Langenium - a sci-fi game series in development

[Paul Brzeski]

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*** UPDATE 4th January 2014 ***

 

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*** UPDATE 8th August 2013 ***
 
I'm working on quite a lot of minor changes and upgrades to the server and client of the game. My current focus is to create support for scene changes so that players can enter indoor environments with the character. I'm also working on building up a set of procedurally generated/configurable texture and morphing generators to help with defining the world. 

Another thing I'm working is ditching JSON updates in favour of Float arrays and try to push all effects into GLSL shader code to relieve strain from the CPU. The biggest bottlenecks at the moment are CPU and network bandwidth.

Check it out at http://langenium.com/play and http://langenium.com/editor

Big thanks to the continued hard work of mrdoob and the github community (http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/) as well as the incredibly useful examples over at http://stemkoski.github.io/Three.js.
 
 
*** UPDATE  6th July 2013 ***
 
I'm still actively working on the game. At the moment I'm focusing on a map editor as I was finding it too hard to manually place objects via database. 
 
You can view it here: www.langenium.com/editor
 
The goal of Map Editor is for it to eventually be able to;
- Place objects from the database
- Re-paint objects using a texture building tool
- Create object presets
- Create missions, cut-scenes and dialogue scripts
 
The Object Library has the following objects ready:
- Terrain (mountains, plateau's and rocks)
- Bridges (steel, rickety wood and sky-bridge)
- Mock buildings (various shapes and sizes)
 

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I'm working on a 3D airship MMO called Langenium. You control a 32bit sprite character and take to the skies of the planet Ibidan.
 
I'm aiming to create an FF style feel in your brower. The game uses webGL/THREE.JS and currently only works in Firefox and Chrome.
 
More info at the website:
http://www.langenium.com/
 
Game previews:
Play - http://www.langenium.com/play
Map editor - http://www.langenium.com/play#editor
 
I'm working on this by myself at the moment but if anyone is keen to help out, please get in contact with me via Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Langenium

[austin]

I'm a big fan of ambitious projects - best of luck to you! When I try the demo link you posted, I get the message: "Cannot GET /play".

 

EDIT: http://www.langenium.com/play/ works (with forward slash at the end). Was fun flying the ship around

[Paul Brzeski]

Ah cheers!

 

That's fixed now, I was playing with routes and accidentally broke that

 

The last demo had combat but I ended up rebuilding the game from scratch after I got to that point so I'm yet to re-implement it.

You can watch a trailer over at Youtube though - 

[Paul Brzeski]

I've made quite some progress on the game engine. For the latest updates, see the original post.

[Evan Burchard]

This is super exciting.  I can't wait to play the full game.  The story sounds fun.  Exploring an uncharted watery planet with an airship?  Count me in.

 

One thing on the controls caught me off-guard.  I think you might be going for realistic speeds of lift and lateral movement.  When I turned, I got immediate perceivable feedback (probably less than realistic turning ability), so when I pressed the other keys to move, I initially thought that they didn't do anything. 

 

I don't know if this suggests that going faster is awesome/the machine should be faster, or matching the turning speed to the lift/movement speed would just be less confusing.  If everything looks as nice as the water, I'd happily cruise around pretty slowly.

[Paul Brzeski]

Hehe, thanks for that  

 

The controls definitely need some improvement. Once I start tuning the engine for combat, I will definitely be focusing on fine tuning ship handling.

 

In terms of speed, you'll be surprised to find out that you're actually moving quite fast I'd say approx 150~300km/h depending on how much you're accelerating. 20x that in editor mode.
 

The main issue at the moment is that movement speed appears imperceptible due to the sheer scale of the scenery. Try opening two windows side by side [yes, you can do this! it's how i test ] and note how whichever ship you are controlling is moving on the other screen. The speed is there, I just need to fill in the world so it's more noticeable.

 

To give you some idea of how this will play out - here's a combat trailer I recorded with an earlier build:

[Paul Brzeski]

I've just updated the main topic with the current progress on the game.

 

As well as the game, I'm also working on some retro JRPG-esque soundtrack. Head over to my Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/paul-brzeski for a preview

[Paul Brzeski]

Here's a look at the latest work done on my game Langenium. I'm using some shaders to procedurally generate the clouds on a sphere and the ocean on a plane.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1qSntZxVI

 

Most of the work in the past 2 months has been to move to an MVC style architecture, but I'm now working towards a new website design which needs the game as a backdrop.

 

Code is available at https://github.com/paulbrzeski/Langenium

https://github.com/paulbrzeski/Langenium/tree/master/views/game/shaders

 

Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions.

 

More information about Langenium is available at the website http://www.langenium.com and the Facebook page - http://facebook.com/Langenium

 

Procedurally generated ocean and sky,

 

Website mock-up using this new look,

[Paul Brzeski]

Introducing the Langenium Staging server. 

 

http://staging.langenium.com/

http://staging.langenium.com/play

 

Due to the website being bound to the same server, I've had to hold off on deploying the latest code. To get around this, I've setup a new instance.

 

The new website is in very early days. The endgame is to unite all the frontend code into a single stack that can then treat the website and game as one entity - allowing really rich and interesting backgrounds for the site.

 

The game client has also had some heavy work on water and clouds, as well as a better camera. 

 

If anyone has any questions fire away 

 

Screenshot of game client on staging:

 

Screenshot of website on staging:

[Paul Brzeski]

As some might recall, this was originally an MMO project. I've now split it into two strategic projects - one to deliver an engine (Langenium on Github) and the other to create the game's creative universe (Langenium-Universe on Github).

 

I've come quite far but I'm still evaluating and incorporating new things. The most significant change in my work would be the change to Live2D for character art instead of pixel sprites. The retro look was cool but these much richer images will give me a lot of options for making characters react to environments and show emotion.

 

Live2D demo: http://langenium.com/src/vendor/live2d-sdk/sample/jack/jack.html

 

Unfortunately I'm halfway through a website rebuild so I only have my Facebook page as a landing site - www.facebook.com/Langenium

 

You can play around with the current engine build at http://langenium.com/?mode=Editor. The button in the top left opens a sidebar that allows you to explore the various scenes.