We have submitted Open Fire Gold to Shockwave.com and are waiting on a response from them to see if they accept the game into their portal. Unfortunately they are quite slow in processing submitted games and we have heard nothing in this first week since submission. We continue to wait as patiently as possible for their response, and will be looking into other portals as well.

 Open Fire Gold should be up as soon as we are accepted by a portal, then you all can enjoy our very first internally developed game!

Hi guys, Jeff here

 So its been a very full week for me, mostly to do with non game dev related stuff (blah). Thankfuly I did get a decent bit of work done on our next project! As Joe mentioned in a previous post I decided to take this next game (which we will code name CT for referencing in this and later posts) in a very different art direction than anything I have worked on before. Its going to have a rather cartoon look with bright colors and a friendly warm emotional value to it.

 I have started on the art style and have a number of art assets completed. I must say it has been a blast to see them come together, a far more artistic feeling experience than working on Open Fire Gold artwork. On CT I’m using Ambient Designs wonderful little painting app ArtRage2 for texture work. This in combination with my wacom tablet allows me to get a good painted/cartoon feel in a rather short time, my painting classes in University are starting to pay off, which in turn helps me to be more motivated and focused when I am in class.

 Something that will be new for me in this project is rigging/binding and animating characters. I have one character partially modeled out already and will be continuing to work on it until I’m done with the mesh, texturing and the many varying animation cycles that will be needed.

 In other areas I have been spending a large amount of time getting familiar with the Drupal CMS, this has more to do with some contract work I have been doing (have to pay the bills you know), the good thing is that all of this knowledge will in turn be useful for improving our beta program site!

Spent most of my time working on the flying code today, tweaked the work I’d done a few days before, made a new “placeholder” island to test on, added objects that get removed when you run in to them.

Current flying controls are, move left/right, up (a limited distance), down (down to the water), speed up, slow down (which makes you descend). I’m not sure if speed up should make you descend and slow down should make you climb a little or if it should be the other way around. Oh well.

I’m trying to use a race-car control script to move on the ground. It wasn’t working very well until I raised the rigidbody’s mass to 3000. Now it doesn’t fly all over the place like a toothpick with a jet engine strapped to it. :p

A good day’s work. Next step: 3D adventure gameplay! (And constantly tweaking the flying code/environment)

Day 1 has gone well, I’ve got the basic flying almost finished. I’ve only had to re-write the flying script about six times. :p.

We layed out some gameplay and prioritized items that need to be worked on first. Hopefully they won’t be droll, it kind of takes some of the fun out of game devving.

Using placeholder art is annoying, because Jeff’s looks so much better ;). I’ll have to remind him to upload his project folder tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll finish the basics of a <censored> soon so that I won’t have to use a truck model.

We tested basic multiplayer and it works… somewhat. It works better than the gameplay at the moment though. Had trouble getting the master server to connect us to each other though.

We’ve decided to enter the Unity Awards 2008 game competition. We’re using our next planed game design in this competition (it’s got a small enough scope and can be made even smaller if we run out of time). We’re looking towards a cartooney environment, art style, and game play.