A lot has been happening recently, a lot except of blog updates :P
The last time I wrote an entry here was in the summer, after I finished developing the android port of my game XPro Rally. The game has fared pretty well. In fact, today is the day when the cumulative downloads will cross half a million downloads ( cumulative because there are two versions, one is specifically promoted through Asian countries ).
I remember that when the game debuted on the Google Play store and wasn’t really successful on launch, I had received offers to sell the game for amounts that later seemed so meager when the game started to get about 8k - 10k downloads a day. Apart from that XPro Rally has given me the chance to develop some business and co-developer contacts, make some deals, sign agreements for great partnerships with stock exchange listed companies ( :O !) , which now ensure to a great extent that my future games will have better launches ( and revenues :P ). In fact the last couple of months have been really good as far as business growth is concerned, the commercial possibilities are now Huge ( yes, huge with a capital 'H'! ) and I am very, very-extremely-super optimistic for the future :D
So, coming to the lot of things that have been happening recently :
GOT AN OFFICE!!
Yes, our university has granted me a working space of my own. It’s a nice room in our technology incubation building and is very close to our academic area. Our university has a reputation for encouraging tech business activities and has an entrepreneurship cell. A level-up like this certainly boosts morale. I also now have one more workstation, the LED monitor of which I use to extend my laptops' screen and I suddenly find myself back to being a workaholic ^_^
NEW RACING GAME! - “huh? Racing? again??”
Soon after finishing the XPro Rally android port, I started working on my zombie shooter again, which I had been planning for months back then. I finally got around to working on it and the initial progress was quicker than I had anticipated. There is a screenshot below that shows how much and what kind of quality I managed to achieve in… the first week maybe.
For a mobile game, it doesn’t look bad in my opinion, though, I know that it is no Dead Trigger.
It was then that I got an offer to work on a racing game ( yes, a racing game again ). I had been making only racing games for the last 1 year already. The offer came from my good friend at racing3dgames.com who had previously sponsored the online version of XPro Rally and involved collaboration with more designers. I had always worked alone and looked forward to being on a small team.
With Gemma Suen ( http://gemmasuen.blogspot.com/), I started working on this new game. It is a city /street racing game. Gemma’s environmental modeling and textures have been better than I could ever even think of creating on my own. Here are some screenshots :
As you see, only one car is ready yet, more will be coming soon!
I have made some android builds and they are running at about 20FPS on my Xperia ZL. Of course, right now there is a lot of dynamic lighting which is causing a lot of performance issues. Without any lightmapping the poly count goes up to 12 million largely because the whole track is one big mesh. After lightmapping the road railing and the road surface, it comes down to ~350k. After further reduction of “important” dynamic lighting and more lightmapping, I managed to get it under 150k, but the draw calls are still above 500 for the most parts of the track. Also, some conversion of models need to be done, trees perhaps can be made 2D-ish as each of them are 1.5k polys each :/
I don’t think that mobile performance will be an issue in the end, of course still a lot work will need to be done from here. For the online version though, 150k polys should not cause any lag.
LIGHTING IS FUN!
Apart from the programming aspects of the game, I am doing lighting and learning quite a LOT about lightmapping and creating textures for night-time environments, and sort of getting good at it! In fact I contributed to another project being developed in Spain where my role was to convert a day time scene into a night-time one and make suitable buildings to better populate the environment. I was really happy with the kinds of results I could get. Some screenshots here :
Sponsored by racing3dgame.com, the game can played here : http://www.racing3dgames.com/games/airport-taxi-parking?playgame=1
NEW ACTION GAME!
So, racing is not the only thing happening around, after all : "Diversity is the key to progress, growth and evolution." ( you don't need to write down that "quote", I just made it up right now ) there is an action game also under development. This game was partially developed somewhere else, and I will extend and improve its content. Again, my interest in night-time lighting can be seen here :
There are more level themes under consideration, so the final game will not just have the forest level. The gameplay is about the player fighting waves of infected zombie cubes. Yes, they are cubes, because zombie human epidemics are so mainstream, you know? Maybe make them look like Rubik cubes and call the game Zubik cubes? Dead Rubiks? Rubikopolypse?? I haven’t run out of ideas here, pitch in your idea of a name in the comments if you want ;)
Cheers! :D
The last time I wrote an entry here was in the summer, after I finished developing the android port of my game XPro Rally. The game has fared pretty well. In fact, today is the day when the cumulative downloads will cross half a million downloads ( cumulative because there are two versions, one is specifically promoted through Asian countries ).
I remember that when the game debuted on the Google Play store and wasn’t really successful on launch, I had received offers to sell the game for amounts that later seemed so meager when the game started to get about 8k - 10k downloads a day. Apart from that XPro Rally has given me the chance to develop some business and co-developer contacts, make some deals, sign agreements for great partnerships with stock exchange listed companies ( :O !) , which now ensure to a great extent that my future games will have better launches ( and revenues :P ). In fact the last couple of months have been really good as far as business growth is concerned, the commercial possibilities are now Huge ( yes, huge with a capital 'H'! ) and I am very, very-extremely-super optimistic for the future :D
So, coming to the lot of things that have been happening recently :
GOT AN OFFICE!!
Yes, our university has granted me a working space of my own. It’s a nice room in our technology incubation building and is very close to our academic area. Our university has a reputation for encouraging tech business activities and has an entrepreneurship cell. A level-up like this certainly boosts morale. I also now have one more workstation, the LED monitor of which I use to extend my laptops' screen and I suddenly find myself back to being a workaholic ^_^
NEW RACING GAME! - “huh? Racing? again??”
Soon after finishing the XPro Rally android port, I started working on my zombie shooter again, which I had been planning for months back then. I finally got around to working on it and the initial progress was quicker than I had anticipated. There is a screenshot below that shows how much and what kind of quality I managed to achieve in… the first week maybe.
For a mobile game, it doesn’t look bad in my opinion, though, I know that it is no Dead Trigger.
It was then that I got an offer to work on a racing game ( yes, a racing game again ). I had been making only racing games for the last 1 year already. The offer came from my good friend at racing3dgames.com who had previously sponsored the online version of XPro Rally and involved collaboration with more designers. I had always worked alone and looked forward to being on a small team.
With Gemma Suen ( http://gemmasuen.blogspot.com/), I started working on this new game. It is a city /street racing game. Gemma’s environmental modeling and textures have been better than I could ever even think of creating on my own. Here are some screenshots :
As you see, only one car is ready yet, more will be coming soon!
I have made some android builds and they are running at about 20FPS on my Xperia ZL. Of course, right now there is a lot of dynamic lighting which is causing a lot of performance issues. Without any lightmapping the poly count goes up to 12 million largely because the whole track is one big mesh. After lightmapping the road railing and the road surface, it comes down to ~350k. After further reduction of “important” dynamic lighting and more lightmapping, I managed to get it under 150k, but the draw calls are still above 500 for the most parts of the track. Also, some conversion of models need to be done, trees perhaps can be made 2D-ish as each of them are 1.5k polys each :/
I don’t think that mobile performance will be an issue in the end, of course still a lot work will need to be done from here. For the online version though, 150k polys should not cause any lag.
LIGHTING IS FUN!
Apart from the programming aspects of the game, I am doing lighting and learning quite a LOT about lightmapping and creating textures for night-time environments, and sort of getting good at it! In fact I contributed to another project being developed in Spain where my role was to convert a day time scene into a night-time one and make suitable buildings to better populate the environment. I was really happy with the kinds of results I could get. Some screenshots here :
Sponsored by racing3dgame.com, the game can played here : http://www.racing3dgames.com/games/airport-taxi-parking?playgame=1
NEW ACTION GAME!
So, racing is not the only thing happening around, after all : "Diversity is the key to progress, growth and evolution." ( you don't need to write down that "quote", I just made it up right now ) there is an action game also under development. This game was partially developed somewhere else, and I will extend and improve its content. Again, my interest in night-time lighting can be seen here :
There are more level themes under consideration, so the final game will not just have the forest level. The gameplay is about the player fighting waves of infected zombie cubes. Yes, they are cubes, because zombie human epidemics are so mainstream, you know? Maybe make them look like Rubik cubes and call the game Zubik cubes? Dead Rubiks? Rubikopolypse?? I haven’t run out of ideas here, pitch in your idea of a name in the comments if you want ;)
Cheers! :D
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