Polished Screens

Glory awaits the brave players that enter the hall of fame! Well, it's not much of a surprise since I've talked about it already on the Scores & Ranks post...

Hall of fame screen

The top 10 names and their respective scores are shown here. Also, check out the polished font: it'll be the main one seen throughout the game.

Speaking of polished things, the start menu looks better now:

Button texture and a cool font!

Many thanks to Kenney for releasing the button texture as free material! Also, the fonts were 100% free: the start menu font was made by Andrew McCluskey and the other one, by Ray Larabie from Typodermic Fonts Inc.

Music

Soundtrack is essential in any game, as it brings forth the player's emotion over a character or a scene. Since we don't have anyone skilled with music on our team, we've searched over old songs belonging to TechSchool and decided to use these two:

Opening

This piece plays during the start/end screens. It kind of gives a Quake II vibe, in my opinion. A rock theme playing on a futuristic set makes a great combination!

Battle

Soundtrack played during the battle with Dr. Stone. It continues the rock aspect of the opening theme, and builds up quite some pressure; the Earth is in danger, after all.

The Shader Challenge

This project is being quite an interesting programming challenge (at least in my greenhorn game programmer perspective). Today, I'll talk about a big, recent difficulty: shaders.

For those unfamiliar with the term, shaders are small programs that run in the GPU. They're responsible for adding special effects to sprites and models: colors on texture, production of lighting or shadow on a model, etc.
 

Shaders can activate our Moon's normals!

Sounds cool and all, right? Well, implementing them with no previous experience was a nightmare. Seriously. Since libGDX uses OpenGL for 2D and 3D rendering, shaders had to be written in GLSL, a language with a similar structure to C. Getting the hang of it was quite hard, as most tutorials I found around the Internet were too simple or too complex.

With some help, everything seemed to work out. Keep calm and carry on, right?

Score & Ranks

We've been bumping into some programming troubles lately, so a post about the game itself will take a few more days. Please wait a bit more!

Today's talk is about the ranking system. While confronting Dr. Stone, the player will gain points according to their actions. After the battle, the ending screen awaits, where your final score is shown. If you're that good, you may even enter a local Hall of Fame! Think of it like those old arcade games, where the name in 1st place is honored as a living legend.... Or as someone with too much free time?

Anyway, every score is accompanied by a rank: a nice title for you to feel proud of. Check out some of the ranks below:

1. Son of the Sun
2. Arcturus Admiral
3. Betelguese Beast
4. Pollux's Pride
5. Formalhaut's First
6. Regulus Relief
7. Polaris Plebeian
8. Saiph Scrap

The fancy names come from the brightest stars as seen from the Earth. They say there are more than 10 ranks... See if you can discover them all!

The Moon

To make up for the lack of posts recently, today we'll have a double post feast! Woohoo!

Below we have an in-game screenshot of our Moon model. No shaders or neat lighting stuff has been applied yet. It looks quite... Flat on the top, with some giant crater sprouting out of it? Yep, Dr. Stone's evil scheme is already beginning...

Moon model

Side note from a programmer perspective: for some reason, this model gave us quite a challenge when it came to importing it in the game. We had to convert the model to a text format (G3DJ), edit a line that had opacity = 0.0 and then reconvert it to the usual G3DB format. At least the result was nice!

Press Start!

Hey there! Today we bring you a screenshot of the game's front door: the glorious start menu! It still needs some work on font and button texture (the current ones are for debugging). We've kept it simple for now with three basic commands:

Start screen menu

See that second button, CREDITS? It was quite fun to program it as a movie-like effect. Here's a static preview of it with that ugly, debug font:

Credits scene

Inspiration

Happy New Year! Sorry for the sudden disappearance, folks. We're still alive and running, and soon we'll have more fancy, graphical stuff to show here!

Back on topic: what inspired our game? Well, the main idea came from A Trip to the Moon, a movie directed by French filmmaker Georges Méliès. A few years ago, The Invention of Hugo Cabret payed a tribute to him (the movie's worth it, by the way).

The above scene, taken directly from A Trip to the Moon, is a cinema classic. Remembering our game's plot, Hervog uses a cannon to shoot himself to the Moon. Sounds familiar, huh?

Interestingly, Méliès inspiration for this scene seems to come from From the Earth to the Moon, a novel written by Jules Verne, where a space gun attempts to shoot three people inside a projectile to the Moon.