Seren Nova 3D : More Enemies

After considering a few names, such as Space Falcon, I've decided to call my game Seren Nova 3D (Seren being Star in Welsh).  

In the development news, I've been working on the enemies and managed to get them to face and and shoot at the player.

3D shooter: Progress

I been working with the control system and thanks to some nice helpers at the Blitz3D forum learning about movement and control in 3D games, as well as some theory about the targeting system in Star Fox (aka Lylat Wars in the UK).

Now, thanks to this great help with working out the movement and adapting some code kindly given to me, I'm pretty happy with how the ship moves.

Over the weekend I haven't been able to stop thinking about the game and have come-up with some ideas for names:

Seren 1 (seren is Welsh for star) Serol (welsh for stellar, could use it with a name, such as the pilot or squadron) Galaeth (galaxy).

Regarding how it plays, I'm considering two game modes (ideally, I'd like to have them both): 1. A survival mode, where the player has to survive as long as possible and random enemies are created, this would be the easiest to implement. 2. Story mode, where the player has to travel to different worlds or environments, such as in a city or in an asteroid field. This mode will depend on how confident I feel in my programming abilities as I am learning 3D game development as I go.

3D Space Game: We have buildings!

I'm back working on my 'on rails' space shooter game.

If I do finish this game, levels will either be in space or above the ground on planets.  One question to do with levels that I've been thinking about are whether to have fixed pre-designed levels or randomly created ones.

The planet levels will be in different locations, such as above a city, in the mountains, above lava. 
So, today, I've been trying to create a city and playing with adding randomly sized and placed buildings in the level, and they work quite well in that once they disapear behind the level, they are moved into a random position in front of the player.

The player approaches a dense city

Inside the city

A city with 'thinner' buildings

3D Game 2013: Fire All Lasers!

I'm really enjoying using miniB3D with Monkey.  Even though I've just started I feel a renewed energy towards making games.

Anyway, today I've got pretty accurate laser shooting (the laser is currently just a coloured 3D tube) and also textures.

If this game does go anywhere, I would debate whether to use textures or just  basic colours for the models, because, I'd like to make a game with a graphical feeling similar to Star Fox (or Lylat Wars) on the SNES, as well as my graphic and 3D modeling skills not being great.

3D Exploration, now with proper targets...

I haven't done a lot of work on my 3D test game today, I've been busy with the lovely bureaucracy of Spain.  However, I improved the smoothness of the ships movement and added some better looking targets for the ship to point at.

As you can see, my 3D experiment is in the form of a basic 3D 'on rails' shooter in the form of Lylat Wars (or Star Fox for non-Europeans).

3D test, still going...

I've had a bit of a frustrating day learning 3D, but I have made progress.

I've managed to get some temporary targets (the red, white and blue objects) and for the ship to follow them, the ship can also be moved using the keyboard or a touch screen on a mobile.

3D, Testing the Waters

The previous posts were related to a 2D space project that I was working on.  I say that in the past tense, because I'm still not sure what I want to do.  I haven't released a game since January because I had stopped enjoying programming due to pressuring myself too much to work on a big project that had become overwhelming (Grand Prix Super Manager).   And although I've been trying different ideas in the meantime, I hadn't put any real time into any of the ideas.


Today, I've started to have a look at what it would take to make a 3D game using Monkey and minib3d.  I've set my heart on a simple space shooter 'on rails'.
It's my first real foray into 3D programming (I had tried a few years ago, but my programming knowledge was lacking at the time), and although I'm still not sure on whether it will lead to anything. So, here is today's progress:

The first screenshot shows a small 3D space ship model I created that currently only flies forward over some land, it currently runs on PC's through flash and mobiles using Android:

The second screenshot shows the a basic 3D ship model in the model editor which I'm testing out.