prototype in Unity.

Here's a screenshot for today's most ridiculous bug where I've modified object creation to originate from a more flexible 'spawner' object (and failed to detect correctly when a generation was set).

End result, had to kill unity, but still managed to screenshot this beauty!

I've been working on a voxel-esque multiplayer shooter from scratch called 'BITPHORIA' since April '14. It's written in C, uses SDL, and renders using core OpenGL 3.3. I figure I'm at about the halfway point. I just recently gave the overall aesthetic of the world rendering some polish, and I am very happy with it. Everything is procedurally scripted using the equivalent of console-command scripting language.

Entity types, logic functions, particle types, world materials, entity models, dynamic models (verlet spring systems), UI menus, etc. are all scripted using simple command-based language, where each system has its own set of commands, but they are all highly similar.

The world is generated as a 3D volume that tiles horizontally (the game world repeats horizontally forever, there is no 'edge', or 'out of bounds'). This 'voxel' representation is only used as an intermediate representation from which the mesh for the world is generated, in VBO chunks. The 'voxels' themselves are material indices, which describe which scripted procedural 3D-texture material should be rendered at that point in space on the mesh.

The 3D textures are for raymarching into via GLSL shaders, giving surfaces an actual volumetric appearance beneath the polygon surface. This is in contrast to parallax mapping, which is merely vertical displacement along the normal of a polygon. With 3D textures they are actually 3D, and look voxelesque. They are expensive, memory-wise, and also GPU cycle-wise to have and raytrace into, which is why I'm doing everything in a 3D retro-pixel fashion, playing on the low-resolutions to demonstrate the novelty of the rendering technique. The other novel aspect of using raymarched 3D texturing is that there isn't a definite division between empty and solid space. You can have a cloudy marble material, for instance, with varying opacity throughout.

Players are simple verlet spring meshes that are dynamically animated. Feet/knees are dynamically thrown around and 'stuck' to the ground in succession to give the illlusion of running. Really the player model is dangling from 'anchor' points on the player entity, attached to the view angle so as to aim the head/guns around when you look around.. This is glitchy still, but looks good most of the time. Still needs tweaking though.

I just finally got multiplayer networking to connect up and create players, handle reliable event transmission, etc.. All from scratch using UDP.

I have a bunch of 'neat' ideas for the HUD and gameplay itself, but this is what I have so far with the engine and basic aesthetic and dynamics. I am still on the fence about a kickstarter, Steam early release, etc... I almost just want to try to pull a Minecraft and self-release, creating leaderboards where players must create email-tied accounts to play on servers (ala 'Won-ID', if anybody remembers those days). This is in the hopes of minimizing piracy.

Please forgive the ultra low quality. At least you can get a feel for what I got going on thus far.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62846912/IMAGE/screen009.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62846912/IMAGE/screen019.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62846912/IMAGE/screen018.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62846912/IMAGE/screen020.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62846912/IMAGE/screen022.jpg

This is mostly a total remake of an older game project I started a long while ago called 'Revolude', which was abandoned when I met the mother of my children. Now that I have two babies, and we run a crafting business from home, I feel it is about time I have something to show for for all of those years I spent learning game dev in my youth.

PS: how on earth do I embed a youtube video in a post?

Just put the YouTube url on a line on a line on its own, no tags around it.

Took me a while to figure this out too... :)

Some great stuff in here!

I've been working on a futuristic combat racing game for, like, the last 3 years, using my own engine. Except coding isn't what's keeping me occupied so long. Yeah, designing fun racetracks is *hard*. I can't remember how much work I've thrown away all this time because I didn't think it was good enough. Plus, having started working for a game company since July, I now have to push myself more to work on my own game having spent 8 hours working on another game every day.

Hopefully it'll be released during this summer though...the mobile/ouya ports will be basically graphically downgraded versions of the PC build, and done with Marmalade, so I get to keep most of my C++ code (and then I can start working on adding multiplayer and arena modes!)

Crazy busy at the moment :)

* lots of work on The Division for my day job (I'm the audio systems programmer)

* learning how to use Maya so I can rig a simple character model for a game I'm building in my spare time

* learning how to use Unreal (for the personal project)

* trying to fit in a bit of digital signal processing research