Archive for October, 2011

That’s right, there have been some big changes to Rooks Keep! The beasts set has been implemented in-game, the UIs are starting to look wicked and music is starting to go in, but the biggest change of all has been to the combat.
The combat system has been given a total overhaul so instead of having limited movement in 1vs1 combat, players will now be able to roam freely around the arena in third person and engage any number of enemies. This opens up lots of crazy new game possibilities including mass battles against many other players and bots, invasion game types and large team battle. BlackEagle is busy right now working on realizing these new gametype possibilities.

With this, player controlled combat is now the primary focus of Rooks Keep, putting chess into the backseat. If you can’t imagine how the game works, to try to give you a general idea of what exactly Rooks Keep is; basically, Rooks Keep is a bit like Unreal Tournament with swords!

Also not minor is that the Beasts have been added. This means there are now 12 characters in-game to engage in various flavors of brutal asymmetric combat.

Screenshots:

Don’t let the wild character colors frighten you, we’ll be attending to those as we go.
Also notice ShadowBlade’s new UI graphics compared to the previous shots of the UI I posted.

Greetings everyone!

I’ve not shown much of my own work here on the blog, but today I decided to render up some of the animations I’ve been doing for the Beast side in Rooks Keep.

These Beasts were much quicker for me than the ‘Knights’ side i’d already done. The Knights were the first real character anims i’d ever done (with the exception of some sequences for Crucible UT3). I had to get the hang of some of the more advanced rigging aspects, requirements for the engine and the game itself, and then finally tackle the animations themselves.

To start off with, here is the Pawn from the Beasts in action. You can see the walking(forward), parrying at various angles and some quick attacks on display here. Each piece in the game thus far, requires about 30 separate sequences for the combat system to look proper neat

And here is the Beasts Bishop doing his thing. Similar to the Pawn, he features moving(forward), parrying (which will probably also include some neat FX down the line) and some attacks.

I’ll post more short videos in the coming weeks, and try to document more of the goings on on my side