Games

From Dust

Its not often these days that I post about games I have been playing, usually I leave that sort of stuff in the realms of Twitter or social networks.

For “From Dust” however ill make an exception. It’s also not often these days that I see some tech in a game and wonder to myself “how the hell did they do that?” or just “wow I have never seen that done before”. From Dust made me think both those things this week.

From Dust is a god game that follows in the heels of other god games such as Populus and Black and White. The reason why it has attracted my attention so much is the incredible tech that the game employs.

Check out this tech-demo / trailer for the game:

When I watched that earlier in the week I was amazed but skeptical that everything shown was actually how it was in game. After downloading and playing it on xbox this week however I can confirm that everything shown in the above video is in game and more. Not only that its actually fun!

The water flows from the top of the mountains realistically, over time it erodes the landscape to form rivers. Water pressure builds up need harder rock causing bends in the river that threaten your villages. You have to think ahead about how to divert a river one way but making sure not to flood an area downstream. More often than not it takes several tries to get it right.

Lava is great. Several missions have volcanoes that you must be swift to tame else they can easily threaten your villages. The great this however is that there are many ways you can choose to solve a particular problem.

You could just manually suck up all the lava and drop it somewhere else, a somewhat temporary solution. You could try to build a channel for the lava to follow however lava has a habit of melting through any channels you build. You could use one of the spells your villagers to supply to aid you. You could divert the course of a river to cool the lava as it nears your village. You could use a “water tree” to cool the oncoming flow of magma. The choice is yours.

I have been pondering over the tech and thinking how they managed to get such a complex liquid simulation to run in realtime. Infact, how they managed to get several complex liquid simulations to run in realtime. The sand, the water, the lava and the rock all act as liquids with different properties, however they all interact with each other in different ways. Not only is the liquid tech impressive, the vegetation propagation and the fire mechanics are all seamless, and from what I could tell not a single frame was dropped.

It must be a GPU based liquid simulation (particularly as the xbox CPU is weak), however I didn’t think they were good enough to do something like this. Perhaps they are using some optimized Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics such as that employed by Fairlight from the scene: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

Anyways, the game is available for download right now on xbox or if you are like me and are pc-inclined then it should be available on PC from the 17th of August.

 

Ludum Dare – Hour 40 – COMPLETE!

Okay well its not quite complete, the waves of enemies could do with some more work but I have my mum coming up from London to visit me in 30 mins so im gonna call it quits here.

So, finally it has a name, I have called it “48 Hours Later” :) Its not technically true as I have only had 40 hours to do it, but oh well!

Overall im pretty happy with my first Ludum Dare entry, im very tired right now and have a banging headache, but thats all part of the fun right?

So onto the game. First some shots:


Okay so if you have been following waaaay back my original intention was to make a game with the same sort of art style as World of Goo but with the game mechanics of Boom Stick. I think I have stayed pretty true to that original idea.

Basically you fight against waves of enemies that float across the screen. There are currently only 10 waves, I would have liked more and with more variety but oh well ;)

The theme of the competition was “Enemies as Weapons”. I have incorporated that theme by having the enemies drop giblets when they die. You then have a certain amount of time to pick up those giblets and fire them back at the enemies. Enemies as weapons!

So as a disclaimer: im sure the game has many bugs and things, I have run out of time to do much in the way of testing and optimising. If you find any bugs however drop a comment I would love to hear about them as I plan to release this to a few flash portals, so would like to get those bugs fixed ;)

Anyways enough jibber jabber. A few more shots then the game is below:


EDIT: I have now made a youtube gameplay video and timelapse of development, check em here.

Tools Used:
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Flash Builder 4
Adobe Flash CS5
SFXR
Chronolapse

Ludum Dare – Hour 0

Okay its 3:31am the competition started 31mins ago. I had originally intended to wake up at 5-6am then start coding but I couldnt sleep so I thought I would get cracking early then catch a nap later on when im tired.

The theme for the competition is “Enemies as Weapons” which is actually a better theme than what I was expecting “Technology in the wrong time period”. I havent got an idea yet but im sure something will come to me :)

Anyways, here is where all the magic will be happeneing over the next 48 hours:

I have ChronoLapse setup to capture a screenshot every 60 seconds so hopefully we will get a nice video at the end showing my progress (or lack of :P ).

I will be updating at regular intervals throughout, mainly to break up the dev process a little as 48hours is a long time!

Wish me luck!

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