Here are the rules for my Space RPG Project (I am going with the title Star Revolution, based on Sol’s suggestion):
1. I am free to use any code I’ve already written in this project. This includes my framework and any other code from Inaria or my previous projects.
2. The game must be completed by April 30th, since I intend to do three of these projects this year.
3. This game will have sound and will feature procedurally-created planets, since I need to learn how to do that. I’ll be using FMOD for sound, it’s teh awesome and I’ve used it before.
4. This game will not use the SDL. Instead, I will be using OpenGL. This is both to learn the API better and because…
5. This game will feature 3D entities in the game world – the planets and ships will be 3D. But because 3D content creation takes so long and because I can’t simply grab pictures of aliens off the web…
6. Only programming and design will count against my forty hours – creating 3D entities and other artwork will not. Otherwise, there’d be no way for me to get the project done in the required time.
Yes, I could probably use 2D-only graphics and grab alien art out of Starflight, but I was going over the technical requirements of the game and honestly…it’s not that different from Inaria. The procedurally-generated planets were the only real difference; otherwise this game is just “Inaria in Space”. I wouldn’t learn enough from making Space Inaria, so I added the new requirements. I don’t think I’m cheating that much; if this were a “real” project, all of that art would simply be handed to me by an artist instead.
So that’s the nature of the current game. Wish me luck!
If you don’t have all the Conquest assets, I think you should get them. There might be legal issues, but it’s a quick way to get 3-D ships. I think for the purposes of the exercise, it might be alright. You may want to find some kind of blanket retexturing you could do, or just ignore all the fancy textures like normal maps, displacement maps and emissive maps.
And if that makes you uncomfortable, I suggest stealing the textures and mapping them onto boxes and cylinders and simple shapes assembled into rocket ships. If you made the pyramid ship species, you could get a slew of easy ships.
That’s a pretty good idea, but I wouldn’t learn as much. In the end, these are learning exercises rather than full-fledged attempts to write commercially viable games.
Thanks for commenting, though…do you have a website yet, Dave?
Yes, I do. It’s here…
http://www.daveshramek.com
It’s pretty basic. I did the bulk of it in a day and I’ve been fixing typos and the like all week.
Well, if you wanted to learn about 3-D modelling, then I guess you’d have to build the art, but I was only suggesting you use the Conquest ship assets to help you. But, I suppose the format for those assets would dictate how 3-D objects are handled in your world.
Anyway, you can get a lot out of boxes, cylinders, spheres and bevelled edges. Once I learned those functions in Max, it’d take me 5 minutes to create low poly versions of stuff like Y-wings and the like. So, space ships aren’t all that hard, if you’re not going for a look like the Nostromo.