The games for Indie Games Uprising III have been announced.. We are honored to have Xenominer as part of the promotion this year. We have been working hard on the game since Dream Build Play so we made this video to show off all the new things before the release in September.
Keep checking up here for when we announce the exact release date. Be sure to check out the rest of the games in the uprising here.
Our VoxMill engine has been modified quite a lot from the prototype used for the ZPoc project. Our team decided to step in the ring again for Dream Build Play, and we needed an engine that would work well on the XBox for what we had in mind. Since the XBox has 3 cores, and 2 threads per core, that meant a threaded engine.
In the beginning we tried to find something off the shelf to use. Some of the open source projects were quite promising, but when pushed hard just couldn’t make the cut. When programmers hear “threaded” they generally lift their eye brow as if to say — “Are you sure you want to go there?” You see, there really are dragons there, the multi-headed Tiamat sort of beasts. Not to say there aren’t a lot of capable programmers that can handle it, but many modern engines and software solutions keep “we” the coders at arms length for a reason. It’s terribly easy to make a mess, and many times harder to clean it up. It’s generally just not worth the time or pain….yet we did it anyway…and still have a long way to go.
The nature of Dream Build Play is that you end up with a hard crunch at the end. This was no exception. Coordinating a team that can only work nights is very difficult. Inevitably, a host of features are piled on top of the engine at the last moment. So this time, we invested up front so it would be ready for the final push.
At the prototype level of the game, we were routinely hitting 100+ fps on the XBox. Even now, after the final content and additional features, we’re still hovering around 60.
So, we have the typical blocks (voxels) any builder would have, sunlight propagation and multi-colored light propagation. But there are still a lot of features to add. Normal mapped voxels, liquids, radiation fields, “decals” and semi-complex constructs. All of that, just to get caught up with where we feel we should be. After that, we hope to start adding complex/dynamic systems that interact with the world in an accessible manner. Sounds vague — it still is to me too 🙂
Xenominer has a large story to tell. Only a fraction of the features we have on the board made it through to Dream Build Play. The VoxMill engine will continue to grow through the process, and will likely live on for more titles after this. Many of those will look nothing like Xenominer. It seems to me that the simple voxel has a long future, and when combined with its siblings in the millions, will form some very beautiful constructs!
As our work on Etch has been wrapping up, I’ve had a bit more time to put into the voxel-art denizens of Zpoc. You may have seen their current state in the “Early Engine Work” post, but with a little love and more than a little practice, they’ve come quite a ways.
Here are a few renditions of “Zpoc Girl” – note the better eyes, a taller body (it looks better in the Iso view as well) and the cowboy boots.
In fact, here’s Zpoc Girl in skirt. The interesting thing about Voxel Modeling at this resolution is the amount of detail you get to save into to the world. In Zpoc, the people you interact with won’t just be a silouhette-like mesh model, but can have all the internals you’d expect:
As you can see, this person is made of bone and stomach and lungs and brains and flesh.
The world itself is to be fully destructible as well, so the walls get the same treatment (siding, studs and insulation, drywall).
I don’t know about you, but this is what I’ve been wanting from a Zombie Survival game for most of my life. I want to see them coming through the walls, breaking through the floors, dropping through ceilings. I want to know that the brick house is a better choice than the wood and vinyl-siding beside it; I want to break off the bottom steps of a stairwell, and chop my way through a bedroom wall with a fireax to get away from the horde just outside my door …
For anyone else that feels this way, welcome home. Sign up for a chance to run our earliest Alphas.
Content in ZPOC is based off of a voxel – a cube of single color much like a pixel. 32 of these in each direction make up a Vlock. Thousands of these Vlocks will eventually make up every game object – from the character you move to the brick wall against which you smashed the skull of yet another zombie. Bridging that gap, however, has proven to be quite tricky.
Building a single Vlock is easy – we’re using a program called Qubicle. It’s nice when designing a single piece of a wall or a roof tile… but not so nice if trying to build, say, an entire wall with windows, curtains and the occasional door. So a new tool was created for the designers (see picture), allowing them to click-place Vlocks onto a three-dimensional map-type layout. It worked, though it didn’t really save any output. Why, you ask? Because we never really discussed how to get from Vlock to map…
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