I introduce you a new project: The naooak platform! (www.naooak.com)
NaooaK Interactive is a new company founded in north of France (so excuse my poor english :D) by me and a friend, where i’m the CTO.
Currently we are three guys and one girl, and some interns will coming soon, growing up the team to 7.
The NaooaK Platform is an internet game platform which goal to make a virtual arcade room with original games.
All games is made with Java and jME. This provide some features, unlike flash, which are:
Multiplayer game: All games are made for real time multiplayer (up to 4)
True 3d (thanks to jme!)
Integration with social networks, like facebook
Deployment looks like “Bang! Howdy”, really accessible even for casual players.
Currently we work on the first game of our platform: “Zombies ate the Dog!”, beat’em’all which looks like a mix between “Double Dragon” and “Castle Crashers”.
It will coming in half of September, and will be free to play, enjoy!
Graphical content is a blend between 3d and 2d:
I will forward our progression here few time, and I hope you’ll interested
Moreover, I have add some stuff to jME (i.e Integrate NodeAnimationController for ogremesh), and I share it soon (when stability is ok)
It's always cool to be made aware of new startups like these; I wish more people would give us a heads up.
That game snapshot is brilliant, I'm digging the 2D/3D merge! Looks like it would easily be low enough on resources to run fine on most smartphones, but I suppose you're sticking to PCs? And it's jME2, right?
Wish you the best of luck on this exciting endeavor, hope you'll be frequently in touch
And with regards to the contributions you've been working on… one of the cool things about open source is that posting the patches sometimes results in folks finding bugs and fixing them for you
That game snapshot is brilliant, I'm digging the 2D/3D merge! Looks like it would easily be low enough on resources to run fine on most smartphones, but I suppose you're sticking to PCs? And it's jME2, right?
You've all right! Currently we work only on pc model of our game, but we are thinking about mobile device and android, and our games will certainly running on this platforms.
The game is yet developed with jME 2, but we hope we'll move on jME 3 when the library will be more mature.
I have no doubt than it's will be easy to merge project to jME 3; currently all frontend of our game engine is based on "objects interactions driven" system (I don't know if this exist, it's like object data driven method, but with some changes...).
In fact, jME is only a backend of our system. In example, we have a component named "physics3d" for each asset which control all jME nodes of our scene.
We just need to rewrite this one, and obviously display/game initialization and game will work on jME3 ;)
Also, all game design and controls balancing are written in javascript (we work with rhino engine) and heavily encapsulated. This provide easy and fast way for our game designer to tweak the game!
Its hard not to love the cheap and efficient methods, what a difference that makes!
Yeah, cheaps methods are sometime the bests!
Also the powerful jME give to developers large and easy access for tweaking and easily add all type of effects, thanks to him, maybe the best engine ever :D
New screenshot, just to show you the shadow effect on character and zombies:
Image: As you can see, Lightmap of my floor directly influence my character color
I just make a AmbientColorByLightmapController class which provide with jme pick system to catch the uv coordinates of textures under the character, retrieve pixel and apply color to him!
Was easy, as all things to do with jME ;)
Up! Here a beta key, to testing purpose on www.naooak.com:
KCX8HAGUK
This key works only for the first 10 players! So register fast! Or send me MP to get a personnal key
The network currently works only in Europe due to p2p doesn’t work (so we making udp relay server, which is based in France ). In North America, it will be unplayable due to strong ping i think…
A lot of small problems are currently fixed for a new release in the next few days
Btw if you have any idea for fix the problem of NAT Transversal in p2p communication, i’ll be really interested (currently we are researching about uPnP implementation in real time game…)
Yay! I’ve been wondering how you guys were doing – Tweeted.
Runs fine on Windows 7 64-bit, GeForce 8600M GT.
However on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit, GeForce 8600M GT (same computer), it fails to load. I’m using the Sun applet plugin, not IcedTea, because previously I have not been able to load applets with that one at all. This time however it doesn’t seem to work.
Feedback so far:
The English-speaking version of your website doesn’t seem to work. I tried changing between the languages but nothing seemed to happen.
The combined load for the applet and the initial client loading is pretty brutal. Hopefully it’ll only go down from here?
Why QAZS?.. Why not something like WASD or QWER?
The act of turning around isn’t very responsive when I’m spamming the attack key. Taking damage was always a result of not being able to face my enemy quickly enough. (If it wasn’t for that I would’ve been flawless I tells ya)
Is the girl supposed to throw ~20 punches a second?
It’s kinda hard to playtest effectively when the whole app quits on me after I die, and I have to go through the web-menu all over again to start it back up. “Play Again!”-button please!
Bug: Table on grandma’s starting level traps a lot of zombies (also notice the Avatar is wrong)
The game doesn’t works yet on UNIX based platform (just a little problem with path…). I’ll try to fix it in the next days!
For website translation, it wasn’t done yet, but all structure are prepared for applying in few days the translation
For AZQS, damn you’re right its french keyboard for QWAS. Btw in few days we’ll able to map the keys for english keyboard
Sorry for this inconvience, the beta is currently opened only in France in a first time
GUI of the game will come with new version (this one is an old version, so the little girl profile is up on all characters).
The game lobby will be refactorized too.
Is the girl supposed to throw ~20 punches a second?
=> Oh yeah she’s really freaking and badass little girl :P!! The true fact is the gameplay isn’t balanced yet; the little girl will dont hit so often in few versions
The act of turning around isn’t very responsive when I’m spamming the attack key. Taking damage was always a result of not being able to face my enemy quickly enough. (If it wasn’t for that I would’ve been flawless I tells ya)
=> Don’t forget that this game will be configured to play with 3 buddies in cooperative mode. In 4vAI the game is really more easy, cause coplayers can backup you
Currently, we works about a more stable with all base feature version (coming in the half of march), and we try to find some investment (around 150k€/200k$) to raise a team and produce more content.
The bug of the table will be suppressed when we’ll migrate physics from jme-physics2 to jme-jbullet…
If you don’t mind me asking, are the characters made up of several billboarded sprites setup to animate as body parts? Like, a sprite for the upper arm, lower arm, hand, head, etc etc. I’d considered implementing something like that in my project but I decided it was a bit over my head. Still I’d be interested to know how you guys pulled that effect off! Looks great!
). In North America, it will be unplayable due to strong ping i think…
