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Azimuth Skies!

A lot has been going on recently. Partly due to the holiday season, partly due to a foul little piece of malware corrupting my windows installation and effectively wasting a week. However, much has changed since the last webplayer. There are more ships, they are more sophisticated, several things have been fixed and I really only have AI left to do (and some sounds) before the core gameplay model is complete. Check out the Webplayer above to give it a go!

Perhaps the biggest change has been of name. For the last four years, this project has been known as Iron Skies. A name I came up with for the incarnation that was my university project, I decided to change it in light of the Finnish indie film of a very similar name.

My game is now known as Azimuth Skies. Seeing as the name of the world within which it is set is Azimuth, this seemed like an obvious choice. I also toyed with the likes of Azimuth Wars and Azimuth Air Battles, but there really is (or at least, will be) more to the game than just combat.

For the uninitiated, Azimuth is “an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system”, such as a compass bearing. It is also a term found in artillery, meaning direction of fire. So now you know.

Iron Skies Devblog – Some Changes

From now on I will be streamlining the devblog a little. The webplayer will now be in one place, (on that top bar up there), and I will continue to update it, commenting on updates from time to time as entries here, so feel free to check back occasionally. Here’s what’s in the latest version:

– Ship’s guns now present and working; the first ship has a single forward cannon for you to play with

– Skyfighters added back in. With their new and shiny flight model that’s almost complete.

– Ships can ram each other! Collision causes damage finally, something the old version never got around to having. The damage model will change too; I want some components to leave behind a ‘shell’ of wreckage so that you don’t get weird gaps when a central system (like the hull) is destroyed. A hierarchy would be another alternative, but I want to make shipbuilding as simple as possible.

– Some targets to shoot at. Both the skyfighters and ship cannons can take em out. You can even ram the crap out of them.

As a final note, I am considering a new name for the project. Since my first version way back in 2006, a Finnish film studio has been working on Iron Sky, a movie about space nazis. I’ve known about it for a few months now, but the fact is it’s inevitably more publicised than mine and to continue using such a similar name is only going to cause me trouble later on. So if you have any ideas, feel free to suggest them!

At the very least it might prevent confusion around the fact that I’ve started again from scratch…

Iron Skies Devblog : Components and Outputs

So it’s been a while since the last one due to all manner of things, but I’d like to tell you what I’m now working on. The Airship / Component system is at the heart of the game’s mechanics and I’ve given it a complete overhaul.

Play the Webplayer Test

  • Controls: WASD move the ship; Left Shift / CTRL to ascend/descend; Right Mouse Drag to move camera and Left click on a ship component to open its properties.

Continue reading

Rally to Restore Sanity

The Rally to Restore Sanity took place in Washington D.C, a week ago last saturday, and was basically a rally to poke fun at rallies; or more specifically the kneejerk, ill-informed, hypochondriac Tea Party type of rally that America seems to be plagued by in recent years.

Follow the link for a full gallery with some more great examples:

Rally to Restore Sanity

Please note: I don't own these images, they are reproduced here for the purpose of exposure and I highly recommend checking out the rest on Flickr. Thank you!

The Altimeter is Not Magical, But Awesome

The altimeter is essentially a barometer, a device that measures the difference between two pressure levels.

It’s better known as “that thing in a plane that tells you how high up you are”. Exactly what that means varies, but in aviation there are basically two ways of expressing it:

Altitude, or QNH, is your height in feet above mean sea level. Sea level is very often lower than the ground below you, but QNH is useful because it gives a common level to work with between airfields, and constantly updating your setting isn’t really feasible.

Height, or QFE, is your height above the ground level at a certain location, generally an airfield. Hence a good way to remember the two: QNH is Nautical, QFE is airField. The uses of calibrating your altimeter to the ground level are obvious (especially when landing), but of course the ground doesn’t stay at that level and away from the airfield the reading isn’t always useful. Continue reading

A Demo of “Explorers”

Alright so the progress on Iron Skies is currently agonisingly slow, but this is mainly because I’ve been cooking up a quick portfolio project currently titled “Explorers” (well, that and Minecraft). It’s named after on a long, proud and (oh, surprise) unfinished lineage of Games Factory games I made well over twelve years ago. The premise was simply planetary exploration, although in this latest form your mission is more archaeological than recon.

You are an AP3 droid, remotely controlled from your ship to investigate dangerous worlds and collect clues, leading to a find piece of ancient treasure! It’s all done with a very old skool N64 feel, as I always wanted to do a game like that. A lot of the art is taken from a similar cancelled joint project undertaken last year. The main purpose of it is to show my ability to make art, code, sound and prose and meld them into a game pretty much autonomously. This is also one of the few ways a game designer can showcase the high-level application of game design itself.

So here’s an early version. [Link removed due to changes in the unity webplayer breaking pretty much everything]

  • Welcome to Nash! Feel free to explore.
  • See how many Clues you can collect (there’s 16 in all).
  • I don’t want it to get too complex, but there’s still some things I’ve yet to add to spice up the gameplay a little
  • Not to mention fix several bugs and replace some placeholders

Please have a go and tell me what you think! I will try to update it as I go, and of course get right on to Iron Skies.

Explorers screenshot

Play Explorers Web Demo v1

Quick note on the music: I’ve used some bgm from an old game for now as this is only a quick webplayer demo. It will be replaced as a priority, but right now I don’t think anyone will care; it just sounded odd with only sound effects. If it causes a huffle I’ll take it down of course, but geez, come on.

Span Mail

Every day my inbox is swamped with comments from hundreds of dedicated fans of my website. I’d like to take a moment to just read out some fan mail in my inbox this morning.

SnabyDyenia from YourWebsiteHere.com writes:

How are things?! forward: high def porn flash player porn  or reall young teen porn free asian porn movies  and my boyfriends mom porn fucking porn sex pussy anal free  . Good-bye!

Thanks Snaby! And cheers for keeping in touch. Continue reading

The Horror of the Yellowbugs

Last week I went camping in Norfolk with my wonderful lady companion and though it wasn’t a long holiday, we’d set aside a day to basically do whatever we wanted (the day after we arrived, to be precise). So when the morning came, on seeing a bright shining sun, I felt the urge to build something. So I figured, let’s head for a beach. You see, despite being a ‘respectable’ adult, I have not lost the need to construct temples to Ra out of sand. I’m actually volatile in temperatures exceeding 30 degrees, so sunbathing is never something I took a liking to, but I don’t know if you can go to a beach when it’s raining. It might be against the law; I don’t know, I’ll look it up. Continue reading

Iron Skies Devblog : When it comes to the Crunch

What do I know about the Crunch? I haven’t even been to the Crunch. But I have been pretty busy, working toward a playable demonstration of Iron Skies.

iTween for Unity, from the nice chap at pixelplacement!If you use Unity, I highly recommend checking it out…

But as everything is a bit all over the place, I’d like to share a link with something that promises to be useful not just for this project but anything else I do with Unity: iTween. Okay, bad name; but a fantastic set of tools. It was written by an independent developer (nothing to do with Apple) and put basically is an extension on Unity’s functionality to make changing something from A to B both easy and powerful. All that needs installing is a static script, slapped into your asset folder. Coupled with how painless Unity is already, the result is possibly the best thing in the world you can get for nothing.

On a computer.