zaphod

Valve can exploit me any day.

it's called Zero Gear because a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, we made a list of a ton of different words and phrases and put them in a bag and mixed them up and that was the combination we thought sounded good

no next one until the game is released!

We recently got the 12th and last map before release put into the game. It is a little hard to appreciate how many maps we have made over the last 2 years, so I decided to put them all together in one graphic for visualization. on the game progress front, we are back to having closed private beta tests every week, and we hope to move to an open beta at the end on November.

that wouldn't be very hard to put into the settings at all, I will make a note of it.

I moved it a little closer, we will see how it feels during the next playtest. I have also been fine tuning the amount of rotational dampening on the karts in order to cut down on the flipping out, to make the karts a little less fragile when bumping into things.

Here are a few clips from some playtesting of the race game mode that we had the other day. There are some new features in these clips, including mouse looking/aiming and hopping. The other major change to race mode has been our experimentation with awarding boost to the players, which has increased the fun factor by keeping players close enough together to use Zero Gear’s unique brand of close and personal physical weapons.

I should make a related thread: "5 Years Later: How to break out of the games industry - an outsiders' guide"

Just wanted to pitch in and say that I totally dig the art style in this one.

I remember getting a couple grand way back in the counter-strike days. I wonder if it has gone up or down since then. Still, the much more valuable thing is to be able to list it in your portfolio Grats insta!

not really always, but you can at least influence it to land upright and we have tweaked it enough so that you usually stick the landing. That is one of the things that has taken a while to tweak over a long period. When you are fully simulating physics, you have to try and coax it into doing what you want using a bunch of little tweaks rather than what most kart games do which is just have a faked simulation that only handles the kart moving along a rack exactly how they wish with no room for deviation.

I made a short video this morning showing off one of the weapon items we have had working in the game for a little bit, but have never fully shown off. Here is my little description of how the weapon works:

yea, that is pretty much the universal feedback we have gotten - we are actually working on adding that as we speak *edit* the sound and particles, not the whole stunt system (don't be alarmed Warby and Sentura)

here is a quick video I made this weekend after we implemented the idea of being able to control the rotation of the kart once it is airborne. It only took a few hours to add and it adds a much greater feeling of control instead of just watching your kart tumble around a lot. Now you have more of a chance to orient yourself into a nice landing.

i don't know this doesn't sound like locking it down or polishing core mechanics ... Well, I can't program so either I can sit on my hands and do nothing or I can keep creating assets (that will still function in the game whether we get to making a new game mode or not) while the programmers bring some of the core performance and tech of the game up to speed.

believe me, it's not feature creep. It's "need a functioning game before we can release it". The majority of our work is going towards getting core systems running correctly. For more insight as to what we are actually spending time on, here is a twitter feed with snippets of our project tracker: http://twitter.com/zgtracker How many games have you seen with awesome nice looking screenshots and then when released are barely function buggy messes? Screenshots and videos are not really an accurate indicator for how close a game actually is to done. Believe me, we are the ones that want this out ASAP more than anyone else, it is coming out of our pockets every month it's not out.

here is an update of a map I have been working on, I am hoping we can create an entirely new stunt gameplay mode that will track rotations and such to identify barrel rolls, flips, airtime, etc. Kind of like tony hawk meets karts. My brother the iPhone dev is switching over to ZG to help us script stuff for the next few months so we will be jamming full speed on those kinds of things. Clicky for big.

this guy (Adam Saltsman) also put out the library he created to make all these 2d flash games. It is basically an IDE to create them without using the flash IDE at all: http://flixel.org/

I am confident our gigantic legal dept here at NimbleBit would crush puny Microsoft and Sony.

well, I am glad we didn't waste any time looking into porting ZG to consoles - apparently this is the year of the kart game.

I have been working on some new custom items, and I decided to see what it would look like to string together all the items we have in the game at the moment into one image for fun:

just finished texturing a new char:

So, I have been talking a little bit more with my partner about this since I was surprised about the strong reaction to the idea here. Another one of our goals with this game is to encourage a lot of user generated content, whether it is custom characters and karts - or even full blown new game modes and levels. My only experience with attaining a large enough interested group of people to facilitate that is either with a mod, or something else you can develop with for free - or a community built around a few very popular AAA games. I am pretty sure we can't count on being in the latter category, so having a free version to expand our community would really help drum up interest in user developed content I think. Which would be great for us, since an entire community working on the game is going to be a lot more exciting than 2 people. I think that our goal is actually exactly the example you post above Skjalg, we want people to tell their friends to just download it and try it out with no barriers - and to have fun. While they are having fun though, there should be some very obvious things going on - like seeing everyone else in the game rocking awesome looking characters and karts, and people unlocking achievements, etc. that it is clear you are missing out on those things. If you are playing for free and you see your friend who got you to try it out doing those things, I would hope it would be enough incentive to register the game. Free weekends are a cool idea, I just think that making people wait a few months to be able to check it out would leave more people to forget the game by then instead of checking out what the game is all about right away. I also think there are some cheapskates that will never buy the game no matter what, and I would rather have them fill up servers to make the games fun for other people than have them not play at all.

That is why it is so hard to figure out what you might be able to limit or not without pissing people off. Personally I am most in favor of limiting cosmetic things like not being able to customize your character, not being able to have the name you want, etc. Things that wont be frustrating, but that most people that end up liking the game would probably want to be able to do. You also have to consider what increased exposure the game might have by having a free version that might allow you to sell more copies as well. If there is no reason not to try the game whenever you want, I would have to imagine there would be a much larger word of mouth factor.

I was hoping that the restrictions for free players wouldn't need to be so obviously game-play stunting. I wouldn't have much fun playing against people who were really obviously handicapped. Here are some of the ideas for restrictions I/we have: -can access garage but not save new characters (you will always have the default character, but you can see how cool of a character you COULD have) -limit some settings like resolution / custom key configuration -free players have less priority when joining servers -free players have pre-generated name perhaps ("Cheapskate4938") -free players have no access to steam overlay? (friends / web / community) -could do something drastic like make free players have a second or 2 delay to fire weapons when pressed, I feel that dumbing down the game might reflect negatively on whether they enjoy the game enough to buy it though. Overall, we would really like people to still have fun playing the game, with the obvious showcase that you could be accessing a lot more features if you plunk down 10/15/20 bucks.