#goo engine

[gootechnologies-blog]

Year 0 - The First Commercial Game Released On Goo's Technology!

Today Year 0 - an online massively multi-player strategy game - was launched. The game was created by Legendary Games, who says Year 0 “marks the start of the birth of HTML5 as a serious platform for creating games good enough to take on native language applications.”

Year 0 is the first commercial game created with Goo and can be played from any internet enabled device. “The enhanced 3D version of our game had become a pipe dream for us and we were preparing to launch in isometric 2D until we came across Goo,” says Ewan Lamont, CEO of Legendary Games. “It took us a couple of months to switch engine and we are certainly moving more than double the speed we were with the artists having loads more control and input.”

Building the game in Goo has made Legendary Games experienced users of the engine. “It is the best HTML5 engine I have ever used, it is in a class of its own at the moment. Integration was a piece of cake and the Art Pipeline is amazing,” says Adam Smith, Game Developer at Legendary Games. Sam Postans, Graphic Artist, says “The import and export process is really simple and user friendly. It’s quick and easy pipeline gives good control over art assets, materials, lighting and effects.”

Here Ewan Lamont tells us about how Legendary Games ended up using Goo:

"Using Goo has given us access to their full screen effects and excellent online editor that makes it possible for our artists to test and export scenes without needing coder involvement. We have received excellent support from the Goo team and are excited about the many genuine opportunities this engine will bring in the future.

Initially we planned on doing all the tech in-house starting with isometric games in and outside the canvas. We considered using Unity for fully 3D games but were keen to avoid a plug-in and use a fully HTML5-based solution, so we investigated three.js which was easy to work with and to get things up and running, but then experienced problems when we got to the animation. There was no real support for Maya exporting and skeletal animation was still fairly basic.

So we decided to move to Turbulenz, which was much more fully featured. However, Turbulenz has been designed to be used within their framework to create games for their portal, so we sometimes struggled to get our game working with it in the way we wanted. Although it was a good engine, it was not as intuitive to work with as three.js.

We then experimented with Goo, just to take a look and compare with Turbulenz. The tool and feature set was so good, and the engine so easy to work with, that we made the decision that it would be quicker and easier to switch development to Goo, as we were again running into difficulties with animation support. With Goo, our animations worked correctly without needing modification."

Year 0

“The War raged globally for a decade, gradually sweeping away the old order and replacing it with anarchy. With a final crescendo, it reached its cataclysmic finale, and only now have the ashes settled enough for the survivors to emerge from their underground bunkers once again.

In the aftermath a new age for humanity has begun. The world is a broken hellish version of its former self. By day the sun is visible as a faint ghost through the pall, a memory of golden promise. Rain spits black torrents from the heavens. Stagnant rivers reflect the hazy sheen in an inverted pall. Black trees morph and twist out of the hellish bracken.

No matter though, the bunkers are still operational. While scavengers forage the ruins of civilisation for anything that might ensure another day of survival, mechanised factories continue to provide sufficient material to ensure death at high velocities. There isn't much left, but it is worth fighting for…

The War may be over, but the Battle has only just begun. It is Year 0.”

Year 0 can be played in open beta on Facebook and is also available on the Legendary Games portal. Try it out now!

[chaozagent]

Remaking Serilda's Model. I've got a bit more work to do before it's done, mostly rigging the jacket and the hair.

[jacksanity]

Received the account information in order to use Goo Create, their cloud-based modelling environment. In first thoughts I thought it to be a smooth platform that reminded me of a simplified Unity 3D environment. It was EXTREMELY simple on first glance, it seemed like a great place to test out modelling concepts and such, all the while in relatively any browser.

Although I won't be interacting with this side of the Goo Engine in too much depth, I am sure it is not only simple, but advanced in it's deeper end. I have little experience with modelling and rendering so I didn't venture too far into the program but I'll await Anais and Scott's interpretation.

I think it's pretty good feeling to be able to work with something so new and can't wait to start to formulate a working prototype.

[gootechnologies-blog]

Goo Crazy: 4-week Challenge

Today we are announcing Goo Crazy: 4-week Challenge. Our Goo Engine alpha developers have been invited to participate in a challenge where their projects created using Goo Engine get judged by a jury of representatives from the tech and games industry.

Entries can be submitted here in this blog post, and we will reveal more information about the jury in the coming weeks. The deadline is on October 20th.

If you still do not have access to Goo Engine, it is due to us still being in Developer Alpha. If you are a developer, or someone in your team for the challenge is a developer, e-mail Sara and let her know. That way we can give you early access so that you can participate in the challenge.

[jacksanity]

Working with Animations and Game Code

I've been working on altering the game code to introduce visuals through the use of a FSM (Finite State Machine). This was extremely troublesome at first, the Goo API is horrific and did not demonstrate any of the functions used by the FSM or how to alter them. I had to make use of the Development console to navigate around the engine code. Eventually I got a product that I wanted, the cards are being placed into a state of "ZoomedIn" when they are picked by the Mouse (clicked by raycasting). When you stop zooming, by clicking the card again, it returns back to it's position. This was a hard to arrive at stage but eventually it proved to be worth it as the final look and feel is fluid and responsive. An issue that arose was that the FSMs for each created card entity were all identical and so changing one produced a change in all the others, this was the one hurdle that took the most time, but eventually was flattened.

[jacksanity]

Goo introduced 2D Graphics into the engine, which are A MUST in our card game. Displaying the GUI, card attributes etc. require a form of 2D Graphic.

The issue in integrating them into our game was that our engine code did not support the canvas that is required for the 2D Graphics to function correctly. I solved this earlier today after a few attempts and it seems to be working fine. I am extremely glad that updated modules such as this, timeline, etc. from GooTech are all easy to integrate as other things have been a bit more difficult.

[jacksanity]

Code issues, errors, etc.

During the week I met up with Connor to go over the complexity of the Goo Engine and the bugs I was encountering. At about this point Goo announced their update to include scripting in the Create environment. I'm not sure how this affects our work but it's going to be a plus either way if it works well. I managed to get the ResourceLoader code correct and it theoretically should have functioned pretty well inside it's basic array but Goo didn't like the port and gave me an error on all runtime tests. This motivated Connor to develop the EventHandler ahead of Schedule and allow for us to start sticking with a template and inserting the code correctly. It took him a long time to work out the correct way and I'm glad he figured it out cause after all my work I didn't manage to.

[jacksanity]

Simple environment test in the Goo Engine.

[jacksanity]

This Friday we presented our viability plan (through digitalising the game) and the issues/profits from using a virtual game rather than a physical game. We got a lot of good constructive criticism from the desk-crit. I took a long time on Friday to look at some gameplay of popular virtual card games, such as Hearthstone. Key effects such as popping, blinking and the jumping of cards on actions (to show activity and enhance visuals) were visible throughout matches and multiple times on turns. The game was more real-time reactant than ours hopes to be, (all players see every event as it's done), whereas we plan on turns to be organised and then put forward at the end of the turn for all animations to be transmitted to the other player. (separates the GUI action code from the server code and allows simpler event handling for replays etc.) After the presentation we sat down with key points in mind: allocation of tasks for the agile wall, front-end and back-end task separation and further visual thoughts on the GUI/Environment. As a side note we also introduced our 7th member, Jay Kiely who is a Sound engineer with side skills in visual design and game design. The next objective was to organise what the Card class would consist of and how it would interact with the abilities put forward by each card (as they are very distinct from each other, but have small commonalities in their active abilities). The task was allocated over the next 2 weeks to design, develop and theorise how to best develop the back-end of the cards and their abilities in order to insert into the Goo Engine. This will all be done in the Javascript and then hooked into the assets produced by Goo create. I'm not a huge fan of Javascript, but the simple aspects of it should help in faster development, even if it does mean sacrificing efficiency as well as longer testing phase lengths.

[jacksanity]

Goo Technologies - HTML based engine

This seems like a great new tool to put forward our new game onto, not only is it new but it's giving incentive to it's developers to produce via the Goo platform. Although it's currently in Beta, I see it as a really good looking engine that would make a great place to work on our M.A.D. card game.

I'm waiting on the invitation to start using the software but I'm sure that will be given shortly as Tom is in contact with the head of the technology.

[gootechnologies-blog]

Goo Talk At Sthlm.js Meetup

Sara from the Goo community team will be speaking about Goo Engine at the sthlm.js meetup hosted by Netlight on the evening of Oct 2.

The tickets get booked out pretty quickly (usually in 1 minute) so if you're interested in listening to her talk, make sure to grab one at 15.00 sharp today!

More more info and to grab a ticket click here.