Anyone mind if I document the development of my new game in this thread? I’ve learned much after shipping my first game this past August and, after a short break, have planned a different tack this time around, with the main changes being:
A shorter development cycle
A game that requires less performance tuning and gameplay balancing than my last game.
A game that looks like it’s FULL OF AWESOME – maybe an ‘instant buy’ if seen in the App Store. Rockets seemed like a safe choice.
I’ll post more on the gameplay later, but for now, these are the first screenshots. The rocket model is stock model and just a placeholder. The main focus so far has been getting realistic particle effects for the rocket exhaust, which I think I’ve got. The recent Ares launch has provide a lot of inspiration and a ton of reference imagery.
Second test animation showing launch to orbit. (Time-compressed to 1 minute). The focus of this round of changes was to add more light atmosphere effects.
The sequence begins with bright daylight and then proceeds through haze, and then finally ends in a zero atmosphere environment. I wrote a shader with special blend modes to achieve these effects.
Everything runs smoothly on my 3GS device; have not tested other devices yet. Animation is captured from the Unity iPhone IDE:
The next bit of work is for multi-stage rocket sequences: Lower rocket stages burnout, drop off and then upper stages start their burn. Trying to squeeze in as much work as I can before the weekend is up…
Third test animation, from launch to “launch anomaly”. (The launch vehicle is unmanned.)
Framerate is super-smooth on the iPhone 3GS, but on the 1G it’s about 1 frame every 4 seconds. :twisted: I don’t think I’m going to spend too much time trying to support this device, though.
The explosion animation is still a work-in-progress. The launch pad environment is just a photo that’s been matched to the 3d scene.
This is an editor screenshot of the particles, post-explosion (atmospheric). It’s two particle system’s working together: a system of one-shot, falling particles, that have a prefab smoke generator system attached to each particle.
Thanks. It’s really a matter of spending mind-numbing hours tweaking the parameters, and also watching lots of YouTube videos of rockets. :shock:
Parameter’s effect one another in different ways: Param A could be 1.0 and Param B could be 0.0 and it looks great. Flip some values around: Param A = 0.0 and Param B = 1.0 and it looks great in a different way. Continue to flip values around: Param A = 0.0 and Param B = .9 – a small change, and it looks terrible.
