Top Gunner - game for coin-ops

[martin_prochazka]

This is many months finished project, but I have uploaded video recently and because it's not publicly available game I though it could be interesting for someone...

We developed Top Gunner for Taiwan-based manufacturer of coin-op machines. The game is rail-shooter controlled with mounted guns and can be played by one or two players. There is just regular PC board running some embedded version of Windows XP so we could use Ogre. It was our first finished project using Ogre.

The "story line" is just terrible. Please don't assume it's our work. We know that biotech dragons don't fit into WW2 setting, but it was requested by our asian client. We had many disputes. The cooperation was enlightening experience in terms of how culturally different are people from west and east...

Gameplay footage on youtube

[chaosavy]

great work! looks like a lot of fun

[steven]

Very good. Good work!

I love the big gun coming out of the carrier

[PolyVox]

Great! I watched the whoole thing because I wanted to see the flying biotech dragon But really, it looks like a nice game you've got there.

[spacegaier]

That acutally looks like a lot of fun. Well done!

Two questions:

• Is the player also steering the plane or can he/she fully concentrate on the gun?
• Can the player hit its on plane (w.g. the wings)?

[SunSailor]

Just an assumption, but as it is a rail-shooter, I'd guess no. At least that's the norm on most games of this type. And I doubt you can shoot your own wings, as those game are more about fun than about realism . Especially with biotech dragons, although they are a pretty funny idea. If not set into WWII...

[chaosavy]

in their defense records from that time are spotty at best

[martin_prochazka]

Thanx for positive replies. It's not Time Crisis, but people in target markets (Asia, South America, etc.) hopefully enjoy it.

No, you can't steer the plane. We have scenes with precreated static curves. The same is for enemies. We have tried dynamic approach to enemies, but there were problems with timing. In this genre it's better to have it prepared for every second.

And no, You can't shoot your own plane. We have also need to move turrets off real position as they seem to be and rotate them around center axis, because of having to support two players on one screen.

[Slappy]

I know this game for a long time, Martin mentioned it on some game developer session maybe a year ago...
But is it based on Ogre3D??
I supposed it is based on Air Conflict or some fly-with-planes-game I head a long times ago - was it hard to port it to this coin machine?
What technology is behind it? (Opengl/DirectX ), was it difficult to port it to that machine or it is some type of PC in that ...
Tell us more, btw great job

Who does not know what that "machine" means check this: http://www.bmigaming.com/games-catalog-injoy-motion.htm at the very bottom

[martin_prochazka]

Yeah, initial plan was to use game engine of our developer friend 3Dvision with simple Direct3D engine. But at that time (2008) Ogre started to have ecosystem of tools, is feature-rich, etc.

As I said we had regular PC configuration with GeForce videocard as target. We have delivered the game controlled with mouse and they then added support for mounted guns. From what I have seen, they used some shared memory library to read state of hardware. The memory region was probably updated by device driver of the controller. If you would like to build a coin-op nowdays it's quite simple, there are eshops where you can buy every component (various designs) and just put it with some PC together.

This project was finished with a little loss, because direction of the game was changed severaly. It meant to be for different type of machine at the start and also Asian people like to copy other games, so we were always told "Look at this, we want it to have such feature in the game!" The good point is that we are not longer afraid of competition and cheap labour from this area

[Jabberwocky]

Nice work!

What year does this take place in? If I remember correctly, biotech dragons weren't developed until around '43.

[martin_prochazka]

Yeah, that's correct. Marketing put it into '44:

In the year 1944, days before the German troops were numbered, the Allied intelligence reports revealed that the German troops were reluctant to surrender because they held a very secret weapon. To confirm the above intelligence, we, as he assigned "task force", sneaked into the heart of Germany, and were ambushed, resulting in just one airplane and carrier that survived the ambush - Could our secret task force break the siege and win?

I have told them at least not to put "German" there

[mkultra333]

Rocket powered biotech dragons capable of sub orbital flight didn't start hitting England till 1943, but there were small, jet driven, platform launched biotech dragons around before that.

The youtube clip is great, looks a lot of fun. I had hoped the dragon's head would explode when you killed him, and personally I like a few swasticas in my WWII alternate history fantasy games, but still, neat game. Looks pretty exciting.

[Jabberwocky]

According to a recent History channel documentary, it is a source of active debate as to when biotech dragon technology was first launched. There were considerable failures with the earlier biotech gecko prototypes. Their tail-mounted jets malfunctioned each time the lizards' tails fell off, baffling Nazi scientists throughout most of '42.

The rocket-propelled flying squirrel incident also pushed back development by several months, at least.

[martin_prochazka]

German engineers picked wrong type of energy source. Attached plans for initial protype show they used blue ion power, which is not so stable as red energy.



(In fact this is a real concept send to us. We did not quite follow it.)

[koirat]

Is this the gun on It's chest ?

[martin_prochazka]

Two guns!

[fayt]

Very nice, great job, looks fun to play!