Astervoid 2000

Project Space - January 2014

One of the first games I made with the tentative title 'Project Space'. I started creating this after doing a handful of tutorials online. I was heavily inspired by watching "Indie Game The Movie" and playing a ton great local multiplayer games like Nidhogg, TowerFall, and Samurai Gunn with my friends. The best experiences I've ever had gaming are sitting next to my friends screaming and hollering at the screen and each other. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew I wanted to make games. So I started doing it.

Evolving - November 2014

I started to add functionality to the game. Asteroids that broke apart into smaller pieces and a 'blink' ability. My significant other told me that my spaceships looked like chickens :/

AsterVoid Classic - April 2015

It took a while to get into a playable state, but this is what I affectionately call AsterVoid Classic. It's a build of the game that I took around to various exhibitions and got tons of playtesting on. At this point I brought a good friend of mine (Chuck Bergeron) onto the project to help me out with sound effects and music. We went through the Steam Greenlight process with a publisher and rebranded the game as Astervoid 2000. Unfortunately things went south with the publisher and we ended up going our own way with the project.

Astervoid 2000 - December 2016

Build 1864 is Live!

New: - New ice asteroids, reflect some fired projectiles - New artwork! Asteroids and background artwork greatly improved - Explosive asteroids grow as they take damage, will add an animation to show they're about to explode - Motion blur on ships when boosting

Updated: - In the middle of adjusting new background artwork so it works on Retina, hi-DPI, and other various screen resolutions (will be adding a resolution switcher to Settings) - Optimizations to prevent game from locking / stuttering - Tweaked SFX volumes - Removed Chromatic Aberration image effect during gameplay as it was annoying

Survival Singleplayer:

Improve the AI difficulty

Warship now fires on players and bots

Add UI elements to show what kill & wave # you're currently on

Versus (Local Multiplayer):

Current leader fires a rainbow burst and spits out colorful engine trails (target them)

Killing another player with a succeful critical chase awards that player a kill

Warship now fires on players

Both:

Added new song: LREVG - HIIT ANND RRUN

Tripled up Memorecks' Victory song so it is 3 minutes long instead of 1 minute

Added ship callsigns in player select panels

Change how we unload / load scenes, fade out the music first to avoid crackles and pops which could damage speakers and are fucking annoying to ears everywhere

Next Up:

Juice up the scoreboard UI

Versus Team DM, 1vs2, 1vs3 and 2vs2

Survival Mode: Leaderboards

Allow toggling of image effects in Settings

Add new environments

A couple of months ago I was mussing around integrating noise, vigenette, chromatic aberration, and other image effects into Astervoid 2000.

I found it wasn't enough to just throw the image effects on the camera, I also wanted to change them at runtime depending on various events happening in the game.

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Example of chromatic aberration offset & bloom intensity changing over time.

While coming up with a solution, I didn't find this as straightforward as I had hoped it would be in Unity, and wanted to document and share the technique I devised for fellow game devs to use.

I started with the interface I wanted our team to use. Essentially, it'd be nice to call a method from anywhere in our codebase (an event handler, when a certain GameObject shows up, etc). I came up with a 1-liner solution like so:

// Kick up noise intensity to 1.5 over 0.8 seconds DynamicCameraEffects.BringTheNoise(newIntensity: 1.5f, duration: 0.8f);

`DynamicCameraEffects` is a C# class inheriting from MonoBehaviour that is added to camera. This camera also needs Unity's 'Noise And Grain' ImageEffect from StandardAssets.

Once the noise has hit it's desired effect, the callback `RemoveNoise()` pulls out the effect after a random amount of time has passed.

One gotcha, I needed to reference the Unity ImageEffects namespace via `using UnityStandardAssets.ImageEffects;`

Also, we rely heavily on DOTween to simplify changing values over time (Similar to MCTween for Flash, 'member that?). It has a ton of helpers to clean up your code and provides a bunch of easing equations, but you could also re-write this with a typical LERPing implementation.

The whole class for affecting Noise looks something like this:

using DG.Tweening; // remove this if you're not using DOTween using System.Collections; using UnityEngine; using UnityStandardAssets.ImageEffects; /// /// An extension class for dynamically adding noise to the camera easily at runtime /// public class DynamicCameraEffects : MonoBehaviour { private static NoiseAndGrain _noiseScript; private void Start() { _noiseScript = GetComponent(); } public static void BringTheNoise(float newIntensity, float duration) { DOTween.To(() => _noiseScript.intensityMultiplier, x => _noiseScript.intensityMultiplier = x, newIntensity, duration) .SetEase(Ease.OutCirc) .SetUpdate(true) .OnComplete(RemoveNoise); } private static void RemoveNoise() { var duration = Random.Range(0.2f, 1f); DOTween.To(() => _noiseScript.intensityMultiplier, x => _noiseScript.intensityMultiplier = x, 0.45f, duration) .SetEase(Ease.InQuad) .SetUpdate(true); } }

Download/Gist - Raw

You could control the effect manually by deleting the `RemoveNoise()` function, and the `OnComplete(RemoveNoise)`.

This also makes it easier to create effects loops where every X number of seconds effects are added and pulled off the camera, breathing life into your game and making every playthrough unique.

I originally posted this on Reddit, writing about VSTs and instrument sources used to compose the tune Solar Zenith. I believe it belongs here as well:

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For percussion I've got XLN Audio's Addictive Drums driving the snare and hats. Some kick and ride samples I found around the nets. Plogue's Chipsounds for a variation on the hats.

The main melodic percussive sound is "Airy Bell" (I believe it's from Ableton).

Some of the pads are Chipsounds, some are NI's Session Strings (which I wouldn't really recommend these days). I've got another pad as an NI Razor patch (Razor is tons of fun but obviously so is Massive).

There are two bass sounds (I believe also from Ableton), both called "Dual Osc4 Plastic Bass" but I've tweaked them super differently (octave transposition, oscillators, noise, etc). For leads, an Ableton pack called "Rubber Harp" is in there. And a custom NI Massive sound I came up with.

The reverse builds are some cymbal samples I have in my collection, obviously reversed then warped in Live.

And to top it all off there is a background "room" noise sample I recorded on my phone from some small performance space in Montréal about five or six years ago.

Live's redux tool sounds awesome but is super limited as far as what it can do for 8bit / 16bit reduction so instead I use Plogue's Chipcrusher a bunch for the signal degradation stuff.

Dimension Expander is in there and it's rad. Gives your tracks some more "space". Some awesome dev pulled the concept from Massive and made it it's own VST which you can grab for free.

I also use A1StereoControl almost religiously. It's free as well, and let's you do "Safe Bass" stereo effects, where it takes anything below a certain freq and cuts the pan, outing it through the middle.

And here's a Live Audio Effect Rack I made that essentially splits a single track into multiple and sends some of it through the left, some through the right, and some through the middle. Tweak the panning, volume of each pan and spread as much as you like.

From the bottom of our hearts! We really appreciate the support we've received on Steam Greenlight. I'm so happy to say that we've been successfully lit and are looking forward to creating a fun, fast and furious couch multiplayer game!

Chuck and I have been dreaming about making games for a few years now. Thanks to the community we are going to achieve a goal we've had our eyes on.

I just threw a draft of this tune for AsterVoid 2000 up on SoundCloud. We're still deciding if there should be tunes playing while you're in the heat of battle, or if we should keep it atmospheric while blasting and save the music for the menu screens. If you've got an opinion, throw it down here!

Listen to LREVG

Cheers, Chuck

(NSWF, cursing, wear headphones)

Hey everyone! Check out this Let's Play of an early build of the game back in May. It's hilarious watching them play and cursing away at each other. The early version of the game went by "Astervoid" and I exhibited it in Edmonton at an event called GDX (Game Discovery Exhibition.) I didn't get a chance to meet the Game Mode people but they saw the game and decided to pick it up on their spare time and I'm so grateful.

Here's a description of them from their YouTube channel: "Game Mode is a co-op comedy gaming show! We let's play our favorite new releases and classics while laughing at our own stupid jokes. We also do speed runs, challenge runs, walkthroughs and indie game profiles. New videos every single day so be sure to subscribe to see them all first!"

I can't believe how much support we've received on this game! Thank you so much to everyone that has given us a 'yes'. In just two very short days we have almost broken into the top 100 on greenlight!

Chuck and I are ecstatic! So thank you thank you thank you!

Here's a little breakdown of how the basic mechanics for the game work.

In the above gif you can see how shooting down your opponents works. Each player will start with a shield. One hit will take the shield down and leave the player vulnerable to being destroyed if they get hit one more time. However the shield will recharge if they are able to avoid getting hit for short amount of time.

I'm working on getting more gifs to show you guys the charged shot, and how asteroids play into the mix. I'm currently in Vancouver for the Full Indie Summit, but I'll be updating the campaign with more information when I'm back in Calgary this coming week.

Hey fellow gamers! Chuck "LREVG" here, the guy responsible for making AsterVoid's music & sfx punch. It's been loads of fun working on this game so far. I've done countless iterations on each sound to make sure it fits the game just the way it should, and have been slaving over the tunes for months to really kick up the atmosphere during those intense dog fights and gut-wrenching menu selections.

I stick to Ableton Live as my DAW, but to come up with a unique flavour for AsterVoid I use a variety of VSTs (plug-ins) such as Polyplex for drums, Massive for synths, and Chipcrusher for bit-crushing the hell out of the master bus. I'll aim to publish a few videos of my process showing how I pull all this off and what I'm aiming for when I'm surrounded by sound.

On top of this I dabble in artwork, programming, and UI design for AsterVoid. I've got a slew of great ideas (well, I think they're pretty great) for making the game as damn fun as possible -- and I'm really looking forward to making that a reality.

Thanks for checking out the Greenlight campaign for AsterVoid 2000!

AsterVoid 2000 is a very tight and frantic experience. At it's core it is a 2-4 local multiplayer game meant to be played with your friends next to you, controller in hand, and reflexes on point.

Allow me to introduce myself and the other contributor for this game. My name is Justin Luk and I'm a freelance web developer that has spent just over a year learning how to make games. I am responsible for the art, game design, and programming on this game. My partner in crime on AsterVoid 2000 is Chuck Bergeron, the mastermind behind the sound design and music for the game as well as some additional programming. Chuck and I have been friends for a very long time and have always flirted with the idea of making games. AsterVoid 2000 is our first project together, and we're very proud of it! We are really firm believers in local multiplayer games.

We'll be announcing more to give you guys an idea of what we're planning to do with the game. If you have an comments or suggestions please feel free to leave them with us.