In 2003, which seems like a lifetime ago, I came up with the concept of Alien Arena. I had created a Mars Attacks Martian, a Dalek, a Xenomorph, and a Cyberman as player characters, and a variety of goofy looking sci-fi weapons. The first level I designed was meant to resemble the flying saucers internals from Mars Attacks, and was apply named “The Saucer”.
The level was dark, creepy, with tight and confusing corridors connecting a quintet of rooms. It wasn’t exactly most well designed level, especially for an aFPS game, but for some reason, it was popular. There were a number of design flaws, and some ugly textures, and it was entirely too dark.
In 2007 I rebuilt it from scratch, this time more well lit, with larger rooms(and removed the old dead-end room). It quickly became (and remains) one of the game’s most popular and enduring maps of all time. Several years later is was rebuilt again, though retaining the same layout, it returned to a darker theme was some really high detail and lighting. Sadly, it was not well received…”How dare you change our favorite map!?”.
A couple of years ago I wanted to remake the map again, but using mostly mesh objects. I started creating a corridor section, just to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately, Alien Arena was in decline, and I was losing interest and motivation. Also the engine just wasn’t really up to the task.
So naturally when I started getting the idea for Saucermen, I thought of The Saucer, and the corridor I had started on. I revamped it, and added a bend section, and am currently working on other sections. These sections are more in scale with the 2003 map, being smaller in scale. My plan is to marry the original layout with the later versions, and add some other sections to make a very circular, and complex design.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve made some great strides in the engine and the game mechanics. In this screenshot you can see (barely) that I added light shafts coming out of the white wall lights, and that the first person weapon is properly rendered and lit now. I tweaked the DOF and fog effects for the scale of this game, adding tremendous atmosphere improvements. I finally fixed the weapon firing and trajectory, and made even more AI improvements. It’s all really starting to come together. On the renderer side, the main thing I need to get working is shadow maps, and then I’ll feel much better about how it all looks, though I am very happy with it’s progress to this point. I will very likely replace those modelled lightshafts with a shader generated, proper version, but for now I just needed to feel decent about this level’s appearance, and those did will for this specific application. I could also consider adding the 2d image based ones like I did in the CRX engine for Alien Arena, but that’s something to ponder another time.
Meanwhile, while digging up screenshots for this post, I came across this one, of the Generation 1 alien, prior to the “heavy” incarnation, and it’s interesting to see there actually IS a pretty strong resemblance to the new Generation 4 designs!
One of the game mechanics I got working better was the gib system. Now when you kill an alien, it explodes into five bits of head, torso, arms, and legs. I have to work out a couple of minor things, but overall it really looks cool! These exercises with physics are getting me prepared for the more daunting task of ragdolls. I do need to add the waist bending routine from Alien Arena pretty soon as well, and over the weekend I plan on addressing the jump animation. I’ll also add some more map sections, and do some AI work.