Scott and I finished up a few cool flight control options. These are a few very math heavy functions that are useful to both the player and the AI. As we worked on them, they became very generalized and can be easily combined for many effects:

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I’ve been working on improvements to the ship editor. I’ve cleaned up a few more things with placing pieces, such as allowing you to rotate them before you place them. I’ve updated the ship creator to identify pieces by an ID, instead of by name (since we’ll be renaming them …

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The last few weeks of work have finally resulted in something playable! In this demonstration, you can construct your own ship and then click “Fly Me!” to try it out!

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We haven’t forgotten about posting, we’re just working on a few internal rewrites. The collision system is being upgraded to allow for layered collisions- this will give us the flexibility we need to control bullet behavior when you’re surrounded by a mix of friendly and hostile …

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Here’s a teaser image of the almost-completely-working ship. I made this quick ship in our ship editor, saved it, and loaded it into the game to fly around.

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I’ve recently been using Monodevelop with Unity3D and I’ve been pretty pleased. I tried it out a year or so ago, but found it to be very difficult to setup and not really worth the trouble. But my friend Jon from Graveck Interactive looked into it again recently and suggested I give it …

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Today I got ships successfully loading from the JSON string! I created three simple save slots for persisting ships using Unity’s player prefs system. I don’t want to spill the beans before we’re done cooking them, but I’m hoping we’ll have a blueprint sharing system at …

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It’s been mostly backend work for me, lately. I’ve evaluated a few different JSON libraries- the plan is to use it to create strings of our complex data types to save within Unity’s PlayerPrefs system.

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As you probably noticed from the previous demos, zooming is a big part of the game. Although we’re still doing a lot of tweaking with ship speeds, traveling fast with quick acceleration is also a key gameplay point. So we started some visualization stuff, by transitioning seamlessly into a …

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As we mentioned before, player-built ships are a big part of our plans for Solaro. You’ve probably noticed that the other builds feature a stock ship model that doesn’t look particularly configurable.

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We believe in showing off our work early, and we don’t want a game that isn’t fun until the very end stages of production. So we’ve thrown in a few example ships with some placeholder AI, a few explosions and weapon effects I threw together, and the zooming and nebula drawing. You …

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Our experiences at GDC 2010 have begun to sink in as we catch up on our work and email. Scott and I had a great time, and had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of fantastic people.

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Fast action dogfighting requires basic flight controls, but for what we’re doing, we also want a zoom system, with both manual and dynamic controls.

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Since Solaro is a big game, the key is to avoid being bogged down in extraneous junk while making the core gameplay great. So we’ve decided to focus on three key features and be sure they are totally awesome. (That article is a great read, by the way. Focus on the real essence of what you are …

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Introduction

Howling Moon Software is proud to announce an update to Chipmunk Physics, the powerful 2D physics engine used in many hit iPhone, Mac, PSP, and even Nintendo DS games. Version 5.2.0 includes several major optimizations, a few small fixes, and includes the new Objective-C wrapper and …

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Hi everyone. Once again it’s been too long since an update. We’ve done a few contracts since the last post, but we’ve also been working on a Mac utility called Upshot.

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We’ve been working on allowing …

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Great things happen on a great canvas, right? Scott’s been working furiously on some neat effects for drawing backgrounds in Solaro. Coloring the nebula in the background differently based on the area you are in is a great start in keeping the world memorable (which was one of our key goals). …

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Scott had a fairly free day today so he figured he’d get some of the trunk changes/fixes out into the wild.

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Scott and I have been chatting a bit about economic simulation trading games. DrugWar style trading games are popular in space- buy low, fly somewhere else, and sell high. Sometimes, as you buy and sell goods, the prices fluctuate. But I got to thinking about what is intrinsically fun about these …

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