Fractured Universe

My good friend +David Bitkowski and I have been working on an +OUYA game in our "spare time" now since about August of last year.  Stalled by false starts with artists, changes in architecture and Real Life™, the game is finally coming together to the point where we can envision an alpha release in our near future.  There is still a ton of balancing to do and of course plenty of bugs to squash, but somewhere along the way "fun" somehow emerged in the game. :)  You can follow us over on Facebook to see images of the ships and such.

Fractured Universe is a fast paced, arena style combat game for 2-4 players. You choose your avatar from a number of different ships, each with its own unique skills and characteristics. As we progress in development, you'll eventually be able to bring ability cards into battle, customizing your battle experience in a strategic way.

It uses the open-source Ardor3D and Ardor3D-android libraries.

Now you too can Goo4Dead

As this election day shambles to a close, I thought it might be appropriate to give the world a small diversion!  So in that spirit, here is a version of the Goo Engine powered demo Goo4Dead you can download and try for yourself.

Keeping things simple, I've made it a zip you can download, unzip, and run by double clicking a jar. Further below is the README though if you'd like to have a look before deciding to download.

Goo4Deadv1.0.zip

Enjoy!

README.txt

Goo4Dead Video Walkthrough

And here at last is that video walkthrough of the goo4dead project I've been posting about.  It's almost 8 minutes long, so I'll spare you any more text to read and just get right to it:

Lightmaps

Work continues on the Goo Engine port of my Ardor3D Left4Dead map viewer.  I just finished up getting HDR lightmaps in as well as working my way through several Javascript headaches.  I am still not applying the vertex colors and cubemap samplers for the props, and as you can see below no tonemapping yet.  Still, I'm pretty amazed that I can fit a full level from L4D into a web browser, particularly since I've done nothing yet to optimize assets for a browser experience.

I will get a quick video walkthrough together as soon as I can, but for now, here are a few snapshots.  Enjoy!

HDR lightmaps!

Looking the other way...

Hardly dented!

Revisiting the Apartment Level

After a long day of coding, getting stumped, muttering curses, discovering a stupid mistake, recoding (and repeating the cycle), I can now load and walk around a good deal of the first level of Left4Dead in WebGL. My next challenge is unzipping an embedded .pak client-side so I can pull some material settings out (which would fix a lot of the bad texturing below.)  Then perhaps I can start adding in entities (memory is already an issue though.)  I am at least getting a decent frame rate (>30fps) so far, but there's still a lot to add of course, so we'll see.

I spent so much time staring at this level when writing the original Ardor3D importer that it feels a bit like coming home again. :)