Game Design 0.7: GDW Progress

I've made some progress on the design of our GDW game this week. There were particles coming out of the thrusters (which I put in before), but I added ambient ones as well as a billboard to make the thruster look better. I also posted before that I would show off our skybox.

Here it is:

You can't see it in this still frame, but some of those white points that look like stars are actually particles zooming past you because you're going fast

I photoshopped the planet into the skybox. The planet was a picture of a rock that I coloured on and added glowing effects to. That is why the terrain looks so realistic

I made the skybox using a program called "spacescape" (http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape). It actually exports seamless space skyboxes for you. You just need to create and add different layers of noise or stars or billboards. It's pretty cool. I can't take credit for our awesome skybox because I simply followed a tutorial.

You can also see the particle effects on the thrusters. It isn't very difficult to do in Ogre because Ogre has a particle system that you can use (http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_34.html). It just takes a bit of fiddling to make it look the way you want it to.

We will be adding textures to our objects soon. The problem is that I just finished texturing my ship (I think I'm done. I could add more but I'm not sure yet). It's an enemy ship and it's only 800 triangles, which is excellent if we want many enemy fighters in our game. The lower the polycount, the more efficient it is to render.

The rough metal texture of this ship comes from a photo I took of my mother's baking pan. 

That's all I've got for now. I've barely just started working on GDW because I've had to finish ALL the assignments and study for midterms and sit in class and listen. I really hope I can make more time somehow because I would really, really like to work on this game more. I think it has potential and working on it is probably the best part of being in Game Dev :]