Robot Rising game
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Update... our game went open beta today, w00t! We also put up some more videos http://www.robot-rising.com/media/. We're in beta, so let us know what you like, what you hate, what would be awesome to add. We'd love to get your feedback!
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlH89G1_hk8"]Robot Rising - Opening Cinematic - YouTube[/ame]
http://www.facebook.com/RobotRising
This week we announced the game we've been working on.
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEE6nrew4yU"]ROBOT RISING - Announcement Video (High Definition HD) - YouTube[/ame]
http://www.robot-rising.com/
It's in closed beta, but you can most likely get a beta key here. We would love to get your feedback! We have some time to tweak the formula and make it better, and beta testers are a big part of making that happen.
A few Polycounters contributed their talents to this; they're doing awesome work. Shout out to ChaosEidolon, Parnell, Rayph, Razgriz, Sectaurs, timwiese, and tokidokizenzen. It's been a treat working with and learning from you guys.
Rayph posted some of his concepts already in WAYWO. I must say this guy seriously kicks ass, that was only a tiny percentage of his output.
Some candy from the character, enviro, and fx people...
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlH89G1_hk8"]Robot Rising - Opening Cinematic - YouTube[/ame]http://www.facebook.com/RobotRising
This week we announced the game we've been working on.
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEE6nrew4yU"]ROBOT RISING - Announcement Video (High Definition HD) - YouTube[/ame]http://www.robot-rising.com/
It's in closed beta, but you can most likely get a beta key here. We would love to get your feedback! We have some time to tweak the formula and make it better, and beta testers are a big part of making that happen.
A few Polycounters contributed their talents to this; they're doing awesome work. Shout out to ChaosEidolon, Parnell, Rayph, Razgriz, Sectaurs, timwiese, and tokidokizenzen. It's been a treat working with and learning from you guys.
Rayph posted some of his concepts already in WAYWO. I must say this guy seriously kicks ass, that was only a tiny percentage of his output.
Some candy from the character, enviro, and fx people...
Replies
Press release says "will initially be available on Facebook" so I guess that keeps it open for folks that don't really want a FB account. You just have to wait a bit longer.
There must be a reason why turnbased / slow games are popular (?) on facebook, as opposed to something that is more demanding in terms of focus. As someone who plays games that do require my full attention I really wouldnt see myself accessing them via facebook, infact facebook seems like an unnecessary distraction if i was playing something like quakelive.
It'd be nice to give it a play through rather than just speculate about things that you may have accounted for with level length or checkpoints but I've no facebook account.
Then again, you plan to release it in places besides facebook eventually so what i've just said is mostly moot, it just seems a bit of a strange platform.
If your game idea has a strong social component then Facebook makes more sense. QuakeLive doesn't really need or want that.
As to the focus thing, yeah I guess we'll see what happens. If people dig it, then that's great.
I'm glad you guys announced, it looks really well done.
Yeah, I know facebook games are dirty, but give it a try...we wont tell anyone.
PS: and Eric, the pleasure is mine! No one's got chops like the Trolldad!
http://blog.games.com/2012/08/01/robot-rising-preview/
http://www.rtsguru.com/article/3671/Robot-Rising-A-Facebook-Game-That-Doesnt-Suck.html
Also we're making it pretty easy to get beta keys if you want to check it out. Worth a quick play.
[ame="
http://www.facebook.com/RobotRising
Music is great also - the theme is spot on for the futuristic robot battles. :thumbup:
We're using a modular grid system. If you look at the smallest rooms or cooridors, those are one grid unit wide.
Each layout is manually created and manually populated, though we re-use most of the layouts a few times... by rotating the camera we get four variations (adding some custom encounters for each), and we multiply those by five by applying the different themes (tech, mine, space, etc.). So we have something like 1000 floors in the game, can't remember the exact number though.
The sound guy here is excellent, Matteo Stronati. I think my favorite music is the Bio-Sanctuary theme, very cool, very organic and a little creepy too.
This shows a little bit how the layouts are setup, plus my lighting & palette work.
Some of the other palettes I worked on. You start seeing this theme when your robot is level 17 and you choose Hard mode.
This is probably a silly question, but with your Modular Lighting screenshot, the bright white / green parts, are those meshes that are apart of a prefab? Are you using emissive materials applied to those pieces to bake in the lighting? Is most of your "lighting" produced from the emmissives once you bake them down?
Sorry if those are dumb questions, I was just interested in that screenshot in particular.
Sorry if this has been asked, but are you guys using UDK / Unreal?
Awesome work as always! I would be really interested to hear how this "develop / update as we go" approach works for you guys, maybe you could update us as time goes on. I'm personally very interested in this type of approach since the project I'm on currently at work will (hopefully) be doing the same thing.
Really impressed with how you guys have planned this all out, and with the modular peices + colour schemes made a rich and varying environment, it takes me back a little to the 16-bit days in the way are resources were cleverly re-used by shifting palettes.
Just as an aside, maybe a little more Robobucks for your money would go further, should be more like Columbian Peso and less like Swiss Francs when it comes to USD>RB - unless it's a balancing thing, stuff like paying RB to finish build times etc could probably be less. It'd be $10 just to upgrade the control tower.
Yeah so the modular lighting. You got it right. The solid-color meshes are a separate modular set, just for baking the lightmapping, discarded from the runtime build.
Unity has SelfIllumin shaders that work with the lightmapper. Pretty basic controls, but it works. Almost all of the lightmap is done with these, plus ambient occlusion. For some of the themes I added some skylight for more even lighting, and that makes the ambient occlusion stronger as well.
We're using Unity. It's been pretty awesome so far, though as others have said it's a bit of a pain when your prefabs lose their connection to Unity's database, and forget to update their latest settings. The source control is also a bit of a mess with a larger crew (we're about 40 people). But the editor is nicely designed, the scripting system is great for quick iterations, and the insta-update with 3ds Max is real nice.
Johnny, there IS pink. I added those colors myself (and named them, that was fun). But I don't control which ones get into the store
You definitely should be able to get pink as loot, though that's iffy of course. Store would be better. There's a light baby pink, a hot pink, and a darker maroon pink. Each dye has a light a medium and a dark.
That greenish palette is called CopperSalvage. There are some funky ones like SmurfHeartAttack and TuxedoLaborcamp. I also added a Polycount color theme.
We're adjusting things like prices as we go along. You should make a post in the forum over there about this, all that stuff is read, it makes a difference.
Another pic. These are some of the color palettes I've made so far, eight for each of the five themes.
After I posted about the pink bucket missing from the store, every other paint I found in the levels seemed to be pink haha.
Going for red while I work on expanding my hoard of pinks for the next upgrade.
Having twin flamers is fun , not just for the awesome destruction but the particle effects.
My first project as Lead Env. Just trying not to fuck it up too bad.
Pretty fun working in the limitations, though. Each environment theme is composed of just 2 512s - one for all the floors, and one for all the walls.
also - take a look at the color scheme in the picture Eric posted - 5th column, 5th row
Yeah I think the fx guys are excellent. Even more impressive is they've had to use our own custom mesh-based fx system, because traditional emitters were getting too expensive to render. So the fx tech is very restrictive. But they've been squeezing out every bit of awesome that is possible to squeeze.
congrats.
Like the "winter" edition
Full HTML/webgl might be faster.. but i think the unity pipeline seems to be better,is this right ?
I posted a couple making-of vids on my site, fwiw.
http://ericchadwick.com/img/robot_rising.html
Thanks Eric - thats really nice.