Since then it’s been rather quiet on here but that’s not because the project ended. If you are following me on Twitter then you will have spotted that work was still happening but the update posts had moved home to IndieDB. The even more astute will have spotted that I have created an alter-ego for my independent game developing known as Squid In A Box.

Well Squid In A Box finally has a site!

This will be the home of all future news on my games (although the posts will be mirrored on IndieDB still) so you should all bookmark it and such.

I’m going to try and increase the amount of general games designing posts on here but there are only so many hours in the day and what hours aren’t spent in my dayjob trying to ship Enslaved are usually spent trying to finish Waves but you can probably expect a few musings on Crackdown 2 in the next few weeks as it will no doubt steal some of my precious free time.

In the mean time here is the last video of Waves. As you can see it’s come on quite a long way since the last one I posted here.

However there is more recent footage on the interwebs than my youtubes contains thanks to Epics UDK trailer they made for GDC2010.

The good bit is around 2:37 the rest of the video is clearly rubbish.

So things that are new in this version:

Pickups!

These will home in on you once you get close and form the basis for just about all pickups and rewards that will be in the full game.

Slowmo!

Collect Pickups to recharge your Slowmo-o-meter and then hit the right mouse button to slow down time. Very useful when you get yourself surrounded.

New Spawning Code!

OK so this isn’t noticable or will affect gameplay but it was some much needed rework of the code that was really holding back further development until it was done. This also gave me an opportunity to do a quick revamp of the Wave structure. It’s still dead simple but now no longer dependent on you killing one wave before the next starts. Depending on how well you are doing you may get ambushed.

The Future!

The biggest thing to change so far is going to be the way the waves are structured and managed. I have an idea for a system that is semi-scripted so certain things can happen at certain points in gameplay but largely procedural based on how well you are playing. Hopefully this will mean that better players won’t get bored trudging through easier stuff. Unlike most “Dynamic Difficulty” systems though this will mostly worry about making the game harder rather than making it easier. The later tends to rely on things like the player dying over and over and getting frustrated until the game is finally easy enough for them to progress which sucks.

There are also plans for an early alpha release as a kind of demo but I’ll blog about that closer to the time.

Lets start with the video:

The most notable addition this week is a new enemy called a “Bumble”. Bumbles are so named because they bumble around the arena in a pseudo random fashion bumping into each other and occasionally the player. I wanted an enemy that would be unpredictable and serve to reduce the amount of empty space in the arena which would make it more difficult to just kite the “Grunt” enemies.

The wandering behaviour is based on this article although since I don’t have an infinite playing field to work with I added in some code that pushes the steering force back towards the middle of the arena the closer to the edge they get (although it’s not so strong that they don’t sometimes just bounce off the arena wall).

I’m learning some things about shoot-em-ups that I never realised before but which tie in with Deathmatch style level design.

For example – Power-ups exist not to make the player more powerful but as a way to get the player to move somewhere specific rather than just moving into the space with the least enemies. As enemies often spawn a Power-Up when they die; and this is often in the middle of other enemies, this forces the player to make a risk-reward decision. This is exactly the same as placing Power-up in a Deathmatch level where the best weapons get put in the most exposed and least defensible places.

Finally if you want to read about the more technical work that went on this week (most of my time was spent refactoring code rather than adding new features) then check out this post on the UDK forums where I talk about Actor pools, memory fragmentation and Pawns being overweight.

However there was also more serious attempt: Escape from Woomera which was… well it wasn’t actually that fun. That may have been the point of course.

Well now we have Harpooned. A satirical look at Japanese Whaling via the medium of the Vertically scrolling Shmup.

Harpooned 2009 update from Conor O’Kane on Vimeo.