Blog - Dev Diaries | Nuclear Dawn

Red versus Blue

Posted: Friday, October 2, 2009 - 17:30

Hello again from the Lucky Developer of the Week! My name is Igor, and I lead design for Nuclear Dawn. Many try their hand at the noble art of game design, and I was blessed with the chance to find out how much hard work designing a game actually is.

Nuclear Dawn is an incredibly rewarding project, and over the past months and years, it definitely gave everyone involved in its design the chance to stretch their creative muscles. The end result was a complex, believable game world that will resonate powerfully with players as they prowl the savage landscapes that might have once been their very home cities.

Posted by: Igor |

Categories: Dev Diaries

Of crates, motion and bones.

Posted: Friday, September 18, 2009 - 12:43

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the latest Dev Diary. My name is Andrew and I am the Lead Animator for Nuclear Dawn. Our job in the animation department is to illustrate the style of the game through movement. Whenever we are animating a prop, character, weapon, or structure; our goal is to convey the concept while still conforming to the restrictions that we have set to maximize performance. In today's blog, I will be focusing on one of the aspects that has proven to be quite a daunting task to me, personally: the RTS structures.

Along with my role as animator, I have picked up a side role as mesh-modifier-breaker-upper. It is my job to take all the beautiful RTS machines, and tear them apart...literally. When I am handed an RTS structure, I first need to look at every corner, every seam, every wire, every lever, every panel and every section. While looking it over, I am thinking of how these things can compact themselves down small enough to fit inside a delivery crate.

Posted by: Andrew |

Categories: Dev Diaries

Ghost Lasers of New York

Posted: Monday, September 7, 2009 - 16:41

Hi, I am Olly, one of Nuclear Dawn’s two lead coders. This month, I’d like to talk to you about how the best things in life are those that you just take for granted every day, such as your sanity, and working power distribution systems.

The most challenging aspect of Nuclear Dawn is that there are no hidden mechanics in the game. There are no magical buildings mushrooming out of the future’s scarred concrete soil, and no elves that come out at night and restock your ammo supplies.

Nearly everything with a physical presence has been represented and coded in-game, so that buildings are produced in actual factories and need to be placed, and deployed according to specific logistics mechanism. Ammo depots have to be restocked, and everything needs to be kept powered up, else the enemy are going to be ramming rockets down your throat before you can finish admiring the detailed, apocalyptic landscapes.

Posted by: Olly |

Categories: Dev Diaries

Behind the scenes of the level design department

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 16:13

Nuclear Dawn is proving to be a real challenge for the level design department here at InterWave Studios. We knew from the start that the real-time strategy gameplay was going to play a vital and difficult role in the development of the game. Most games are build around the FPS or RTS genre.

With Nuclear Dawn however, we need to keep both perspectives in mind and most important of all the game needs to be a blast to play. The level design department has been given the task to come up with exciting environments based on the artwork you’ve already seen. In today’s developer blog I’m going to tell you something about one of the levels that we’re are currently working on.

Posted by: Jeroen |

Categories: Dev Diaries