Working title: World Wild West style: Third person celshaded cartoony sneaker/shooter/beatemup (possible) with some humor involved (nolf style) Story: Bandits come to your town, you decide it's time to kill them all, once and for all Elements: Accountant - You work as an accountant at the start of the game, and people refer to you as an accountant (like father for priest) Explosions - Dynamites explode Crystals - When you shoot gangsters they drop "bling bling" in the form of crystals that you can use to upgrade your weapons, buy more ammo, and train yourself(better accuracy, more health etc) Ponies - Kinda subtle element. Where you find something that has to do with ponies you can find goodies and/or plot advancements. To get accross the desert you have to be hired as a rider for the pony express, you'll find a trader that sell ammo cheap in "the drunken pony", or you can find gold if you follow the dark cave marked with an old pony sketch (pre rune time, cant remember the correct name). Elements might (and probably will) get removed or change if they don't fit in the final implementation. Tech: Graphics: Ogre Input: ois Sound & music: fmod Physics: PhysX Scripting: GameMonkey (planned) Time: As I am a full time employee(since a few weeks back) I'll only have time to work on this on the weekends. Progress: I'll try to post at least once a week, blog style. [Edited by - sirGustav on January 18, 2008 5:07:23 PM]

Input testing, Camera placement and a clean game-structure added(no ogre ExampleApplication here). I've done a (massive) information searching, gathering references and background information, and decided that the first (and hopefully not the only) level will be in some wild west city. I've also done some ui sketches and the like on how to best fit in overlay's into a "cartoony" world.

Tomorrow(or tonight) I'll get started doing 3d models of houses that the player can take cover behind, so I can (hopefully) implement scene loading and movement by the end of this week.

Bear in mind that cartoony != disney. As much as I hate the anti-hero concept, the "hero" is an anti hero. I am toying with the idea that your character has stopped a robbery by shooting the bad guy through some innocent woman/child.
The celshading and outline are there to create/enhance a dark, twisted world. I'm thinking in the lines of red dead revolver, mixed with lucky luke and god of war.

This week I focused on the art pipeline. I modeled a (simple) house, made some textures(wood and grass). If I model one house every day I might have a pretty large town in 2-3 weeks (sigh), then I can start on the cave or the train level, I dont know how to make those without it looking (too) goofy. I also shadows, so now I get a real western feeling, to bad that there is a robot in the scene that spoils it :)
I also rewrote the camera system since it was flawed.

I watched "high plains drifter" so I could get some inspiration for weapons to use in the game. The current list includes sixshooters, shotgun, sniper rifle, dynamite, lasso(should pretty much work like the secondary fire of painkiller from painkiller), whiplash, axe, knife, bow and gatlinggun. The player will only be able to carry 3 at any given time, so (s)he have to prioritize.

Finally, next week I probably have to get acquainted with blender as it seems to be able to process the dotScene and make animated characters.

Thanks Chuck, thb 3d isn't all that different from 2d unless you yourself are telling the hardware what to do. In my case I am not, I tell ogre, and I tell it that I want it to cast shadows from this (light) onto all of that (world). The only difference is that 2d is easier to make programmer art in :D

I was actually going to wait to the weekend to post this, but why wait :D

I know I was going to make a new house(finish this one) but I went nuts with the effects, don't mind the low framerate - this is debug and unoptimized. Gotta cashe the blur matrices :)

The black and white thing will be used in slow-motion sequences, and the blury thing will be used when damaged(as in Call of Duty 2+), recharging health or whatever it's called.

Nothing worth showing has been done this week. The modeling has been pretty much null, and the optimization turned out to be not what I've been hoping for. I get as much fps as the ogre sample. The harsh reality is that I might have to implement a health status-bar even if I don't like that option. I also spent some time designing how my code will interact, the code is pretty static as of now, and I realized that before I add more features, I better make some nice design of what I have. I also went through my vhs collection and discovered that I got 3 cowboy movies laying around. I might have to dig out my recorder so I actually can watch them and grab references.

The refactoring should be done by the end of this week. I only got a few classes more to write but as for now I am pretty satisfied with the design. I am considering moving from the .scene format (octree) to a bsp version, since well mdeling should be easier(I think).

I havent thought of fonts just yet, on the top of my head it could be some comical font(like comic sans) with some western colors, as I intend to include both. Graphically I am looking at "naruto: rise of a ninja" and the latest simpson game for inspiration, though I like the no-heads-up-display-design without text, so blur, small bars and icons are to be expected.

Instructions probably wont be necessary since I only use standard shooter/max payne controls and I dont have time to implement and test any new ideas.

As of now my main (only) concern is if I'm going to finish this in time, being a fulltime employee.
A trip to Rome last week didn't bring the game forward, but by the end of this weekend I think I might actually see my component based design in action. I have a clean design of everything except the shooting, but I'm pretty confident I will have that sorted out, and if everything goes as planned I might actually be able to shoot by the end of this year(fingers crossed)