Today marks the anniversary of America going independent, and to celebrate, I thought I would show you a bunch of new stuff we have been working on lately. This morning I woke up and realized we had no 4th of July themed hat, so I took care of that
Also, I have been working on a cool pirate ship kart as well:
Finally, a very enthusiastic Zero Gear fan (ok, my wonderful girlfriend) decided to make an entirely physical version of our sock monkey character, complete with a Zero Gear butt-label! Awesome!!!
Beyond all our expectations, the artists on the glorious game-art forum Polycount have started making custom content for Zero Gear before they have even been able to play the game themselves. Here is a little collage showcasing some of the work they have already started on:
The people are hungry for Zero Gear!!! I had better get back to work. Here is the Zero Gear thread on polycount if you want to see what people are making, or are interested in making something yourself!
Pior Oberson is the first person to make some custom content for Zero Gear! He has modeled a new character and hat for the game which I got into the engine today, check it out!
Woohoo! This is our 50th post since we started the Zero Gear development blog! I am just taking a quick moment to post a revised GUI mockup of how we want the garage to function. This will hopefully be another GUI programmed in flash, and will feature floating elements that can be positioned by the user. Hopefully you will be tooling around in this garage soon!
After getting Hikari working, we wanted to test it.
We wanted to create something we could use in game. Something that would be difficult or time consuming to create manually. We also wanted to see how well it held up. What better test than a Mini Map?
First, here is the Mini Map in action:
It was created by Dave's brother Ian and supports rotating, zooming, and any number of icons on the map. It was written in ActionScript 3 and is a Flash element that is being rendering in our game using Hikari.
It performs quite well. There is barely a FPS drop and it is pretty smooth.
You can see the full source here and the data file here.
Here is a quick summery of what I needed to do to get it working in game.
I call the ActionScript loadMap(imageUrl:String, mapWidth:Number, mapHeight:Number):void function from Lua, passing in the name of the mini map image, the width of the map in game units (1 unit is a meter), and the height (or depth in 3D).
I can then call the ActionScript setPlayerPosition(x:Number, y:Number, rot:Number, zoom:Number):void function, passing in the x position, y position (or z in 3D), the degrees rotated around the y axis, and a zoom amount (based on speed of the player).
There is a similar function for setting data related to other players called setObjectPosition().
From there Ian takes care of the rest and that means I have time to watch an episode of Dexter instead of writing a Mini Map in C++. Yay!
As we are starting to build pieces of the GUI for the much anticipated race mode for our game, I spent some time mocking up a general outline of what it might look like. What do you think? We will use this as a guide to build the real pieces. Click to see the bigger picture.
As you may have noticed in our last video, we have finally gotten some sound effects for Zero Gear. This is all due to our partnership with Kaamos Sound, which is run by Tapio Liukkonen, a friendly and frosty fellow who lives down the street from Santa Claus in North Finland near the arctic circle.
Tapio found our game online and was very excited to help, we are excited to be working with him because he is very passionate about his work. Here is a sound sample of some of the work he has done for Zero Gear:
Tapio braves bears, junkyards and go-kart dealerships on a regular basis to find and record the source material he needs to transform into crisp, clear sounds. Here is a picture of him with his giant fuzzy microphone.
You can look forward to some of Tapio's great sounds in Zero Gear!
Thanks for patiently waiting, (well most of you) we have reached another milestone in the development of the game. This video was from an online playtest we held to test out a fresh gameplay mode called "Fallout" (where the object is not to fall out of the level) along with our very first implementations of 3 different items. There are also a few new characters thrown in and some other things we have added along the way. You might also notice another new thing for Zero Gear, sounds! We have been working with a mysterious character from the icy north to provide Zero Gear with sounds. We will reveal all about him in another post soon! Enjoy the video!
At least that is what I gathered becuase when people would suggest characters for the game, a panda was always one of the first blurted out. So I made a panda character! Here it is!
We had our first big (8 people) internet test last night. There were a few issues that we were able to fix while the test was going on thanks to a Subversion build deployment system. The biggest issue was the lack of bandwidth on our home internet connections which caused lag.
So we are shopping for a service to host game servers for future tests. Amazon EC2 seems perfect for us. Does anyone have any other suggestions? (We need full access to the server to configure the game server and other services). If you do, post a comment please!
real quick post, we just got our new level up and running for the next game mode we are building for the next video. Wanted to post a screenshot. Click for big.
As some of you might have noticed in our last video, we have started putting particles in our game. For the non-developers out there, particles are how we create effects such as explosions, weather, dust or any situation where we need to animate some kind of graphical effect using many graphics moving together in a certain way. We are using an excellent particle library called Particle Universe which allows you to create these effects in a script type format. Here are a couple of effects I have been working on lately using this system.
Here is a snippet of the script of the bottom explosion effect, detailing how the system should animate the fireball part of the explosion:
In this video we are using a “Tag” type game mode as an intitial test of our gameplay scripting system. Using the experience from this we will design bigger and more exciting gameplay!
In this mode, players compete for the longest amount of time being "IT". The longer you are "IT" the more points you rack up. There is also a 3 second immunity after you have become "IT". For this level, we also made points accumulate faster the closer you are to the middle, to encourage people to duke it out in the middle ring.
The test was a lot of fun, and gave us a lot of ideas and feedback for how we are going to implement more gameplay features in the near future!
NimbleBit is a couple of guys on a quest to be awesome. One is an artist/designer and the other is an engineer/programmer.
Currently we are working on a kart racing game called
