Fun With Rockets
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| Little splash screen mock-up. |
Shoebox Cadet (Working Title) is one of Chillbytes earliest proof of concept projects that I am attempting to see through to the end. As most indie devs know it's a rare occurrence to actually complete a project but I'm confident I can get the job done. The objective of the game is fairly simple: Start from 1 launch pad and fly to the next landing pad without touching the terrain or other hazards. After hours of trying out different rocket designs, sizes, weights and movement speeds I had hit a bit of a wall trying to decide if I wanted to simulate a sense of floaty weightlessness or have much tighter start/stop controls. Using different scenarios with each control scheme helped see what could produce the least amount of frustration for the player yet still prove to be challenging. While I believe I've finally found a good feel for the rockets movement I won't truly know until I have a working beta for others to test. This is my current goal and I hope to release a demo soon™.
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| The pillar in the middle swings back and forth. We'll can blame the wind. |
The main camera is currently stationary and I actually struggled with that for awhile. I initially placed it where I thought it fit best in the world for testing flight control and level size. Then after deciding on the games theme and attempting to work out the play area to represent the look, size and feel of a shoebox I don't think I'll really need to make the camera move, at least not yet. Using only primitive objects as placeholder prefabs may not help much in the aesthetically pleasing department but it makes prototyping level obstacles and maze designs incredibly fast and easy. Since it's meant to look like a childs play thing it works fairly well for now.
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| Smooth moving obstacle and control test. |
Future feature updates may possibly include a collectible challenge, fuel/energy counter that needs to be refilled at power stations adding multiple safe points for players to catch their breath. I'm also working on more intricate puzzles so it's not always as straight forward as going from point A to point B. A lot of ideas are up in the air right now. I'll figure it out eventually. Blog updates following this project will go more in depth into specific design decisions, detail project changes and even show off scripting ideas and tutorials. The point of this blog is to track my own progress and growth as a developer and share all that I've learned on my quest to entertain. By adopting a "learn by doing" philosophy I feel it's important to mix teaching in as well. I'd like to think that I haven't truly learned a concept unless I am capable of explaining it to others.
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| Thread the needle. |
This project will be made with a mix of my own personally created assets as well as free/CC0 assets supplied all across the web (Mostly sound. All credit given where credit is due) and eventually release it, free, on Android/iOS as well as some PC shareware sites. Some of the software packages I'll be using includes but is not limited to: Unity, Blender, Gimp, Magix Music Maker and Audacity. So if you think this project is neat and would like to keep track of it or just relish in the lamentations of a struggling indie noob feel free to follow Chillbyte's official Twitter account HERE. Comments, criticisms, etc. are welcomed. Please keep in mind that this is most definitely still a work in progress. ~RB
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