Progress is continuing at a rapid rate with the gameplay, environment and vfx improving every day. Also – if you missed our last post showing early game-play footage, be sure to check it out here, but bear in mind the game looks a lot better now!
GAMEPLAY UPDATE
We took our Space Dust Racing milestone build to the IGDA Melbourne pitching night and got some great feedback. About 30 people wandered over and joined in the 4-player mayhem, and offered some great suggestions on things we could improve and their favourite elements.
Playing Space Dust Racing @ IGDA Melbourne meet, complete with scrappy piece of paper showing controls affixed to side of laptop
New features we’ve added include the ability to ram other vehicles off the track, auto-aiming laser sights for the turret gun, slow but sneaky homing on the smart missile, a passive shock shield which protects you from attacks and also acts as a melee weapon, and a more forgiving revision of the vehicle physics to ensure players remain in the game for longer. And thanks to Unreal Engine 4.3’s splines, we’ve added spline data for the race track, which has finally allowed us to create a silky smooth camera behaviour and easily give the AI racers some rudimentary knowledge of the track.
CLAWTOPIA
Latest Clawtopia shot
Clawtopia is feeling more and more like the alien tropical island we imagined in the early concept art. Pops has been heading up the creation of the terrain sculpting, plant creation/placement and it is really coming to life. As final gameplay adjustments are made to track and obstacles, the remaining white-box assets will be replaced with final art and textured mesh.
Plant concepts for Clawtopia
The concepts above as fully realised assets
The vision for Clawtopia was that it should feel familiar but also alien, and that vibe is really starting to materialize. Obviously the enormous crashed flying saucer helps a bit!
Crashed Saucer production drawing
HERMAN’S SKIFF
Clawtopia is Hermans’ home world, so unsurprisingly Herman will be the next Space Dust Racing character to be built. However… Grigs is first building out the geometry for his vehicle, which in keeping with his character is a fishy inspired hovering jet powered skiff (phew!). Several rounds of concepts were created from which the final design was refined to fit similar proportions to Sarge’s tank – you can see the early progress below.
Concept / Ortho / Mesh creation process
Well… that’s it from us for this development update. Is there any part of the game you’d like us to talk about? Leave your thoughts below in the comments.