For the past two weeks I have been working on my new game, and now I’m finally introducing it: Wasabi Defense! Your mission is to build an outpost on the planet Omega Wasabi 4 and defend it from attackers. You have to manoever spacecraft that carry equipment to a landing platform, after wich additional structures are added to the outpost, and then an attack wave follows. During the attacks you control a hovering gun platform that floats above the base. Here’s a first screenshot that shows the surface of Omega Wasabi 4 and a lander that’s firing it’s main engine.

wasabi_defense_01_small.png

For this game, I have started using Torque Game Builder 1.5, and I must say, it’s a great improvement over the previous version. There are a few new things that I’ll be using in this game. First of all, it will be fullscreen, with support for both standard and widescreen formats. For controls, you can use the keyboard or a gamepad. I will also use pre-rendered sprites and much more animations. In Gridblaster, all sprites were drawn with Inkscape and they were all static. And finally, the game will be more configurable: customizable controls, volume control, setting resolution, etcetera.
Creating the background image you see in the screenshot was quite tricky, but I think it turned out quite fine. I mainly used Gimp for it, and a bit of Povray/Moray. I’ll write a few tutorials about how I did it (putting it all in a single tutorial would make it way too long). For most of the sprites, I’ll also be using Povray/Moray. I have been studying Blender a bit, but I’m not nearly skilled enough to rely on it for game art.