A Cat, an Ice Planet, giant Worms, a DJ, a lovely Girl we all know ... and one of the hardest enemies of all time!

Dudes, JFGR is back with a load of news for you if you have not followed us on our facebook page.

First things first. Last time we we're about to complete Orion's weapons - and we did it.

Orion's final weapon will be the homing missile launcher:

The next thing was modelling the cat in the space suit. You can imagine this took quite some time, but we are very satisfied with the results. Orion got his full bone structure and is ready to move. I also added a cover for the weapon arm which only opens when the arm is moving in and out. It has a gap for the roll which controls the angle of the arm so it's still able to move.

I also added bones to the face for hopefully achieving facial comic expressions and at least maybe a VERY rough lip synch in cutscenes...

Since Orion got his run-animation now and I almost needed half a day just for that run cycle (why do cats move their legs so irregular!?) I needed a pause from animating and switched my activities to the Unity NavMesh System.

Within one evening it was possible to get rid of our two level waypoint system (lvl one for cover detection, lvl two for avoiding obstacles) and reduce it to a one level waypoint system because the NavMesh system is now responsible for avoiding obstacles - and it works like a dream. When NavMeshes are baked correctly no enemy should ever walk through obstacles again right now, even in groups.

In combination with the NavMesh system I also achieved that Missile Drone and Gatling Drone are now walking far enough around the corners to really hit the player when they are following him instead of (sometimes) shooting against the wall or standing still. The problem was to get the muzzle far enough around obstacles but now everything is working.

 Few days later all 4 of Orion's weapons were ingame, untextured and attached to the weapon arm. When you switch to aim mode (which is also possible right now) the weapons rotate independently from the body towards the crosshair.

Finally he got textured and performed his first facial expression

With all weapons attached and a competed running circle fighting was also possible. Firing missiles also damages enemies although they might not be hidden directly. Explosions also do damage now!
The reduction of the enemies health depends on how many body parts are in range of the explosion.

After that we shortly decided to complete THE APEX club. The 4 pillars are changing their color rapidly and the giantic half mirror ball on the roof rotates! So come on in - the red carpet is rolled out!

 Also DJ fishface got textured, animated and a coat with fur.

Parallel to all this I received the final art for the Echidna Snow Worm. He is a natural inhabitant of Echidna which has been caputured and drilled by Mizar's troops. Now he attacks the small space port.

You will encounter two of these beasts at the same time! 

I then tried to set up a 3D Model according to our artwork

 
In contrast to the concept art we added some spikes to the single elements of the worm to increase the level of detail. The guns are a little bit thinner, the head has been improved and we now have the tail part and the "tube" which holds everything together.

Then there was new year's eve and I visited Jan directly in January so we could complete our work for the Echidna Trailer and set up a summary what happened in 2013:

Within the last year we've implemented our second playable character, the cat "Orion", we developed new weapons, improved the AI of drones and air units, created the new enemy type "Gatling Drone", the new Boss "Snow Worm Twins" and we revived "DJ Fishface" and also "Vela" for a guest appearance. We've also created a reminiscene to the "Big Bug Fun Club" manifested in our Disco "The Apex" (in memory of the biggest JFG Fanpages ever made) and well - crafted a complete new level which is almost completely ready to play!

The rest of January was spent to complete the Echidna Boss fight and I also needed some time of creative pause to come up with some ideas for story details, attack sequences (look at those maggots :D ), music... :

I've integrated two different death animations because you have to kill one worm first - so according to the mantis boss in JFG you'll see one enemy die during the fight without a cutscene. Since our worms are either jumping or rear up in front of you, you can kill them in the air and watch how they nicely crash into the snow - or you can shoot them in front of you and see how they slowly collapse. 

The next thing we are doing now is setting up the meeting point for both characters on the map: The Ruin of Mizar's Palace 

Therefore we are also using N64 architecture again to improve and extend it to suit our needs:

E.g. with some outskirts:

 
And what would Jet Force Gemini be without the coolest video game boss ever (except for the fact that there was a shitty little fluffy bear behind all this!)?

Thanks to the work of Jet Force Gemini APEX years ago who ripped the original Mizar Model from JFG Rom I was able to increase the number of its polygons and craft a newer and more detailed version out of it. He will get a few tweaks before I actually use him, but yeah ... Mizar now really has RESURRECTED!

So far so good... There are still many details to fix, many spots to improve but we are on a good way and we never thought we would actually come this far - so the dream of a Jet Force Gemini sequel is getting closer each day. Slow but constant...

Keep it up dudes!

Best regards,

Marius

Long time no see... and SO MUCH NEWS!

Yeah dudes, I know we haven't been very busy on this blog for a quite long time... Sorry for that but Blogspot just isn't as easy and fast to use as Facebook and the Unity3D Forums... Sorry for keeping you waiting. But - the longer you have to wait, the more news you recieve!

First things first. We've stopped telling you about the implemetation of the Plasma Gun and it's capability of an instant kill and our playable Demo which hopefully brought you some fun and showed you how JFGR will play. Fine.

Due to a crash in Unity3D during saving the complete Echidna Scene had been deleted and the Jet Force suffered from quite a setback. I could recover some of the data but at least I had to rebuild at least 75% of the scene and I also started to have a job back then which slowed me additionally.

Only a few days later the graphics card refused to do its work so, after a few tests and even baking, I finally said goodbye to my beloved ATI 4870 X2. Sometimes technology is as fascinating as stupid. After a removing every removeable part from my broken ATI 4780 X2 and a short baking session in my oven (200° Celsius, 10 minutes) the error LED didn't glow anymore and everything seemed to work normal again... but I think I killed it while testing without the cooling support of its fan. Even those few seconds seemed too much.

I then borrowed a ATI HD 5570 from a friend and continued to work on Echidna.

And after rebuilding the mountain path scene, adding a foggy valley and getting myself a new graphics card, we came up with the first concrete ideas for our second Character.

This was around the Easter days - just to get you a little feel for the time that has passed. While Jan worked on a conrete rendering of our second Character I continued to enlarge Echidna with an Ice Cave.

We built that cave on a terrain to make it easier for us to texture the ground with quite a lot varieties of snowy, rocky and icy surfaces and are now quite satisfied with the results. The last sceenshot shows the textured cave walls.













After that it was time to begin the "Pre-Boss"-area you know from the original JFG and we adapted this for the Spawnship and Goldwood. On Echidna it would be a bit different... since the Pre-Boss-Area is a small space port with several houses and inhabitants...

It will also contain a very special kind of establishment you've seen on Ichor...

Yeah right: in the middle of the small space port there is a CLUB!

And we dedicate its name to some guys which ran a great JFG website that doesn't exist anymore... too bad because these guys also came up with a JFG2 idea and tried to use the unreal engine... Unfortunately they disappeared into nowhere and we never saw any results... R.I.P. Jet Force Gemini APEX!

I've established a connection between the boss area, the club and the landing pad. The Club model still misses some details on this picture and the space port buildings haven't got any doors but this was fixed in the mean time.

The area where you fight the boss lies in front of a giant security door which blocks the way to the APEX until you took down the boss. It looks like this:

And here are the first concrete ideas for the bossfight:

While Jan was working on these I improved a few things on Goldwood because I recocgnized some hard breaks in style and colour... the style broke to much when heading from King Jeff's hut to the canyon... so I tried to recolour the texture from that brown rocky surface to this Goldwood-typical orange...

After recolouring all areas with that orange type of rock I also attached some distance fog to the boss room to intensify the feeling of a horizon. Goldwood always had some strange type of a very bright green fog... or was it the N64 and not Goldwood in the end? 

 I've also improved the trunks of the trees which were shipped with Unity...

I then prepared some stuff in the Apex again and also tried out the mecanim animation system on a test model. Took quite some time but this could be quite handy when importing fitting motion capture data (thanks to the internet there are a lot of every day movements avaliable for free) and we will build every new Player- and NPC-model based on the desired bone structure of the system. Speaking of NPCs... what would be a club without a DJ... so we brought back DJ Fishface!

While modelling and improving a lot of stuff Jan was working heavily on the designs for our new Character Orion and so he wasn't able to make any textures for the models I made... This will be hopefully done in the next few days.

At first I'll show you the final rendering of Orion and parallel the 3D-Model WIPs.

Nash's animal partner is less than half in size and will move much faster than his human counterpart. In contrast he carries weaker weapons. In combat, the two form a perfect symbiosis of a quick attacker / scout and a strong fighter with heavier weapons.
Orion uses different weapons so you don't face the problem of snatching away upgrades like it was possible in the orginal. If you hadn't pushed Juno to his max. ammo values the final fight was a real pain - and I guess every normal guy pushed vela...

In contrast to Lupus, Orion is a real cat which got its mechanical implants after an accident and due to the technological advance over time he also received a translation module so he can communicate with humans and vice versa.

And the final model with the smaller adaption of the Standard Gun.

Don't wonder about the big plates on his face, these serve as painting surface for eye brows and whiskers. Right now I am modelling all 4 weapons for Orion and two of them have already been completed.

The Laser Turret...

... will be the equivalent to Nashs Machine Gun - though it will have an alternately and much lower fire rate than the MG. Since the MG only does half the damage of the Standard Gun I think we'll apply the same to the laser turret.
 
And the Sniper Rifle:

So that's basically it... hope you had fun while reading and recognizing that JFGR isn't dead. Next post is coming I promise and then you'll hopefully see an ingame Orion with fur and animation, functioning weapons, hovering ability and a new trailer for Echidna...

Stay tuned guys!

Best regards,

Marius