B.U.R.N - FPS Mech combat (in Development)

Community Showcases
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Here I am at it again and I brought a friend along for the ride. Yung is helping a lot by building the mechs for my second and his first indie game using Unity!

So what is B.U.R.N? Burn is an action/mech battle game that puts you in the seat of a B.U.R.N unit. Members of B.U.R.N take on other mechs be that they are autonomous or driven by another human. The story and other details will be revealed as we go along. Hopefully it will get everyone excited enough to want to check out more!

The design for this game was to keep it simple and keep it fun. Before I asked Yung to join in I went and developed most of the movement system. I then went on to add a basic firing abilities and other controls. From there I designed the damage and health system as this is important. Then I did the weapons system and started placing in dummy effects. So after that, I asked Yung to join in and I was lucky he said yes. Most every system is already coded/scripted (whatever you want to call what someone does in Unity).

After a few days Yung had a few concepts for the project and already I can tell it is going to be awesome. Based of the concepts he had, I began to think about the levels that each one would inhabit and began coming up with ideas.

So to kick things off, here’s some shots of our concepts and models. From here on out it’s adding content and playing the hell out of it. Play testers are already signed up and will get the droid training level soon :). Along the way I’ll share my discoveries and other bits of information I hope you’ll find useful.

I’ll keep everything in this thread so people don’t have to sign up for needless websites.

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Lightwave :stuck_out_tongue:

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very nice design Lamont

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Really cool concepts. Sounds like it could be alot of fun, looking foward to seeing some progress.

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So outside of the hours spent today geo-referencing a *.xyz terrain file and it’s corresponding color map (and fixing projections…) I ran a test using what we will be using for in-game graphics, and with my hardware and GUI running 3 animated stat-bars (no radar map yet), it was a steady 28fps. I am very happy because I over-blew the poly budget for the test as a worse, worse case (15,000 tris in the scene). There is some slow-down with the shotgun (because of the hit effects), but other than that, it’s really nice. Will be posting video as soon as we get the first mech and level done.

When I started this project, my goal was " have it play awesome and look good on old hardware". I don’t have the latest iPhone/iTouch. It’s a couple generations behind. And this is one of the things I love about handheld game development: optimizing. No skinned meshes, I am killing needless items ASAP (including GUI things). I made a manager for the GUI. So if the GUI element isn’t needed, the item it’s attached to is killed, not just turning off the GUI. There are only three materials used at any one time: sparks, mech texture and world texture.

At first I was going to have the level and mech share a texture, till I saw how much/little memory I was actually using. So we are now using one texture for the world, and one for the mechs. Yung is happy about this.

About scripting…

So Toaster Kun was made all in one script file. It was VERY hard to manage at times. I didn’t get into messaging and referencing other scripts. If it’s one thing to learn about how Unity works is doing things like this. It has made Burn SO MUCH EASIER. It made it easy to fix and tweak things. I wanted to work on just the health, open the health file. I wanted to make a weapon, just flick a setting.

My weapon script is actually one file. It has settings so I can make almost any kind of weapon needed for this game. From machine guns, to shotguns to a rocket launcher. Then my weapons manager looks for the null objects that I have attached to it, and I can swap between them any time. Want 8 weapons, fill the array with 8 objects. I was thinking of just having a button change values in the script, but it could get hairy. Next time…

Discovery…

I found a way to do side-scroller beat-em ups. And animated jointed (not skinned) objects with physics will break and still play the animation. Add a command to stop the animation and cool things can happen. Like a rock gollum crumbling as it walked type stuff.

Developing with Unity is fun, and it’s been great so far. I write most of the things I need to do on the whiteboard (or paper) and just follow it, and it works out in Unity.

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this looks very promising!

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Kool Works :slight_smile:

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Both Yung and I landed un-related contract gigs. We’ve been busy :P… but didn’t stop me from getting some more lighting done while the other machines were rendering :smile:!! Yung also got animations done on the first mech. I need to get him to show you guys and gals.

Viewport shot, unlit and using one texture. Still need to do some more touchup on the texture to bring out the edges on the mesh, but it’s close to 100%. But should look kick-arse on the iThing. And need to color adjust for the iThing texture compression.

Stay tuned. More to come!

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looks great, keep it up ^^

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Re-did some controls. Hopefully the training bot will be 100% done and can have something playable to show. Still baking lightmaps, and adding geometry to the scene, getting rid of those white bar things, looks like crap. Yung and I still have a bunch of freelance to take care of (and looking for more!!), but we’re not stopping!! Wish I had a DAT recorder so I can get some sounds…

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I’ll also post snippets of scripts I’ve made as we get things more solid. As soon as I refine the head-bob, right now it makes the control jump when I do a touch action.

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Will not be updating here as Burn isn’t Unity-related anymore. Thanks for watching :slight_smile:

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out of curiosity what platform did this move to?

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We went to UDK.

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Awwww, Poor unity :frowning:

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If I may offer one slight view… I think everyone and their dog likes Mechs but I think we are all agreed that Mech games generally suck. Nice graphics and nothing else… Now Phantom Crash… that was a decent enough game… It sounds right up your alley also… So might I suggest you have a look at how they did their game and use that for inspiration?

Hope it helps :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I played the hell out of Phantom Crash. It would require different performance and art direction. Controls would have to be spot on. Hopefully will be fun how we decided to do it :).

Thanks :smile:

(We’re ZOE fans).

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Nice work

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Armored Core was also really cool, as well as Lost Planet, and I was a huge fan of the simulator feel of Mechwarrior 2. I just don’t agree that mech games suck, though a number do. Lamont, why did you switch to UDK?

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Yeah, why?
I tested it some months and found it, to say the least, frustrating.
Also, the engine itself is maybe better than Unity’s, but I wouldn’t move on that for all the gold on this world.