The main gameplay involves flying an attack cruiser around, and enemy ships have elaborate AI to charge towards the player, or travel on a predetermined path, maybe decide to leave, spawn more ships, or stay at a certain range. It is also 3D as the little ships will fly above or below you instead of crashing into the side of you.

Uniquely on this game, I had a lot of fun with bezier curves. We had many things moving on snake-lines.
Keeping ships in formation is extremely hard though! Flocking algorithms they call it. You could launch your own fighters which were allies and attacked things intelligently on their path. They actually did heavy damage and were great for blowing up the massive ships.

Working with one other programmer, we made very powerful design tools to allow a base of 10 or 20 ships turn into hundreds of variations for types of weapons fired, physical movements, difficulty for damage and armor, and also huge flexibility for AI. It was the first time I thought of a designers tool as actually programming tool instead of simple changing of numbers. Using conditional statements to change AI, launch more ships, and end the game in a tool with user interface for designers certainly lightened the load for the programmers.

The edge of the map being a ‘soft edge’ and forcing a warp out, and warp back in, was kinda fun to rig up. We used animations quite heavily. The death animations were interesting too, which parts of the ship crumbling and different camera angles used. The beginning scene has all the ships fly by the camera but the players in the videos below just skip past them sadly.

Other things you probably can’t see, the turrets on the gun actually spin toward your cursor. As you fly toward the top of the screen you will curve around the planet. Flying down you can see a more top view, flying up you see more of the side. The scoring system has complex logorithmic scale and is based on how quickly score is achieved combined with how little damage is taken, to avoid all the bullets will give a larger points multiplier.

This is the first time I helped make all the parts of a whole game. It was thoroughly design balanced and had great 3d models, animations and effects. Also the code was smooth for 6 players on various internet connections.

My favorite part was the special code for ram damage. If you hit your nose in someone’s side you can take half their health. If you rub noses, it doesn’t do as much, but if you smash at full speed, it can be significant. I graphed it out on paper and them wrote the formulas to match.

Also not pictured is parking in your cave. I had to write code to disable user movement, and collision and manually pull the car into the hole like a car wash. Except you could come in at weird angles so you had to SPIN and MOVE in, ugh, it was an elaborate motion problem with all sorts of factors I had to consider. I’m very happy with how it turned out, but when it was buggy, it was really bad. Ha!

Someone else recorded video

Why did he choose Burundi? I never knew where it is until it shows up on the globe! Geography!

I didn’t work on gameplay, and I dont really recommend this game over any other PSP soccer game, but hey! the menu is cool!

Ok, so I wrote C++ to pull the numbers, and then some smoothing code to keep it from jumping all over the place. Also rotation to allow the cursor to rotate, just for kicks.

The fun part was rewriting the UI and then using the backboard concept, I wrote up a little minigame as you click through the menus. Depending on where you click, the ball shoots and goes into the hoop or bounces off the rim, or whatever. It was the senior engine guy’s idea but I wrote it up using actual physics properties in projectile motion, accelerations and modelling the front side back rims, backboards. It was quite elaborate! Ha.

Here’s a video of two people clicking through quickly, you may not notice it really, but the whole arc is dynamic.

Music from Glitch Mob

Release Notes:
* Migrate from XNA 4.0 CTP to XNA 4.0 Beta. (broke skinnedeffect?)
* Drew model of female in Paint.Net
* Outlined as 3dshape, added basic depth in SketchUp
* Imported to Blender as dae. Exported as fxp (PAINFUL!!!!)
* Scaled down 0.0005times (why?) and rotated to be vertical.

Google’s Sketchup is a new friendly approach to creating models and I quite enjoy it.  However my options for exporting are limited until I pay 500 for a Pro edition.  Hoping there was a way around this on the internet (I can’t be the only one) I have found some dae to fbx converters and other walkthroughs on how to do the process.

Problem #1 I can’t export to FBX in Sketchup

First Plan:  Use Autodesks’ dae to fbx converter.

This seemed easy enough! However my created file was 15 times smaller, and not in the ‘compressed’ good kind of smaller.  It was smaller as in I didn’t see any vertex data.  I think it is pretty hard to have a shape if there are no points to draw a shape from. I fiddle with these parameters, export options, but just gave up

New Plan:  Use blender’s dae import.

I thought this would be a good way to verify the dae was working but I ran into some hurdles

Hurdle #2 No Python installed.  Easy enough.

Hurdle #3 Python “not found”.  Luckily I know how to hack environment variables, but this is not easy for most people.

Hurdle #4 Import script failed. “ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application”

New Plan: Try different python version.

Nope, this didn’t work, it turns out I got it right on the 5th try with 2.7 64bit 2.6 64bit 2.5 64bit 2.5 32bit 2.6 32bit … why so i have to do all this?

Also, I have to uninstall blender and use an older version (2.49).  Seriously? 2.49b broke compatibility? If this was a commercial product the company would have hate mail constantly.

I get all the right files, turns out that my installation of Blender with data files in user directory breaks things.  I have to reinstall that now.  Great.

Oh, and reset my pythonpath to 2.5 now.

Then comes normal things like scaling it down to 0.01 and exporting entire scene instead of selection. But those are dialog box options, something that is easy and intuitive unlike everything else before this. Sigh.

I got it all working though. ThreeSquad v0.35 Progress

Solution
1) Python 2.5.4 link 32bit?
2) Blender 2.49 (not 2.49a or 2.49b) link <-Install with userdata in programfiles
3) PyFFI 2.1.4 link
4) ColladaCGF link

5?) Python 2.6.5 link <- not sure if I need this

I think this took me 90minutes and I consider myself a power user.  Why does it have to be such a mess?  I guess if I want a nice tool I should fork out $500 for sketchup or softimage XSI or something.

Thanks to http://www.gamevixenzone.com/gvz/viewtopic.php?p=33915#p33915

Another challenge was to get my UI to render on top of everything. I ended up disabling the default depthstencilstate. Also it was kinda messed up to render a plane which was a quad, not triangles. Reviewing some basic directX principles with vertices and indices was a good exercise.

Release Notes v0.34
* Controls overlay added
* Clickable rotating rectangle zones
* PlaneGeometry rendering on top of objects
* Basic navigation actions added and hooked to controls overlay.

Firstly I textured a geometric primitive with a squiggle. I hope to make more dynamic things in the world this way since I am not prepared to do much with the 3D models other than slide them around.

But specific to the windows phone 7 platform, I set up my persistent storage saving and loading. Also specific to the wp7, specifically network protocols, I am using basic PHP queries to upload a file and download a file which is the current plan to allow for each turn to be synchronized among all players.

I found the storage to be somewhat easy to use but I really dont like web queries and also getting a PHP script to save a file was a bit of a hassle and I ended up ditching my current webhost because I ran into frustrating walls.

The other major game design feature added was the concept of a turn and the action phase.

Under the hood I am using C# events using text overlays as listeners to the gamestate events.

Release Notes v0.33
* Textured cubes with squiggle,
* Save+Load to Persistent Storage,
* Upload+Download to PHP website,
* Director statemachine for Planning and Action Phase
* Overlay Hide+Show with C# Events

More progress to follow.

Link: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/minigame/reachgraphicsdemo

Release Notes v0.21
* Loading skinned 3d Model
* Loading animations
* Playing animations at variable speed