Brian Ortiz

I get mad when people don’t blog so I’d better set a good example!

I’ll be honest, I haven’t worked on OrtzIRC much. It needs more work that I’d first thought. The source is a mess and needs a lot of refactoring. I haven’t given up though, just taken a break!

In place of OrtzIRC, I’ve been working on the game I may have mentioned in the past. Hopefully the concept doesn’t turn out to be too unrealistic.

I’m planning on a space sim in the vein of Wing Commander, except it will be 2D top-down and not constrained to pre-determined “systems”. Everything will procedurally generated and the player will get around by “jumping” with an FTL drive to a set of coordinates, which may take you to something interesting, or take you to some empty space in the middle of nowhere.

Generating systems (at least visually) will be pretty easy. I think the challenge will be making those systems interesting and worth exploring. Another problem I can see is combat. In a 3D space sim, you fly the ship from a first-person perspective. But when it’s 2D to-down, you can’t do that. And so when you’re flying next to, or attacking, a ship much bigger than yours, you’d have to zoom out to see the other ship, at which point your ship would get very small on the screen and possibly make things difficult for you.

So many things to consider!

In the mean time, here are some screenshots:

The planet is still in the testing phase and is not yet “procedural”. The textures are generated with LibNoise.XNA

Team Fortress 2 action. Check it out:

So I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl today… I haven’t been following it since it was first announced in 2001 like some people have, so I didn’t really have any expectations or prior knowledge to speak of.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is not “another DOOM” as was the impression I got from screenshots. It’s a first person shooter with RPG elements to it, such a trading for weapons and other items. It doesn’t have skills like most RPG’s have (you can’t earn increased accuracy) which makes sense for a FPS because you’ll get better at playing the game anyway. What you can do is upgrade certain abilities temporarily through “artifacts” that you find and equip on your belt. The biggest feature of SOC is probably the non-linear story. Grand Theft Auto is non-linear, but not like this. Read the rest of this entry »