Hey everyone,
Wow, Max's blog entry created quite a stir. We got covered on dozens of news sites and had some pretty overwhelming site traffic. We weren't sure if "opening the kimono" was going to be the right strategy, or even if dynamic infestation would excite anyone but I think we found out otherwise! So we're going to try to keep sharing our work as much as possible. It doesn't always come naturally, but I think we'll get the hang of it.
So this week I finished Zen of Sudoku! I got the Steam SDK and build and tested the depots on my own local content server and sent it to VALVe. Their tools still have their quirks but once you know how use them, making depots and publishing new versions is cake. It's just amazing and joyous to be able to fix a game crash bug one day, then release the game "internationally" to millions of people a day or two later. We are pretty excited about Steam and the possibilities for remaining independent and making enough money to make more exciting games. This will be a great test run for us.
Speaking of which...we'll be live on Steam tomorrow! Here's what the store front will look like:
Magazines are a big part of advertising, and typically gaming magazines will only put a game on the cover or do a nice multi-page spread if they've got exclusive information that hasn't been published elsewhere. Information about the game, screen shots, and other tidbits are important bargaining chips for game developers that they don't want to give away unless they get something in return. For an independent game like Natural Selection 2, this doesn't really apply since it's not a mega franchise that all gamers know about, and thus exclusive information is less enticing. Instead we have to focus our marketing on a more grass roots, word-of-mouth approach where we release lots of stuff in the hope of gaining attention.
We're also keen on showing things off as we develop them, since it gives us the chance to get feedback early on features. This is great for helping us build a game that's really going to appeal to our core audience, and it's also a lot more fun to show off what you're working on and get comments than to have to do everything in secrecy. There's a downside to this which is that once you've announced features people are generally upset if they end up changing or getting cut (two very common occurrences in game development). Our hope is that if we put enough caveats and disclaimers in this blog and frame our discussions in the context that it's in-development work, the community will understand when things evolve (or even canceled) as we progress.
And lastly, the Natural Selection community has been steadfastly waiting for a follow up game for a while now, so we'd like to return the kindness by making our development process more transparent and open.
As I promised last time, we're going to start giving a peek at some of the work we've been doing on Natural Selection 2. This is a bit unusual as game developers typically keep everything about the game (even it's existence) secret until pretty far along in the development. Although there are some good reasons for this, we've decided to take a different approach for NS2 and really "open the kimono" to show off what we're doing, as we do it.
One of the features that we've been prototyping is dynamically generating bacterial infestation in the world based on what portions of the map the alien team occupies. This feature is a departure from the original Natural Selection where the alien growth is built into the map by the designer and thus remains static throughout the game. Imagine the environment changing before your eyes as the balance between sides shifts back and forth.
This is what it looks like:
In addition to being an atmospheric visual effect, having dynamic infestation gives us opportunities to develop some interesting game play elements. High on our list is having map entities which are triggered when an area becomes infested or uninfested. For example, you could have a computer console that shuts down when overrun by infestation and causes the lights in the room to go out. If the marines clear out the room and fight back the infestation, the system comes back online and the lights flicker on to fill the room. What about abilities and technology which only function when players are on their home turf?
Well at least that's the theory.
At this stage we're still investigating the technical feasibility of creating good-looking dynamic infestation before committing to it in the game design. We haven't really seen anything quite like this in a game before, so going into it we weren't really sure how to pull it off and tried out a few different approaches before settling on the current one.
We're pretty happy with the current results which can you see in the video above. Please excuse my inept programmer level design . Charlie was kind enough to provide a melodic narration.
To build the infestation, we generate a mesh to get the lumpy appearance and use texture effects to make it transition onto the surface of the walls smoothly. Building the mesh has definitely been the most challenging aspect, especially since we need it to work over essentially any geometry that we throw at it.
At first we though the lighting would also be a tough problem, since Source is based on pre-computed light maps for the static geometry. Trying to illuminate something that dynamically changes at run-time doesn't immediately seem feasible in this scenario, but the facilities built into the BSP for doing normal mapping actually made it pretty simple.
While the progress has been good, we still have a bunch of technical hurdles to work though and lots of ideas on how to take the feature to the next level.
We hope you enjoy your first look at NS2!