Thursday 6 August 2015

Gunsgunsguns

Hey folks

So I'm finding myself with a lot of time and inclination to work on Blackshift these days, and I've been having a bit of a graphics binge. Translating the yellow and blue guns from Blackshift Classic™into 3D went pretty well (the red is a LASER GUN), although coming up with a decent player model has been difficult, so all screenshots will continue to look like arse.

meh

no

not terrible

too cute

too nothingy

maybe?

Holdin' a bullet. Other stuff you pick up could appear in the back.

Also, as you may not have noticed, because I never post much video, almost every object in Blackshift is non-animated. They just sit there rigidly (like jerks). This is due not entirely to laziness on my part — it's also because the kind of animations I want to do (stuff sliding around mechanically) is not well supported in either Blender, Ogre, or the Blender-to-Ogre exporter. Getting this stuff to work will probably require me to write a custom animation exporter, reader,¹ and whole bloody system, and that's just another thing to do. Maybe I should just make do with the limited animation Blackshift is already capable of, and focus on getting it released already.

Speaking of which, I even have the Blackshift website ready to go. Lack of levels and polish is the only thing preventing release right now. I'm going to do "Early Access" by the way, where you can buy the game when it's not quite finished, for cheaper, and help me test it, if you like.

¹ 'Reader' is an item in the list, I'm not going all Charlotte Brontë on you here.

8 comments:

  1. If we like? You bet I do :D
    Can't wait to see what you have in store. And that ambience stuff sounds pretty neat, too.

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  2. How much would the game cost? And was Blackshift (the original) free? I forget.

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    1. I'm thinking somewhere around the £5/$7 mark, at least at first, and yeah, Blackshift Classic was a freebie.

      Actually I'm increasingly considering calling the new game Blackshift 2.

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    2. That sounds like a great idea, but if you we're to call it Blackshift 2 then you might have to give people a place to get Blackshift. (Classic) Unless I'm wrong and you still have an official download of it somewhere. (I don't really trust to download it from 3rd party sources.)
      $7 sounds fair, you could make it more if you we're going to have a level editor like last time. (That was definitely my favorite feature, sadly it lacked the ability to change to the lvl100 tileset) Especially if it had an easy way to share levels.

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    3. Yeah, it's a tricky one. I don't want to make people curious about Blackshift 1, I want them to buy the new and shiny! But I also don't want to confuse people who already know about Blackshift 1.

      My position for now is that you can get it off my Dropbox [1] but I admit that's not at all well advertised :)

      Definitely going to include the editor, BTW.

      [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/kt0t3liy13fx0lm/Blackshift%201.24.exe

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  3. Are you considering Steam Greenlight?

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  4. I am sure we would all ante up for Blackshift2. Maybe you can put some cash in yer pocket for alll the hard work you have been doing!

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