Pocket RPG

[BlackShipsFillt]

Hi everyone.

Tasty Poison are starting a game, this time for themselves (and so on a really tight budget), so I figured I'd do the right thing and start the semi-transparent development process early.

It's going to be a stripped down action-RPG Shooter/HacknSlash Roguelike for the iPhone and iPad. Fantasy themed with chibi-like characters. Imagine Diablo but with shooter control, a choice of three cute characters and 20 minute gameplays.

We have big plans, but will probably have to end up being limited due to budget constraints.

Here's a look at the Dark Ranger, Blasde Master and Battle Mage characters as they would appear in game (apart from the drop shadows).






I'll keep updating this thread as stuff is displayable. I know this isn't a lot to comment on now.

[edit]
Pocket RPG is finally on sale!

[CiNiMoDZA]

Stuff you people and your awesome ability to do graphics...

[xyber]

sweet :D
can't wait to see the results.

[dislekcia]

Really liked the concepts for this when you guys were talking about it... You still going to go with the humor angle? (Old-man boy is awesome, BTW)

[BlackShipsFillt]

Old man boy, and Captain Segway etc, was for another game (which may materialize down the line)...

Pocket RPG might not end up very humorous, the original concept had real world elements mixed into the fantasy, eg. you could choose classes and races, so you could choose to be a Barbarian Lawyer or Samurai Fitness Instructor and fight Minotaur Telemarketers, but the game has been made less bizarre to appeal to what we see as a broad gap in the iPhone market (a lack of Dungeon Crawlers). It will be kept kind of funny, hopefully, but not especially unique.

And also I'm not in control on this one. But trying to appeal to a more mainstream audience is an interesting challenge, one I've never tried before but have thought about a lot.

[BlackShipsFillt]

We're slowly getting there... these are some screenshot/mockups. We should have some gameplay up soon, it's starting to be fun to play.

(I know right now this isn't really exciting, but I'm working on it)

[dislekcia]

This is looking cool. Can't wait for the gameplay vids.

So the redhead is a shooter character?

[BlackShipsFillt]

The baldy is the brawler, the purple one is the shooter and the redhead is the nuker.

I'm busy trying to implement Soul Calibur style trails on baldy's weapons!! Makes me feel like a proper game programmer.

[UntouchableOne]

Looking great! Glad to see things have been progressing "behind the scenes" at Game.dev, I visit occasionally and it seems to have somewhat died :(

[Luke]

Lookin' stylish! I've got a good feeling that Tasty Poison is going come through with a winner here. Looking forward to seeing more as it comes along! Between stuff like this and Desktop Dungeons, Cape Town is where it's at for ZAGD ;)

[dislekcia]

The baldy is the brawler, the purple one is the shooter and the redhead is the nuker.

I'm busy trying to implement Soul Calibur style trails on baldy's weapons!! Makes me feel like a proper game programmer.

Ah, I noticed the controls were different for the different characters... At least, I think they're different.

Also, editing indices is faster than editing vertices for trails ;)

[BlackShipsFillt]

Hey, I've been building on some effects (with the help of the artists at Tasty Poison)... There should be a gameplay video in a week or so.






(All in game shots, just cropped for GameDev forum resolution)

[FuzzYspo0N]

It's looking great guys. Let's hope its as fun as it looks!

[BlackShipsFillt]

Also, editing indices is faster than editing vertices for trails ;)

I don't know much about trails... the way my weapon trail works is that it calculates the mesh once per frame (rebuilds from scratch... which maybe could be optimized)... but it samples the position of of the weapon many times each frame (and adds the information to a list) in order to get a smooth trail... I did at a previous point lazily rebuild the entire mesh everytime I sampled the animation, that even slowed down my Imac, not to mention the iPad.

Is this what you mean by indices? I'm getting surprisingly decent results right now, but I'm sure there is room for optimization.

I'm also going to be recoding the lightning trail... the default Unity Line renderer is not producing quite the results I want (it does not handle sharpish changes in direction well and it doesn't give me access to the mesh's UV coordinates)

[dislekcia]

I don't know much about trails... the way my weapon trail works is that it calculates the mesh once per frame (rebuilds from scratch... which maybe could be optimized)... but it samples the position of of the weapon many times each frame (and adds the information to a list) in order to get a smooth trail... I did at a previous point lazily rebuild the entire mesh everytime I sampled the animation, that even slowed down my Imac, not to mention the iPad.

Is this what you mean by indices? I'm getting surprisingly decent results right now, but I'm sure there is room for optimization.

I'm also going to be recoding the lightning trail... the default Unity Line renderer is not producing quite the results I want (it does not handle sharpish changes in direction well and it doesn't give me access to the mesh's UV coordinates)

The trails look sweet, I bet they look even better from the top-down view :) Can't see any polygonisation, so you're definitely sampling enough. The random "No, UVs are secret information that you can't touch now!" decisions in some places in Unity are a tad annoying. Aeq ended up building a whole bunch of mesh generation stuff for us so that we could control things a little easier at generation time.

I don't know if my blather about changing indices is all that relevant now, seeing as you've got an implementation that seems to be working just fine, but I'll explain it anyway: If you use indexed primitives, you end up lobbing two sets of data at your shader: The list of vertices and a second list of indices that tells the shader in which order to process those vertices. This was initially done to reduce memory load in meshes with multiple triangles sharing a vertex. But it can be useful in other situations too, especially ones with dynamic meshes. Firstly, updating an index list is much quicker because it's smaller in memory, so if you've either got a pre-computed vertex list (you know the path the weapon will take, for instance) or you can write directly to the vertex list in graphics memory and treat it more like a buffer - ie: only change X sampled vertices per frame - instead of re-writing the entire thing and using the index list to determine which specific verts get drawn.

Depending how complex your trail is, you might need a custom shader to handle things like the trail compacting and fading away according to distance. At least it's not one of those hardcore shaders that renders the weapon's position to a texture every frame and generates its own trail positions based on that... Bottom line tho: If you've got it working and it's not kicking your processing power to the curb, leave it the **** alone ;)

[BlackShipsFillt]

Gremlins!

[xyber]

lookin really cool :D

[BlackShipsFillt]

Mumsese!!

And they do the thriller dance! (Because they have no bones I had to make them teeter from leg to leg with their arms outstretched)

BTW. Sorry about there being no videos as yet. We were going to have one up a while back but our publisher said "no" they only want to show finished work, no in progress stuff. It's pretty sad, and pretty against the Indie-Development ethos (and possibly even harmful to us), but they are in charge of marketing.

[edit: Although in the publishers defense they plan on showing it off in places where they have limited chances to display the game so they want their resources to be maximized]

[BlackShipsFillt]

I've been making the enemies bounce around... The pineapply-things are nests and they sort of squirt out the little minions... also the minions jump out of the water and get flung into the air by fireballs and exploding barrels... also now there is a really wobbly camera shake (hence the funny angle of this shot).

[dislekcia]

Juicyness! I was going to ask about the slime over the water there, but I assume it's leaping out. That's pretty awesome, the game just keeps looking better - especially when I consider what it's going to be like on an iPhone/iPad :)

Sucks being too busy to come bother you guys...