Fractal Softworks Forum

Other => Discussions => Topic started by: xenoargh on October 31, 2017, 10:23:55 AM

Title: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on October 31, 2017, 10:23:55 AM
So... without spoilering, basically it’ll be a bit like Teleglitch- top-down twin-stick shooter with crafting and RPG elements.  Not just an arena game like Smash TV but with a lot more depth and replayability (at least, that’s the goal).  Will probably have some modding support out of the box.

If anybody’s interested in testing it, I’ll probably have early builds available in a month or so; I’ve been making progress pretty quickly.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 01, 2017, 09:20:40 AM
Oh, I know, lol. 

Nothing worth throwing money at yet.  I want at least the skeleton done before I get too crazy about saying things.  But I've got the game design set, I know what setting / look / etc. are going to be like, and it's something I've really wanted to see get done; I think people who are fans of that kind of game will be happy.

I'll talk more about it when it's not just vaporware and a vague announcement, lol.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 06, 2017, 08:45:33 PM
I got the "critter" pathfinding and basic state-machine done this weekend. 

It handles a randomly-generated world (not that I have anything interesting there, yet, other than a basic maze generator to make sure they actually work), steers the critters, allows for orders to be given to critters from outside the critter (to generate "intelligent" behaviors, reactive stuff), etc.  The critters aren't "smart" and are a the "programmer-art" stage graphically, but they can all independently pathfind and do motion planning in a fairly large world and all that important stuff.

Next up is probably building the world; I'm looking at various methods of generation.  Thus far, the most-attractive system I've seen is to build a simplistic level-editor where I (or others) can hand-build some content, export it to a text-file, then have the game read it and plug it into other areas via <some method>.  So, first off, I need to build the <some method>, then build the level-editor, then <fingers crossed> combine them.

I think that was one of the most ingenious things about Teleglitch; it combined hand-built content with randomization, for the best of both worlds.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Bastion.Systems on November 13, 2017, 03:27:09 AM
If it's even a little like Teleglitch then I will buy it.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 13, 2017, 09:01:29 PM
Well, I've got a very basic setup on LOS that's a bit like Teleglitch now; I've successfully implemented a Monaco style of LOS (I feel pretty strongly that this is one of the things that made the game very compelling compared to most of the games of that genre I've ever looked at).  This is extremely early, of course; later on, I'll be adding light sources and all that; this is just testing out LOS.

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_shadowcaster_test001.png)
(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_shadowcaster_test002.png)

Still working out some details, but I'll probably be able to build a very simplistic run-and-gun first playable in another week or two.  Nothing like the full game, of course, but at least something that people can play a little bit and hopefully give some very early feedback on.  I don't know whether it'll include a randomly-generated dungeon yet or not; that's something where I finally figured out the best method to do it, and it's in my head, but it's not built yet.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 15, 2017, 12:51:34 PM
A bit cleaner and a whole lot faster.  Now the Monaco/Teleglitch style LOS includes "wall memories"; players will be able to see faint outlines of walls they've already seen, walls gracefullly fade in / out of existence, etc.  I think that's a big improvement over how Teleglitch brute-forced this, and only wrote "seen walls" to the Minimap, which made for fairly ugly navigation sometimes.

A bunch of speedups to the first iteration, too.  This scene is dealing with 70 shadowcasters / wall objects that have to do LOS checks to the player, etc., etc., there are multiple "critters" pathfinding through the maze, and the whole thing's running at 500+ FPS. 

Which is promising, because my critters aren't exactly doing anything interesting yet, I don't have sounds and light sources doing stuff, projectiles to check, etc., etc.  I think it's safe to say that this isn't terrible, though, for all the complicated stuff that's running.  My goal is to keep FPS well above 60 at all times, for a lag-free action experience.  We'll see if I can get there and achieve the complexity I want.

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_shadowcaster_test003.png)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 15, 2017, 11:19:11 PM
I think I've figured out how to do the Rouge-like part, Teleglitch-style.  I have written the beginnings of a room editor and copying system that should <fingers crossed> allow me to copy-paste new rooms, hallways, etc., etc.  into the gameworld without major implementation problems.  It's not working quite yet, but I think I'm on-track.

After I get that working... I guess it's time to make some decisions regarding scales of things (namely, main-character size, hall sizes, etc.)- once set, it'll be hard to change without major problems.  One of the many limitations of building a system like this is that enemy sizes are, of necessity, limited; huge things can't traverse small hallways.  But huge hallways and huge doorways will feel wrong.  One solution is to limit huge things to big rooms; if this system works as intended, then that should be possible.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Sproginator on November 16, 2017, 09:07:29 AM
I think I've figured out how to do the Rouge-like part, Teleglitch-style.  I have written the beginnings of a room editor and copying system that should <fingers crossed> allow me to copy-paste new rooms, hallways, etc., etc.  into the gameworld without major implementation problems.  It's not working quite yet, but I think I'm on-track.

After I get that working... I guess it's time to make some decisions regarding scales of things (namely, main-character size, hall sizes, etc.)- once set, it'll be hard to change without major problems.  One of the many limitations of building a system like this is that enemy sizes are, of necessity, limited; huge things can't traverse small hallways.  But huge hallways and huge doorways will feel wrong.  One solution is to limit huge things to big rooms; if this system works as intended, then that should be possible.

Sounds like a fun game! Might be worth looking into Multiplayer capabilities for this too :) I'd love to play this kind of game with a friend :D
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 17, 2017, 01:09:59 PM
I doubt if it'll have MP; the story's mainly designed around SP.

I got the main puzzle of how to build the Rogue-like dungeons solved; I can now generate copies of hand-built rooms at arbitrary angles.  Still working on room generation itself, though :)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 19, 2017, 04:39:57 PM
Ok, I got the core of room generation in a Rogue-like way, using hand-built rooms like Teleglitch, with completely arbitrary room creation angles (wow, that's a mouthful) solved.  Don't let the square-y nature of the test rooms fool you; this system doesn't care what the rooms are like and all of the objects (including walls and interactive doors) can be placed anywhere in the bounds of the rooms, allowing for a great deal of flexibility in terms of design.

There's still work to do, to make the system less of a "random spam-a-level"; right now there isn't any real logic to room choices, there aren't "required" rooms, etc., etc.... but it's promising; it means I might actually keep on track and have something that's basically playable before the end of the month, maybe.

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_mazegenerator001.png)

Next up is probably some intermediate work to make a less-naive system, so that I can give this sucker some meaningful goals, like, "don't build the exit until you've built at least X rooms", etc.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: TaLaR on November 19, 2017, 08:32:35 PM
How about borrowing some ideas from Unexplored? It's Dev seems to have pretty solid ideas on dungeon generation.

Spoiler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wvkTT-6P3Q
[close]
(short intro video)
http://ctrl500.com/tech/handcrafted-feel-dungeon-generation-unexplored-explores-cyclic-dungeon-generation/ (more detailed article)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 20, 2017, 02:31:12 PM
Hmm.  What he's doing there is basically building a very fancy cellular-automata / binary space partition (https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US753&biw=1783&bih=772&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=sRATWv6nEYrojwSev7vACg&q=binary+space+partition+maze&oq=binary+space+partition+maze&gs_l=psy-ab.3...13927.16564.0.17580.15.15.0.0.0.0.128.1065.13j2.15.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..2.0.0....0.KU739w25qjg) approach, which I evaluated and rejected about a month ago, whereas I basically re-created how this was done in Teleglitch, albeit in a way that I think is a little more reliable.

Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses; the primary strength of the way I'm doing this is that you can have arbitrary geometry in a room, up to the performance-crunch point, whatever that bottleneck turns out to be (remember, I only have the most-simplistic of AIs running right now, doing some simple path-finding and path-following; they'll eat more CPU as they get "smarter").  For example, if I want to build a huge arena room with sub-rooms that have procedural elements, I can totally do that. 

I think this will make more sense when I have built out some bigger rooms; right now, they're just the simplest concept pieces I could build to test things out with.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: TaLaR on November 20, 2017, 09:25:28 PM
Ok, your choice. Having played Unexplored, I'd say it's dungeons do actually feel unlike typical random generation. So while it's approach may have it's share of problems, there are definite merits too.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 21, 2017, 05:36:06 PM
Oh, don't get me wrong, that's a perfectly-good way to build dungeons, I just like this approach better because I think that it'll be easier to make visually-appealing stuff, and as this is my first full game in ages, I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible :)

I might (might) be able to build a playable, basic demo of the concepts tomorrow.  Nothing fancy; just roam around the level, kill zombies, get to the end, keep going until you die (or maybe I'll add a Win Condition, just for giggles).

The room-generator, while still imperfect, is now capable of constructing rooms pretty reliably and can build start-rooms and end-rooms (i.e., an escape to the next dungeon level).  There are a lot of things that are kind of "loose ends" at present, but now that the room-generator appears to be pretty bullet-proof (fingers crossed there) it might work out.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 24, 2017, 05:40:39 PM
Well, that didn't work out.  I badly broke my lighting system on the Wednesday, unfortunately.  I got a little over-ambitious and put in the other part of the lighting system (essentially, point lights with soft shadows and other elements, with my LOS system on top) and broke it.

Good news, though; I got it fixed tonight and working properly, so I can get back to integration of all of the elements and (hopefully) get all of it assembled into a basic game soon.  Unfortunately, this being a holiday weekend here, my time is relatively short.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 27, 2017, 09:41:01 AM
OK, so I have a basic "game" built.  Integration of the maze generator with the lighting and pathfinding system wasn't too scary, but I ended up doing a lot of cleanup in the end.

There's a "main character" you can move around the world, etc.; no baddies to shoot yet, but soon.  The LOS and lighting system got fixed up and I'm fairly confident the whole thing's working like it's supposed to.

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_integration001.png)

I'm having an issue that I didn't fully anticipate, though.  I've learned why Teleglitch used the widely-panned feature of turning the camera when entering new rooms.  

It has to do with navigating spaces that are at odd angular rotations, while using the traditional WASD control setup.  It turns out, once I got a character to move around in the spaces and collide with walls, etc., that this was awkward; moving down a hallway, for example, was pretty annoying.

So... I think I'm going to have to think about my major options:

1.  Tank controls; all movement is relative to the direction the character's facing.  That's how I have it set up right now, and it works pretty well, but I'm guessing newbies will find it a little hard to do.

2.  Mouse movement, where the character moves towards the mouse position when left-clicked and pathfinds on its own, like in games like Grim Dawn, Diablo, etc.  The problem with this is that, while it works, it's hardly a good solution for a twin-stick shooter.

3.  Accept Teleglitch's fix for these issues was correct, and implement it.  Given the amount of complaining it generated at the time, I'm not entirely sold, but, if you didn't get motion sickness from the rotations, it worked.

4.  Give up the fancy angular stuff, of course.  But man, it's cool-feeling.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: TaLaR on November 27, 2017, 06:39:26 PM
As player I'd prefer either 3 or 4.
3 is more immersive, 4 is simple and functional.

1: Tank controls are clunky by definition, so you'll have to make rest the game slow and imprecise to match control scheme.
2: Whenever I see a diablo-like setup my first though is "If only I could properly WASD instead...". Second is "Hmm... I could probably find/make ahk script to convert controls to WASD". But of course such conversion is usually imperfect, and I end up simply passing on the game.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: David on November 27, 2017, 08:17:49 PM
Gotta say, it's neat seeing you grapple with a game design problem you've run headlong into as a logical conclusion of the feature-set you built. You can imagine how game devs have this happen all the time, and it's not something you'd even really think about unless you've actually prototyped such a system and run into it yourself.

In conclusion, nice game dev process going on and it's fun to read this thread!
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 27, 2017, 08:29:45 PM
Yeah, it's interesting dealing with the stuff as it comes up.  The core's pretty satisfying, even in its really early state; it feels like I'm walking through a interconnected series of spaces, which is cool.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 28, 2017, 01:42:10 AM
Welp.  I have zombies in the game.  OK, they're not very interesting zombies right now, but they can successfully navigate the game-world and seek a target.

Oh, wait, didn't I get that done already?  Like, 2 weeks ago?  Well... it turned out that, transitioning from "Simplistic Square World" to "Fully Rotated World" broke their puny, brainless AIs pretty badly.  Reasons for this included not dealing with the A* system in a way that would prevent blocked paths, poor design of the motion-planning systems, and generally, they were pretty brain-dead upon introduction.

Now, they're un-broken, mostly; the zombies can wander the entire map, trying to eat your poor Space Trooper's brains.  However, since said Trooper doesn't have a gun to fight back with, yet, that's hardly sporting, in a world of tight hallways.  So they're still Mostly Harmless right now.

I'm seriously considering whether to implement a node-based pathfinder rather than what I'm doing, which is A* using a grid that gets initialized after the world builds.  It'll be a pain, because the pathfinder nodes will have to calculate connections with one another after the world builds and that means that they'll almost certainly have to be built into the rooms as objects of some kind before being virtualized or I'll have to use some other strategy, but... huh, Teleglitch did that, too... and probably for the same reasons.

It's fairly defendable in terms of both speed and practical obstacle avoidance; one of the things that gave me a real headache was that the AI needs to navigate all those twisty, narrow corridors without borking, which turned out to be Fairly Hard and computationally expensive to boot.  A*'s idea of navigating a hallway is to cut the corners so tightly that the critters get caught on the corners; that was fixable but involved some Heavy Math.  I'm sure glad I was running at 500 FPS back at the beginning of time, because I'm already down to 200, and there still isn't all that much happening, which is not making me happy.  I also don't exactly have hordes of them running around, yet, and I kind of want hordes at times; I think the upper limit on these critters is somewhere south of 30 actively pathfinding before we start seeing noticeable framerate drops. 

I probably need to deal with this soon.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 28, 2017, 10:29:56 PM
Well, that was... fun?

Basically, I ended up doing a combination approach, where the A* feeds into some special movement-guidance points, to help my zombies not get caught on corners too often, combined with an approach to reduce the number of pathfinder steps generated.  It works fairly well and it's fast, and I was able to get the A* considerably faster, too.  Still running well over 100 FPS with lots of critters active; I might actually get hordes after all.

Not much fun, though; endless test-cycles to see if the zombies were finally tracking reasonably well.  So I've got a fairly good base to build more critter AI now; that was the biggest hassle, I think.

I've also partially animated my Space Trooper and I built a simple state-machine to control the animation states.

For example, the character can aim and fire a gun now, and kill things:

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_firing_weapon001.png)

This is almost certainly premature on my part; I don't yet have the inventory system built yet, etc., etc., and there's absolutely no good reason to do this yet... except it's fun, and it was a long day.

Once the base animation's done and that system works, I think I'll try and tackle the issue of camera rotation. 

One of the things that came up during this series of changes was that I tackled one of the things I actually didn't like about Teleglitch; the "aiming" system.  Aiming in that game was cool, in the sense that you got to see a little further, while moving more slowly; it made when to shoot a serious choice.  I liked that part.  However, I didn't like how the mouse-aiming part worked so well.  So what I've done, instead, is that there's a zoom-out when aiming, centered on the character; you get a little benefit to your view distance while aiming, but it's not doing complicated mouse-lerping every frame that created occasional issues with the LOS system in general.  This works very nicely and it gives the sense that you're in a special mode, too.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 01, 2017, 08:37:55 AM
I apologize in advance; this turned into a bigger Wall of Text than usual, lol  ;)

I've gotten all the basics of the game ready; it's still very crude but it works, by gum.  Shooting, moving around, killing things, keeping a basic score, getting hit, dead, etc., etc.

The last few days consisted mainly of grim work on the motion-controller system for the critters, polishing, documenting, making the system abstracted rather than built into the basic critter, etc., etc.  I think that I really did get there, eventually; there are very few obvious issues with them now.

Interestingly, at least to me, was the learning-curve on figuring out the best combination of steering systems; this was a bit like the work I did on my Starsector AI replacer, but with a lot more emphasis on practical obstacle avoidance; one of things I never really developed for that system was a raycaster system for that, but, rather, an angle-tester (i.e., if this close to <thing> and angle <this> then Do Stuff)

This motion controller needed a ray-caster approach, which is slower (get things that might intersect the ray, then test each) but it was ultimately really necessary to get things working well-enough; at first, my zombies had the unerring ability to crash headlong into walls, among other lovely headaches.

I've seen a lot of approaches tried by various folks over the years and have read a fair number of articles on this.  I think it's interesting to share my solution here, at least the abstract:

Essentially, every frame, we shoot one of six rays.  They aren't all spaced evenly and they aren't randomized (that's an approach I've seen used, and while it has merits, it also has problems; if the randomizer misses too much, your only solution is more randomized rays, per-frame, which is exactly what I don't want, because rays are expensive to cast).  Essentially, there are three in front, two at the sides, and one in the rear.  There's only one raycast per game-frame, which appears to be sufficient.

Each ray influences critter behavior slightly differently; if, for example, a critter hits a wall with a side-ray, it turns and slows itself simultaneously.

But now I have to deal with the obvious problem of Content; everything's at the Programmer Art stage, and I have to make choices that I'll live with later.  I know it's been pretty boring looking at my test artwork as I proceed, but this is how things go at the beginning and luckily, I can wear the Artist Hat if I need to (and I probably do, along with the Sound Designer hat, Animator Hat, etc., etc.).

I'm experimenting with an interesting idea; now that zoom works, the question of putting scalar graphics into the game comes into play.  Teleglitch was panned by some of its critics because of its relatively-low resolution art; it was deliberately old-school in that way.  One of the two brothers who were the initial developers said that he was trying to deliberately push the low-res envelope, and while it was interesting, it wasn't everybody's cup of tea (not that there is any such perfect cup, when it comes to art).  So, I can avoid this, by using a trick somewhat similar to Starsector.

The only catches?

1.  Whatever scalar I wish to use, I have to set now; once I start seriously developing sprites for the game, I can't change that willy-nilly.  I think 2:1 is reasonable; if I'm uncomfortable with the zoom later, I can always dial it back and interpolation will cover most of my sins.

2.  Obviously, there's a cost in texture memory, but frankly, I'm not expecting to experience major problems with a 2D game that's using sprite sheets, etc., unless I go really hog-wild.  Memory use in general for the game is nothing right now, by modern standards.  My biggest issues with graphical performance are that scaling the screen up beyond its current size (it's 1000 / 1000) won't work out, in terms of the performance of the LOS / shadow-caster; I can put UI elements to the sides, buff out the 80 pixels top and bottom for 1080 if I wish, but nothing beyond that.  That's the biggest practical detail, in terms of performance, now that the critter system's largely optimized; I just got done running down over 50 critters without lag and everything stayed above 100 FPS the whole time, so I'm fairly confident I'm all right.

But, with my zoom system, an interesting idea came up.  

I can combine higher-resolution images that look their best at min zoom, rather than max-zoom, and the zoom-out can feel bigger; you'll go from "intimate" to "sniper zooming out". And if players prefer a more-intimate view, I can give them a slider to cap max zoom, leaving min-zoom at 1:1.  Going over max zoom won't be possible (it breaks everything, lol) but it won't be necessary, either, I suspect; I can simply limit the ranges of weapons, etc., so that it feels like a really long range.

This sounds reasonable and cool.

All that said, I don't think I'm going to go hog-wild with the graphics side of things.  

I did some messing around with normal-maps, just playing, and I think it'll add too much production time if I'm the only developer; not just building the system (lights would have to create vector data, among other "fun") but mainly, it'll mean developing artwork means developing normalmaps, too.

That takes lots of time to do well, with 2D stuff where they're going to be presented next to other things in a scene and compared in terms of relative heights, etc. I tested out a lot of ideas on this back when GraphicsLib was still pretty new, and frankly, I think it would require a 3D workflow for art to do it reasonably fast, and by reasonably fast, I mean building out characters in 3D, rigging, animating, etc.; anything less, and the randomness of the normals and depth maps (because a really good look probably requires a parallax shader) would be too unreasonable.  I may come back to this later; I like the idea of normal-lighting to give things a 3D-ish feel, especially if I can figure out a way to "bake" it into static objects under static lights or something to make performance really reasonable.

I think I will be using some of my shader-fu on some other ideas, though; among other things, I've been considering water that characters can "splash" through as a possible idea, superimposing normalmaps to edit the final result, fake reflections of nearby stuff and so forth.  

But frankly, those bells and whistles can wait until the actual game is largely done; I know I can do the big things now:

1.  Dynamic and static lighting for the scenes with soft shadows.  I haven't shown it off much, but it works well.  The system I started with required, erm, a fair amount of modification to work properly for this project, and I think I need to do some additional optimization, but I think it's basically there.

2.  The main character's state machine is largely complete, other than building in the equipment system (the bones are there, but not the details).  One game-design choice I made early was that I wasn't going to have a Teleglitch-style inventory; instead, players will have 6 "equipment slots"; this is all they can carry around with them.  Each slot can have anything in it, and what each slot does when used will be determined by what's in it.  That part is still largely not built yet, but I intend to get it done soon.  Examples of things that might go into "equipment slots" are:

A.  Weapons, duh.  A game like this lives on interesting ways to blow things away, cut them into bits, etc., etc.
B.  Instead of having a "healing potion" item, have a "healing potion" piece of equipment that eats "potion ammo" and has a cooldown timer so that it can't be spammed.  That (might) end up Diablo-style abstracted, though; it's pretty essential in games like this to have potions.
C.  Sensors that let players ping monsters through the walls and see them briefly.
D.  Shield devices and other sci-fi gadgets like that (the setting's definitely sci-fi).
E.  Other stuff I can't even be bothered to write down, like devices that help players unlock chests they find, etc.; passives and actives; anything that isn't a new suit (more about suits when that's a thing, but basically, you have a suit that's your armor, it comes with passive buffs / debuffs, and you get a helmet slot, too).

Basically, though... the plan is for:

A.  Ammo is abstractly carried around and won't have weight.
B.  Resources you find are abstractly carried around and might have weight (kind of like Fallout 3/4's system here).  But, in general, I think I'm against weight; if I want to limit players' ability to use ABC items to make XYZ resource (like converting Metal and Chemicals into Pistol Ammo, for example), then the best way to limit this is to restrict it to the pre-run phase (more on the plan for the game's structure later, when the core's built and I can start worrying about structural elements of the meta).
C.  Weapons and other Equipment aren't abstract, might have weight (carrying around a Minigun might be awesome in firefights, but might be a problem when it's empty and you're trying to flee).
D.  If you built a thing during the pre-game, if it's an abstract (like ammo) you have it with you; if it's Equipment, you don't, unless you equip it before the run.
E.  Suits and helmets are set during pre-game and can't get changed during a run.  If you find new stuff, great, it might help on the next run.

So gameplay means making choices and living with them through a run, essentially unless you find a better <something> and give up an Equipment slot to pick it up, essentially.  

I'm probably going to allow soft-storage (i.e., picking something up won't delete that other something, it just shoves it into abstract storage and you can't use it the rest of this run) but probably I'll have to implement hard-storage because somebody will whine that they picked up a Rusty Shotgun to check it out and can't get their Street-Sweeper 9000 back.  Dunno yet.  

Maybe the Right Answer is to give people a choice- pick it up and drop their <something> on the ground, as an interactive they can swap back, or put their current item into abstract storage immediately.  Or just presume that to add something to your gear menu later on, you need to keep it until the end of a run; after that, it stays in your abstract storage.  I guess all of this depends on how many items I allow for; if the abstract-storage UI is 32-pixel buttons, then basically the sky's the limit; I can have 1024 items available to choose from and my problem is coming up with 1024 things that are vaguely original and relevant (yeah, right).  64-pixel buttons (256 choices) sounds a lot more realistic; it'll be hard to come up with that many truly-unique-feeling things anyhow.

So, basically, it's time to work on the UI in general, I think, starting with a basic Loading Screen, a Level Loading screen (to hide the Procedural Stuff, not that it takes long right now) and probably it's time to think about the Equipment screen and then the core gameplay UI.

There's also the question of Content.  I don't think I want to talk much about that, yet.  Let's say only that I face a fairly major challenge there, if I'm going to raise the resolution on the sprites by 2X.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: PyroFuzz on December 01, 2017, 10:39:59 PM
Basing what i just saw from images, it looks like it would make a cool science fiction Dwarf fortress thats not rimworld. Or maybe like dungeon of the endless.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 03, 2017, 07:49:52 AM
I doubt if the core would work for something like Dwarf Fortress; it has some practical upper limits on world size, before things get too big and the game slows down, and it's not a fully-destructible environment; I have thought about how this can be used for multiple genres, but right now I'm concentrating on the sci-fi version and story I want to tell :)

I think that a comparison to Dungeon of the Endless is closer to the mark, although I doubt I'll have RTS-style control over friendly characters; if you have allies along with your main character, they'll be more independent and follow you, like Mercenaries in Diablo did.  It's going to be a while before I make any decisions about all that stuff.  First I have to get the core UIs built, so that the player knows what's going on at a deeper level and can do things like swap equipment, interact with people / objects, etc.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 07, 2017, 10:39:38 AM
Progress.  Still don't have a UI or a million other little details done, but the zombies can seek a player, the lighting system's largely working as designed, including sources from pixel-art Stuff (see the little glow on the Space Trooper's helmet) etc., etc.  Yes, the rooms are still boring to look at, but that's just art, not mechanical problems; I'll take that.  I think it's really time to get the base UI done now, so that we can have a basic game of, "don't get eaten by Zombies".

(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_light_rendering001.png)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 10, 2017, 04:35:45 PM
(http://www.wolfegames.com/EXO/exo_ui_rendering001.png)

Got the basic UI done last night.  That went remarkably easily.  It's basic, it's ugly, but hey, it works, which is way more than I expected on my first day of trying to tackle that.  There's a "loading screen", too, to cover the period where all of the world-generation happens, finally.

So it looks like now I need to actually build out my first real game loop- have a screen where players can see the controls, have the objective explained, and start a new game when they've died.  Then flesh out some of the sub-systems so that it's reasonably complete as a game.

At this point, with the vast majority of the core logic built (believe it or not, things like getting resources from pickups, etc., is so minor I haven't even bothered coding in "chests" yet) FPS is still over 200 on this rig (with load, i.e., 30-50 zombies trying to find you), but it's less than 300 at this point, which is a little worrisome.  At the worst, it bogged to about 100 FPS, with noticeable stuttering, but I finally tracked that down and killed it (the zombies were tending to call the pathfinder more than was ideal).  I think it'll hold up when sounds and effects are thrown in, but we'll see.  Can't wait to start building out effects and art and all that fun stuff, but I need to keep plugging away at essentials.

But I think the main CPU load's basically built out; other than sounds, I don't have a lot of fancy-math stuff to construct now, other than a few specifics for behavioral stuff, which should all be reasonably performant.

We'll see when I get the next details done; the next step is probably to formally build out the game loop for the first time, in a crude fashion, so that we'll have something basically playable, with a win / lose condition, etc.; with the big exception of some important UIs, this gets me pretty close to having the bare bones built.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Sproginator on December 20, 2017, 05:40:14 AM
May I recommend making the UI more around the character? Like a kind of floating system. Games such as these look so much more eerie with the UI as part of the character :)

For instance, Have the currently equipped weapons name showing next to the character as floating text. Indicate HP via a blood splatter filter over the screen. Stuff like that

Apart from that, Love it so far!
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 20, 2017, 09:41:49 AM
I might look at things like that as I get further along.  I get what you're saying there, but I think the balance is between keeping everything visually clean (this is a game where seeing all around you is super-important) and making the feel good.

One option might be to have a small UI that follows the character and shows minimal information (health / energy left, ammo left, if appropriate) and have the bigger things (like which piece of Equipment you're using) out on on the corner edges.  I think players need that information, and it's not taking up a lot of space atm.

I've just finished up the main game loops; the player can start the game, get killed, restart the game, pause the game, unpause.  Still working on structural stuff like this to make the whole thing playable and then it's finally time to worry about introducing some mechanics to make it (hopefully) Fun and starting to add a little more content.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Sproginator on January 03, 2018, 10:31:35 AM
I might look at things like that as I get further along.  I get what you're saying there, but I think the balance is between keeping everything visually clean (this is a game where seeing all around you is super-important) and making the feel good.

One option might be to have a small UI that follows the character and shows minimal information (health / energy left, ammo left, if appropriate) and have the bigger things (like which piece of Equipment you're using) out on on the corner edges.  I think players need that information, and it's not taking up a lot of space atm.

I've just finished up the main game loops; the player can start the game, get killed, restart the game, pause the game, unpause.  Still working on structural stuff like this to make the whole thing playable and then it's finally time to worry about introducing some mechanics to make it (hopefully) Fun and starting to add a little more content.

Sounds great man! Can't wait to keep following the development :D
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on January 08, 2018, 07:26:20 AM
Well, I should have some new news soon :)  I got slowed down quite a lot the last month, due to various RL things (holidays and other stuff) but I'm relatively free this week to get more work done :)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: icepick37 on February 27, 2018, 12:04:00 PM
Just finding this thread and wanted to say: Awesome. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for shameless self-promotion.  :)

Nice work.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Sproginator on March 04, 2018, 02:44:19 AM
I look forward to a progress update :D
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on March 05, 2018, 05:53:33 PM
Ah, well, that's good, I hope to have something to show... soon-ish.  Been really busy with the rest of my life this last month but I'm still tooling away on this when I can :)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 18, 2019, 06:45:04 PM
<GIANT NECRO>

Hey, for everybody who was vaguely interested in this... I've got an update, finally.

Progress on this game came to a rather-abrupt halt last year, due to two things; life in general (my life last year had a lot of moving parts) and some technical issues.  I hit a wall on certain aspects of pathfinding / path-following that really required some lengthy attention to address. 

I actually built another game core (shades of the now-apparently-cancelled The Last Night) while mulling it over; that may turn into another game someday. 

But this fall, sans serious distractions, I sat down with this again, tackled the pathfinding / path-following problems, moved forward on a lot of the other issues, and well, here we are. 

The screenshots won't really look a whole lot different; the core rendering approach with lights and suchlike looks pretty similar (but there have been a lot of small improvements under the hood), but the game's substantially closer to working like it should.  The pathfinder I've developed really performs nicely and should offer good support for lots of nasty critters on the screen!

(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/exodus_screen001.jpg)
(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/exodus_screen002.jpg)

The UI's being worked on right now.  I'm hoping I'll have something that I can show a little demo of sometime this year.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on December 04, 2019, 05:30:12 PM
I think I'm about done working on the lighting system.  The light in the top right is dynamic.  Note the translucency of the glass.
(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/exodus_screen004.jpg)

A lot of other things are now either done or getting there rapidly.  Objects are destroyable, enemies have more-like-final graphics and systems, I built a particle system to do fancy FX with (sometimes I feel like my whole experience of developing games revolves around particle systems, lol).
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on January 07, 2020, 04:51:22 PM
In memory of Syd Mead:

(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/syd_mead_cars01.png)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on January 08, 2020, 02:27:48 AM
Squares make for odd spaces, conversation-wise.

This is just mockup art I threw together, but:

(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/CONVERSATION.png)
(http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/Exodus/CONVERSATION2.png)
I think the second one balances a lot better.  I started with the first one, with ratios similar to Fallout; it just doesn't feel right, as a square.
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on January 24, 2020, 06:45:48 AM
Well... at this point, it's a little past POC stage (the main tech is done and most of the UI exists) but I don't have it ready-enough to consider showing it anywhere yet.  Probably when I get it to that point, I'll show a little demo here and a few other places to help get initial critique, then proceed to get it cleaned up for presentation to publishers, consider whether I'd like to do a Kickstarter, etc. :)
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 10, 2020, 03:53:39 PM
Yes, this is still happening, lol.  I probably need to start tweeting regularly about it, or something, now that a lot of the bigger design stuff is done.

https://youtu.be/sST0cz_R5_E
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Nick XR on November 10, 2020, 04:01:41 PM
Nice work!  Looking forward to seeing how it progresses!
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Sundog on November 10, 2020, 07:07:51 PM
Looking good!
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Morrokain on November 13, 2020, 09:01:13 PM
I'm really liking the sound effects and it seems like there is good weapon/enemy variety just from that little video. Stuff that goes boom feels viscerally impactful in the creepy dim-lit atmosphere too.

Nice job on all the progress!
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: Havoc on November 17, 2020, 02:31:24 AM
the flamethrower looks nice
what graphiclibs/language do you use?
Title: Re: I’m working on a game, finally.
Post by: xenoargh on November 17, 2020, 03:12:21 AM
Thanks for all the nice words :)

For things like the flamethrower, it's drawing with a shader that does some mild displacement distortion w/ Perlin noise; nothing very fancy.

Really, the only "fancy" stuff is the lighting engine and the pathfinder, which took a lot of experimentation to figure out.

However, UI's probably taken the most sheer time (there's a lot of UI you can't see in this video, but there's an interactive map, inventory, upgrade / crafting system, dialog system, settings menu, dual-wielding, etc., etc.).   Most of that's pretty basic, but it works. That, and developing the "demo scenario" stuff, which was mainly about making development of maps as fast as possible later. 

Right now, there's maybe 1-2 hours of gameplay w/ a single random scenario and it's technically a complete game... but who wants to pay for two hours and a handful of enemy types? That said, enough of the core tech's done that that should be expanding pretty rapidly over the next few months, and then I'll probably want to iterate over the core gameplay concept a while before I consider whether to do EA, etc.