A Chip Odyssey

I don't know how many of you remember the movie Snakes on a Plane. I never watched it, but then again I never felt like I needed to. I already know what's going to happen. It's in the title, right?

Over the last decade or so of planning this game I've had one burning question: Is Chips vs Seagulls a bad title? Or a great one?

Anyone familiar with the greatest poem ever written would instantly recognise the following words, penned by the great Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1833:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Oh that the modern world would know a hero like Odysseus once more!

Now, a potato chip on its own is far from great, nor heroic, and will certainly yield to a great many elements, nevertheless, against all odds our carbohydrated protagonists have the strength- nay, the will, to embark on an epic journey - an odyssey - to strive, to seek, to find, and to take back their island and drive their foe to distant lands or death itself.

So what do you think about 'Seagulls: A Chip Odyssey' as a new name? Too much? Not enough? Just right?

Now, a name on its own is no good, so here's an update on what else I've been working on:

Game Design

I've given some thought as to how to balance the major divide between one character type effectively having super powers (it can fly), and the other being, well, tiny. I'm testing out various aspects of level design to encourage chips to move into the big open spaces where they would be at a disadvantage without it getting frustrating as they each get picked off by hungry beasts. A couple of things in the pipeline are: seagulls aren't a team- they're hungry individuals, whereas chips are safe in groups and can work together; and seagulls have certain character traits that are.. bewildering.

3D Navigation and AI

This one I put off for a while because its a massive technical hurdle I need to solve. It's not relevant in a multiplayer game, but if I make a single player option, the player chippy is going to need seagulls to fight.

In most games, NPCs (that's non-player characters for those of you not playing at home) move around on a navigation mesh which is a fancy two-dimensional grid that defines where they can and can't walk, as well as where they can and can't walk to from where they are. Game engines solve the pathfinding of these NPCs by running some fun mathematical algorithms over these navmeshes. Very similar to how Google Maps works out how to get you to the right location in the quickest time possible, even if you've never been there before.

Most games, including many with flying creatures, use a 2D navmesh. All those scary dragons in Skyrim that fly around singeing your backside are really just moving along the ground same as you, only their visible mesh is pushed up into the air. The problem with this approach for Seagulls is that I intend to have lots of vertical spaces and obstacles for the birds to fly up and over and through and around, and a 2D navmesh simply won't support that.

Okay, so make it 3D? Not a trivial task. But it's what I'm doing. If you're interested, which most of you aren't, look up octrees on Google. An octree is a graph-based data structure that consists of subdividing a cube into 8 parts, and then recursively doing so to map out a 3D volume. From there, you have a graph that can be traversed by a pathfinding algorithm, but its a much more involved one than its 2D cousin, and I failed one of my uni maths courses twice so..

Environment Art

Last month I participated in the ArtStation challenge called "Dragon's Rise: The Forgotten Realms". I spent a lot of time creating an ocean shader (fancy graphics word for code-that-makes-stuff-look-good) that with a few tweaks will suit what I have in mind for the island. I also tested out a few different asset pipelines for creating environment pieces like boulders, cliffs and buildings. It was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to start putting together the island that our heroes call home with original, non-prototype assets.

So I went from updates once a week to 6 months. It got a little worrying that each week I posted an update but felt like not much had changed, so I'm going to space them out a little from now on, so you don't all unsubscribe because you're sick of only hearing the anti-seagull propaganda and are wondering if you'll ever get to join the fight.