Topic: Dead Space

This is a little open source pet project I have been working on it's called "Dead Space"

This game takes place in 3312 "1300" years into the future. The planit Mars has been fully terriformed for 300 years
and the human population now resides there. Earth is mostly a dead planit and is mainly used as a prison planit and
weapons testing. But unfortantly an intelagent alien species has discoverd that our solar system harbors life and intends
to exterminate us and mine our resources just as they do with every plaint they come across.
Only problem is we don't know there already here.

To get a better feel for the story line I sugeest you read the screenplay I am putting together.
http://zester.googlecode.com/files/Dead%20Space.pdf

All work except the Spaceship and the sub are my original creations.

The female you see below is Anna Prescott in a uniform civilian ware to identify them from militart troops.
She is in the first part of the screen play.

Dead Space Thumbnail
Dead Space Thumbnail2

Larger Image

Eventualy I will have a project site up on google code where you can fall my progress
or make contributions of your own.

This project will come with tutorials so that anyone wishing to learn how to use Maratis3D
and reproduce the game above just by following the tutorials.

Hope you like my project wink

Last edited by zester (2012-03-27 03:33:29)

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Re: Dead Space

Hey, it looks like promising !
What quind of game is it ? Adventure ?

Re: Dead Space

An Adventure type game. Yahh in a way it is. What I am trying to do is develop the game in seasons like a tv show. following a script. But I want to do it in such away that there can be unscripted play.

For season 1 you would play out the main character for each scene.

In season 2 you might play the character of a new recruit in the military going threw basic training and then on missions and your commanding officer might be one of the main characters you met in the season 1 storyline.

For season 3 you might choose to play a  different character, maybe you are a young child and something dramatic happens to you, your family is killed and you are captured by these hostile invading aliens and eventually your season 2 character ends up on a mission were you just happen to be discovered and rescued.

There will be multiple worlds to play in our galaxy.

Maybe you end up as a ship commander and your on a mission to harvest ore from an asteroid or a type of gas from a gas giant.  Harvesting ore might lead to a new weapon design.

Your ship might be hit with micro meteorites when your harvesting and you have to repair your ship in a certain amount of time before your whole crew dies.

Last edited by zester (2012-03-29 17:35:34)

Re: Dead Space

Nice Project Zester. I will try to contribute some models whenever I can.

Regards.

Re: Dead Space

Well aparently there is allready a game and movie called DeadSpace. So me and my partner are looking at new names.
We also made some changes to the story line.  I am putting that together now.
Here are a couple new screenshot of our work in progress.

All of this is just a rough draft.

Runined Earth City
Runined Earth City

Runined Earth City vin Maratis

Test Character

Another Test Character

The Butcher

Maget

The Dead

Last edited by zester (2012-03-31 20:15:53)

Re: Dead Space

Arclord wrote:

Nice Project Zester. I will try to contribute some models whenever I can.

Regards.

Sure that would be great. Once we have a project page and more of a complete story line up
then everyone will be able to grab what we have and make new citys, planits, submit new levels or
whatever. Maybe you have a side story you would like to put together.

Re: Dead Space

Here is the story line that we are working on now, its very rough draft but should give a good idea on
what the story for the game is.

Scene 1: 

Feb 23 2012  2:28PM Earth

A mother pushes her child on a swing at the park.
The Mail Man delivers mail on is route
A Police Officer directs traffic at an inter section.

***Blank*** "Needs to be filled in"

Alien space crafts the size of a citys appear in the sky. People are pointing
at the sky, some are confused some screaming, some with no expression at all.

Judgment  Day has come but it wasn't what we thought.

The Aliens  attack, total devastation earth is lost to total ruin.


Scene 2:
The most elite of humans set off to terriform mars.
For a thousand years mars terriforms and becomes beautiful.

The date is Dec 10 3312

The human species on earth is wild no one left to save. Earth IS HELL 

The human race on mars is made up of only the ancestry of those that set off so long ago to make mars home.

Very few humans humans survive 1% of original population, earth culture is now very primitive.

The people of mars are though of as those other people that live in the sky.

Mars humans are very sophisticated, smart, advanced in technology.

***Blank*** "Needs to be filled in"

The aliens that devastated earth there mothership has come looking for them.

The aliens find that those that were sent to destroy earth were killed, finds a very different earth instead. Learns of mars.

The aliens plan on exterminating the  remaining human species.

On Mars the aliens covert attacks are nothing more than rumors of wild animal attacks.

Last edited by zester (2012-03-31 21:10:23)

Re: Dead Space

I was just testing out Normal Maps and Differant Materal settings in Blender for Maratis
and this is what I ended up with. Not very impressive but I like the direction its heading. smile


Alien Lab

Last edited by zester (2012-04-02 09:16:32)

Re: Dead Space

Hey, this game looks really great. It's certainly coming along a lot. I'm looking forward to seeing more soon smile

Re: Dead Space

Thanks smile

Nistur wrote:

Hey, this game looks really great. It's certainly coming along a lot. I'm looking forward to seeing more soon smile


This is from an older project that I was working on but never finished. I am thinking it might fit well
in this project.

Pregnant Nun with Tentacles come out of her.

nun

Re: Dead Space

I have absolutely no idea how your nun might fit in with your existing plot, but she certainly seems to fit the atmosphere you've demonstrated.

I love the idea of a episodic game, too few games do it. I've considered trying to make an episodic game myself but I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. Will you keep a project blog or just document your progress on here?

Re: Dead Space

Nistur wrote:

I
have absolutely no idea how your nun might fit in with your existing
plot, but she certainly seems to fit the atmosphere you've demonstrated.

I love the idea of a episodic game, too few games do it. I've considered
trying to make an episodic game myself but I honestly wouldn't know
where to begin. Will you keep a project blog or just document your
progress on here?

Well I was thinking...

Intro music plays (Scoldt – From My Guts
http://zester.googlecode.com/files/Scol … y_Guts.mp3 ) images are
shown of present earth (Alien scout drones patrolling the streets of
earth, citys and towns in ruin from the fires, rotting corpses, Humans
being hurded into concentration camps, Human growth or breeding chambers
on alien ships, warehouses on earth or ships underground?).

The nun might be the product of a breeding experament done by the
aliens, she was rescued along with some others. You and your team
rescues them unaware of whats growing inside of them untill its to late.
Then the tenticals come out of them whipping around, you see
something frantically pushing against the insides of there bellys! Its the
outline of a tiny alien babys hand!

Episodic Game: I did it this way because I hate games with no real story and I wanted
this game to be more about the story than the graphics. Also I wanted to build up a vast
array of art assets for future projects. I also wanted something easily extended. Each season is an
expansion pack and each episode is a level. A single level could be 45 - 60 min's of game play wink
So its like your playing the characters in a tv show.

Right now what you see is just me prototyping the game finding ideas/concepts/plots that i like
and expanding on them to see what I come up with. Thats why alot of the models are not textured.

Eventually I will be documenting the whole process from start to finish, everything from coming up with a
story idea to doing screenplays, how to turn screenplays into workable dialog, prototyping scenes and concepts
storyboarding, modeling, animation, gfx effects, sound effects, music composition, ....

Once all that is done I will be looking into Cloud Funding on Kickstart, Amazon Studios, Donations, ...
in order to raise funds to hire out developers to improve Maratis.

The feature I am looking at are mainly:
1. Playing videos on textures
2. Partical Effects
3. Shaders
4. Networking
5. Exposing more of the C++ api to lua
6. MEngine in Qt5

I enjoy doing all this stuff and really really want to see Maratis grow. smile

Last edited by zester (2012-04-03 04:48:25)

Re: Dead Space

Haha, you've almost described my project.
My project definitely doesn't have the same story, setting or probably genre, but it's heavily story based. I'm also currently in the prototype phase and hoping to make a short demo to put on kickstarter wink I guess whatever they said about great minds must be true wink

I really should put some stuff for my game up, but it's currently little more than placeholder graphics so I am a bit nervous about putting anything up before I'm happy with them (a bit of a strange viewpoint from a programmer who had little to do with the creation of them, I know)

Something that might interest you. I've done some video playing in a previous project, I've not done any videos-to-texture in Maratis, but I can see if I can dig out some code maybe (no promises, a lot of my old code goes walkabouts, never to be seen again).
Also, I'm currently looking into both particle systems and shaders within Maratis and will have some documentation up shortly on both I guess.

I have to say, I'm in two minds about exposing more to lua. One issue I've had with people using something similar to what Maratis provides, in lua, is that it's very very easy to get lost in it. I think it would probably be beneficial for Maratis to more split up it's lua API into several modules, so in general, you don't have to care about the majoirity of the functionality within the low(er) level stuff when you're just looking. API documentation for hundreds of functions, however comprehensive, is daunting.

Of course, I don't have any say in this, it's entirely up to Anael, but after having an in depth look at how Love2D works, I would strongly suggest a similar method of partitioning the functionality.

Anyway, back on topic. The music sounds quite fitting. Again, I've got to say, I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out smile

Re: Dead Space

Nistur wrote:

Something that might interest you. I've done some video playing in a previous project, I've not done any videos-to-texture in Maratis, but I can see if I can dig out some code maybe (no promises, a lot of my old code goes walkabouts, never to be seen again).
Also, I'm currently looking into both particle systems and shaders within Maratis and will have some documentation up shortly on both I guess.

On these forums there is some example code i wrote, I had begun embededing MEngine in SFML and with that i had Video Textures (Theora/Vorbis/OGG) , 2D Graphics Api (Skia, Cairo, ImageMagick, QtPainter) all working the issue I ran into is that I could see MEngine Embeded but I couldn't see my models I might have had transformations messed up I am not sure.

But untill I finish the Premake scripts I won't be doing much coding on Maratis. Yes I dislike scons that much smile

Nistur wrote:

I have to say, I'm in two minds about exposing more to lua. One issue I've had with people using something similar to what Maratis provides, in lua, is that it's very very easy to get lost in it. I think it would probably be beneficial for Maratis to more split up it's lua API into several modules, so in general, you don't have to care about the majoirity of the functionality within the low(er) level stuff when you're just looking. API documentation for hundreds of functions, however comprehensive, is daunting.

Of course, I don't have any say in this, it's entirely up to Anael, but after having an in depth look at how Love2D works, I would strongly suggest a similar method of partitioning the functionality.

Im not sure I understand, Both Love2D and Maratis3D handel lua the same. I would personaly use the luajit headers for performance reasons but thats really really easy to do. Thats how mine is setup. Then you can use luajits ffi module and write
c api bindings really easly "CSFML took an hour to bind", but binding c++ code is a whole differant monster.

I have some C and Lua examples up here http://code.google.com/p/zester/wiki/Lua_C  there is also https://bitbucket.org/alexames/luawrapper/src  and  https://bitbucket.org/alexames/luawrapperexample/src  and you can look at this http://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html

But to me it doesn't make a differance how Maratis uses lua smile

Last edited by zester (2012-04-03 19:18:15)

Re: Dead Space

What I meant was just how the API was structured. With love, there is love.graphics and love.keyboard etc... rather than everything being a global function. It makes it quite easy, when looking through documentation, or even through the code itself, to have a good idea what you're looking for and what you're expecting to find. I don't want to sound like I'm picking at Maratis in particular, it's quite common from what I've seen. I was just saying that I think it would be nice to break up the functionality a bit.

I have no particular dislike for SCONS, I find it a little overengineered quite often, but it does it's job, and usually does it well. I can see why people might dislike it though.

Also, I just thought I would make a small anouncement here. I hope you don't feel like I'm hijacking your thread. I've got the rest of this week and next week free. I had holidays I needed to take. I should therefore have significantly more time to work on the whole particle stuff so hopefully soon I can demo that and I'll probably use my own game and finally show some screenshots of it.

Re: Dead Space

I cant recall exactly what the issue is with c++ and lua but I know that once you get into haveing namespaces and or subclasses things get really complicated real quickly. To the point where its not even worth the trouble. I havent looked at how Lua is implamented in Maratis but I am sure Anael took the path of least resestence. Now Plane C and Lua thats cake you can bind any
c library in no time flat easyest thing there is. You can execute Plane C functions right from inside lua(luajit). The whole love.graphics thing I am sure something can be worked out thats just a nameing convention.

Nistur wrote:

What I meant was just how the API was structured. With love, there is love.graphics and love.keyboard etc... rather than everything being a global function. It makes it quite easy, when looking through documentation, or even through the code itself, to have a good idea what you're looking for and what you're expecting to find. I don't want to sound like I'm picking at Maratis in particular, it's quite common from what I've seen. I was just saying that I think it would be nice to break up the functionality a bit.


No problem looking forward to seeing some screenshots, and keep up the good work with your tutorials. I visit your site often to see what you learned and have to show in regards to Maratis's C++ api even if its a tutorial on a single function, because eventualy I will referance what you have and extended it.  smile

Nistur wrote:

Also, I just thought I would make a small anouncement here. I hope you don't feel like I'm hijacking your thread. I've got the rest of this week and next week free. I had holidays I needed to take. I should therefore have significantly more time to work on the whole particle stuff so hopefully soon I can demo that and I'll probably use my own game and finally show some screenshots of it.

Last edited by zester (2012-04-03 20:28:36)

Re: Dead Space

It's great to hear that you've been checking my website. I've got to say that writing the tutorials has got me to learn quite a bit about how Maratis works. I've started working on the particle system again this morning. Already debugging the crash so I know why it breaks.

With regards to you extending what I have done, if you want to make any additions that you think would be helpful to other readers, I would appreciate the contribution wink