With a lot of effort from the team and others from the IGDA-TC, we have launched Cosmotic Blast on the Steam store with support for the HTC Vive and Valve Index. Of course, we continue to support the Oculus Rift[s].
Please come and check it out on the Steam Store:
Not going to publish this too much but the free version of Cosmotic Blast is going away. The pay version will have the DLC included. So if you want the base version, get it now. You have until April 24th.
Hello everyone, we hope you and your friends and family are safe and healthy. Luckily for us gamers, we can continue to do what we love and promote a healthy lifestyle. (Not used to saying that.)
Ian Davis
This release is a big upgrade for those who like changing up the base ship. This new version has 10 new ships that you can unlock by playing the game or by buying them. I’m going to go over each ship and what unique about them as well as some other updates.
Description: This is the tried and true ship with three front cannons and one cannon each other direction besides backwards.
Animation: This ship has a spinning core that reacts to the amount of fire rate.
Color: Red
Available: Immediately
Description: With this ship, you can acquire a fan like array of cannons that can blast with a vertical plane of destruction.
Animation: None
Color: Red
Available: Level 10
Description: Like the base 1A1, this ship fans out a wall of bullets but as you shoot, the rig spins faster and faster, coving more area.
Animation: Spins on the z-axes as you fire.
Color: Black
Available: Level 50
Description: With front facing canons, this ship can focus a lot of power to where you want it. The draw back is to contain that energy, the cannons have to recoil when you fire.
Animation: Recoil as you fire.
Color: Red
Available: Level 10
Description: Front facing canons, recoil and now with spinning!
Animation: Recoil as you fire and spins up.
Color: Black
Available: Level 60
Description: Front facing canons, with no recoil and with spinning! How can this be!?! The recoil is contained in a random rotation on the z-axes.
Animation: The per shot spin is random.
Color: Red
Available: Level 20
Description: Like the base but with a fixed rotation on the z-axes. Like a revolver.
Animation: The per shot spin is fixed.
Color: Black
Available: Level 70
Description: This wide angle ship is my favorite. While others have suffered from recoil, this ship focuses its shot the more you shoot. Try this with full auto.
Animation: Focus Shot
Color: Black
Available: Level 30
Description: This one is a challenge. Just hard to play with but it is worth if you can get full cannons and full auto. You see, the cannons wobble but when it’s full auto, it’s awesome!
Animation: Wobble Shot +/- 5º
Color: Red
Available: Level 40
Description: Now I’m just messing with you. This ship wobbles +/-10º and that is very hard to contain. But full cannons and full auto, it’s like a cone of destruction.
Animation: Wobble Shot +/- 10º
Color: Black
Available: Level 90
Description: What’s this! We captured an enemy ship and converted it to be one of our own.
Animation: None
Color: Black
Available: Level 80
I really thought people would get a kick out of a coin that did nothing but support the game development. Boy was I wrong, no one bought one. Oh well. So now it’s replaced with a simple “Donate” button. Hopefully it’s less scary and doesn’t trigger peoples natural aversion to coins in free games.
OK ok ok … you can now enable in-ship perspective. Warning, a lot more intense vr experience. You’ve been warned. Default is off, I have it on because it’s fun.
Also, now you can enable snap rotate 90º in the game, not just in the pause menu. I don’t like it because you can twirl and hit asteroids but I’m not you. You be you and now that’s even easier with this setting.
… thanks for reading this far, if you play my game, and you have a better name for each of these, contact me and I’ll update it and give you a shout-out. : Discord
Just an update about the new build published today, Jan. 31, 2020.
User “Martin[…]” informed me he didn’t even know about the pause menu while playing the game. Why is that an issue? The pause menu is where you can exit the game early or get information about your progress unlocking items or changing some of the settings.
I added a section in the Tutorial so players know to press B in game to bring up the pause menu. Also, by taking off your HMD it’ll bring up the pause menu too.
How about a bit of help learning the movement with these guides. Tell me if that helps with your piloting.
This one is just a name change. It was called Gravity Center but not only did “Kbomb[…]” recommend changing it to Gravity Well, but then I saw the new Star Wars and it was mentioned like a 1,000 times. So yeah, Gravity Well it is.
Did you know you could change the name of a profile in this game. Most didn’t, soooo if you have default name, “PROFILE 1” then a little tip helper will give you the heads up you can hit the EDIT button and make it personal. Personally, I’m partial to public participation please … tell me what you think.
What!?! You didn’t know I was doing this for money. I am, but not a lot, I promise. This is your fun money. Well now I can take your fun money in the pause menu. Just another reason to point out the pause menu, I guess.
I wish I didn’t have bugs, but if I didn’t have bugs then I wouldn’t be as good finding them. Thus the ninja training. Makes sense? No. Well just be glad there are less bugs.
Over the last year I’ve been designing and developing the VR title, Cosmotic Blast. The team size is one and I am all in. No day time job, all in. Am I nuts?
In 2017 I successfully ran a KickStarter for the game, The Cosmotic Mission. It was a success in that I was able to bring my first game title to market and sell it on the Oculus store.
I learned a ton from that experience, to the point that seeing someone else go through that process is a huge bonus in reviewing portfolios and resumes. I gained experience that I brought to the design go this new game, Cosmotic Blast.
Cosmotic Blast brings an arcade-style asteroid shooter totally realized in the new VR paradigm. Stand in space like never before and blast asteroids out of the sky with your ship. It is unadulterated fun as you upgrade with more and more power to overcome the waves of procedurally generated asteroids.
… but I made it by myself. No kickstart, no publisher , nothing but savings.
I was asked when I made The Cosmotic Mission by Dr. Andrew Williams, the Game Design and Development program director at UW-Stout, how many hours did you spend to make this and I could not answer besides, ” a lot.” That was not sufficient.
So I kept records when I made Cosmotic Blast …
Without telling you too much. I am making $0.00 per hour on this project at the time of writing this. I must be nuts to do this.
I am making $0.00 per hour on this project.
… must be nuts.
To be fair, the game just launched on January 28th, 2020 and sales numbers have not come in yet. I will post once in awhile on this subject, as I get sales and as I spend more time developing it, it’s bound to fluctuate. Luckily, as of now, it can’t go lower! If it is lower, that’s expenses, and that’s a whole different bag of stats.
If you want to know more details about the ins and outs of what it took to make an arcade-style VR game as a solo independent game developer for the Oculus Rift, we better have a pint or two in front of us, because it’s a lot.
Come and get it at the Oculus Store.
Read more about it on the Cosmotic Blast page.
Are you the press, check out the new Press Kit and Asset pages.
Or just tweet us on our Twitter page or hit us up on Facebook.
Here are an example of some of the dynamic graphics that are so beautiful in VR that I just stop and play with the physics.
It’s official, you can have a blast blastin’ this blast from the past on the Oculus Store on January 28th, 2020 at 10:00 AM PST!
Learn more about Cosmotic Blast.
It’s always fun to tie in music with your game while trying to highlight key features. Here is the Cosmotic Blast trailer for the Oculus Rift.
As I put the finishing touches on my AI script for the two enemies in our new title, Cosmotic Blast, I wanted to out line some of what went into the design.
Enemies had to head towards you, close the gap but also not run into you. So I used this equation to find a point / vector in space to set as a target.
Vector3 locationTarget = ((target.transform.position - transform.position) + (transform.position - target.transform.position).normalized * distance);
Saying that equation in english: Take the targets position and subtract enemies position to get a vector from enemy to target. Now add back a vector from the target to the enemy but only at a given distance. See how that makes a point in space at distance from the target. If you’re to close, it could be behind you.
To avoid targets, I found all near by objects with a OverlapShereNonAlloc() with a given distance. Then applied a opposing force to the enemy. So in a loop …
force += (transform.position - nearByObjects[i].transform.position).normalized * speed;
The speed is a variable since some enemies art faster at avoiding things than others. This also makes it avoid other enemies so they fly around with a nice spacing.
I can also reverse this force for Upgrade objects so the enemy takes them for their self. Muhahah!
First things first, you got to aim at your target:
Vector3 pos = target.transform.position - transform.position; Quaternion rot = Quaternion.LookRotation(pos); transform.rotation = Quaternion.Lerp(transform.rotation, rot, Time.deltaTime * speed);
Why Lerp? Lerp makes it so it slowly rotates towards a target at a given speed. The speed is based on what level the enemy is at.
Next, got to shoot. Well this is more complex, because it depends on what the enemy is shooting but to start it off, I do a Physics.Raycast and find if the “Player” is in front of the enemies canon … then I fire().
if (physics.Raycast (transform.position, canon.gameObject.transform.forward, out hit, range, rayMask)) {
if (hit.transform.tar == "") {
Fire();
}
}
The rayMask hides the Raycast from different gameObjects.
All the rest is inherited from the classes that the ship uses, like upgrades and shield, etc.
Fun fun happy times.