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.
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...
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
