“Hittin’ Worlds” Game Jam Winner

I took part in a game jam on Saturday, and we won! ;-) My main collaborator was artist Niall O’Reilly from local game art company DoomCube.

The game runs using HTML5/Canvas, with a node.js websockets server. The ‘render client’ ran on my laptop and players ran the ‘controller client’ on their phones.. this seems like a really nice way to do casual LAN-style multiplayer games, and it’s a configuration I have been thinking about for a few weeks. I just need to figure out a killer party game idea to use it with!

In “Hittin’ Worlds” Each player plays as a planet, in orbit around a sun. Asteroids are flying about, and players have to use their forcefield to deflect them. By using a virtual joystick-style controller on their phone, they orient the forcefield in specific directions.. incoming asteroids get deflected in that direction. The idea is that players fling the rocks at each other while defending themselves.

We also had a really nice piece of custom music written by a guy called Ian, from Athlone/Reading.

Musclecar Online 82% of the way to top 100 in Steam Greenlight

Musclecar Online is now 82% of the way to the top 100 games on Steam Greenlight.

Let’s give it a last push and get the game released on the biggest appstore for PC and Mac gamers!

If we get released on Steam, I will commit to adding the following features to the game, which have been the main things that the players have been asking me for:

1. Making it ‘proper’ 3D driving, with..
2. Hilly/Offroad terrain circuits.. which can be sculpted in the track designer
3. Springy offroad suspension (see technical demo of this below)
4. Bridges
5. Customised, player-uploaded car skins

Here’s some details on the offroad suspension I have been working on: Shiva Raycast Car

Darkwind marches towards Steam

I haven’t posted on here in too long, and it’s mostly because I have been very busy working on Darkwind again. The big news is that the game was greenlit in May, for release on Steam around the end of August.

Some of the main things I have been working on are:
– making the game ‘free to play’ with an in-game premium currency (‘Chromes’)
– overhaul of the lobby graphics
– integration of significant amount of functionality in the game client that was previously only available on the web site.

The last point is quite important, as we’ll hopefully get a big influx of new players from Steam, and the new player experience needs to be as good as it can. The split between 3D gameplay and web-based management has always been a bit awkward, so now you’ll be able to do core management of gang and vehicular assets from within the client, and complete management of squads – including set-up, travel, scouting, and multiplayer arrangement.

I have also been working again with Taskmasterpeace, one of the two guys who recorded all the excellent ‘sport commentator’ style vocals in the game. Task has been doing voice-overs for a series of tutorials I’m making about Darkwind.

Here’s a two-part tutorial on Deathracing:

Part 1: setting up

Part 2: playing the deathrace

Raycast Car

Here’s some footage of a car driving around in the Shiva game engine, using the ‘raycast wheels’ approach. I have found that this gives much nicer results than the demo car that comes with Shiva, which treats wheels as constrained spheres. The problem with modelling wheels as spheres rotating on one axis is that this assumes rigid bodies for the wheels; actually, wheels are not rigid.

The basic idea with raycast cars is that you cast a ray from each wheel hub, and calculate the distance at which a surface is met (if at all). This defines the suspension’s extension, and then you simulate spring behaviour by applying increasingly strong forces as the suspension gets more compressed. There’s also some subtleties such as anti-roll and varying spring strength depending on whether its compressing or extending; but these are mostly tweaks applied to the core idea.

I also found that at high speed the default Shiva ‘spherical wheels’ car would suffer from occasional glitches and speed wobbles, rendering it fairly useless for most games. Sometimes it seemed to stagger sideways at high speed, presumably due to errors on the axis constraints allowing the spheres to role sideways. I assume these problems are caused by over-relying on the accuracy of the underlying physical simulation in order to obtain the required behaviour.

In the video clips shown here, the behaviour of the car in all ways other than spring response has been results-driven, i.e. the desired behaviour (skidding, drifting, tendency to roll, etc.) has been considered and this is used as a starting point for programming the calculations – rather than starting from an accurate physical simulation and expecting realistic/fun results as an emergent behaviour.

This represents very good progress towards what I’d like to have for a major new Darkwind project (Darkwind 2?) that I have started thinking about. Really the ineffective default Shiva car is what had stopped me considering this before now.

Last year I also wrote Musclecar Online. In this the car was entirely results-based, having no accurate underlying physical simulation from which the behaviour emerged. Musclecar Online is actually a 2D driving simulation with 3D models (hence, no hills or bridges) – and it was therefore entirely possible to define the behaviour I wanted first and then to write code to directly produce that behaviour.