Archive for June, 2011

Hello minions!

Today, in the first proper ‘Trash from the Past’ insight, we will look at something called “ShadowMoon”. This was a strategy game we were planning back in 2001. We went so far as to develop 250+ fully skinned and animated units, 50+ buildings, HUD, and even began sounds. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an engine or anything. We just made all this stuff, with basically no direction. So, from about mid 2001, to early 2002, we made all this content for ShadowMoon. So without further ado, here is a look at some of the stuff:

Important note: The screenshots were made in Photoshop, in an attempt to make what would look like a screenshot. We took shots of the units and objects from the angles, and then pasted them over a mock terrain and added some FX:

The alien race, the Gronkyt’s, take on the medieval Ancients:


The mysterious Dark Hunters battle it out with the Pirates:

In the game, players could choose one of six races. There were three futuristic, and three ancient factions:

UHA: A race of humans from the future, possessing advanced technology.
Jorgon: An advanced alien race of robotic and organic structure.
Gronkyt: The old squishy aliens, which came in large numbers.
Ancients: Medieval humans possessing rudimentary magical abilities.
Pirates: Vicious sea-faring pirates with a taste for crude implants.
Dark Hunters: A race of forest dwelling creatures with strong magical abilities.

The brutal Gronkyt’s try to fight off an attack from the UHA:


A skirmish erupts between the robotic Jorgon and the Dark Hunters:


The noble Ancients encounter a force of barbaric Pirates:


A detachment of UHA troops tries to get the better of a force of Dark Hunters:

So that’s it for the first of the series. Keep checking in for more insight into our past efforts, including more on ShadowMoon.

A great way to start off a blog is with a good, meaty story. Well, how’s this for meaty; Rooks Keep gore!

Chess is a nice clean polite sort of thing, so natrually Rooks Keep, a game mostly about Chess, is brutally violent and completely drenched in blood and viscera.

So thats what I’ve been working on lately. I’m creating a set of decent preliminary gore effects and doing some crazy code shit to get them into the game and appearing in the right ways.
In Rooks Keep, we are using various types of gore effects. We’ve got particle effects, gib meshes, decals on surfaces and material effects on the characters (chess pieces). Each of these works differently, but they all work together to satisfy your gruesome appetites.
One difficulty when working on gore for this game is that there are severl different characters and they all have different weapons and attack styles. The pawn stabs his enemies with a spear, the rook smashes them with a hammer and the knight hacks away with a big old sword. There are also different death styles which every character needs to support such as decapitation, being stabbed and the horrific ‘bursting’.
Another major factor is that there is the possibility of custom chess sets which could have new types of blood. This means all these effects need to be organized and the code has to figure out what effects to play based on how that particular piece got attacked and killed. What we have now is register on each character that holds effects and has to choose the best effect to play based on the attack type. This system is still developing and changing as we add more effects.
With registration and selection sorted out on the code side, we also have to actually create all the effects for these different attack and death styles.

I’ll start with the particles. In Rooks Keep’s gore, their uses include:
-Blood splashes when weapons hit pieces
-Bleeding from injuries
-Blood dripping from weapons
-Slash blood sprays that result from slash weapons such as swords
-Gruesome decapitation sprays
-Gib drip trails
-Horrible explosive bursting

They can even be used for other less obvious effects. When combined with a depth masking technique implemented in the material, they can be used for efficient decals!

Sometimes to achieve some effects, particle systems are manipulated by code to produce dynamic results that fit the situation at that moment.
One example is with slash weapons where we make blood look like it was flicked by the swinging blade. The code determines the direction the weapon is swinging for the attack and then modifies the velocity of the particles to make the blood spray flick off in the same direction the weapon swings.

Well, that’s a start on the gore. Later on, I’ll cover more details and other aspects such as gibs and material effects.
As a matter of interest, do you think all this work necessary? Would you perhaps rather they had wooden swords and just lay down until the end of the match?

Greetings mortals!

So now that we have a nice shiny blog, I got to thinking; what about some of our old stuff? We’ve been making mods and even games *shudders*, since the mid-to-late 90′s. So in this particular line of news, we shall dig into our; Trash from the Past!

We will be updating this series with various bits of useless information on our old, often really old, works of… art.

So stay tuned for more from the RuneStorm archives.

Oh, and by the way. The above image was actually going to be used for piles of trash in the trunks of the cars from The Crucible’s RoadRage gametype. Sadly this sainted idea never made it into the final release, but there you are.

At last, here it is in all its glory: the RuneStorm blog!
But be warned, it’s not just any blog, no it’s a blood-red blog! There was nothing we could do about this because the coloring is just a reflection of the inevitable blood thirsty nature and killer instinct of this evil blog. It’s a vicious beast I tell you!
So, watch out for it, because it will be on the prowl hunting for any interesting stories that can be strained from the RuneStorm development machine.

At the mercy of time, we’ll be posting updates and all kinds of interesting info here about our projects and about RS in general.

Here is one breaking story right now for a start: RuneStorm finally has a blog!
It’s the promise of more frequent updates from us, so keep your eyes peeled for the vicious blood-red RS blog.