opengl stuff

Today was accomplishing. Got the basics of a rough 3d scenery engine made in opengl.
Nothing too orgasmic, just a few tall cubes textured with a brick wall image, to serve as placeholders for buildings that you walk by. Yesterday I laid the groundwork for the 2d animation system (a system that loads up a ton of .PNG files, and then swaps between them in the correct sequence to "play" animations)

Looks like we've picked up a 2nd programmer who will share the workload with me.
We also have another 2d artist who will be handling static 2d art (things like trashcans, bottles etc)

Things keep snowballing and we keep forging ahead making good progress and good time!
Yay.

One time I shot a six pack, just to watch it die...

Planning ahead...

Some concept art

Matt, our awesome character artist just whipped up this character concept sheet for one of the bikers that appear in the game.

I found the time to open up Photoshop and create an early concept of the ghost you play as, too:

THE BIRDS!!!

Yes. Today I coded birds. What that means is you can possess birds, and play as birds. You can also fly around high above the game world as birds. You can attack people as birds. I guess what i'm trying to say here is:


You get to be birds.


I added a raven as the first type of bird, and coded some fun flying physics. Birds will be a great way to travel around fast throughout the game world and scouting out mission objectives, hidden things etc. Also great for annoying and pecking at people. There will probably be about 2-3 other bird types. Buzzards and eagles are pretty much obligatory here.

Oh and yesterday I coded the in-door and out-door terrain systems. Outdoor is a highly efficient slope-based system, and in-door is a good ol' fashioned tile-based system. The in-door system still needs a bit of polish, as well as a toolset. an interesting development was the realization that we could make our interior level-building tools in flash, then export out level data to text strings which can then be loaded into our final C++ program. Having the toolset in flash not only makes level-building easy on us, but also leaves things wide open for making such a user-friendly toolset available to the end user, to make and load new levels into the game infinitly.

...and things start to get a bit spooky

Development took a turn for the sinister today... as I added the ability to utilize the attacks (and weapons) of possessed people, and also the ability to possess live people.
Live possession is a whole different beast from taking over a corpse. You approach the target and press the "possess" button just like normal, but since this person is alive and will fight being possessed, you must then press a correct random sequence of buttons to take them over. The number of buttons you must press to possess them coincides with the individual's strength.
In other words, if Strength = 5 then you'll need to press 5 correct randomized buttons.

On to attacks...

Each person or animal you possess will have an attack. Humans of course may carry weapons which can also be used. The cool part of this is that each person or animal will have an inventory, so you can for example, pick up 5 different guns with one body, jump out, possess another body who has a knife or a tool of some sort, use that body, then come back to the other body and it will still have all the weapons and items in possession.

We're also going to have a personal "spirit realm" where you can stockpile ammo, weapons, tools, items, and pointless objects (ie. skulls, newspapers, trash, empty beer bottles etc). A bit like modern RPGs that let you have a house and decorate it, and litter it with shit. Anything in the spirit realm will be saved indefinetly.

Seeing as this is Friday I'm stopping work for the weekend, must attend to important matters like DRINKING THE ALCOHOL.

Emotions abound

Today, still working in the Flash prototype, but carefully coding everything in classes for the eventual migration into C++, I laid the groundwork for the "reaction" system. This is basically a simple chunk of code that handles how living things react to your actions. So far they react to things like:

Killings,
Possessions,
Attacks made (like if you use your host body to fire a gun in the streets)

I'll be extending the system for other actions as well. Everything such as bumping into a passerby on the street, to using ghostly telekinesis to move objects around, or making yourself look suspicious by sneaking around. The sky's the limit! Different individuals behave differently, based on variables like "bravery" for example. A bravery level of 2 will cause someone run screaming in the opposite direction if they see something disturbing such as a ghostly possession or a violent attack. A bravery level of 8 will cause them to pull out their firearm and try to take you down...
Another fun feature of the reactions is I can have a person say something in a word bubble to go along with their reaction. My prototype sees a brave biker shouting "DIE YOU MONSTER!", and a decidely less brave biker running away shouting "HOLY F***!".

Also added attacks to my sole person type (a blocky placeholder graphic'd, biker) :D