Project FPTD - Nova domaca igra

There has been a lot of stuff going on with this project so we think it is time to let you know what we're been working on. 0.2 is near and many things have been done code and art wise (our modeler's pc broke so we got a stall on that):

1. New concept art - As you have seen some new concept art has been added in the past few days. Brand new enemies, towers, weapons and characters await in 0.2!









P.S. For additional concept art pay a visit to the gallery!

2. New game mechanics - First one is the tower controlling. Some towers have manual override so player can take control of them and do as he please. Additionally you can zoom in on the target in this mode.



Second one is the modified building system. Between the waves the camera is fixed to overview mode in which you can build towers like in any "normal" tower defense game by selecting the building block. When the wave begins you are back in FPS mode in which you can shoot enemies and build towers via terminals on building blocks. You cannot build in overview mode while the wave is on the run.



Third one is the dialogue system. Various dialogue will happen between the main character Jack and his employer Professor Klang. Klang will give you the overview of the current situation, various hints, and news about new towers and upgrades. Jack will do his best to follow his orders.



Last but not the least are the creep abilities. In order to prevent the player from blocking creeps path or doing something silly, creeps emit a small magnetic field that pushes the player away from them. Also some of them have developed force fields, bolstering war cries, EMP waves and such.



3. Story - 666 kilometers away from Earth there is a very small planet called Atom which is inhabited by various microorganisms. They tolerated Earth for centuries but the stink that was coming from it became unbearable. They decided to launch an invasion. By infecting domestic and wild animals Earth would be conquered. Alas their evil plan was stalled by the scientists who are developing antibodies that will nullify the infection and put their invasion to rest. Now infected animals are going from laboratory to laboratory in which scientists hide in order to destroy the research. Scientists hired mercenaries from security agency "Protector" to protect them from pesky microorganisms. Professor Klang discovered that the micros are attacking a nearby laboratory hidden on a farm in the USA. It is up to Jack, the leader of Protector, to set up the defenses and lay waste to the little evil doers.

More news and 0.2 are coming up so stay tuned!

Upgrading to NeoAxis 0.91 was a much enjoyable task. 0.91 brings many beautiful features of which i will show you the most important ones:

1. Native 64-bit support.

2. Rendering optimizations - lighting and shadows are more optimized and have less impact on FPS. Also greater number of options were exposed, so you can tweak performance even more.

3. Parallel-Split Shadow Map (PSSM) shadow technology - provides both high quality shadow render and large view distance. Pictures are worth more than a thousand words:

High:





High PSSM:





4. Full point light support - earlier versions of NA didn't have the support for cubemap shadows, so point lights were out of option because of many artifacts with shadows. Fortunately this is supported now which enabled the nice lighting of our bunker:



5. GUI Shaders - this enables us to have special effects applied on the in-game GUI. It means we can nicely represent terminal/hologram disabled by enemy shockwave or do something silly like this:



Stay tuned!

At long last v0.3 is out! Though only in beta stage it has some cool stuff to show off. In addition to features mentioned in the previous article v0.3 Beta includes some new features:

1. Unlocked FPS mode between waves & camera interpolation
From now on there are no mode restrictions, you can be in FPS and Strategy mode at any time, though buying from Strategy mode is only available between waves. Also camera interpolates between modes nicely and it also works for tower controlling and zooming (zooming interpolation was not implemented during the recording of this video).

Video


2. Tower Tactics
This allows you to change the towers targeting system to your liking. You can easily optimize towers behavior and assign them with specific tasks (a gatling tower that drops everyone's health to half, leaving the rest of the job to cannon tower etc.). All is explained in this video:

Video

3. Radar
I've implemented the radar which will show you all units of importance on the map. Of course it doesn't work like minimap so the units out of range are shown on the edge of radar. Useful for knowing where those annoying chickens ran off...



4. Creeps with special abilities
You will not encounter much of them, in fact there is currently only two of them:
* Pig Tank - has the force field around him which reduces all damage by 40%.
* Rooster Shaman - has the heal field around him restoring 12hp each second.

5. Death & Hunters
Hunters are special type of creeps, infested with mutated viruses which are undetectable by towers, with only one goal: to kill you. They are excellent at drawing your attention from normal creeps, because if you die you are respawned after 10 seconds, and time is precious. They will continue to hunt you until they are dead. Oh yeah, your towers can hurt you too if you are not careful enough.



Well that sums it up! There are still some thing to be added like: proper balancing, weapon upgrades, more special abilities for creeps, traps/mines, tutorial, bug fixing etc. but that can take some time so better to release some form of beta version than get dragged like Duke. I'm still working alone so modelling & sound help would be very appreciated.

You can download v0.3 Beta from here.
Due to engine software bug some dlls were not included so you can download the patch from here and here. Just extract it to the game folder.

I eagerly await your feedback
Cheers.