The pixelated landscape was constructed with painted wood. The red map markers are Sanwa joysticks — the same hardware found in arcade machines in Japan.

Here’s a long overdue update on Space Junk! I’ve added a grapple hook to the game — once I tweak it to my liking, I intend for it to be a main mode of transportation for players in stealth mode (who are otherwise relatively immobile). It will take up an equipment slot, however. Grappling another player will temporarily short circuit their mech and send them helplessly tumbling around in space.

Well, not entirely helpless: while they can’t move or aim normally, their mech isn’t entirely shut down — they can still aim within the bounds of their view (notice the crosshair isn’t centered — it can move freely). So there’s still a good chance of destroying an enemy while in this state as long as they aren’t behind you. Players will also enter this state when critically damaged but not outright destroyed — this is essentially Space Junk’s equivalent to Call of Duty’s Last Stand. After a bit, your mech will auto repair your controls and a bit of health. You’ll probably want to then find a safe place and heal up.

In Space Junk, space is crowded — it can be a bit difficult to see things. There will be a number of visual aids to help out. Here you can see the flag icons, so it’ll be easy to hunt down someone who stole your flag (Oh, yeah — I’ve added a Capture the Flag gameplay mode). Some of these visual aids, including this one, aren’t available to stealthed teamates.

I’ve made a number of other small additions to the game since the last update, including: network interpolation (to smooth out movement of players while over a network), a speed boost key to give yourself a quick push, and better particle effects for bullet impacts. Since the last update, I’ve also playtested the game over the internet. With the core elements of the game functioning, I’m now concentrating on some of the more entertaining features. Hopefully sometime this summer it’ll be ready for some alpha testing among friends.

Wood print with watercolor

Drilled many holes…

Went in after printing to paint in the ‘pixels’ for Bomberman, Megaman, and Mario.

Miniature bronze cast sword styled after low-resolution pixelated game sprites from the 80s.

Model created by super gluing beads together and then applying many layers of spray paint to round everything off and fill in the letters (I couldn’t find cube beads without letters).

Cast in bronze.

Enjoying the class more now that we have more creative freedom

Little update here. In the “Space Bowl”, I don’t imagine the city stopping once you leave the ground. Did a quick ’sketch’ of a level prop. I call it a sketch because I did it quickly just to get the general idea across (most of the texture work is pulled from google images) — I plan on redoing it later.

Most of my time working on this game is still spent coding the core gameplay systems. Things like limiting the number of weapons you can have equipped etc.

I’ve also put in simple explosion effects as feedback letting you know when you land a hit on another player. I don’t have concrete plans for what all the effects will look like, but I think I want to keep them abstracted.

Here are two missile trail effects I’ve toyed around with. I like that they almost resemble pictures of unfocused light. More importantly, it nullifies the work required to do realistic effects — as one guy working on a 3D game, it’s not realistic to expect this game to try and match the realistic graphics of modern games staffing hundreds of paid professionals working full time over several years. I still think I can make my game look interesting though, but aesthetic refinement will have to wait until more of the gameplay programming is done.

In Sculpture II our first project is a wood chiseled relief sculpture. I thought it’d be neat to add light to it and my original concepts were illuminated veins in a tree — I ended up going for something with a little more character — a tree spirit similar to the ones found in some Japanese films. I’ll be building a box to house the lights and I’ll have a slightly ghosted plexi screen in front to catch the light coming through the wood — this gives it a slightly eerie feel to it. I bought some of the materials for that today and did some tests even though I’m not done with the chiseled wood.

(Click image to enlarge)

Here’s a quick mockup for the level I’m working on now. It is similar to the Bernal Sphere space colony design from the 70s, but only one of the poles is exposed. The other pole serves as the base of a spire that functions as the colony’s space port that extends through the center — this port will be crowded with all kinds of ships not unlike a crowded sea port today. These ships, cargo containers, and businesses located around the port will make up the level players actually interact with.

The shell of the colony will serve as an interesting backdrop for the players. The colony’s megapolis living surface spends most of the time in darkness, so the night life in this fictional colony thrives. As one gets closer to the poles of the colony, the gravity would be weaker — there will be sports arenas and water to take advantage of this lesser gravity. To clarify though — the shell is merely a backdrop and players won’t interact with these things mentioned in this paragraph (the players will be on the other side of the artificial ozone with all the ships using the port). I just want to make sure that, even if it’s not 100% realistic, things make sense.

(Click image to enlarge)

I’ve redone the code for the machine gun. Originally, I had used simple raycasts to detect whether or not a player shot another player. While simple, this method produces unrealistic results — implied projectiles hit their target instantaneously from any distance. I’ll probably still use raycasting for the long range sniper rifle, but for the machine gun I wanted something more visceral and realistic.

Now, bullet objects fly through 3D space — which means you can actually see the bullets and it’ll be harder to hit players at longer distances. When I make better art and effects for the bullets, I think it’ll look really neat.

(Click image to enlarge)

I’ve started making the team bases that will house respawn points and the team flag for capture the flag. It has proven challenging designing interior spaces for a zero gravity environment, so I’ve set that aside for a bit to work on other things. For the time being, I’ll have to leave them looking like Super Mario pipes haha.

You can also see something I’ve added to make it easier to spot players and differentiate between teamates and opponents (green vs red) — diffraction spikes (those colored lense-flare crosses). These also play into the stealth mode players can utilize.

Here’s an image showing how going into ’stealth’ mode will make you much harder to see (look where the red diffraction spike was). I want sneaky/stealthy gameplay to be a viable way for people to play if they choose so — there’ll be advantages and disadvantages to using this toggled mode.

I’ve also been working on more network code and have started adding sound effects to my game (yeah, the game takes place in space, but I’m going to have sound anyway and come up with some fictional sci fi tech to justify it). Going into stealth mode makes the audio a little more realistic, but not entirely silent — just heavily muffled. I may have a weapon that temporarily disables audio completely, but it’ll definitely be very temporary — a silent game is just boring, but I think using space’s silence as a gameplay mechanic could be fun.

Space Junk is a zero gravity multiplayer FPS I’m making myself in Unity3D — the game I mentioned in this post. I started about a week ago and already have it in pre-alpha — I’ve done the programming for a couple basic weapons and networking so players can already connect and play against each other. Of course all the art is placeholder art for now.

The only other zero gravity FPS I’m aware of is Shattered Horizon, but apart from zero g and nice visuals, that game is pretty basic (the only weapon is a standard assault rifle) — I’m looking forward to really exploring the gameplay possibilities zero g brings to the table.

The individual castle pieces can now break into rubble as a result of a big enough impact. In addition to that, castle pieces are essentially glued together more like a real structure would be — these joints can break under enough pressure as well. So what happens is that large structures can remain intact as they fall or tip over, but they’ll break up with the force of hitting the ground. You can compare this video with the last one I posted to see the difference it makes.

We’ve now begun swapping out the placeholder art so that the castle can start looking more like a castle, rather than a collection of building blocks. Pieces won’t simply crumble into cubes, either — each piece will have more realistic looking fragments.