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Description
During the last three semesters of school at the Art Institute of Vancouver | Burnaby students are required to team together and build a game using their combined knowledge of programming, art, design and sound. Most teams use the Unreal engine and build a mod for their project, but our team decided to build our game from the ground up, using no pre-built engine. With lots of doubt surrounding our group and with only a single programmer we went to work....and work we did. For nine months our team of ten students spent night and day, mostly night, working away on Sixth Age.
In the end it all paid off as we were left with an amazing project that blew everyone away. We've now taken our game and entered it into the IGF competition as well as the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker competition.
A bit about the game:
Sixth Age offers deep game play that is easy to learn yet hard to master for casual and die hard strategy fanatics. Players choose from a diverse selection of playable characters, each one possessing unique spells and abilities. Then utilizing chess-like strategy on a hex based grid, players use a selection of melee weapons and magical attacks to devestate their apponent. Victory will prevail to those who utilize the tactical advantage that each member of their army offers.
You can find a demo as well as more screenshots and information at my website here.
Engine features:
* Graphics
- DirectX 9.0b
- Vertex and Pixel Shaders 2.0
- Supports full-screen post-processsing effects.
- Support for normal mapping of static | animated meshes.
- Character animation via matrix palette skinning with vertex shaders.
- Advanced particle system, fully customizable through the Particle Editor.
* Terrain:
- 128x128 grid with no LOD
- Octree for fast culling of terrain
- Four texture layers + one lightmap over the whole terrain
- Create and modify, then save and load in game with Terrain Editor
* Input & Sound:
- DirectInput for mouse | keyboard control.
- FMOD used for loading | playing .wav, .ogg, .mp3 files.
* Sky:
- Dynamic sky-sphere that cycles from day-to-night, using just a small 128x128 texture.
- Skybox encloses sky-sphere so stars | planets can be seen.
- Ryan Gaule
rgaule@gmail.com
