Videogame Discovery

Hello! I'm back to programming after my short holiday in the 3D modeling world with Blender. Today, I'll show you a gameplay video from my Java prototype: This is a sample level with random spawned enemies of all kind. It shows how you can approach enemies in different ways, trying to avoid them, moving to their same cell to destroy them, or deploying a mine for the most annoying ones. Also, resources management can be done with different strategies: you can repair as soon as you get hit, or decide to continue playing damaged, hoping to reach the end of the level. In advanced levels, you could be asked to complete it after collecting at least N resources, or killing X enemies, and so on. These constraints will constantly change the way you play, and (hopefully) keep you interested in the game. Next: I'll finally move to Unreal Engine and see how hard it is to implement all these ideas in that environment. I expect many challenges, but I'm sure it will be a...

While working on the basic game concept I decided to take a break and start doing some 3D assets for the final version of the game. The style I'm looking for is not a super realistic, highly detailed one: The game will have a static camera to show all the grid, so the ships will be very small on the screen. So I decided for a low-poly, a bit cartoonish style. First of all, the base shape of the game: the hexagon. Doing this is very simple in Blender: create a cylinder and lower the number of sides to 6. Scale down its height, and you have a perfect hexagon! For the player ship model I started with a simple box; I subdivided and extruded it until I got the basic shape of the ship. Then I added laser weapons on the wings and thrusters on the back (basically modified cylinders). To apply textures to the model, it needs to be UV unwrapped. This means that all the polys have to be "flattened" on a 2D sheet so that the software knows where to apply the...

Even though game balancing will come a lot later in the developement, I had to think about a kind of progression in my game levels, not only increasing difficulty but designing a sort of new elements that come into play as you progress in the levels, forcing you to change the way you play to prevent it from becoming boring. Here are the elements that will change: maps: the maps will get bigger, so it's more difficult and time consuming to explore all cells. enemies: there will be different kind of enemies, each with peculiar behaviour. resources: the resources will become more scarse, so you'll have to decide when to use them. First of all, interaction with the enemies. At the moment all enemies have 1 health point, so if you occupy a cell where there is an enemy (or if it occupies your cell, in his turn), it will die while you lose a health point. For now there's no way to "shoot" them, you can both destroy them at cost of your health, or try to avoi...