Caromble

[ThomasVeil]

Hi all.
We're working on a breakout-clone in Ardor3D called Caromble. It's taking the concept to 3D and has nice physics. Those and the basic gameplay work already - we also have done concepts and now we still have a lot of work ahead of us to put it all together. Our goal is to have one nice looking level fully playable somewhere in April.

We have a webpage with screenshots and a blog, where we explain a bit how we're going about it. http://www.caromble.com/
I also have some tutorials planned if all works out.


[UPDATE - Latest Sceens here (the first ones are in post below)]

Little video with the latest version of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2aZRMtrVUU







Thomas

[ThomasVeil]

Screenshots of one of our early versions:





Here is a concept piece. It shows the direction we're going - but I hope it will get even more of a wasted/industrial look in the end.



And here are some asset shots - the shots are not from the engine, but real-time, and show the look we're going for. Except for the outline we have all the features ready. The normal maps look even better in Ardor3D I think.





Even tried to make a vid of the assets - not a full success
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rcLBJ2YYA

[gouessej]

Hi!

I see you use JBullet, don't you? It is beautiful, good luck

[tduindam]

Yeah, we use JBullet for the physics, although we haven't really integrated it into Ardor3D. Instead we made an abstraction layer above both Ardor3D and JBullet, so we would maintain the freedom to switch engines. (Actually Ardor3D is our second graphics engine, we used Xith3D before).

[gouessej]

Is it difficult to switch from a Java3D-like 3D engine (Xith3D) to a JMonkeyEngine-like 3D engine (Ardor3D)?

[MrCoder]

Looking fantastic! Keep it up!

[jfelrod1960]

Looking fantastic! Keep it up!

Totally agree! Looking forward to more posts.

[tduindam]

To reply to gouessej:

Yeah it was quite a bit of work to switch, but to be honest, I think most time was spend trying to understand the Ardor3D / JMonkey way of doing things as opposed to the Java3D way. Our internal objects only interact with wrappers, so for our engine not that much changed. Looking back it was without doubt worth the investment.

[ThomasVeil]

I've added newer screenshots - also put them in the first post, hope thats alright.

We've filled the level with dummy objects completely. I'll start tweaking the look of them, and the programmers are busy on all fronts so we get the first level to work in May. Phew, we've got some work cut out for us.

[renanse]

Looking great! Can't wait for the next blog post.