This Project is No More

The Inspire/Templar Skies game development project has been canceled. More details and a postmortem to come soon.

Also coming soon:

Announcement on Dream Games forums, and through my GarageGames blog.

First October Review

I’ve spent the first week of October putting together a polished demo, and working on documentation for potential investors, as well as some related business stuff. Once the demo is done, I’ll release it for testing and it won’t be too much more work to get through beta to the final version. That is all for now.

Keeble Armor

Scott Thunelius has finished the armor set for the male Keeble. You can see this set in the concept art for the character, and the model on the character below. Excellent work, and it’s a professional touch which really shows. Unfortunately, at the moment it shows the disparity between final, professional art, and my/placeholder art which is heavily used.

Feature Update

A quick update on some feature changes from the second half of September.

The monster invasion on floating platforms wasn’t working out in a way I was happy with. With the rebuilding of the game on a minimalistic codebase, I played around with the terrain block. I have also been playing a lot of tower defense games, looking for what the fun is in them. With these influences, I decided to prototype a level based on the ground / terrain. It only took a couple of hours to migrate the bare features of Templar Skies to this new codebase and level design, and things worked very well. I had a solid, working game which for the first time in ages felt like something coherent.

Playing Tower Defense games, plus reading through some excellent design blogs, made me realize I was still attempting too much. In this case, it was the monster AI. I’ve spend many, many hours trying to get various solutions to work, without anything being reliable enough to make it in. Then I realized I was over-engineering – a lot of TD games make do with a simple path the monsters follow. This was already in Torque, and worked like a charm. The new AI model will be very simple – not all monsters will attack, and the ones which do, will move away from the main path, and stand stationary while they used their magical ranged attack – in effect becoming temporary towers for the demon side. To finally get this resolved is a great relief, as the AI was the single biggest headache feature.

So now Templar Skies levels are much more simpler. Monsters follow a fixed path across terrain, so no platforms, or pathfinding to worry about. Attacking AI has been simplified greatly, and the code for it already exists. This also reduces the complexity and bug-potential of these systems. It also makes level design and building a lot easier.

September Production

It’s been 10 days since the last update here, which while too long, could not be helped. Due to other work, development on Templar Skies has almost stalled.

Development in the second half of September has focused on tightening the whole game, and focusing on getting a finalized version of everything ready. The main problem with the whole process is I spent about 4 months too long on pre-production tasks. This 6 month period of prototyping, pre-production and reducing scope should never have happened – I should have had a much smaller scope from the outset and just focused on building that.

Well, I’m at that point now. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been finalizing required art assets,  finalizing the scope to the release version, and working on a new version of the game. This is all in aid of producing a beta/release candidate version and get the game released as soon as possible.

Engine. I’ve restarted with a fresh TGE/AFX/Gryphon installation, and added the bare minimum of code functions and assets from previous versions of Templar Skies, as I added and tested the small number of final features. This was needed as every month the Templar Skies codebase gets quite bloated and unstable from the constant development and evolution. The main reason I used the Torque engine is for a stable, complete base to build on top of. So I got back to basics for the latest build to ensure the final product was as small and bug-free as possible. All the subsystems I was adding back in were the tried and tested ones which I knew worked from previous development. A lot of features were cut from this final scope simply because their implementation wasn’t 100% reliable.

Assets and content. These are the most expensive parts of game development. I’ve spent more than I’ve intended, for what has turned out to be experimental development, rather than experiment with basic art and wait until final production to spend on art properly. I believe in doing things properly, and the art produced has been fantastic, but the problem lies with the ever changing scope, and old specs which should have been updated before the artist started working on them.

Level content has been a problem also. I haven’t found a level layout and architecture style I’m really happy with yet, because I’m the one working on this, and I’m no artist. I also have no budget for this part of the project. It just takes so long to do a proper job, and that’s something I don’t have. I’ve narrowed down what elements the levels need, and the basic layouts, and the number of levels etc. Now just to get them build and running smoothly.

Design Document. The design document has been undergoing a major revision, and is almost complete for the final specification. I need to submit it to the Dream Games competition for the September revision, so it should be complete later today. It is much shorter and concise than the original, and a lot more specific. Most final issues are covered, there is still a little bit of specifics to be added over the next couple of weeks.

Overall, Templar Skies has the potential to be a solid title. Features and code arn’t a problem, it’s money for final assets, and level design & content which are the final problem. After that is promotion, marketing, sales etc, which I’m looking forward to. I’m also considering approaching some indie game publishers to help with the funding of more art, and marketing of Templar Skies. The help a publisher could provide could be the difference between a mediocre indie title, and a polished successful one.

Still Alive

Weekly post to say I’m still alive. Biggest thing to do with Templar Skies right now is to get a final product milestone list written, and to update the Design Document. I think the Dream Games contest is having another points tally after September, so I have to get it ready for that.

September

This project has blown past all my original deadlines, I can’t believe we are so far into September. I’m still plugging away on Templar Skies. If I do a bit each week, it will eventually get finished. This week I’ve been revamping AI pathfinding (again!) and refining the game menus and general quality of the product. I’ve also organized final artwork, I’ll be glad when that’s all done. The whole thing actually acts like a proper game finally. Still so much to do, its the whole last 10% is 90% of the work thing.

August GarageGames Update

My monthly GarageGames update is available here.

Progression

Work on Templar Skies has slowed now, due to other (good) factors. I’m still in the fix-check-repeat loop, and the game gets better for it every day. Finally fixed a couple of GUI-ability interaction issues also. Adding in the final data and assets has been slowed; final data has mostly been implemented, but I’ve put a hold on final assets for now. This is pending more gameplay assessments, where text data is cheap to change, and art & sound are expensive. Level tweaking is on hold pending the construction of a bigger level to explore more gameplay options. Yes, this project is dragging on, but hopefully all this extra time in the oven makes for a decent game.

So not much more to say than work is slow, always being bug-fixed, tweaked and improved, and this game will be released someday.

Meteors & More

Been doing more on Templar Skies this week, quite an iterative process of play the game, list what’s broken, attempt a fix, and repeat. I’ve also added in some more specific temp art (models that look more like what they are meant to be, rather than checkered cubes). I’ve tweaked the rules a bit, now when each wave of monsters spawns, some powerups spawn as well, rather than having powerup spawns on their own timers. It makes balancing easier, tying a set of powerups to a stream of monsters. Lots of bugs have been smished, and some new ones created, as is always the case. The build tower ability has been broken and fixed about 20 times now, driving me crazy. It should work for good now, and final spells have started their fix cycle. First to be done was Meteor, where a giant meteor falls from the sky onto the target. Characters and towers can both cast this now. It still has an interesting bug however; for some reason the towers are targeting me, rather than the invading monsters. At least it works.

This last one is the meteor hitting the player character. There won’t be any pics of meteors falling until I fix the player targeting bug