GPU-based visualization :: Shepherd of Dreams

Ensign Expendable

Click here to download (now patched for ATI cards) Ensign Expendable (38 MB)

 

Requires card with Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 2.0
 

Screenshots

 
       
Description
 

In Ensign Expendable, you are a lowly ensign trying to fend off a relentless attack of pod-beasts. In the future, mankind has invented 'living fuel' - creatures that eat our garbage and convert it into pure fuel. Something went wrong, however, and these creatures (usually referred to as squids because of their appearance) mutated into pods, which of course, proceeded to immediately go on a killing spree.

Your job is to irradicate the pod threat using the variety of weapons at your disposal. Collect the fuel creatures to powerup your weapons and destroy the pods. Time is a factor however, since pods reproduce and would like nothing better than to help you live up to your name.
       
New Technologies / Techniques Demonstrated
Graphics
   
 

A pixel-shader-based fluid simulation runs on the GPU to provide fluid effects for explosions, gas trails, jetpacks, etc.

A cell-shading vertex shader is used to give the characters a hand-drawn feel to stay consistent with the 'cartoony' feel of the game.

 

User Interface / Gamplay
   
 

Inherently, this is a fairly complicated game since you have several game-devices that the user must control:

1) Jetpack

2) Weapons

3) Vacuum (used to suck up the fuel creatures)

At one end of the spectrum, all these devices could have their own readouts, etc., but we found a better solution was to use one central 'currency' for all these concepts.

The player's 'fuel gauge' measures how much fuel he has collected through sucking up the fuel squids - the jetpack, vacuum, and weapons system all draw power from this 'fuel' supply. As the player collects more fuel, he is allowed to launch more powerful attacks. In our user-testing, we found this 'single-currency' approach was easier for users to grasp and nicely integrated three otherwise disparate game concepts.