I'm hoping to do a 2nd reboot of this project at some point... there's a new version of Torque2D on the horizon that will support true real-time networking. I'm thinking about holding out until that is released.

Definitely some ideas still floating around in my head... this project is like my Duke Nukem 3D. I keep releasing other games but I'm never sure what to do with this one!

Right, I was leaning toward on-screen buttons. So here's a little bit of background for this:

I've been advertising Xeno Versus on this forum for, amazingly, years. It was close to publication at one point before a shakeup at GarageGames changed how they handled their game store in Fall '07. Discouraged, I went simpler and released 3 PC board games from my site just to learn the indie biz...

In Fall '08, I felt I needed to get back to my melee game. Interestingly enough, however, a little side project of mine gained a lot of attention. I had enabled 'mode7' in TGB, thus opening it up for games like Mario Kart, F-Zero, etc... So around January, at the alpha stage of Xeno Versus, I switched gears and cranked out the TGB Kart Kit which is now published with GarageGames.

Of course, I felt the kit needed to run on the iPhone... so to learn the ropes of porting to it, I first ported Mini Shogi... and somewhere along the lines I started calling this stuff a business and registered as Cascadia Games. Whew!

Mini Shogi is, by itself, going to bring in more money than my PC games combined sometime in the next month. And I have a couple other ports to iPhone underway... which brings me back to Xeno Versus. Do I release on PC / Mac? As coded, the game wouldn't port well to iPhone. But I'm not sure the money is in PC games to justify the time to finish the game.

So... what about a "mode7" melee on the iPhone? Perhaps in the vein of Wing Commander Arena?

Anyway, apologies for the mega post! I just wanted to explain where I'm at for those who've followed the Mega Thread about Xeno Versus!

Howdy folks.... long time no post. As you can imagine, my belove StarCon clone, Xeno Versus has been stuck in perpetual alpha for months now. The reason actually was because I got a publishing contract with Garage Games for a kit I developed... it helps people make racing games on the iPhone. That caused me to shelve XV while I finished up the kit.

Anyhow, I've found the iPhone to be a better source of income than PC. So I've started thinking about how a melee game would work on it. Tilt steer? A small interface, etc?

Any ideas?

You can absolutely try it. I've got an alpha version up for anyone to try here: http://xenoclone.com/project_xenoversus.html. 

I'd love to get your thoughts on it.

@Dragon. Yup, that's easy to make an option. Right now the D-Pad works that way.

@Shiver: I don't think there will be net play. I'm *slowly* building up what my games can do. Maybe next one!

Hopefully more people can check it out and let me know their thoughts. I've had a decent traffic surge, but not much input....

As promised, something playable this month. Go to: alpha.xenoversus.com to download the game. As a thank you, if you fill out the form on the site letting me know your thoughts, you can pick a free game key to receive for any of my released games. There are still some obvious bugs in this version, but I really wanted to get a copy out there for folks to try out. Thoughts are obviously welcome in this thread as well.

Note that if you want two players on a local machine, you'll have to plug in a game pad. Torque appears to dislike having too many keys pressed at once. So as a precaution, for the time being, I've limited the keyboard to only one player.

Thanks!

I think the really depressing part is how set everyone is in their ideas. I could easily play a well scripted game with Ur-Quans as main antagonists, allies or shattered fractions (i.e both). But  everyone seems to feel that theirs is the only possible way the game could be any good. I guess that is why Team Beige eventually fell apart.

I think this is why I like the "side plot" idea. You can avoid general trends (Ur-Quan as allies) and instead can do an isolated event. Rogue fleets that must join up to fight a common threat. Or a local wrong must be righted, etc. If a story was more on the scale of a "terrorist attack" instead of "Galactic War 3", then I'd presume *fewer* people would be offended.

Impressive. Within the last half-dozen posts, you guys have perfectly illustrated why there will never be a fan sequel to SC2. Nobody can agree on what makes a worthy follow-up plot. I think this says more about the quality of TFB's storytelling than anything else; with any luck, Alex's map stunt has generated some attention.

Haha. I suppose with the benefit of instant interest comes the liability of everyone having their own ideas. I suppose if I were to do a SC fan-game, I'd do something similar to how I'm implementing Xeno Versus. That is, a real short plot directly integrated into the melee game and no RPG adventure. Small side plots have less risk of upsetting people.

Rigid body physics are indeed still in place. I've actually put in mass / inertia factors into the current version as well. As a result, the little yellow bullets won't knock a big ship back very far. But something like a big blade will knock back a little ship pretty good.

The backgrounds are all done by my wife, who used Photoshop.

Excellent progress is being made... I'm feeling good about getting something up and playable soon.

Standalone ship tutorial prompt, shown below.

This is looking cool! If there's one thing I think the world has a distinct shortage of, it's good space melee games. If you think about how many Street Fighter style games are out there, it's amazing so few came out of the genre Spacewar pioneered.

Here's a pre-alpha youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLbVU-XIs-k

I thought I'd post a four-weeks-later update. Things are going really well. I managed to integrate in a nice fuzzy logic class into the engine, which has helped make a smooth and challenging AI -- MUCH better than the AI of old. Two ships are done and a third ship has been started. I've already integrated a number of effects, sounds, music, etc...

I made one change-up from my plan. After a bit of play-testing, the teleport didn't seem necessary for all ships. So instead each ship gets a third ability, which I've dubbed "defense." It has helped ensure the ships stay balanced. The "Scarab" (shown above) plays fairly similar to a Kohr-Ah with cloak. While the "Razor" plays a bit more like a Suppox / Thraddash hybrid with mini-ships.

Sooo.... I'm not entirely sure when I can get a playable alpha up. Maybe within a couple weeks from now?

Well if the history of this thread shows anything, it's that I'm bad with time estimates. But XVS is playable right now with the two ships. So if things go well, there might be some sort of alpha/beta/demo type thing for people to try out. The biggest things left are content and balancing. And content plug-in should go fairly quickly, since it's mostly ship art and character art that needs to be wrapped up.

Open source? Probably not. But who knows how things will go?

Wow! It's been a while. So here's what's up. As promised, I re-ordered my projects. I've released Mini Chess, Xeno Sola, and Mini Shogi since my last post. You can find them here. They were a great way to learn how the whole indie game dev process goes: creating an installer, generating activation keys, demo modes, getting reviewed, etc, etc....

So with those done, I've turned my attention back to the project. For starters, I rebooted the code from scratch with great results. It's only been about a week back on the project, but it's already got the basics in place. Here are a few pics:

I've had to make a few tough decisions in order to simplify development. Those include:

• 9 ships
• 3 ships per fleet
• 2 players
• 4 levels
• Levels will be boxed in; but all ships will teleport
• Only 1 resolution

On the plus side, the game will now be in 1024x768 resolution instead of 800x600. And the ships are 128x128 instead of 62x46.  Still undecided: the in-game health / energy HUD.

The next pics I'll post should have the finished HUD and some more ships. 

Thanks for the 'grats. Xeno Sola is starting to get a little bit of attention from indie sites. It should appear on gametunnel.com next month and on games du jour the month after that. There's been some apparent pirating going on already though....

Right now, things are starting to pick up again for Xeno Versus. We've got the art done for two more levels as well as a bit more character art. So I've decided to up my game and get the ships a little more detailed. (Power ups, as a result, probably will not affect ship appearance as much... if at all.) Old and new next to each other.

Razor


Scarab