Empyreal: Progress Check 11/06/09

The Empyreal team has made significant strides over the month since our last update, illustrated and explained below.

Among the features illustrated in this video:

• The first thing you'll notice is a new player ship model. Though it still needs texturing work, it's much better than it was before.
• The next thing you'll notice is the afterburner shader effect. The effect is coded in HLSL, and the size of the afterburner is dependent on the throttle control of the player. You'll also notice at the end of the video, the afterburner gets utterly massive; this is the result of the "Awesome Button", which basically is an escape mechanism for the player if he gets in a hairy situation.
• You'll also notice that basic weapons functionality is in; the player fires white cube placeholder projectiles. Though there's no clear onscreen indicators yet, weapons can have finite or infinite ammo, optional ammo recharging, and differing projectiles depending on what weapon is active. Projectiles have collision detection with other nonplayer ships based on whether the owner of the weapon which fired the projectile is friendly or an enemy; i.e. as of now friendly fire has no effect.
• Every now and then, you'll see a purple box in the lower left hand side of the screen. This is for the Empyreal Event System, which is a main driver of the gameplay in Empyreal. The inspiration of one of our programmers, Nick Wasilewski, the event system is responsible for presenting challenges and story elements to the player. Events can include the appearance of new enemy ships, text messages, audio cues (for example, voice acting sound bytes to drive a story), and more. The event system is backed by a strong in-house level editing and event planning tool which allows for the creation of many varied and challenging missions.

Much still needs to be done for Empyreal, however. Notably:

• AI for Nonplayer characters is still a work-in-progress and has not yet been implemented. This should arrive shortly.
• Unfortunately, Empyreal is still sorely lacking in content in nearly every area at this point; there is some stuff in the works, however, but the game may need a second semester to flesh out the idea completely.

Though there is still much work to be done, Empyreal is making strides and should still be ready and playable at the SGD Fall 2009 End Of Semester Expo.

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.

Empyreal: A Closer Look

Hi there gamedevs, I'm Chris Hooe, fourth-year BACS major and director of Empyreal. I'd like to take a moment to more thoroughly introduce the motivation for and goals of the project.

The goal of the Empyreal team is to take the game's spiritual predecessor, Skies of Fury, and expand on it in every way possible. The most evident expansions to the player to begin with will be the shift from 2D sprite-based graphics to 3D rendered graphics, and the freedom to roam this world on a 2D scale (in Skies, the player was locked to constant forward progression). Many changes are planned for the game mechanics as well; rather than extreme arcade-style gameplay, Empyreal will provide a more tactical slant of air combat, as players will have multiple choices of aircraft with clear strengths and weaknesses, choice of weapons loadouts (with great differentiation between available weapons), and enemies who (you guessed it) have their own strengths, weaknesses, and AI routines.

Another game mechanic to push towards this goal is the introduction of missions. Missions will consist of multiple pass/fail objectives that the player must complete to pass a particular level. Mission scenarios might potentially include: standard sorties, where either a specific group of targets or all in-range hostiles must be neutralized; escort missions, where the player must protect an NPC from being destroyed by hostiles as it navigates through a series of waypoints; base defense missions, where the player must defend a stationary target for a slew of enemies; and finally, assaults, where the player must take out a heavily-defended stationary enemy base. Ideally, several missions could be played in sequence for a campaign mode, and icing on the cake would be a story loosely tying all the missions together.

As one can probably tell, game options and variance is of utmost importance to this project; if this goal of clear differentiation and strategy beyond what was establised in Skies is not met, then this project cannot in my mind be considered a success. As such, making sure all gameplay additions add a clear, concise, and unique function to the gameplay will be mission-critical and emphasized through the development of the project.

There has to this point been significant work done on the base engine, and a preview video is embedded below:

Features showcased in this video include:

• 3D environment generated from a heightmap, texture applied to generated mesh
• 3D player character (the green cube) flies around the environment; player can turn, and player character model rolls to the side a bit during a turn
• non-player characters (the larger two cubes) are present; currently they have no distinguishing features. Non-player characters can include enemies, NPC allies, NPC characters to be escorted by the player, and environmental props.
• Culling of 3D game entities that are outside of the player's view screen; the camera is intentionally zoomed out too far to show this effect
• Spritefont messages can be drawn on top of the 3D gameplay screen

Be sure to check back for updates on the development of Empyreal soon!

Project Pitch: Empyreal

The spiritual successor to last semester's Skies of Fury, Empyreal is a top-down view 3D shooter which returns the player to the fight for control of the heavens in an advanced tactical fighter. This time around, however, the player is free to roam the gameplay environment as he pleases, and he will engage in a variety of tactical gameplay challenges through various mission types, ranging from simple “kill everything” sorties, escort missions, base defense missions, and enemy base assaults.

The project is to be completed over the course of one semester using the XNA platform. At least three and up to six positions are available, focusing in the game design, programming, and 3D asset modeling facets of the project. Empyreal is directed by fourth-year CS major Christopher Hooe.

Click here to download the Powerpoint presentation for Empyreal.