Archive for the ‘Rooks Keep’ Category

It’s a dark, gloomy night, and more unsettling secrets are escaping the confines of Rooks Keep.

Perhaps you thought Rooks Keep was just Chess with some fancy moving pieces and gore?
Well, we’re pleased to squash those fears (or dreams) and introduce the other side of Rooks Keep, the fighting game! It will indeed feature an expansive, interactive combat mode, where players will take direct control of the pieces and fight in pitched battles for victory.


In a variety of game-modes players can battle through fights with interactive combat, using quick and slow attacks, parrying, dodging and counter-attacks to out-maneuver the enemy. Players will be able to engage in this fighting game during standard Chess, or simply play with traditional rules. The attacker will still have an advantage, but a skilled fighter may actually fight back against the attacker and if victorious, the opposition loses their piece.

Rooks Keep will offer a selection of game-modes, including, Arena, Chess and Tournament modes to test your fighting prowess and more. We’ll be sure to detail the various modes in due course.

So there it is! And just to be clear, Rooks Keep will feature traditional Chess, various fighting game modes, Chess with fighting and more. It’s more of a strategy/fighting game hybrid inspired by Chess and set in gothic universe.

Its 3:30 AM in the cold dark night and like any mad indie developer (or mad scientist), instead of sleeping, I’m hard at work on some diabolical creation.

This time, I’m crafting the grotesque creatures that hail from the darker recesses of Rooks Keep.
In Rooks Keep players will get a selection of chess sets to play as.
While our previous set of characters were all a bit cleaner and outfitted with metal suits of armor, these beasts have a different style. Their bulky bodies are bulging with muscle and while some of them use only their natural claws or blades. They all wear minimal armor and what litte equipment they do have is crude and worn.
If you stretch your mind a bit, you might notice that the monsters of Quake 1 lent an inspirational hand to their design.

BE WARNED: What you are about to see includes graphic representation of endevours not entirely finished, one might even call them work-in-progress…

Knight
This friendly customer is going to be the Knight for the beasts side. It will joyfully hack its oppoents with two big sharp implements.

As you can see it doesn’t have textures yet and the materials are not the most fancy. This is the high-detail sculpted mesh with about 8 million polygons. As you can see I’ve been having lots of fun with muscles and trying to get a reasonable skin on him.
We’ll be sure to post some updated shots when SB gets to work on the textures.

Here are some shots showing the early construction of the mesh. Now you can see how I used box modelling and took it from that initial, basic “box chicken” to the snarling beast at the end. I then stuck a piece of armor on top and moved on to the high detail work.



To get it to this stage took about 5 hours.
Here is a shot of the state it was in just before sculpting.

I did the armore and it’s straps in high detail and prepared the rest of the mesh for scuplting by applying smoothing. I also cut some extra loops into the teeth and spike to retain their shape when smoothed.

Ogre / Rook
And then there’s the next one! Right now, I am working on the brutish ogre that will be the Rook on the beasts side!
He’s not done yet. I am in the middle of sculpting my way through the various pieces.


As you can see I’m getting lots of practice on muscles. Its tough, but its getting easier. I think I am getting better at them with each mesh. What makes them even more fun is that there are slight differences on every reference I’ve got.

And for good measure, here are some earlier shots.

That is the LD mesh and the other is the other is the partial HD mesh just before going to sculpting. Notice how the hard ‘mechanic’ style parts have been detailed out while the organic pieces are just smoothed out.

Ok, enough for now. When I’ve finished this little bugger, I’ll fire off arender or two and post those along with some shots of the initial progression.

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?