Here is a quick set of teaser shots from my development sandbox... I think it is amazing how immediately recognisable the space craft, humanoids and aliens are. Nice work Brad!
At the moment the entire play area is an infinite square of procedurally generated landscape.
You can swing the ship around to face any direction in 360 degrees and fly forwards across the landscape.
When you fly off the edge you seamlessly come back on the other side, so although you are in a fixed play area it seems to go on forever. So exactly like Defender, except you can fly around in a 360 degree arc.
It feels silky smooth on everything down to an original iPhone. I also have a bare 2D version with a landscape more like the original in Defender made out of cubes similar to those of the enemy ships. But I think that will look too simplistic. I will however be developing a pure 2D version alongside this version moving forward also. If anything perhaps as an easter egg for the main game...
Ultimately I think what I am going to end up doing is making the landscape a gully running from left to right, kind of like the Grand Canyon, with any foreground elevations transparent, so we get a feeling of speed and parallax, but also depth to the play area. Instead of having the freedom of movement in 360, you will basically only go left or right, and perhaps have some control over 3 or 4 lanes of depth you can move forward or backwards in, as well as elevation. So kind of like LBP. At the end of the day the controlling factor for those decisions will be based on gameplay feedback. Too much freedom and it's going to be hard to aim at anything.
Our ship hugs the landscape at the moment. So you can't crash. On the original you could fly through the landscape. Obviously that won't work for us. So the idea I am working with is we hug the landscape, but can lift off from it to gain altitude. If you are carrying humanoids and come down hard towards the landscape as you bottom out you drop them back to the ground again. Again, feedback on that idea is welcome. It's the best solution I could come up with so far. But when you zip over the landscape and the ship follows the contours it feels great on my iPod! When I make a video you'll see how tight you can bank the ship, it tilts as you turn and you can whip around almost on your side, like you are in a jet fighter. That almost makes me want to keep the 360 steering in. But it takes a lot of getting used to. Especially when you are flying towards yourself. Feels great though!!
The Palm Trees, are just a bit of whimsey. We'll have something else for ground features. But whatever they are you'll be able to frag them also. On, and the landscape is theoretically destructible. So I am planning to have big explosions darken it and dent it as you progress on a level. The code for that is all done as the landscape is generated on the fly from a big database in memory. All the moveable objects in game have a coordinate that maps directly to the landscape height map, so it's easy to deform the landscape around them when they explode.. Should be quite impressive to behold!
On newer devices, if the water stays in (it's a just a rudimentary transparent layer right now) then it will be reflective. I also have a whole host of starfield, and lighting effects to go with a range of different other worldly sky boxes, like the yellow one I am using right now. So we'll have different colours terrains, and skies. So think, post apocalyptic Earth, Mars, Asteroid etc. etc.
If you want to test early versions then PM me the UDID of your iPhone / iPod or iPad and I'll include you in builds in the coming week or two.
This weekend my main task is experimenting with controls and shooting stuff, and also doing the conversion from models to cubes for explosions so everything explodes in fragments and bounces on the landscape. I'll also be tweaking the abduction logic for the landers so we can see that stuff working.
There are / will be lots of particles and flares, like the ones which look like a little glow under the landers. They will be tweaked as I go along. But rest assured this will be a fragment fest! For example, if you look closely at our ship we have a cockpit glow. I'll be adding lots of bits like that, so that things like the bright yellow points on the pods pulse and glow also.. Just to add some feel to it all overall. Also the particles from the landers and our ship are all single point particles, and just placeholders at the moment. Expect them to get bigger, softer, and to have more weight and relevance to them as I tweak stuff also.
I also have someone working on remastering the original Defender SFX so they are re-imagined for 2010, but still sound like the arcade game....
Feedback is welcome on the limited pictures I have put up so far. Bear in mind it's early days, and this will get more tidy, and more pretty in the coming week... I will also try to put up a video of gameplay and some more screen shots here in the next 48 - 72 hours.
I have been busy with a WWDC project, and another overdue project, so am fitting this in in the weekends, and evenings. So most big changes will come over weekends in the coming weeks.