Dawn Earth Episode 1 - IndieHex Studios

[IndieHex]

UPDATE: Game is now available on OUYA!
OUYA version has a different HUD than the one on the videos. Ship also rotates instead of being "stuck" to the camera as on the videos.

New HUD:
NewHUD.jpg

Thanks for all the useful feedback received on this forum.

Dawn Earth is a 3D space shooter, this is the first of a series of "episodes" based on the (yet to be published) book "A Story about Stars and gods".

The year is 2175, the world is in the brink of nuclear war when an unknown alien species invades the planet.All cities are turned to dust, the few survivors are trying to escape Earth and go to a colony in hopes to survive.Your mission is to help these survivors escape with the hope to strike back at the aliens and retake our planet.

Developing episodic games allow for continuous release of content. Staying true to the free-to-play concept of OUYA, we plan to keep all content free with optional upgrades through the store.

Features:

- High-definition graphics and sound, pushing the limits of OUYA's Tegra 3 chip.

- Fully orchestrated soundtrack and 3D sound to take advantage of the console's 5.1 surround sound.

- Running on the powerful Unity 3D engine.

- Translated into English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Chinese (Test of multilingual support on OUYA pending).

Expected release date April 2013.

Dawn Earth Trailer:



Gameplay video (PC-version, but OUYA will look very similar):

[Outlander999]

The game seems very good, but explosions are terrible.

Ships instead of break and explode are simply vanishing... I suggest you to work on that for the next patches

p.s.
however the game deserve to be bought

[zamzarvideo]

The game seems very good, but explosions are terrible.

Ships instead of break and explode are simply vanishing... I suggest you to work on that for the next patches

p.s.
however the game deserve to be bought

I also noticed that... Everything looked great but the explosions seemed off.

Also, the ship being completely still in front of you was a little off-putting for some reason. Any way to figure out how to make it wobble slightly in a way that is less discomforting?

[IndieHex]

Thanks for the comment. During testing we found that moving the ship while also allowing the space to rotate made it a bit awkward to shoot. What we are exploring is to integrate different cameras so that the player can select one that is most comfortable.

[JCPRuckus]

Thanks for the comment. During testing we found that moving the ship while also allowing the space to rotate made it a bit awkward to shoot. What we are exploring is to integrate different cameras so that the player can select one that is most comfortable.

Looking good so far... However, I have to agree about the camera. It's not that the angle is a problem. It's that the camera feels like it's on an invisible stick attached to the ship instead of following the ship independently. You just need to let the ship roll, pitch and yaw just a little before the camera moves to catch up. At that camera distance it should feel like another plane that's just a split second behind in mirroring your moves.

[IndieHex]

We are experimenting with different explosions that does not increase the "poly-count" and cause lag. Definitely that is something that will get tuned as we play with OUYA's capabilities. That is also another reason we broke up the game into episodes so that we can iterate and make it better, especially as OUYA is planning on releasing new hardware each year.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

[BlackCrackerStudios]

We are experimenting with different explosions that does not increase the "poly-count" and cause lag. Definitely that is something that will get tuned as we play with OUYA's capabilities. That is also another reason we broke up the game into episodes so that we can iterate and make it better, especially as OUYA is planning on releasing new hardware each year.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Indie what software are you using for your 3d models. Blender has a nice cell fracture option I've messed with basically allowing you to break into as many pieces as you want. Of course I was not messing with models as detailed as yours

[IndieHex]

Indie what software are you using for your 3d models. Blender has a nice cell fracture option I've messed with basically allowing you to break into as many pieces as you want. Of course I was not messing with models as detailed as yours

3D Models in Maya and Blender. The cell fracture option of Blender is indeed really nice. The challenge is to render on the same scene particles/smoke from the explosion while still retaining the polys of the model without taking a hit on the framerate. It is a bit tricky to make this balance when going into mobile GPUs, but will look for ways to add something like this. Thank you very much for your suggestion.

[Dreamzle]

Looks like a new Wing Commander game, I'm in!

[IndieHex]

Now that the game will be published on console it is possible to play with camera settings, will be looked at for future updates. These are all very good comments, thank you.