Jelloknee.com

Games

In 2002, I spent some of my time working on my own project called "Viking", an online multiplayer space action game.

It drew contextual similarities from the Homeworld series and gameplay similarities from the team based multiplayer shooter Couterstrike.

The basic concept was you would fly small manouverable ships in and around large scale capital ships controlled by an RTS style ai manager.

Using a round based system similar to Counterstrike, you and your teammates had to destroy the enemies capital ships to win the round.

Causing damage to enemy vessels would grant you money which you could then use to upgrade your weapons and buy additional capital ships.

Purchased capital ships would 'jump' into the level and autonomously engage the enemy in an RTS stlye conflict.

The design was intened to immerse the players into an epic RTS space battle scenario, whilst retaining a pure 'action game' feel and twitch based gameplay.

This was achieved primarily by automating the entire battlefiled, so the player only ever had to focus on the movement and control of their single ship.

Strategically, players were able to manipulate the course of the battle through their piloting performance, weapon/ship loadouts,

and by purchasing capital ships through a buy interface similar to Counterstrike.

I supplied all of the assets, and wrote most of the engine architecture except for the rendering engine and object serialisation, which was provided by Radon Labs' Nebula Device.

This included collision, physics, client/server side game object prediction and syncronisation, inverse causality hit detection, 3Dsound engine, UI, etc etc...

(click image for link)