2.17.13 - A Fury Void Update

Though this is a biased comment, Team Fury is fantastic.  The range of what has been accomplished by the few people making Fury Void is a true testament of ability.  In the past two weeks, much has been done, and this is a report hoping to share those things.

To begin, due to player feedback and hands-on play, it was decided that Fury Void uses too big of spaces that have too spread-out features.  With the defense that the game already bends the laws of nature (astral body size, gravity warping effects, etc.), the in-game arena has been condensed.  The decision was reached because the game was not playing as fast as was originally hoped-for in Fury Void’s development.  Now, planets, moons, and suns are closer together, while the bounds to the level are closer to the player’s spawn point.

Making the play-space even more crowded is the inclusion of stationary enemies.  A simple AI script was written and attached to the moons of the game.  The script rotates the moon to ‘look-at’ the player and fire a missile that way.  This ‘proof-of-concept’ demonstrates that stationary enemies are ready to be brought in-game at whatever time proper 3D models are created.  If the worst occurs (no 3D model is found or made), a simple block could serve the purpose of being an opponent for the player.

Look closely - you can see the missiles fly!

Getting to various menus of the game has been an uncertain pain for a long time.  Uncertainty lay with not being able to interact with the screen and the game doing nothing visible while the application was loading; this was not allowable, as some load-times could be many seconds.  Loading screens now handle the visual aspect of the game while the game progresses.  Fury Void no longer leaves the player alone, and this will make debugging and playing the game much smoother (not to mention more fun).

The last QA session held exposed many terrible issues embedded.  One of those would be the lack of audio being produced from the game.  Not a thing played; music and noises didn't utter a thing.  Such an issue eventually was discovered to have been because one of Team Fury’s members had uploaded their preferences for Unity without reason to.  Changing those preferences brought the booms and drums of Fury Void back to the enjoyment of both the developers and the players.

When playing the game, only one level could be played at a time.  When player health drops to zero or below, the game will kick the player out to the main menu.  If the player ship would have been destroyed before going to the main menu, the next time would kick the player out again, as the ship’s health would be lowered again and again.  Thus, whenever the main game level is loaded, the persistent variable that represents the player health resets.  A simple fix this was, but an important one indeed.

Speaking of in-game features, in-game ships can be changed at the player’s convenience.  Fury Void has always been pitched as a game with a certain level of customizability, and altering the game ship is but on feature that’s a must.  Therefore, with half of Team Fury working on the task, a half-dozen different ships can be chosen from to pilot in-game.  The selection can be expanded, but the Team’s time resources are currently being directed elsewhere.

Along with having custom features, Fury Void has always sought the inclusion of game-ending black holes.  A simple script was written for such an object; testing showed that the functions of the code worked.  To continue the development of black holes, suns were tested to make sure they spawn the objects, and that worked, too.  However, further development of the game feature is needed, as when the black holes are brought into the game world, they don’t appear to attract worlds or moons or the player ship as they did in testing.  Additional updates to this feature will likely happen within a week of this writing.

Next, the issue of saving a game in progress, or at least the features of a player profile, has been brought up many times.  It is now in the works to get three available saves in-game.  Using a handy Unity Game Engine feature, the foundations have been laid to fully implement the save feature once it has been concluded what variables of Fury Void need to persist between games played.

In addition to the aforementioned stationary AI being put into practice, path finding AI have been developed.  Though this is a late development requiring much more work, simple blocks find and follow a randomized path in-game.  The AI enemies have yet to avoid planets or other stellar bodies, nor do they find and attack the player, but the fact that the groundwork is done is worth notice in Team Fury’s work.

Lastly, though such things have been mentioned before, explosions finally fully damage the player and other objects.  Exploding suns, planets, and missiles take their toll on the surrounding environment.  This feature truly helps bring forward one of the phrases of Fury Void: ‘Salvation by fire.’  Further investigations into the benefits of damage from explosions will be pursued come March’s Beta.

To end, Team Fury is busy to lock-down all current features, as by the time of February’s last week, no more features may be implemented.  After that, Beta is reached, with a full-force sprint to the end of the year, and the finalizing of Fury Void.  If there are any questions or comments about or for this game, please email furyvoidgame@gmail.com.  Until then, take care.

P.S. Find the previous report here, and stay tuned  for more to come!