Greetings Fellows,
It has been some time since my previous news update. This is because the project has been in a break for more than a half year. But now I'm back and will go on with the project.
Rethinking
The last weeks I've done some rethinking about the game concept. One of the things I thought about was the artstyle. One of the styles that currently is doing very well at the indie gaming market is the cartoon style. Games like Tower Wars, Cross of the Dutchman and Nemesis are really pulling the attention of fans with their fatastic art. I started to do some research in this area and decided to make a model to see how it will turnout.
The cannons how they will appear in the game from now on.
I was quite happy with the look of this model. So the new artstyle is now definite. The next thing I will be working on is the remake of the Aeronef. I will post some work-in-process images along the way so you can see the progress I'm making on it.
Game Engine
A completely different aspect of the game I have been thinking about is which game engine to use. I started producing the game on the quite popular game engine Unity. But I wasn't very happy with the way of development. One of them being the lack of advanced shader support in the free version. Since the project has just started, I don't have the funds yet to buy the full version. Another problem I ran into was the user interface of Unity. They did a great job on making a user friendly ui, but somehow I found this limiting my flexibility and control I have when just coding everything.
So I have been searching for some alternative game engines. I didn't want to go for the big sdk's like the Unreal or Crytek engines, because they are way over the top for a small game like mine. I finally ran into two alternatives comparable with Unity: Torque 3D and NeoAxis. I decided to go for the last one for the following reasons:
- Support for Windows and Mac platform ~ This is a prior for me
- C# programming language ~ I'm experienced in this language
- Build on the great open-source render-engine Ogre ~ Open-source for the win
- NVIDIA PhysX support ~ Great dynamic physics for realism
- Shadows supported in the non-com version, along with some other great visual effects
I was quite surprised when seeing what the NeoAxis engine was capable of and I will show you some in-game screenshots as soon as I have something to show. You can also checkout their website yourself to see what has been done so far with the engine by others: www.neoaxis.com.
Stay tuned, I'm trying (again) to keep you up-to-date with weekly media/news updates.
Greetings,
MrEmjeR
