Programmable Art & Graphic Endeavors

Digital art and Unity development blog.

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Short video showing off the newly implemented guided missile system, as well as updates to the laser particle FX.

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Another development update, this time showing off the completed basic user interface functions.

With all the basic systems in place, I can now start working on the AI. This will be a big task and take quite some time, but I am excited to finally be at this stage.

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A quick development progress update showing off the fire control interface and laser weapon system.

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Progress update:

I have been hard at work the past few weeks and much has changed. I'm going to break it down into sections.

First off the helm system interface and mechanics have seen a drastic redesign. How it works now is much like Starfleet Battles - movement costs power. On average it will take about 75% of a ship's total max power output to go the maximum speed. Further, instead of a slider in Power Allocation, the bar will fill based on the speed setting's required power for a given speed. The left side of the engine power bar (ENG) representing 0, and the right (full) representing 75% of the reactor's max output, the most power the engines can use. Some ships will be under or over powered in terms of reactor max output, so won't always be exactly 75%. A weaker ship might have to go as high as 90% to go max speed, where as a ship with a beefed up reactor core might only need 50%, as rough examples.

The other big addition is the fire control GUI system. I am very excited to have this in the game finally! Each weapon get's a GUI data block that shows the weapon type and size as an icon, which fire groups it is part of (1-4), it's current mode (in plain text), a button to cycle modes, it's status (ready, charging, over heated, or offline), it's heat status, and it's ammo status. As well there is a master fire control panel to the right of the weapon blocks that lets you select which fire groups are active to fire and of course, a GUI fire button (space bar is the fire key). So with this setup, you can effectively see all the information you need about each weapon at a glance. To further add to this, I might change the weapon icons so that each type has a color associated with it (like orange for rails, green for plasma, red for lasers ect). I'll mess with that kind of polishing later.

Next step will be to finally build all the weapon systems. I've had the railgun system mostly finished for quite awhile, so it will be great to focus on finishing that and moving on to new weapons. During this phase I will also be finishing the full visuals for the weapons, with stuff like muzzle flashes and particle effects. Learning Unity's particle FX system for 2D games will be fun I hope.

Until next time, fly safe! o7

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Hello and welcome to the first progress update video for my game project!

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It's been awhile since I posted anything here, but that is for good reason. Much has transpired since my last post. For one, I decided to change the subject of my game project to a top down tactical space combat sim using hand painted 2D graphics. This is for several reasons, most notably that I would enjoy actually finishing the game within this century, as I am building the entire thing solo. Still using Unity, it's working great for the project and things so far have been mostly smooth sailing.

So, where things stand right now? Currently the project is getting very close to a playable alpha state. I still have much of the GUI to finish building, some systems design and code to finalize, all of the weapons systems to code and build art for, and then basic AI. While there is still much work ahead before I can officially call this an actual game, a lot has already been done.

A brief list of completed or mostly complete systems:

GameController, soundcontroller, camera zoom

Player helm control and ship movement

Shields, hull sections, damage control

Railguns, fire control, sensors, and ship core (reactor)

Universal turret script with computed aim lead vs moving targets, universal projectile script 

GUI for power allocation, helm control, and camera zoom

Various art and sound assets

Also, progress for today:

While I have recently been distracted with sound effect creation and coding various features, I finally got back to my first ship sprite to finish it! I also learned how Unity handles sprite size scaling vs it's resolution, which is pretty handy. I also learned that it's not worth making 512 sized maps for my frigates, they are too small and the detail is lost. So I think the scale will endup being 64 maps for fighters, 128 for corvettes, 256 for frigates / destroyers, 512 for cruisers and possibly 1024 maps for dreadnaughts and other huge ships. I can control the in-game scale of the sprites finely by changing the pixels to units value on imported sprite and then adjusting the in-game scale.

Anyways here is the 512 sized version of my first ship sprite, a terran frigate! I haven't worked on figuring out the "lore" of the game fully yet but I'll do a write up on the ship class and several variants eventually. More to come!

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Demo of the unit movement system for my space rts unity project. It needs refinement, but it works!

Movement systems are GOOOOO!!! *rocket engine noises*

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Check out my 3d space rts camera! It's patterned after Homeworld's camera style, and seems to work pretty good.

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Back view of the laser cannon pods. I wanted to give the impression it had some kind of power pack that gets loaded before launch.

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Finally finished the wingtip laser cannons. Took me longer than I anticipated because I ended up redesigning them about 3 or 4 times. Happy with the results though!

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Last update for now, showing off the new upper wing detailing and upper retro thrusters.

More to come soon!

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I have made significant changes to the fuselage. It is now much more streamlined and no-longer a reverse thruster since I have two up top and the larger ones towards the back already. I will likely move the missile system into the lower pod from the area by the wing roots. Would make sense, could have larger ordinance packages.

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I have added drag flaps and ailerons. While not specifically designed for atmospheric flight, it is capable of it with reduced performance compared to space. In an atmosphere it would use a combination of RCS and control surfaces.

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Alright so I was really thinking the design was looking far too long. After some analysis on how to shorten it, I set to work. The top engine bulges have been significantly moved forward, as has the lower engines, which were also slightly elongated. The nose area was brought back and integrated into the center more than before. Various minor tweaks as to how the different parts fit together had to be made but it worked out.

While it's overall length hasn't actually decreased by a huge amount, it's actually quite abit more compact and visually reads much better. It is no longer entirely accurate to the concept sketch at this point, but I don't feel I must be a slave to accuracy for accuracy's sake. If I wanted it exact, it could be, but I feel my designs evolve as I take them from 2D to 3D, and I don't want to restrict that vision.

It's past the time where every model and sketch exists mainly to prove that I possess skill. Now it's time to build things exactly how I want them to be and let the critics say what they may.

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Put in some more time on this, most of the engines are done, next up will be the large center engine and the cockpit to finish it off. Then details, unwrapping, textures, and finished!

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Right so I keep getting distracted by things, but I've finally gotten some more progress done on this today. More to come soon - this thing needs to get done! :P

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Thought I should probably post a link to the finished Robot Arm Sim app. If you’ve got an iPad, go check it out!

The page for the RAS also has links to the other two applications I made while working at DCCC: The Caliper Training Tool and the Micrometer Training Tool, also for iPad.