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RC Laser Warrior Released!

Discussion in 'Made With Unity' started by Jonathan Czeck, Feb 26, 2008.

  1. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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  2. MatthewW

    MatthewW

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    Congrats on the release! The glare from the game's polish is amazing :D
     
  3. Alpha-Loup

    Alpha-Loup

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    God damn it... i cant stop :D This game simply rocks, fast paced, nice steering lots of fun and hell yeah one hell of an announcer. Nice Intro too. 5 of 5.

    Keep going!

    Back to game...

    Frank.
     
  4. drJones

    drJones

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    woohoo that's fun! such a nice polish to everything, can't wait to get my hands on that huge selection of cars. big congrats on the release - i was wondering who among us unity'rs was going to be the first to get a racing game on there ; )

    awesome jonathan

    : )
     
  5. boxy

    boxy

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    brilliant:)
    Boxy
     
  6. HJPuhlmann

    HJPuhlmann

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    I like it. Awesome Jon ...
     
  7. seon

    seon

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    very cool :)
     
  8. psychicparrot

    psychicparrot

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    Awesome game! Nice work ... I think it's the most kick-ass intro I've seen in an online game!!
     
  9. tbelgrave

    tbelgrave

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    This is a very good game, kudos on the release! As Matthew said, that's one serious spit shine wow! Nice voice btw

    P.S. damn you shockwave for not letting us go fullscreen!

    ~t
     
  10. Jessy

    Jessy

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    Who's the guitar player? I'm impressed.
     
  11. nickavv

    nickavv

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    :D That's awesome. Nice and fast paced. n_n
     
  12. forestjohnson

    forestjohnson

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    You guys did a wonderful job on this, I hope it does really well. Its really fun to play, even more so than the last time I saw it. I love watching cars fly around with rockets like crazy out of control insects emitting a nice smoke trail.

    I can go on and on about all the things in it that are pulled off really well but I won't, instead I will talk constructive crits as always :)

    Why does the old levels menu look different and not have trophies? I found this a bit weird. When I am tweaking performance attributes on the car, why can I drab all the sliders to the max? Shouldn't they have forced mirror relationships? I never noticed the effects of tweaking any car performance things in the game. I think you could make it a bit more clear how unlocking things works. I want more stats handed to me at the end of every race, like unlocking status (Even if it says "You didn't unlock anything" most of the time) and my warriorness percent.

    Is warrior mode just Time.timeScale = 1.3? If so that is awesome and I salute you :D
     
  13. HiggyB

    HiggyB

    Unity Product Evangelist

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    Well done guys, congrats!
     
  14. bronxbomber92

    bronxbomber92

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    Very nice game. You've got the car handling just right!
     
  15. aaronsullivan

    aaronsullivan

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    Everything else aside it is most importantly a very fun game. Great work and I expect a lot of traffic on it.
     
  16. AGhost

    AGhost

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    Really awesome job! I love how you have the countdown to new cars and tracks as it adds to the replay value (it makes me want to come back to see what the new track is in 1 day).

    I wasted a good hour and a half of coding time playing this.

    Just inquiring, what does you tool-pipe look like?

    AGhost
     
  17. forestjohnson

    forestjohnson

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    My dad played it on my eMac with radeon 7500 and it had some possibly bad fallbacks and did about 10 fps. Have you tested it on that bad of cards?

    It looks like the lightmaps are using the tiled texture coords instead of the second set, and without the lightmaps things are very poorly defined. Also, there is no vertex lighting. How many objects are in a typical level? Could it be draw calls that are killing it? Seems like fill rate and polys should be no problem at all.
     
  18. GWPGearWorx

    GWPGearWorx

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    Ok here is my 2 cents, very fun game, n2o is crazy fast ;) Spit N polish galore. Just awesome, awesome, awesome.

    Take care.

    Steve
     
  19. Aras

    Aras

    Unity Technologies

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    Yay! Congrats. The polish and the game overall went way up since TopDOG.
     
  20. Martin-Schultz

    Martin-Schultz

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    Very nice game! Well polished and plays really arcade like. Great job.

    What I'm asking myself: Does it pay off to publish on Shockwave.com? Is there money coming in from publishing games there? Couldn't resist to ask.. :)
     
  21. Dafu

    Dafu

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    This is great! Awesome work, congratulations.
     
  22. aaron-parr

    aaron-parr

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    WoooHooo. Lots of fun.

    Would be hilarious with a cutscene of the guys controlling those toy cars duking it out.

    Great work, and good luck.
     
  23. taumel

    taumel

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    Okay i'm not so much into these type of games but i like the intro as already written in another thread.

    On my first try it was more like a slideshow but after i reloaded the game, it went a lot faster with only some hickups here and there.
     
  24. 64746c

    64746c

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    This is the most polished game I've ever seen. It ran great on an Intel GMA 950 Macbook, and it was incredibly fun. It really had that console quality feel to it.

    Congrats!
     
  25. Lka

    Lka

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    WOW!! Great game and great music!!
     
  26. taumel

    taumel

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    I also would be interestd in why you went for a car game. Is this client work or was it your personal choice, with shockwave in mind? Anything to do with the discussion there once was that there aren't a lot of untiy car games?
     
  27. evicubix

    evicubix

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    i just tried the classic mode for 4 times and 3rd place is the best i can do :oops:
    very cool games, loves it so far :D
     
  28. drJones

    drJones

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    heh - can't answer for jonathan but for me at least that thread definitely caught my attention (probably others too, seems there's a more than a couple racing games being produced atm ; )
     
  29. Ricko

    Ricko

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    That is a really fun game. I can't stop playing it! Very well done!

    Ricko
     
  30. mgravelle

    mgravelle

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    Thanks everybody for the praise. :oops:

    We're seeing a huge flux of traffic this morning. We're at 9000+ people. Wonder why such a sudden jump?

    To answer your question, Taumel, it started with the Top DOG competition. We were tossing around original ideas . . . none of which we felt overly inspired by. So then we were like, "well, what to people on Shockwave want?" It was either a Diner Dash clone or a racing game. We choose racing and tried to make it as fun to develop as possible.

    Recording the movie guy's voice was probably one of the top 10 outrageously awesome moments of my life. :D

    - Matt
     
  31. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    15k+ now, yay. :) Currently the most played game at Shockwave. Just wanted to mention that... I have to go back to working for some other deadlines, now! Will respond more in depth later, but thanks for the kind words. :)

    Cheers,
    -Jon
     
  32. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

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    You guys rock!
     
  33. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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  34. drJones

    drJones

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    i have a theory about this - not really verifiable but maybe food for thought. it seems to me that, to an extent, popularity begets popularity. we've been watching shockwave for a while now and i've seen what is happening here many times before - a new game will debut and do so-so for a while and suddenly bam - massive jump in players, which then more slowly grows to a high peak.

    maybe coincidentally a large number of players try the game at the same time, pushing the player count past a certain threshold where suddenly people are much more inclined to see what all the hubbub is about - and it snowballs from there. (i'd estimate the tipping point is somewhere around 3k) speaking subjectively as a shockwave player, i know this is how i operate - if i go on there see a new game with 17k players you can bet i'm going to check it out regardless of what it is or what the review score says ; )

    how fun the game is how much content you offer will probably then decide how long that crescendo will hold before it tapers off into a more regular player base.

    of course maybe shockwave is just bulk mailing their users, or doing a press release - i don't know how it all works behind the scenes.

    : )
     
  35. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    It probably is from being linked on addictinggames.com, I'm thinking. Just realized that it was. 20k+!
     
  36. MatthewW

    MatthewW

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    Top 10 lists are definitely self-fulfilling. Congrats on breaking out!
     
  37. drJones

    drJones

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    haha probably - i would have thought it would be released on there at the same time, isn't one company owned by the other?

    congrats again, right up near 22k now ; )
     
  38. MatthewW

    MatthewW

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    Both are owned by MTV / Viacom, yeah.
     
  39. nickavv

    nickavv

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    I'm not digging the new car. It oversteers too much. :p But either way, I went and unlocked the mod kits for it just because its so fun.
     
  40. forestjohnson

    forestjohnson

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    I have a theory that no one actually goes to shockwave compared to the number that are linked from somewhere else, like addictinggames.com

    There is a link to RC Laser Warrior on the front page of addicting games, I bet thats where the traffic is coming from.

    Congrats on breaking through to some popular game lists!
     

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  41. Ricko

    Ricko

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    I wanted to be the 40,000th online player but alas I was only the 39,956 current player. WOW! Congratulations again.

    Ricko
     
  42. HiggyB

    HiggyB

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    Damn! Nice work guys, I *love* those numbers! :eek:
     
  43. bronxbomber92

    bronxbomber92

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    This games is completely awesome! I showed my friends, and they are completely addicted now :D

    I'd love to know how much income comes in from shockwave games. I'm interested in taking a similar approach, but I don't know if the time invest as a one or two man team would be worth it.
     
  44. drJones

    drJones

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    @ martin bronx

    i would love to hear it too (or at least what the shockwave CPMs are), but i think most portals make you sign non-disclosure agreements forbidding you from giving up that info.

    of course if jonathan starts driving around in a ferrari then we'll know ; P

    wait, are you saying you got THE movie guy to record that?
     
  45. Martin-Schultz

    Martin-Schultz

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    @DrJones: I have the contract stuff here from shockwave.com, but haven't found any NDA thing about the numbers. But maybe we hear in the near future a bit more about it. Guess our game is a hot candidate too for shockwave.com. :-D
     
  46. mgravelle

    mgravelle

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    No, it's not the movie guy voice (I think most people refer to Don LaFontaine as the voice). The guy's name is Greg O'Neill (imdb link: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0642176/) and is every bit as awesome. According to that link he's the voice of the Fox News Channel.

    Here's a fun movie-guy voice link, it may have been thrown out there before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRtuxdfQHw

    - Matt
     
  47. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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  48. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    Phew, finally have a moment to respond, here! Thanks for all the comments, criticism, and virtual high fives... this community rocks!

    A talented gentleman named Marc Pattison, as it says in the credits.
    We may add old levels menu having trophies. There was some technical reason before, and I have no idea, and then we just ran out of time. Unfortunately this project was only a side project most of the time. :) Sometimes if you drag the sliders to the max, it'll actually worsen how you perform in the race. And I'm sick of the speed/acceleration tradeoff being like it's written in stone in these kart games. I agree the end of the race needs more stats, or flare some how. It was a bit tacked on.

    You are 0.05 off in Warrior mode. :) It's 1.25 with slightly lessened gravity and harder AI.

    I thought about embedding a picture of a rusty pipe, but... A lot (most?) things were modeled in Blender. Most of the cars were modeled in Maya. Things were UV mapped in Blender. (Maya's UV tools really stink... there is probably an expensive plugin to fix that, but really...) Textures were done in Illustrator and Photoshop, CS3. It was all brought together in Unity, of course. :) I use TextMate as my editor of choice for now. Most scripts are written in JavaScript, with a large C# base of sitting in Plugins and tons of Editor scripts. Levels are composed of a bunch of prefabs that you arrange inside of Unity, that get serialized out to small files using a custom format. These get loaded and optimized and "lightmapped" on load, for download size concerns.

    I think we did test on an older eMac. It's most likely CPU bound, and it sounds like the fallbacks are functioning as intended, though perhaps there should be a better intermediate car fallback shader. Actually the only lightmap and 2nd set of UVs is on the floor, which is generated at load. Otherwise it's funky vertex color lighting baked at load combined with cubemap lighting. Not much is actually vertex lit. Believe me, I did a lot to optimize performance and download size in a lot of tricks, but there of course is probably stuff left to do.

    Yes, it does. :) It's of course all about volume and longer term, but so far we're very happy with working with Shockwave.

    I honestly don't remember. Probably "what hopefully would do well financially" did come to mind as Unity work is and has been our full time jobs for a while now. I know we decided to try and make something quick for Top DOG, and ended up with this idea or a bowling game.

    Racing games definitely have a history of doing well on Shockwave. Check out their racing games category for case studies:
    http://www.shockwave.com/online/racing.jsp

    Cheers,
    -Jon
     
  49. HiggyB

    HiggyB

    Unity Product Evangelist

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    I've heard it over-and-over-and-over from the guys at shockwave.com: racing games sell. They are constantly found in their most-popular list and have been for years.

    Once again, good stuff guys, I'm thrilled to see how much attention your game is getting! :D
     
  50. tbelgrave

    tbelgrave

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    Serious amount of fun Jonathan, and can i ask for a request? Can you assign the shift command to a button on a gamepad? I just tried this game with a gamepad and its loads more fun BUT I couldn't use any pickups :( using the left analog as throttle and braking is sweet!

    ~t