Empyreal: Progress Report

The Empyreal project has made significant progress since the engine proof-of-concept demonstration two weeks ago.

Evident additions in this video include:

• new player ship model (another placeholder as our artists are producing multiple ideas to work from)
• working radar (in the upper-right-hand corner; critical enemies show as red dots, NPCs to protect show up as blue dots, and non-critical enemies show up as white dots)
• working collision detection (notice when the in-game cubes flash red as the player intersects each of them)

Improvements not evident in this video:

• radar resolution is mutable (i.e. it can zoom in / out)
• front-end UI is present
• game can be paused, resumed, restarted, aborted to front-end UI
• game has a start-up screen sequence
• work on level editor is underway

In addition, a number of under-the-hood classes for entities such as weapons, projectiles, and environmental props are in development.

Notable topics to be addressed in the near future regarding the engine include weapons, enemy AI routines, and level success and fail conditions checking. Similarly, notable topics to be addressed in the near future on the development timeline regarding the game design are the final player model, the artistic theme for enemies, environment design, and weapons ideas, and the beginnings of implementing these ideas.

The development of Empyreal is on-schedule and the game is due for release in December 2009.