GigaWar Dev Blog

This is the flight path for Stage 1, route A. Its a bit short at around 2 minutes, so I need to play with camera speed and angles. Eventually it should be 4 minutes in length from start to just before boss sequence. Seems short eh? Go check out all the great shmups, 3-4 minutes is pretty much standard for 1st level duration.

First route through stage 1 is now complete, they are quite a pain to build and get working correctly. What looks good in blender, doesnt neccesarily work out so well in-game.

Should have a video up soon, few more pieces to work on first.

While I have still been modelling on stage 1′ city theme (its going well) I decided to take a little break and work on some of the music tracks involved.
After numerous tracks that I simply wasnt happy with, something clicked and finally I got in the groove. For your audio pleasure is a sample of stage 1’s Dawn Raid; Sample.mp3

Considering the game will have multiple routes through each stage this pushes up the content requirement. I will have to code in real time mixing, as the audio should reflect the route and action that is happening on screen.

For a game developer there is nothing more depressing than the realisation that nobody wants your game. (Had this happen to me last year and it put me off working for sometime)
Some times it seems it doesnt matter who you contact, nobody is interested, or willing to talk about your game. And thus the general public never gets to hear about it.

For the past few weeks I’ve seen numerous press releases of indie game announcements on the indiegames.com blog (which I follow daily). Some of these games arent even in production yet, but they are allready getting media coverage. My game has been in development for allmost half a year and yet still nobody is willing to mention it.

This makes me wonder. Do my games suck? Maybe, its certainly a possibility. But without getting these games out there and known to people I will never know for certain.

But I digress, this is one aspect I really need help with. Emailing indie blogs and such doesnt work for me. Its times like this when I just think whats the point in making games if nobody is going to play them. Being indie is tough :s
So if anyone out there has encountered the same problem, and managed to get some good coverage please speak up.

X

Decided that since this damn game is taking so long I may aswell up the ante somewhat.
Instead of standard 2d scrolling the game is now using camera flight paths through a 3d world.
The above screenshot is the current progress of stage 1.

I know I’ve been quiet again, but I’m still busy working away. Been doing some math related work for the shmup. Had to write up some collision routines for the game, and decided to write up some simple physics that will appear in the game at specific points.
All a bit spacey and drifty so should work out well for what I had planned.

Began working on the next boss a few days back, pretty good progress so far.
Got some nice idea’s for attack patterns, animations and so on.

With some luck it will work out ingame. If not he could allways be relagated to a mid-boss.

First boss finally done. Spent way too much time on him, but I am hopeful that I can pickup the pace on the following bosses.
Ofcourse I had to do a lot of extra work along the way, such as new weapons and effects.
Grunt work here and there, and ontop of that I was sick with flu for a while, plus a painful shoulder injury. Great times!
Feedback welcome.

Been working non-stop on this same boss (its taking an awfully long time!) but now the light at the end of the tunnel is visible.
3 more animations left to do besides giving his guns a little pew-pew.

As you can see, I’m still pushing ahead with development allthough it seems to slow to a crawl.
These are the preliminary explosions I shall be using, more work needs to be done but overall its a step in the right direction.