Another fortnight, another update! Here's what's been going on in the imaginary offices of the redMatter development team for the past two weeks:
In our previous Spotlight/Development blog entry and news post, we unveiled IA!'s first pieces of concept art and an audio style test, giving you a taste of what to expect when you finally get your hands on a playable build. The stack of concepts, showcased in our Gallery, were just the first step in the art creation process for IA!.
In a follow-up blog entry posted just a few hours ago, IA!'s art lead explores the process our artists follow while creating the many assets for IA!'s first level. In it, he details our choice of art style, describes the modular nature of the assets we're building (and how useful they'll be to content creators in our community), explains the creation process for the many 3D objects we'll be using in-game, and also talks about the texture maps that are applied to those models.
To show you how it all comes together, and as promised in our last communiqué, he's also included IA!'s very first in-game screenshots, giving you a very early look at our work so far!
⇒ Read: Spotlight: Designing Art for IA!'s First Environment (Part Two)
In addition to 2D/3D assets (and sounds/music), we've still been hard at work on IA!'s core functionality and gameplay. In fact, with approximately 200 tickets on our task manager and 250 updates to our code and assets in January alone (compared to 80 tickets and 125 updates in all previous months combined), we've been making tons of progress!
[+] Some of the features we've implemented so far include: (Click to Expand/Collapse)
- General
- Main menu
- Spawning (GPs and OP units)
- Team system (currently 1 OP, multiple GPs) + friendly fire
- OP opt-in system + automatic OP selection
- Round system + basic victory conditions (OP wins, GPs win, draw)
- Weapons
- Overhead Players (OPs)
- Top-down view
- Navigation (by moving the cursor to the edges of the window, holding down a button and moving the mouse around, or even using the WASD keys)
- Dynamic occlusion (allowing the OP to see through walls)
- Unit spawning + HUD button
- Unit selection (including box-selection)
- Unit commands (move, attack, stop) + HUD buttons
- Unit world markers (including health indicators and selection circles/effects)
- GP world markers (glow that can be seen through walls, targeting effects)
- Minimap (including markers for both GPs and OP units)
- Ability to issue move/attack orders on the Minimap to selected units
- Ability to navigate around the level by clicking on the Minimap
- Ground Players (GPs)
- First-person and third-person views
- We're also currently prototyping objectives, roles, traps and dynamic music!
We've given plenty of control over much of the above functionality to our level designers via Kismet actors, nodes and objects, which will also be very useful to community content creators.
It's worth noting that most of these features still need a few iterations before they can be considered "complete", but we're definitely close to having enough implemented to be able to give you all early access to the game. Be sure to stop by our IRC channel to track our progress LIVE!
In the coming weeks, we'll be posting a few threads in the Feedback Requests section of the IA! forums, where we'll be asking for your input on some of the discussions we've been having internally regarding upcoming features. You can also contribute by posting your very own ideas and suggestions in the aptly-named Ideas & Suggestions forum. Help us make IA! the most kick-ass game it can be!
We're all anxiously counting down the days to our first public release. We hope you are as excited as we are and we look forward to seeing you all in-game very, very soon!
isnt that dog logo the pirandello and krueger logo from mirrors edge?
It's close looking but they aren't the same.
Also you guys should be careful with the anti-aliasing on your normal map because it transfers it to your model as well.
Thanks for the feedback! The original texture sheet is 2048px*2048px. What seems like AA is likely caused by us resizing the image to 800px*800px to share it with the public. It's also just an example and isn't as polished as our final texture maps will be!
Playing Overwatch since Closed-Beta - can't wait to see more of this game xD
Glad you're still around Wutoholik! :D
Am I at all right in thinking that Intruder Alert! is essentially Overwatch on an engine that doesn't suck?
...and I mean that in the best possible way, I liked Overwatch, but Source is dinosaur technology, so I'd love to see a reincarnation.
Well, source can still do some great modern ****, as seen in City 17, it's a bitch to change it... so yeah. Obligatory blind defense of an engine that's legitimately pretty old... :/
Then again, UE3 isn't much newer. Just 2 years newer than Source. Then again it's had much more drastic updates since then, even though some **** that should be standard and simple still has issues (AA).
True, but then I'd far rather have an engine that could do this: Youtube.com with no AA than an engine with great AA but none of those other features.
Although I think the biggest problem of all is that Source's editor is very tough to use and slightly broken. In the words of Dear Esther's creator; "Creating environments like this in Source is like trying to paint with a chainsaw".
Yes and no. While the core ideas are the same, IA! is a much, much bigger game. You'll see plenty of OW in there (gameplay-wise), but we're aiming much higher this time around.
And UE3 has definitely been much more.. cooperative. :P
Cool, sounds interesting.
And yeah, I figured as much, haha. :)
The art design is pretty great.
Thanks! :D
One that stands out to me is "Implemented Weapon Attachment System". I would expect that kind of custom stuff to come later, after the game is working and running.
I'm not going to post ideas, mainly because all my ideas are bad. However, there is 2 common mistakes related to weapon attachments that most games make. 1, keep your cosmetic/preference stuff separate from the functional stuff. In CoD for example, Red Dot is a preference thing, but if you are willing to get used to (or even prefer) iron sights, that leaves a slot for rapid fire, grenade launcher or some other stuff that has an effect that gives a player an edge.
2, make it obvious what each thing does. Sounds simple, but again, alot of games don't tell you why you should or shouldn't use a silencer or how much extra damage something does. You get the idea.
Hello SabreXT,
Weapon Attachments are the weapons themselves (attached to pawns), not accessories like silencers. So basically, all that point means is that we've added code for displaying weapons in first-person and third-person views and shooting those weapons in both views, and have added a default weapon to the player's inventory (which we also started implementing). The terminology is a bit ambiguous, I agree.
In either case, I like your suggestions regarding weapon accessories. Would you be able to post them on our forums so that other members of our community can share their views on the subject as well?
Community.redMatter.ca
Thanks!