State of the Game #32 : Level Polish

Hey everyone, it’s state of the game time! First things, there is no new build today 🙁 As you may recall from last week I have been working on a procedural level system. Work is continuing on the level system, but I experienced a few setbacks in the past week. Here is why I am delaying the release: In the previous …

State of the Game #31 : Procedural Levels

Welcome to the weekly State of the game! This week marks the release of version 0.3.4 and it has an exciting new feature! Can you guess what it is? Get the game! Procedural levels! Wait, what is that? Procedural levels are what is going to allow you to play many playthoughs of M.A.V. and still have a new experience each …

State of the Game #30 : New MAV Editor and Game Mode

Hello everyone, time for another fantastic State of the Game! Get Version 0.3.3! So this week, I focused exclusivly on issues that had been reported / suggested by a number of different users. The two biggests complaints have been the editor not being that easy to use and the missing single player option with the Alpha build. This week, I have …

State of the Game #29: In game chat!

Hey everyone! Another week and another update. So I had these great plans of making a great video to show some of the new feature in this week and to kind of detail how the procedural part system works and will be expanded but, nature felt otherwise. I have been really sick this week and have all but lost my …

State of the Game #28 : Alpha 0.3.1

New week, new update! If you are an alpha member you can find a new build available for download on your user page. If not, you can still play the free demo or sign up here! So, what is new this week : This week I focused on some back end systems to help speed up future updates, but I …

State of the game #27: Alpha Release!

After countless hours and many late late nights I am proud to announce the Alpha release (version 0.3.0) There is quite a bit in this release so I made a video demo showing some of the new game play. This is also the first paid release, so if you would like to help out buy purchasing the game and being part …

State of the Game #26: Preparing for Alpha

For this week I have started making some great progress into everything required for the 0.3.0 release. Also, I have been looking at the amount of work in the release and what lies ahead and can announce that 0.3.0 will be the Official Alpha release and will mark the movement away from pre-alpha development. What does this mean? Well, to …

State of the Game #25 : March to 0.3.0

Hey everyone! To start things off, there will not be a new build this week. I am working very hard on the 0.3.0 update, which will bring M.A.V. into a full Alpha state. Here are the things I have been working on for the Alpha release. As always, bug fixes are a high priority item. I want to enter Alpha …

State of the Game #24: Bug fixes

Hey everyone, this week I have been focusing on larger systems so this is primarily a bug fix build. I tackled a lot of bugs that I found, plus quite a few user submited bugs. There is one big change though! I felt the speed of the game was way to fast. Everything gun was an instant hit, there was …

State of the game #23: Multiplayer cleanup

Hey everyone! Another week, and another state of the game. This week has been a fun week. I have been focusing a lot more on backend systems, and will continue that for a few weeks, but that don’t mean you can’t tell the difference in builds. Speaking of which, you can grab version 0.2.9 now! Here are a list of …

State of the Game #22: AI Improvements

Hey everyone, sorry for posting so late. I was working on a surprise! First off though, go grab the newest build HERE! For the first time, I am going to try a Dev video of the new features in this week’s video. Now the world can hear my amazing voice. This is what is new this week: You must install …

Screen Shot Saturday 6/23/2012

I have been reworking the Part selection UI. Here are some screen shots of the new layout and the new part filtering screen.    

State of the Game #21: Editor Cleanup

I have an updated build as promised for today. Grab version 0.2.6 here! Changes: +Part Naming system +Part Filtering system +Part Database for performance * Fixed issues with Mech stats not updating * Fixed one instance of the Mech validation bug (Still happens rarely. Still tracking it) Read more: This week I was focused on making the editor experience better. …

State of the Game #20 : Polish Pass

Man, week 20 already. Time flies when you are making games! So this week I have spent a lot of time tweaking part settings to balance the weapons and adding a little more visual polish to the level. Here, you can check it out in the new build! This is what I plan for the next week: So for the …

State of the Game #19 : Procedural Weapons

Another week, another feature! This week I have been working hard fixing bugs and adding in a new Procedural part generator. It’s not quite ready to be shown yet, but progress has been very great so far. I am starting with the weapons first, as they have the most stats to test the rule set on. This same system, however, …

State of the Game #18 : Single Player is Back

Well, after much hard work and many many late nights, I have finished getting the multiplayer to a semi stable state and I can now bring both game modes back into a single release. So, with out farther delay, go grab the latest release, version 0.2.3! So, what’s in this release you might be asking. Well, it depends on if …

State of the Game #17 : New Multiplayer Build

Hey, this week I have been hard at work fixing all the major bugs in the multiplayer test build. You can grab a copy from here and start playing it now. I still have a few bugs that are apperent in the multiplayer, namely a bug that doesn’t let the health sync when a new client joins. That is not …

State of the Game #16 : Multiplayer Testing

What a week. It can be said, one does not simply ‘Add multiplayer’ to a game. I am very happy I started working on the networking now as opposed to later though. The amount of ‘single-player-only’ code I had already written is quite staggering. Lucky for me, Unity does take a lot of the pain away from networking (once you …

State of the Game #15 : More Networking

This week I am neck deep in creating networking systems. I am making fairly good progress, even if it is a bit slower than I had hoped for. Here is what I have done so far: There is a working dedicated server. Right now it has a display window for selecting level and starting the game, but this will go …

No Animation Theory Today

No animation series today, sorry. I am busy with networking code. Will get back to the series next week.

State of the Game #14 : Networking and Multiplayer

This week starts the official development of the multiplayer systems. I have actually been spending a great deal of time researching different networking setups to determine what would be best for handling the gameplay we have now vs. the full gameplay that we are planning for. That research has lead me to this decision. All the multiplayer will be handled …

Animation Practices #1 :The beginning

Hey everyone, this is the start of a new blog series centered around explaining some of the higher level concepts and best practices that I have learned being a professional Technical Animator. This idea came up from a talk over at Reddit’s gamedev section (you should check it out!). There was a question about more complex animation systems (read it …

State of the Game #13 : Stats tracking

Yay, lucky number 13. This week I went back to work on the Stats tracking, as I felt getting some kind of ‘how well did I do”‘ was very important for making the demo more fun. Also, I put in a new camera system, so now you can actually see stuff in 3rd person mode. Here are some screen grabs: …

State of the Game #12 : New M.A.V. Builder

So, I took the plan from last week and put it on hold. I got some great feedback from everyone over the weekend and it became painfully obvious that the M.A.V. editor needed to receive some serious love. So here is feedback we got: I can’t tell what is going on. The arrow keys don’t do what I expected. This is frustrating. …