We're Gonna Have a Montage!

This is simply a montage of the various graphical effects we've come up with over the course of development.

Fan Concept Art!

Corrie Uys, an artist/developer using 3DGS saw one of the concepts for the Jakinbax enemy and sent in his own artist's depiction:

I really liked the jakinbax enemy! So I got this idea. Some kind of mechanical squid. In the image you'll see some ideas for animating it. I also made a quick, extremely ugly model. A rough idea.

Thank you, Corrie!

Enemy Concept Art

Here is some early concept art for the entities players might come across in their travels planetside.

Heaping Abuse on Your Computer

How much abuse can your GPU take? Galaxy Rage's aesthetic derives primarily from repeating geometry, so we did a test to see how much junk we could toss onto the screen before things got ugly. The upper-left test was the most brutal, bringing the framerate down to single digits. But with a single LoD optimization, we can bring that framerate up an order of magnitude.

Zanda Loves Elliot

The info-quid who's responsible for the ship's mission control and news filters has a crush on Elliot. Pass it on.

Procedural Terrain Generation

The buzzword of the day in game development is "procedural." And, while game developers have been using procedurally generated content for decadest's just becoming more of an issue these days, since content generation costs and arm and a leg (and an array of talented artists) to produce. In Galaxy Rage, we're using procedural terrain generation to allow the player to visit thousands of different worlds. Our first-blush algorithm is shown above in all its snowy glory.

Now comes the hard part: making this reusable enough so that the player doesn't become bored with thousands of same-looking terrains.

The Bridge Sketches

Two concept doodles and a concept sketch of the ship's bridge. We wanted the command environment to be an organic one, with the biological diversity and density of a swamp, but the atmosphere of something more pleasant.

Enemy Prototypes - Dancer

We're currently prototyping enemy AI. They're ugly boxes at the moment, but our artists will tend to that.

The Dancer (WMV, 3MB) will hover around the player and strike with a laser (the white pipe) which leeches shield energy from the player, and applies radiation damage that continues to reduce the shields for several seconds. When the Dancer is hit, you'll see it flying off in a random direction for some time before returning.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

What makes up the universe? It's all in a little script file called universe.dat, a human-readable definition file that describes all the intricacies of every astronomical object in the game, and then some. What's interesting (to us, anyway) about this approach is that both humans and machines can modify the universe definition. It becomes possible to combine the intricacies of designer-generated content with the expansiveness of procedurally-generated content.

Fuzzy Rings and Bloomy Things

These rings function as the cogs in a Babbage Engine. What goes on on the surface of a planet isn't what it at first seems.

Bridge Concept Sketches

Like all vessels in the game, the player's ship, Azad, is a living, breathing entity. The bridge is one of Azad's artistic expressions. (Sort-of like if you had a bedroom in your lungs and decided to decorate it with art-nouveau furniture.) The player uses the various computers (called "quids") to nagivate space, manipulate cargo, and check on the universe's latest news.



The quids are independent organisms living in tunnels below the bridge. They communicate with the player via illuminated botanical structures. When they get bored, they start doodling things.

A Graph of All Everything

Above - We're specifying each major component of the game and how they're related. This gives us an image of the whole game at-a-glance. After we implement all the above modules, we'll have a playable alpha. Below - A graph visualization program called yEd helps us do this.

Ship's Bridge

"Azad has seen much of humanity, the best and worst, and has developed a wry sense of humor. Sometimes he hides that sense of humor behind a vaguely sarcastic aura of low competence; sometimes he uses humor to hide his true, strong feelings of affection for his captain and crew. Azad favors dark blue coloration with yellow markings. "

Most of the technology in Galaxy Rage is living tech, and our player's ship is no exception. Here's an early concept sketch of Azad's bridge; something we're now trying to pin down.

Lessons from Nethack

To Nethack players (save for the ASCII-only purists), this is a circular room filled with monsters and treasure. What's interesting about it from a designer's point of view is that it expands the player's concept of the game ("I know how this game works -- wait a sec, what's all this?") in a logical fashion. Most of Nethack's levels are room-passage-room affairs. This was obviously different, with special dangers and benefits that seem overwhelming the first time around.

Elements such as this make the player wonder, "What other cool stuff is there in the game?"

Everything Looks More Interesting with Shaders

The image on the left is taken straight from the game; the image on the right has a bloom effect applied. The latter is probably more "interesting" due to the relative novelty of the effect, despite some shortcomings.

Using Google Sketchup to Design the Bridge

We're using Google Sketchup to lay out the ship's bridge. Much of the game takes place aboard a giant, spacefaring jellyfish, Azad (exhibit A), so we're having fun with the bridge -- it's a semi-submerged island floating in a sea of fluid that's probably mucus or something gross.

New Starmap

This development tool allows us to view each star system and its connections to other systems. Yellow stars are the major systems; blue ones are minor, and green ones are basically rest stops on galaxy's "highways." The in-game navigation tool will look similar but (hopefully) sexier.

Here's a video of same (WMV, 3.2MB), because life is incomplete without a video.

Ripple Shader

We're planning to require Pixel Shader Model 2.0 for Galaxy Rage. This allows us to create some simple but interesting effects such as the Ripple Shader. Here's a video example (wmv, 12MB).

Blur Abuse

These stress tests demonstrate the number of simultaneous on-screen entities we can throw at the 3D engine. The less said about this the better. Mostly because it's 3am.

This is an internal shot of Azad, who is both your friend and starfaring vessel. The relationship between homo sapiens and transport animals goes back a long way. Here in 2007, we ride horses -- in the future, we pilot sentient, uplifted jellyfish who are just beginning to realize that they're getting the short end of the stick when it comes to civil rights.