Bases received a few upgrades.

One of the biggest upgrades, however, are the base defenses. There are now forcefields protecting the quickest routes in and out of the bases. They let friendly players travel through freely but severely slow down enemies making them easy targets.

However, in order to keep these defensive fields up, the team must defend their base’s generator (found deep in their base). When the generator goes down, so do the force fields — this leaves the base wide open until the generator repairs itself sufficiently and, in this defenseless state, it is much easier for the other team to make off with the flag.

Another new feature is debris that flies off when a player’s mech is damaged or destroyed. Most FPS games have blood splatters to provide evidence of a past firefight — SpaceJunk has, well… space junk. After a large firefight, the area will be littered with mech parts cluttering the space.

We picked up an environment concept artist and a 3D environment artist, so hopefully soon we will start replacing the solid blocks that currently make up the bases. I’m also happy to announce we finally have a sound guy who has began replacing placeholder sound effects and we have a domain for SpaceJunk’s future webpage at http://spacejunkgame.com, but don’t expect to see much up there until later this year — right now is crunch time to get the game presentable for IGF submission.

I held a small scale playtest a few nights ago over the internet and captured some clips to share. Hopefully this gives an idea of how the game plays and perhaps where the game is headed.

Here’s a non-final concept design for SpaceJunk’s assault rifle weapon (tentatively named the Autocannon) from one of our new concept artists. It is now a more flexible weapon with two modes it can transform between: the mode shown on top acts more like a submachine gun — it’s got a high rate of fire and is great for closer ranges; the mode shown on the bottom acts more like a semi-auto rifle for picking off targets at longer ranges — it has great accuracy and each bullet does more damage (and travels faster). You can switch between the modes pretty quickly making this a well rounded weapon to have equipped.

One new feature is the ability to save and load custom preset loadouts — this lets the player create their own custom classes and easily switch between their favorite combinations of weapons and equipment. Players can rename their saved loadouts to whatever they want.

We’ve also added the deployable turret as a new piece of equipment (the art is definitely NOT final). These will come in handy for defending bases and flags or if you want to control parts of the map. If a team wants to infiltrate a base, they will probably want to have someone bring a shield to help deal with any turrets the other team has set up. Turrets fire bullets and homing missiles at their target and can be quite dangerous if ignored, though a stealthed player won’t have much trouble taking one down.

While the grapple has been in the game for a while now, it can finally be used to swing the player. I’m still getting the hang of it myself, but you can see in the video how useful it can be for quickly navigating around the map. Not only is it a ton of fun swinging around like SpiderMan in zero gravity, but the grapple will be important to master for aspiring flag-cappers in SpaceJunk.

Up until recently I’ve been the only one working on SpaceJunk, but now we’ve got a small team so soon I hope we’ll see more rapid progress. I’ll be posting some of their work here too (with credit given of course).

Here’s a rough concept I did for our CTF flag. The team logo/color will be shown on the holo-projection (where you see “SJ” right now). The human head represents corporate pride and celebration of mankind — this sort of decoration will probably be seen in other SpaceJunk designs that are specifically corporate in nature.

Phong Nguyen gave us a working concept for a cargo ship that’ll be docked in the level.

Both the grapple and shield have seen improvements. The grapple claw now stays with moving objects after it has attached and we’ve began working on letting the player swing with the grapple. Players can also now deploy the shield (it is normally attached to the player) if they want to protect a certain area or set up a sniper nest (if they die or switch equipment, the shield returns to them). Thanks to a new programmer, limiting player velocity is now more realistic — if you boost, you keep that speed until you deviate from that trajectory or hit a wall. This lets players take advantage of drifting in zero gravity, which I think is key to giving the game a unique feel.

I’ve also added sounds for the existing weapons and have made it to where sound effects sound different depending on whether you’re in stealth mode or not. Space is naturally an [almost entirely] silent vacuum, which isn’t necessarily fun or entertaining — but we want to capture that idea, and it is represented by having sounds heavily muffled while your mech is powered down in stealth mode (also powering down the mech’s fictional sound enhancement technologies).

I’ve also redone the texture for the space colony that the first map takes place within. There are now beaches near the top open area and I’ve added some transparent areas near the bottom. Still placeholder artwork, but it isn’t quite as confusing as what we had.

SpaceJunk now has a page on Mod DB. You can find it at moddb.com/games/spacejunk. Hopefully it’ll help us get noticed

The shield makes its debut today — it takes up an equipment slot. Bullets and rockets are stopped cold, but the railgun can penetrate it. Holding the left mouse button will keep the shield in front of you, but you can let go and look freely without the shield moving. This means you can position it to cover your six as you try and make off with the enemy’s flag. Later I plan on letting the player deploy it and set up stationary protection.

I’ve began playing around with the HUD a bit. The idea is that when you power down into stealth mode, it’ll disconnect the pilot’s neural link to the mech, so the player will see from the perspective of the pilot’s eyes rather than having direct feed from the mech’s camera systems as they do with normal operations. This is just a quick 2D mock-up, but I’ll end up creating a 3D cockpit later.

Another big new feature is chat — you can finally communicate with other players in Space Junk. In addition to being able to send messages, the chat box will also notify players of flag activity, when someone destroys someone else, and general things like when someone connects or changes teams.

Space Junk is post-cyberpunk. Corporations rule and advertisements will be everywhere — including open space.

The grapple is now much quicker and lets you zip around the map very effectively. Your weapon and equipment loadout is now saved and loaded when you start the game again — down the road, I plan on letting the player save loadout presets so they can quickly switch between their favorites. Mouse sensitivity is now adjustable on the fly (and saved for next time) and there’s been a lot of usability fixes like hiding the cursor while playing and ignoring inputs while in the menus. And last, there’s now auto team select so there’s less to do before you enter the action after joining a game.

So up until now, this multiplayer map has basically been many random primitives scattered around. Finally, there’s actually some design applied to the level. I’ve designed and blocked out the basic layout of this map (meaning I’ve made a rough playable version with little or no visual details so that I can test game flow). It’s sure to change as development continues (which is why the visual details will be done later), but it’s a good start. Designing a level for zero gravity has been a challenge — compared to map design for most games (which have gravity), there’s an extra dimension to consider because of the freedoms given to a player in zero gravity. Because the players aren’t locked to a single axis, the environment needs to accommodate players in any spacial orientation (upside-down, right-side-up, sideways, and anything in between).

To make things even more difficult, there’s almost zero architectural references I can use. The only existing zero gravity architecture are space ships or space stations, which are essentially a series of connected tubes and suite an entirely different scale compared to Space Junk (where players pilot large mechs). I’ve found that almost all sci-fi really plays it safe and just throws gravity into any interior space a human might be in. So while it’ll be more challenging, much of Space Junk’s designs will end up being non-derivative.

I’ve also added a nearby planet to the skybox. This was a chance to play with some shaders and effects that simulate atmospheric scattering — there’s also a normal map applied to give a sense of the planet’s rough terrain. It looks good enough for now but I’ve got plans to improve it later.

You can see the sniper rifle in action this video, but I’ve since redone the trail effect (now it is animated to dissipate) and I’ve also added ejecting shells. Small additions that look nice in motion.

I’ve also confirmed Space Junk can be added to your Steam list (as a non-steam game) and works fine with the steam overlay to access friends and chat.

Another small addition is space dust — hard to see in these screenshots, but it’s basically small dust particles that give the player a sense of movement when it flies by. I’ve also added a screenshot key to make taking screenshots easier. Equipment is now selected like a weapon — this includes the grapple and repair kit. And finally, I’ve improved the HUD by providing info on boost/repair cooldowns and the status of the flags (whether they’re safe at home or have been taken etc). Still ugly placeholder art, but at least it is more usable now.

Short video demonstrating homing missiles and the railgun.

Until I build a proper webpage for Space Junk (something I’ll worry about much later), I’ll now direct people to here when introducing them to the game. It’ll also give context to the past and future blog posts about the progress I’m making on Space Junk. You can also find a link on the top right menu.

(click image for full sized version)

(click image for full sized version)

I’ve been spending the last couple days revamping the missile launcher. Potential targets are marked with a red box and the missiles you fire will home in on the closest target. You can’t lock-on to a stealthed player and you also can’t utilize this lock-on while you yourself are stealthed.

I got pretty burned out on drawing figures every day but there’s a few drawings I like.