Aerial Combat Game Development - Update 1

Over the last 3 weeks our studio, Phoenix Development Studios, has met at least once per week.

In our first meeting the discussion was mostly which game type should we choose; action, adventure, aerial combat, racing, or run'n'jump. We talked about how we might go about making each one, how much creative control we had, and whether or not we believed we'd meet the criteria for each game type. We eventually found ourselves gravitating towards the aerial combat game because we felt we could do a lot with the game in terms of design and adding our own features to it while still meeting all the requirements asked of us. Our group only has four people and a contractor, meaning planning and managing our time will be more important for us since we don't want to spread ourselves thin.

After deciding to do an aerial combat game we brainstormed different themes and styles of play. We started throwing ideas out randomly and as fast as we could so as to make sure the ideas kept flowing. In terms of themes we had:

• World Wars I, II and III
• Aliens
• Technology 
• Bio-mechanical
• Dragons
• Greek Mythology
• Superheroes
• Birds
• Pegasus
• My Little Pony

We weeded out ideas we didn't like and ended up with aliens, technology, and bio-mechanical as themes. We also decided that each level will be like a sandbox and will be played more like Geometry Wars as opposed to Phoenix HD (iOS and Android).

Love how the game looks and how the shapes stretch and compress. We want our game to mostly control in the same way, and we're going with sandbox style gameplay.

Love how this game looks too. It's fun to play, but the player can't really escape from enemies, they're always in his face; I'd like to allow a little more freedom so that a player can move around and be chased, move in one direction and shoot in another.

At this point we were far enough along to start designing the game at a high level and we created a story that suited our themes.

Since then we have finalized the high-level design, determined what art assets we will need and when they need to be done by, and using the Game class from last year's BaseSpriteLib, we have a project using SFML, OpenGL, as well as full Vector, Matrix and Quaternion classes. 

I also want to note that in terms of performance there is a considerable difference between SFML and GLUT; the SFML version seems to be running much faster and smoother, I'm not sure why though. The input is also much easier to set up for multiple keys than GLUT because there is no keyboard callback function needed, input is all real-time and SFML has classes setup in its library to make use of it.

I'm really excited to be working on this game, and can't wait to start programming and testing.