APOCALYX is a...

free Game Engine based on OpenGL (MAIL) (SITE) (FORUM) (BLOG)

Sunday, January 18, 2009

MekaWars meets Gun-Tactyx

Yesterday I cited the space marines that populate the starships during battles.

Space marines defending the
central area of a module

My idea was to develop the MekaWars control unit system (as you may already know, in MekaWars the players develop the AI of their units - that's how MekaWars is meant to be played) and recycle it for Gun-Tactyx-2 (that is the sequel of Gun-Tactyx).
Then, recently, I had a more interesting idea: why don't merge the two projects? This brought to an additional mechanic of the game.
During starship battles, hits can destory a unit (producing wreckage that is going to be collected), but starship modules can't. The latter are only disabled, but hulls may be robbed of their resources (up to a certain percentage).
The additional mechanics is: before materials can be brought away from a module, a space marine unit must assault it and defeat the defending troops. Here is where the Gun-Tactyx fight-style comes in.
You can imagine hard fights between starships and, at the end, you'll see assault units moving to the modules; then the attention is focused on the inner corridors of the modules, where attackers fight the defenders (as in the initial scene of the first Star Wars movie) to steal the contained resources or the whole module.

Space marine on an assault
unit waiting for the attack

6 comments:

qubodup said...

Hello, I was wondering whether the engine is windows-only

Unknown said...

> I was wondering whether
> the engine is windows-only

Yes, it's Windows only, but people report that it works on Linux using WINE.

sourcerror said...

Did you do MekaWars as well? If not, how are you related to it. As all its page was in Italian, I didn't understand anything, but demo videos looked cool.

sourcerror said...

I dug in the blog archives, and now I see that you built it all. Respect.

But it would be good, if it would accessible to English speaking audiences as well. (At least a part on how to get started with it.)

You mentioned it, that it's a free online game. Do you host it on some school/university computer?

sourcerror said...

I just notice it will launch on 2009 september instead of 2008. I guess there's some scope creep here ;)

Unknown said...

sourceerror said:
>
> Did you do MekaWars as well? If not, how
> are you related to it. As all its page was
> in Italian, I didn't understand anything,
> but demo videos looked cool.

In my spare time, I develop only MekaWars offline. The site is related to MekaWars offline, that is quite different. As usual, the release date has moved (forward) several times, in fact during the summer period the development was quite fast (as you can see from the posts), but then I was too busy to write a line. Since it is a free game, we have no real time constraints ;->

> I dug in the blog archives, and now I see that
> you built it all. Respect.

In reality, I develop only the offline version (that is going to be also the client of the online version). The online version (server+database) is developed by another programmer.

> But it would be good, if it would accessible
> to English speaking audiences as well.
> (At least a part on how to get started with it.)

Unluckily we don't speak English. The first version of the game is for italians only. Instead, the offline version can reach a more international audience.

> You mentioned it, that it's a free online game.
> Do you host it on some school/university computer?

No, it's forbidden. The other programmer is going to host it on a server of his own.

> I just notice it will launch on 2009 september
> instead of 2008. I guess there's some scope creep here ;)

The development rate during the summer period was very high... then almost stopped, sorry!
Probably the coming summer will boost the development again.