Tools For Aeolus

Here I will go over the tools and components we will be using in our engine for our game Aeolus. Really quickly our name for the game came from the Greek God of the Winds. It was initially a toss up between Fly For Pinks or Fight For Keeps because of the mechanic that will later be implemented into the game for it's online play where a player can battle online against other players and gamble the helicopter they use in the battle. The name was later changed to Aeolus because a decision could not be made at the name creation meeting and there was no dislikes for it.

Here is one of my quick rough sketches of the gameplay when playing in the campaign. In this image of the player's perspective you can see the player is trying to complete the objective to destroy a small airport using a variety of weapons that they have customized for their helicopter.  

There is a lot that is needed to have this become a functional game. Our team will have to put a lot of tools and components together to develop the game. Before I get into this, let me say a little more about the game so we know what components are required to complete such a project. So, our game's high concept is "A futuristic helicopter combat game. You’re a mercenary in an endless war. You can create your own helicopter, and gamble parts online.". That means our game will need to have a player, who can fight in this war since he's a mercenary. He must also be able to create a helicopter that he can fly and use to fight in this war. If the helicopter can be created he can probably also customize it so there will need to be a system for that too. And gambling parts online means there will be online, and another system that will handle player's helicopter's and parts. That's a lot of components.

So what do we need first? We need an engine to build this game. Which means we are going to need certain engine blocks to get this game up and running. Well it's great that our TA Saad has given us a framework to start with. This framework to the engine we like to call TwoLoc. This name came from a joke made by the previous year from us where everything can be done in two lines of code. The framework has a lot of the components we need for the game's engine such as Ogre, our rendering tool for displaying images on the screen and Havok, the physics tool used to handle all of the related physics in our game.

We still need to add other tools to this engine. One of the first tools we are going to implement is FMOD. This component to our game engine will give us the ability to play sounds in our game. We are also going to add Squirrel SQL into our game engine. This tool will allow our engine to read scripts which will be used for initializing game objects and gameplay. We hope to have as much game code done with scripts as possible. If that is done then we have successfully separated the gameplay code from the game engine code. In the following semester we plan on implementing another tool called RakNet which is a multiplayer game network engine.  

Some smaller systems that we are planning to implement into the game will include phantoms for triggers and events. The support from this comes from Havok. Another small system will be for AI which will control the steering behaviors and goals of the enemy A.I. For the first semester we will only have static AI with simple goals to try and shoot the player.

When it comes to the player, their helicopter will be broken up into different parts such as the engine, generator, and weapons. Each one of these are entities. The player can put these parts together to create a personal helicopter which is one entity that has the smaller components parented to it. The scene is comprised of scenery objects, a terrain, particles, sounds, and turrets. All of these objects in the scene will also be entities. 

This is the plan for the layout of the game. If you have anymore questions on the tools or our engine design feel free to tweet at our studio, @studio6games or leave a post on our website facebook.com/studio6games .