4660 Nereus [DevLog]

**NEW Video

AI Routines:

**OP

Hey,

I'm making a new prototype called 4660 Nereus (at the moment). It's about exploring randomly generated asteroid fields, taking on generated missions, rescuing survivors and expanding / maintaining a mining colony.

The game started out as a way to create a mix of Lunar Lander and Asteroids but it has since shifted into something much more it's own slower paced thing.

All Videos (oldest to newest):

Prototype: http://youtu.be/pZIwzHe41cQ

Devlog: http://youtu.be/y3RsfBsWwGg

Docking Demo: http://youtu.be/TJ3Fim5KW24

Mission Generator Demo: http://youtu.be/51CUPtGVbLc

Mining Demo: http://youtu.be/-bxXbSf3vTA

AI Routines: https://youtu.be/FQCrYhMVQKU

I've been enjoying watching your prototypes & love the sound design in all of them (Attract especially, which I tried to rip-off until discovering that keyboards don't like multiple keypresses).

If you wanted to make your game fully procedural, you could try Yann's polygon plugin - - to generate the asteroids. That would also allow you to split them, which might make an interesting mechanic where you use the laser to carve up specific shapes.

Other ideas:

-let the player zoom out to a macro view & see what's in the neighborhood for planning (fuel, collision interactions).

-have some global affector to the levels like a swirling gravitational field (like the orbit levels in osmos), or a neaby sun where you use line of sight to heat the ships, & shadow casting to see where the cool spots are.

-if this is physics based then i recommend rojo's chipmunk plugin over the native one - it lets you do raycasting, query individual collision points, make any kind of joint...

mattb thanks for the kind words. I do have a scene in this game where I use the polygon tool and did actually have a splitting mechanic sort of working, but ultimately it wasn't a natural fit for the design and would mean I can't eventually texture the asteroids.

The player can scan across the whole asteroid field with the arrow keys, but I want to keep the same zoom level as it adds a little tension having an idea of what's coming up but not being 100 percent sure. With the camera I'm going to have an ability to drop waypoints so you can plan out routes.

I like the idea about the global affectors I've been thinking about similar ideas. At the moment the level generator has a severity meter which determines the initial speed of the asteroids motion.

I absolutely am going to switch to chipmunk and see what I can do with it, it looks awesome.

Thanks man.

Just added gravitation physics to all the asteroids - they don't attract each other but they do attract smaller physics objects, means the player can lock into orbit of an asteroid.

Here's a new video showcasing the mining mechanics for the game.

http://youtu.be/-bxXbSf3vTA

Mining plays a part in most missions in order to collect enough resources to build structures and units.

Just noticed the gif with textures, very nice. So when you blow up an asteroid, you're spawning random chunks? Probably the best approach, but might cause physics spazzing if sprites are overlapping. This might be an interesting approach, needs to be vector though (using the canvas & polygon plugins):

[attachment=0:32ryo0h2]Untitled-1-01.png[/attachment:32ryo0h2]

It'd be nice if a neighbor-sensitive sprite thing was possible: http://www.saltgames.com/2010/a-bitwise ... -tilemaps/

Each asteroid would be like a floating tilemap/array of sprites. Probably impossible in c2 though, especially for collisions.

mattb - I would be very interested in trying this. I guess with polygon plugin, there's no way to texture at all is there? What if it was like a texture mask, so a tiled rock texture that only shows on the polygons, then we use the outline colour of the poly to act as the outline for the texture, if that makes sense?

I dunno, I'm sure its possible but then you'd need 2 layers per fragment which can't be good. Why not just make a vector prototype, then move on to unity or another engine later if it's any good. For textures, i think an engine with normal mapping is a must.

Started adding AI to the game:

AI seeks resources in asteroids, manages fuel and shares information within a network of docking platforms. The AI simulates player inputs to navigate the environment, they seek to assigned x and y positions and use collision polys to avoid physics objects. They can seek around objects as the left and right collides has a ‘last collided’ check on them which allows the AI to strafe when an object is detected in front of them.

They try to conserve fuel where possible and when they have either started to run low or have collected enough data, they attempt to dock at the nearest landing platform.

Interesting addition, I really like the idea of lots of these drones buzzing around in the background. Will they be competing against the player, or background life, or maybe a player-guided swarm?

Lovely audio as always & I prefer these retro vectors to the textured polys. Also I saw your other post about ai optimization - I'll have a think & post some ideas later.

mattb - Nice one, I'll put up another video in a couple days to show the use of these AI, they're quite a fundamental part of the game now.