Well we did the presentation of the alpha of our game last week where we unveiled this mind blowing trailer!

As you no doubt expect after seeing such a masterpiece, we blew everybody away :).  The trailer only features a few snippets of the game but essentially the player gets to control the 4 cool looking skeletons from the video which all have a different class (warrior, cleric, wizard and ranger) and therefore combat style.  As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post, the controls mimic that of an RTS game like Starcraft where you point and click orders to your minions.  We have very much stuck to our initial idea where the units have a basic AI which can be customized that is in place to help the player manage this party of epic undead heroes.

As of now, we have finished controls, the AI system (which helps the players), combat, physics, dungeon creation (which is randomly generated to provide fun and new experiences every time!) and others.  We still have much work ahead of us (and little time!) but the game will be playable at least on LAN (we are targeting web but that’s mostly because we are overachievers really…) have some cool visual effects and an evil dungeon master sending legions of undead against our 4 heroes to try and stop them from taking over the dungeon.

We will be releasing a playable version of the game soon.

Here is a small teaser trailer of Unrest. Enjoy!

Unrest: teaser trailer on Vimeo.

We will try to make some videos while the game develops but we all generally prefer spending time on the game rather than making videos of the game

For our second semester at the DDJV (Diplôme de Développement de Jeux Vidéo), we are tasked with creating another game using, where possible, existing engines.  The scope of the game is much larger than the previous semester because we now have a lot more experience.

My team (Marçal Argudo Grau, Clement Linel and Jad Imad) and I have decided on a new game called Unrest using a few ideas I had for a game in the past as it’s basis.  The game is primarily a dungeon crawler with RTS and RPG elements to it.  The player controls a team of 4 powerful skeletons that find their current whereabouts unworthy of their final rest so they decide to shop around for a cozy dungeon where they can rest for eternity (they’ll have to kick the current owners out before they can!).

The control scheme will be very much like an RTS where you point and click directions to the skeletons.  However, we are also adding a BRAIN (Basic Reasoning Aiding Incompetent Newbs) system to the game.  Basically, each of the 4 heroes can be given some basic behavior which dictates what the skeletons do while the player is not controlling them.  The format is fairly simple, you have one trigger and one action to do when the trigger’s condition is met.  Triggers represent certain things like when an allied skeleton is below a certain amount of health or if an enemy is paralyzed.  Actions are the skeleton’s abilities like Cure, Fireball, Attack, etc.

If a player sets the BRAINs up correctly, it can help him manage his team much more easily as they will act and defend themselves without waiting for an order from the player.  Of course, this system is not meant to replace player controls, it is only there to help and cannot bring forth the maximum potential of the characters.  For that, the player will have to manually tell them what to do.

Here are a few screen shots of the skeletons meshes we will be using for the game.  Unlike for Polaracer, we decided to invest a little in some animated models to allow us to have a good looking game.

A Badass Skeleton Warrior

An Unholy Healer

The Skeleton Meshes were purchased from 3Drt.com and the dungeon tiles from Frogames.net.

This is a video of a game I created with 3 other students at Campus Ubisoft (University of Sherbrooke).  It’s basically a 3D racing game but with a twist! Each car has a “magnetic pole” allowing it to attract and repel other vehicles.  A skillful player can use this ability to speed himself up by repelling a ship of the same color that is behind him or by attracting an opponent in the lead with a different pole.

Here is a video of the game in action :

Polaracer on Vimeo.

The project was completed in 3 months.  My part of the work revolved primarily around Gameplay, Physics, Scene management and Particles.  The Physics were made from scratch using and Octree to do Broad Phase Prunning, Bounding Spheres to quickly eliminate potential collision tests and finally a combination of OBBs and OBPrisms (a triangular prism) as the final bounding shapes of our vehicles.

The track is generated from an xml which is written using our track building tool and is then converted to a simplified physical representation for collision testing (using OBPrisms).  The physics engine allowed for loops and other cool track formations in the game (which was one of the main features we wanted for the game other than the gameplay element).

Unfortunately, the game has some portability issues that we did not see appear until the week before submission so we couldn’t get those fixed in time (the game only works on our school desktops or similar computers).  So we have not packaged it and made it available (there are no plans to do so either).  We have however taken these problems into account for our current project and will make sure that the next game can be downloaded and played on reasonably powerful machines running windows.

The site now has it’s basic structure done but it’s still missing content. I’ll get to it when I get the time >.< so for the time being: