Our art team has moved on to tackling arena design. A big and awesome task. Our game takes place in a spaceship that travels through spacetime, visiting different eras and different worlds as our game season changes. Season one is space themed. Players will journey through the Milky Way galaxy, starting from our solar system, all the way to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Meanwhile, our characters will be competing in kaotic sports matches held in sci-arenas spread through-out alien asteroids and space stations along the way.
Attending each match, crowds will arrive in an assortment of spaceships bearing their team’s colors and badges. Serving as our “grandstands”, these will bring a unique environment to the arena exterior with different types of ships arriving for each match.
Here’s some concept art by our artist Laís Tavares:
And some initial 3d work by Gabriel Brasil:
You will play either for the home or the away team when you start a match. We’re thinking of ways to make matches feel like there’s home field advantage. Not from a mechanics perspective, but from an atmospheric one. The home team will have its logo on center field, the crowd will be louder when they score a goal. They might chant “DEFENSE! DEFENSE!” if the home team’s winning and the match is almost over. And there will be more home fans, than away fans on the stands. You will be able to create your own club, its uniform and logo, invite your friends, and feel, in the arena, your own home field advantage when you play representing your union. But even if you choose not to create your club, you will play in the same environment when you’re assigned one of four base teams.
We expect to share more about our arenas in the next dev diary.
We’re also in the process of finalizing the facial animations of our first character, Brand. The animation method we’re using is called texture swapping. It’s very different from animating a character’s face in 3d, as there are no “bones” to be manipulated. Texture swapping requires a bit of work inside Unity. It’s used in a lot of games with low-poly characters, and it requires a texture map, like this one:
As for gameplay, we’ve finally added dribbling. This is something that’s been on our to-do list for quite some time. Before we implemented dribbling, the character would act as a physical object affecting the ball (another physical object), similar to Rocket League. While a pure physics-based approach works well with cars thanks to their larger surface areas, the same cannot be said for humanoids.
The dribbling system draws the ball in close to the player and keeps it within range of the player’s feet, almost like a magnet. But with a good kick, the ball is launched across the arena regaining its physics-based attributes. The best of both worlds!
The process wasn’t easy, due to the crazy number of bugs that originated from changing the ball’s physics and how it interacts with objects, but we got it done. There are still some extra necessary steps, but it Todd Howards.
See you in two weeks!
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