A couple of ether breeders gating in from the 8th dimension; the swirly mass of sparking fog looks better in motion. I always found the pop-in of spwaned enemies in Ace Combat etc annoying, and I think it's better to have spawning enemies fly out of these than fade in. That said I should probably suppress firing the beams until they're fully materialised.



Also, behold the battle zeppelins in action;



Self-indulgence you say? Well it is a recreational programming project...

why not start a kickstarter? or have you already tried that?

To fund what exactly? Kickstarter is supposed to be to raise capital for projects that need front-loaded funding to be viable. I know in the current euphoria some devs are treating it as a revenue model but that seems wrong to me.

Nah - you should be able to use it to finalize stuff. Why does it seem wrong? You need as much exposure as possible. Hell, you could spend 200.00 and get onto the jumbotron at maximumfun.org and get a mention on one or more of their popular podcasts. MBMBAM did one for a dude to get a copper die to make Stack soap and just by being mentioned dude got funded and MORE. Just saying - Don't sell yourself short. If you believe in it, pimp it out like a drug-addled whore. Next thing you know you're working at Bethesda and I have an inside line on making sure the next Elder Scrolls game isn't a broken pile of poop.

Yeah, so I have a pipe-dreamy ulterior motive.

Point is: DO IT.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/162 ... r-broken-p

www.maximumfun.org

I have published the final video in the Windhaven development diary series, with battle zeppelins, tower defences, enemy vultures etc. Production values are a bit higher than the previous ones, as core development is now complete and I will be starting to promote the game. As such if you're interested in this project please check it out and consider liking / sharing as appropriate.

If you're this late into the dev cycle with it and are close to a release build (as it appears you are), then Kickstarter wouldn't be the right choice.

I'd be looking at the various Indie Bundles (you aren't high profile enough for Humble probably, but Royale or Gala or even Fortress would be viable) and getting exposure through there.

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What is Project Zohar?

The game is getting fan-art before it is even released!

There are seven different failure icons depending on exactly how you screwed up, plus that classic GTA style 'pull camera up from player's body while slowly panning', complete with 20 seconds of mournful strings.

The sailing ships are the only part of the game that uses conventional models instead of procedural generation - I haven't written the code that reefs the sails yet so this one is presumably about to crash;



Sail texture is still a placeholder. This is a civillian ship, I will use a different mesh for the naval battles later. The problem with conventional meshes is pretty obvious here; this is a low-poly model suitable for use on the Xbox 360, which looks pretty bad running on a decent PC. The procedural models are tesselated at load time so at least they look much smoother (although if I had an actual 3D modeller on the project I could use several different LOD meshes, which is what games with real funding do).

Here is the opening cutscene with the new script, music, art (although still a few frames to come) and voice acting.

Final version of chapter select menu;



Due to the simultaneous arrival of a major commercial delivery deadline, an important sales pitch requiring lots of demo & analysis prep, and the DreamBuildPlay 2012 submission deadline for Windhaven, I will not be posting to SDN for a while other than to update this thread.

Sounds good - wish you all the best.

Art continues to trickle in. Here are concepts for the fortress where the eyrie council (avian society ruling body) is located, plus some warship ideas;



I will forward any relevant comments to the artist working on this section.

I like the idea of number 8. The nest-like structure underlines the exclusiveness of the club. Be a bird, or you won't get in here...
Merge it with the looks of #4 - I like how cluttered this town is - #8 looks too much like a planned city, #4 looks like it simply grew into a mountain over time, slowly encroaching on all spaces available.

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The Greeks are somewhat undependable allies when it comes to keeping promises. I am sure the fleet of 300 galleys they promised will turn out to be 3 guys in an oversized cooking pot. (Thanas, revealing the plans for German world domination)

I do archery skeet. With a Trebuchet.

Thanks, I've forwarded that on, final versions of this (before and after invasion) should arrive next month.

New logo for the ships & airships, replacing my placeholder;



Story missions 1 and 2 are now complete, only 14 to go...

Story mission 3 is complete. The first two are mostly player training, so this is the first 'dramatic' mission;



Gameplay video (probably the last one I can post without spoilers). Skip to the last minute for the airships blowing up (with custom mission failure screen).

Concept for the end credits song : http://www.bitphase.com/starglider/windhaven-credits-concept.mp3. Synth, will be replaced with actual vocals & acoustic guitar for the final version.

I submitted Windhaven to DreamBuildPlay 2012, although since the competition is effectively DreamBuildPlatformer (all winners have been 2D platformers, 3D games very rarely make it into the finalists, no flight sim has ever made it to even the semi-finals) this was mostly to motivate me to work on the Xbox-specific bugs.

Development has been slow due to commercial commitments, but here's some more artwork from the game;

Windhaven is now on Steam Greenlight. If you'd like to see the game released on PC, please give it a positive rating.

Also the game was chosen as a DreamBuildPlay 2012 finalist. It didn't win of course but I was frankly amazed to make it to the finals, give that it is (a) a 3D game (b) a flight sim (c) not a platformer and (d) has difficult to learn controls with a lenghtly tutorial. The prize for finalists is a Windows smartphone (Nokia I suspect), which is handy as my old phone recently died.

congrats on that

Will be voting for Windhaven on Greenlight. Hope everyone here who uses Steaam does the same because it really is a highly original and good by one of our own !

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I have to tell you something everything I wrote above is a lie.

Thanks, Greenlight is 1000 games trying to squeeze through a tiny 10-games-a-month straw though, alas not too optimistic at this point.

On the plus size the prize from the Dream Build Play competition turned up today : a Nokia Lumia 900. Don't think I would've bought a Windows phone, but it's free and I don't have a smartphone right now so I'll give it a try.

Haven't had time to work on this for a while, but I finally got around to fixing the two blocking issues that were preventing a public beta. Specifically, non-Microsoft controller support and MediaPlayer event unreliability.

An early beta is now available for download. It should work on any reasonably modern graphics card / version of Windows. It has most features but only 3 of the story missions and lots of bugs remaining. This version still requires a twin-stick gamepad; either the Microsoft one, Sony PS3 pad (with appropriate drivers), most third-party gamepads of similar configuration should work although you might have to fiddle with the config file a bit.