Games Pirates of Frontier's Reach

I'm posting this in the form of a twitch link because it far easier to stream and archive with twitch than to do everything through youtube. Sorry for the inconvenience but it's where I do most of my dev and progress streams for my team.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781860394

That having been said I'm looking for feedback on general gameplay. I've spent about a month on this project thus far so it's far from being in a fully playable state but I'd like to have a few extra sets of eyes on this to get some meaningful insights.

To give you all some back story, this project was born out of the frustration I have with the lawyers over at Lucasfilm. Lots of fan made projects have been shutdown and rather than extending an open hand with some kind of limited licensing agreement, it's just CnD letter after CnD letter. Understandably it's their business and their IP so I really can't fault them. But it made really think about what it would take to make something like a Rogue Squadron game akin to the fan remake that was shutdown some time ago.

For the past 6 years I've had this scifi universe that I've playing around with and writing stories in and so decided to make a rogue squadron like game. Ultimately I want to build more complexity into my game than what was available in Rogue Squadron, but the idea is still the same. More importantly however, I want this to be a game for people who want spaceships but who may not necessarily have the time for spaceships the way other games do spaceships.

Anyone who has any advance on pathfinding in 3 dimensions, it would be awesome if you could share. I've got something akin to a raycast LIDAR doing collision avoidance and waypoints handling large sort of macro movements across terrain right now but would be nice to have some idea of how to get better movement with regards to larger structures that simple collision avoidance just can't resolve.

Also, I'm possibly looking at multiplayer for both PvE and PvP and I've never done networking anything so any advice on where to begin with that would be appreciated as well.

PS. It is late where I am so I may not respond for some time. I will answer as soon as possible.

 

Here is a trailer highlighting some of the more action oriented gameplay as well as some of the in menu interactions. As you may notice, the parameters for each player selectable starship is growing and eventually that will translate in attributes the player can manipulate by swapping out various modules.

I'm taking the game into early access on steam to get more user feedback as I do not want to design this game in a vacuum and want to know what kind of things other people would like to see in it.

I also need help testing the tool set that I've developed that is intended to be used for rapid content creation to allow for weekly episodic missions to be created.

 

Showing off some of the secondary weapons players will unlock as they complete the campaign.

 

Starship line up so far. The first 3 ships starting from bottom left are the player flyable ships.

 

Staged beauty shot using game assets in the engine.

 

My apologies for the delay in communications. I have been, well, busy

The images below are all playable starfighters each with it's own cockpit perspective and third person perspective. The one in the middle is going into the next update.



The images below are all rendered in engine. Still working out the artwork some areas. I have to bounce between art and code so things get prioritized base upon criticality.




The images below here are from actual gameplay with the camera repositioned in the editor with gismos and UI elements turned off.









The loadout screen has been moved into the hangar bay and a new module system now allows for players to tweak some parameters of their starfighters performance.



Latest trailer.

 

We've recently begun to update the game to the HDRP. We're looking to have a June release but are unsure of when exactly it will happen in June. In the mean time here are some snaps from the engine.

 

Starfighters have been integrated into a shading pipeline that allows for a significant level of customization. This new shading system even allows players to save and load paint jobs between starfighters.

 

New cockpit instrumentation with as much relevant data as we can get is also on the way.

 

This weeks updated sees the return of an old starfighter with a new design. Additionally we've update our store front, released a new gameplay trailer, and an animated short that doubles as our Kickstarter announcement.

 

Progress has continued!

 

Interesting, not bad the last vid, keep going!

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/854860955/frontiers-reach