WIP: the Cove – Contest Entry – [Final Release + 27min full play through video]

archive beta-1-game-contest
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Final Build + 27min full play through video





Final Build Beta Release Here



Demo Releaes Here




    http://i.imgur.com/CAJiZ.jpg

    I used the TerrainEditor plugin for the first time and quickly added water.
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    Cool, glad to see you in the contest :slight_smile: You can also add end edit the water by creating a new FilterPostProcessor file and editing the parameters in the SDK btw, allows for easier adapting of the parameters to make it look good :slight_smile:

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    Whats that blue thing in the water?



    Is it a secret item? A power up? Or maybe a boat from the future :o

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    Good Luck :slight_smile: If you need any help with the rules, just ask!

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    cant wait to see what you come up with!

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    Nice shot!



    Sometimes depth blur really feels distracting. Dunno, may be its just me.

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    Update One



    Not heaps of progress, I unfortunately don’t have much time to devote to this project at the moment.



    I have been playing around with the terain editor and blender importing which has been a pleasure to use, however is blowing heaps of time as it’s not part of my usual streamlined workflow.



    I’m currently toying with scale and a baseline vissual feel, once I’m happy with these I will move onto some core gameplay.



    NRLuT.jpg1000×1012
    http://i.imgur.com/NRLuT.jpg

    Here are some screenshots of current progress, inital modeling and some current gameplay shots.



    @Momoko_Fan the blue thing is shader injection in action :stuck_out_tongue:



    @memonick @wezrule cheers :slight_smile:



    @iamcreasy know exactly what you mean, however I’m planing to heavily overuse DOF and Bloom as an experimental gameplay idea, will see how it goes

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    @thetoucher said:
    @Momoko_Fan the blue thing is shader injection in action :P

    OMG this is one hell of a taunt!
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    http://www.crossfiteastvillage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Oh-Snap.jpg

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    Are you serious!?? That looks funky amazing!!! Rock’n’Roll

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    That screen really looks cool, like a commercial “game dev work in progress” :slight_smile:

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    I unfortunately don’t have much time to devote to this project at the moment.


    Lol! Then who are you? The Superman xD ?!
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    @thetoucher please some more updates! O_o its already freaking awesome!



    yeh, maybe underwater depth blur wont cause that much distraction. :slight_smile:

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    That screenie looks so awesome!!



    You’re definitely building a very gorgeous game :smiley:

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    When anybody mentions “shader injection” that cat becomes our face :smiley:



    So I assume the player is the floaty things in the water which eat the fish and whales

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    Quick Update.



    Firstly, thanks for all the kind words and encouragement,



    Not much progress in the last few days, I have been very busy with life… the upshot being I have left my job to focus on development full time! Which is a pretty massive and exciting move :slight_smile:



    … but onto the reef, the Coral engine is progressing nicely in its most basic form, the ‘wee fish’ is rigged, basically animated and happily swimming around. I had a few issues with using the Blender Importer which was mostly just getting familiar with the proccess and making silly mistakes like not clearing model rotation and scale, and differing origin points. I also did get caught out by BlenderKey setFixUpAxis issues that took a while to debug.



    vtCDm.jpg1300×762
    http://i.imgur.com/vtCDm.jpg



    The next step will be to add some sea life to the Cove, with basic waypoint nativation and pathfinding. It’s far to soon to be adding flocking behaviour, but I’m looking fowrad to playing with that so I may need to bump it up the list.



    I keep putting off actual gameplay as it hinges heavly on interacting with the life in the world so I would still like to establish a stronger core game world before exploring the play mechanics too much.



    Cheers

    James

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    Looking very nice.

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    Hi guys, quick update …



    R5lMH.jpg2000×2000
    http://i.imgur.com/R5lMH.jpg



    Updates :

    • moddeled, rigged and textured another fish type (animations are shared);
    • wrote a texture loader capable of shifting the hue of images, so one texture can be retinted to any colour* and reused over and over for rapid development of different fish and coral species, and variants within.
    • added CoralFactory manager class and pulled out coral species definitions so they can quickly be added and changed.
    • started getting coral to propogate vertically as well as spread across the sea floor, this really enhances the vissual impact
    • spent a long time laying out Blender windows and viewports on my minitors so it looks hella cool when I model
    • FishDirector class manages fish behaviour, which is currently limited to aimlessly swimming around… which is pretty much all they do anyway.



      I got royally rodgered by the AssetManager asset caching, spent a very long time trying to figure out why completely unique material and texture instances were seamily sharing image data… because they were. So if this sounds like something that might be screwing with your currecnt project, I arrived at the following line of code to help get around my issues:



      [java]((DesktopAssetManager) assetManager).deleteFromCache(textureKey);[/java]


    • not actually ‘any’ colour… don’t judge me.



      peace out

      James
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    Nice :slight_smile:

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    @thetoucher said:

    Not much progress in the last few days, I have been very busy with life... the upshot being I have left my job to focus on development full time! Which is a pretty massive and exciting move :)


    Congratulations! Very exciting, I'm very jealous. I will be doing that next year some time I think, if all goes well.