Whoo! Volo just got featured on Rock Paper Shotgun! Many thanks go out to mr. Rossignol.
And if you just came here from that article, thanks for your interest! Stick around. 
Ack! Forgot to post this new video on the blog. Here you go:
Two wingmen doing their proxy flying thing.
Video time! This one shows of some quick footage of flying relative to other players.
I’ll post more stuff this week, promise!
High time for an update, methinks!
Non-Technical stuff
I have been demoing the game to more and more people, and I’ve been streamlining the feel of the game according to the feedback I’ve received so far. The design principle I’m trying to use is something you can call ‘layered complexity’. I’m making sure that the basic flight manoeuvres are easy to use; you can now perform broad banking turns using a single analogue stick, for example. Fancier stuff (for harsh turns, flips, barrel rolls) will be accessible by using the other controls, turning off assists, and using the basic controls in new ways. The crucial things is that you will have all those things available from the start, and you can explore them at your own pace.
I presented the game in playable form at Joint Venture: Check de Technique, which was an event in Amsterdam about games, audio and technology. Many people liked the basic control scheme, and noted that while it felt really solid, they also liked the sense of growing instability at high-speed manoeuvring. Jarno proposed hosting a playtest session in the AirRebels office soon, and I’m really looking forward to it. If you’re in the neighbourhood of Rotterdam, let me know!
Also, wingman (which is what we call our courageous stick-figure) now has elbows, and he has gotten a tiny bit smarter. New video soon.
Technical Stuff
I’ve been working on the framework for the game, which consists (among other things) of:
- Networking
- Editing, saving/loading player settings
- Game types
- Event system
- Runtime assembly loading (for mods!)
Networking is coming along slowly but surely. It’s requiring a lot more study than I thought beforehand, and I’m starting to understand why networking experts get paid so handsomely. I’ll get it done though, I’m sure of it.
The other major thing I’m trying now is loading .NET assemblies into the game live, as described here: http://eej.dk/angryant/general/tipsandtricks/downloading-the-hydra/. Long story short: That trick allows you to build mods for the game using normal Unity scripts. If everything works out I think I can make the workflow such that you can build a mod using the unity editor, compile your custom code using Visual C#, and tell the game to load your compiled mod at startup. How cool would that be huh? Now, I don’t think there has been a Unity game that uses this trick so I’m unaware of any caveats, but since this is coming from one of Unity’s own developers I recon it has serious potential.
That’s it so far, cheers!
Quick note: I’m moving this blog to http://www.volo-airsport.net sometime later today. Hope to see you all there!
I’ve been a little too quiet lately! Here’s a collection of Volo-related tidbits that have been going on.
Playtesting
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve put the game in the hands of a bunch of friends. They played a slightly more updated version of this:
In short, they loved it! This is the first version that really engaged them in a just-one-more-go kind of way. This means that the game is intuitive enough to pick up, deep enough to provide a lot of choices and room for skill development, and contains enough feedback for people to identify things they are doing right or wrong.
Feedback
Amongst all the feedback I’ve gathered several things were key:
- While control feels smooth and fairly intuitive, precision is often either too coarse of too fine. This depends on what they wanted to do of course. When you are performance flying you want to use the full range of your input device for generating very small but very precise moves. Coarse input here means that your movements get exaggerated, which can throw you off course and make you lose altitude fast. I had added some tricks to dynamically alter your precision, but apparently I’ll need a more rigorous solution.
- Gametypes, ranging from real-world (think proximity flight, formations) to very game-like mechanics (think James Bond action scenes). Many people would also like to see the game’s scope include normal skydiving and basejumping. I’m aiming for the game to be flexible enough to allow all kinds of game types, created either by me or by modders. By keeping my code well-organised and by paying special attention to possibilities for code reuse, hopefully you will even be able to do some hanggliding or skysurfing.
- Multiplayer! This is by far the most requested feature. As well it should be; skydiving is hardly a solo activity, right? Since this feature is so important it has become a top priority to get some netcode fixed.
- A replay/ghost racing system. This will get in right after the netcode is done, as it will use a great deal of its functionality.
Some of these features are also based on discussions on the community forum. Check out the Ask The Developers and Wishlist threads to see all the features that the forumites have come up with so far, they’re all very good food for thought. And while you’re there, why not drop in some of your own ideas; we can always use more!
Logo
In other news, a couple of graphic-design buddies have started brainstorming about Volo’s graphical style. The logo is their first point of interest and I’m very curious to see what they’ll come up with. Many thanks, and good luck to them!
That’s it for now. I’ve got some course-work related deadlines this week, so I’m not sure how much work I can get done, but we’ll see.
The kind folks at www.flokas.de/baseforum/ have set up a forum section dedicated to Volo! Originally covering discussion on the open source release of D3′s B.A.S.E., they were very glad to see a new skydiving simulator is slowly shaping up.
I’m very grateful for their early support, and I have decided to let their place become the primary place for all Volo discussion for now. So, go to the Volo Forum Section if you feel like discussing the game itself or anything related to it.
Hope to see you there!
I’ve been thinking about switching to open development for Volo. Open development, in short, means that you make the development process very transparent. There are several things you can do, including:
- Maintain a publicly available, detailed log of all important developments.
- Keep in close contact with the community, by all means available.
- Make some or all of your game’s assets (code, models, textures, etc.) available online. (Under GPL licence, and for preorderers. People still have to pay for the actual game.)
By doing this you sacrifice privacy for exposure, which is something any small-time developer can always use more of. By being so open you can maximise the chances of serendipitous events happening. You can make a lot of friends, grow a community before the game is out, and people can support the project in all kinds of ways. For example, people can create their own modifications, and fix bugs that you’ve missed.
Anyway, Wolfire (developers of Lugaru and the upcoming sequel Overgrowth) have a more detailed post about this, so I’ll let them explain it: Wolfire’s PR Tips.
The reasons I’ve started thinking about opening up Volo’s development process are numerous. Here’s some of the important ones:
- The game needs to grow a lot if it is going to survive. And it will not do that as long as it stays within the confines of my bedroom.
- Some prominent indie developers have succesfully used open development to make a name for themselves. Look at the Humble Bundle to see what I’m talking about.
- I like sharing. If people can learn from my work then let them. If people can contribute to my work then let them.
- Unity does not support an easy way to facility game modification, even though it should. This means you cannot, for example, use the Unity Basic edition to write a new multiplayer mode for the finished game using Unity script. This limits my options for allowing mods, unless I integrate my own scripting tools, or go open source.
So what do you think? I know that you like to know what’s going on in my work-shed, I know that you really want mods,, and I know that some of you would be delighted to contribute some content to the game. Also, would you consider paying for a game that’s not nearly finished for a chance to play with the source code, or just to support a smalltime developer?
(By request: This is a repost from my old blog)
Rock Paper Shotgun is an excellent PC gaming blog, maintained by some of the UK’s coolest gaming journalists. Recently I’ve done some programming for their community effort to create a game in Unity. It is an implementation of a first person shooter movement system that utilises a rigidbody, so that it can be influenced by physics.
Some features:
- Slope limiting
- Movers (elevators, escalators, etc.)
- Climbable surfaces (ladders, vines, etc.)
- Air control (not finished)
Here’s the script: Clicketyclick
And here’s an in-game preview:
[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.volo-airsport.net/games/rps/rps_game_mover.unity3d" width="720" height="391" altimage="http://www.volo-airsport.net/games/rps/rps_game_preview.jpg"/]
In this post I’ll detail the work I’ve done on the game so far.
When I started building this game about 8 months ago I had a couple of years of programming experience, but no extensive knowledge of physics or specific game-related technologies. Thus so far the development process has mostly consisted of learning a whole lot by study, and trial and error.
This is where I am right now:
