Atom Universe Devblog - Part 1

Hey Atomz,

Welcome to Atom Republic’s first ever development diary! Over the course this series we’ll be aiming to keep communication with the community open and to able to discuss the design of Atom Universe as we move forward. We’re not necessarily going to be using this series to announce big flashy feature each time, but we’ll be aiming to keep you informed as much as possible.

Now, earlier this week we shared a picture of our Designer, Luke working on something mysterious across our social media channels and we had a great response from the community sharing their thoughts about what Luke was working on (hyper sonic rollercoasters, bowling alley, and some Jedi stuff).

Earlier today, we managed to pull Luke away from his work to find out exactly what he was working on;

“Recently, I have been focused on implementing the new bowling game into Atom Universe. The first step in this process was to create a game framework that allows us to create games externally from the main Atom Universe world. At first, this may not seem so important, but as a developer this is invaluable as it means we can spend more time in the future focused on creating content without having to worry about the specifics of implementing it.”

“Once the framework was completed I moved on to the bowling project. The first task was to add a little more polish to the game and to remove the snapping of the camera between different states of the game by replacing them with smooth interpolated transitions between these states. Next up was removing all 2D UI elements from the game and replacing them with interactive 3D objects that are projected in the games world space. For example the execution meter, which controls the power and accuracy of your throw is now projected onto the bowling lane itself instead of taking up unnecessary space on the screen.”

“Previously, the bowling alley has gone through 2 iterations. The first was initially the prototype and involved creating the core game loop and the basic mechanics that were required to make the game function, at this point the user had the ability to play a basic 10 frames of bowling with one ball.”

Bowling Alley - Work In Progress

“The second iteration involved a little more polish. At this stage we started to add some of the UI to the game and added a ball selection stage. This allowed the user to select different types of bowling balls with a variation of statistics and skins to change the way the game plays and feels. An interactive scoreboard was also introduced to add a little more dynamism to the game and allowed the user to track their score.”