manta 2010 and other stories

Early mockup (not in-game) showing relative scales.

Manta in-game screenshot from about two months ago. Yeah, we’ve come a long way.

Alien Submarine test render. I love this model.

Early render of the (as yet unreleased) Alien Ruins level of (as yet unapproved) MANTA.

MANTA uses a few animated particle effects. Most of these were created using Apple’s Motion (which outputs video files) and then processed into single textures using a utility called Particle Accelerator I wrote specifically for that purpose. (It’s available here.)

Here’s a MANTA-themed desktop picture for your viewing pleasure. Note that it’s using the old typographic treatment of “MANTA”. I ended up not using it because of the strokes which bugged me. If I had my druthers I would have redone the logo using a black version of Eurostile, but I didn’t want to spend money on typefaces when we’d already put a ton of time and money into the project. (Ah the joys of indie development.)

In case you’re wondering, the backdrop was generated from a bunch of particle effects in Apple’s Motion (which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite programs to play with). The Manta was rendered in Cheetah 3d (of course).

For good performance on the iPhone you need to keep things as simple as possible, and one way of doing this is to bake lighting into your geometry.

At some point I rendered this collection of vehicle models from MANTA. (Some scale changes occurred after this.) I had to remodel pretty much every vehicle from the original game to cut poly counts for the iPhone — but most of the low poly models looked better than the originals. As is so often the case, constraints make us better.