We are planning for a large part of the racing to be point to point, you make your own way to the checkpoint. The problem I had though was that it was all happening over the sea, interesting looking landscape was rarely flat enough for the craft to fly over safely. This is where the roads came in. They were initially a little irritating but a re-write of the physics and the addition of banking made them a complete blast to skim over, the banking makes it possible to snake around the landscape at full speed... ..which is what I meant by "flat turns are challenging". Flattening the banking makes it easy to drift out and crash on corners. The point is we have a racing game where level designers can switch between freeform checkpoints, smooth fast, banked turns and fiddlier technical stuff very easily. Unfortunately the video was badly timed because we'd been focused on the road racing in the weeks running up to it. The next video will feature, among other things, true point to point races. We have done a lot of tuning and ended up with 'gliding' that lets the craft fall slow enough not to be damaged on impact as long as it 'lands' on the flat or a downslope. Falling any faster would require a more powerful ground effect cushion which would in turn have knock on effects on the handling. Those who have been playing it like the handling how it is so it probably won't get tweaked too far. My kids and I found a great bit of emergent gameplay in Ground Effect a few days ago. We were throwing ourselves off the big jump that appears near the start of the video, gliding off too the left and skimming between the peaks on a nearby island. We will be encouraging players to explore with hidden bonus items. My Halo playing 14 year old son/artist/level designer is messing around with the new pause-camera as I type this. I'll upload some of his 'photos' in a future post.
Thanks for responding. Your counter-points are well made and it's good to see reason in the design and not just random direction. Emergent gameplay is definitely an easy way to create longevity in a map, so it's great to hear you have an interest in it. I'm looking forward to the game even more!
Since I heard about your game I've become curious about ekranoplans & I found this really cool video on Youtube. Is this where you got your idea from? The craft looks pretty similar to yours. Way more interesting than the usual cars, planes & random space ships. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYFEFekPzDM
I wanted to use Ekranoplans because I like the idea of taking a sci-fi hover racer and bringing it back towards reality. Setting it in an organic landscape and using vehicles that could sort of exist. The Airfish video was one of those I showed to the artist and, I think, the main one he found aesthetically inspiring. Most of the others are kind of ugly by comparison. Our Ekranoplans are smaller, faster, jet engined. More like a low-flying F1 car than a low-flying light aircraft. Since I posted the last video I've rewritten the controls, added con trails and lap timers. This proved a bit of a distraction as work stopped for several hours as we tried to beat each other on vearious levels... We're currently working on the oponent AI. When they are in we'll make a new video showing some of the more free roaming levels.
Just a little update on what we've been working on in no particular order: New controls Completely new handling (more accessable and yet more drifty) Opponents Music Sound Effects Con trails Optimisations (runs even smoother) fixing a million little graphical glitches (the fuzziness of the last video hid a lot...) explosions Free roaming levels Navigation aids to stop you getting lost on the free roaming levels. Race timers Front end All of this should be evident in the next video, hopefully in a week or so.
I'm still working very hard on it. Why the delay?, a lot of things really. Mostly it's the sheer work involved in coding a game. Partly adding load of new features, partly having to learn more bits of Apple SDK, partly pedantic rewrites of the graphics system (too many years of being a performance obsessed graphic engine guy...). I've also had a few distractions over the last few months, such as a collaboration with some other devs, both on Ground Effect and something else... Thanks for the continued interest, I really appreciate it. Ground Effect WILL be finished soon, a video will be sooner.
Thanks very much Glenn, it's great to see so many devs being able to benefit from each other's knowledge and working together on each other's projects. I'm a sucker for graphics (I know there's a lot of people out there saying iphone games should stick to 2D and leave 3D efforts to allegedly more suitable platforms), so always glad to see OCD (Obsessive coding disease) applied to graphics! PS: Are we going to find out about "something else" through another channel, or is it not iphone related? (can't drop a hint here without people wanting to stick their nose in it!)
I am developer, too, so I know how long this all can take. But I do not want to wait any longer for this Just release it today Zombie - New info on our ZombieSmash Blog : http://zombiesmash.gamedrs.com Try to guess who our sound magician is and win a promo code when the game is released
to give a bit more hope (but we know from experience that most devs underestimate the tim ethey need to submit their apps ) Glenn told me this: "...Hopefully it'll be submitted to Apple within the month." I'm hopeful, but I'll try to keep it real!
Hey you used to work at Bullfrog and still habe contacts to EA? Pitch them the idea of Magic Carpet on the iPhone. Pretty Please? I'll buy your racer (which looks really good by the way) in return.
Actually, the iPhone would be a great platform for a Magic Carpet type game. Dynamic geometry is something it can handle pretty well. It also wouldn't suffer from the hideous draw distance problem... What aspects of the Magic Carpet gameplay did you like? I always found it a little annoying and repetitive.
Is this ever gonna be released? There seem to be a couple of new screenshots on the dev's website but no news for ages...
Hi Jeep and yellowsquirrel, it's great to see that some of you are still interested despite the wait. Here are a few screenshots that show a little of what we've been doing with that time. There will be a new video as soon as I have the last few bits of artwork. Other than that all that is left before submission is a little tuning and tweaking. Glenn.
