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[icepick37]

Just finding this thread and wanted to say: Awesome. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for shameless self-promotion. 

Nice work.

[Sproginator]

I look forward to a progress update

[xenoargh]

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

[xenoargh]

<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!

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.

[xenoargh]

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.

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).

[xenoargh]

In memory of Syd Mead:

[xenoargh]

Squares make for odd spaces, conversation-wise.

This is just mockup art I threw together, but:

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.

[xenoargh]

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.

[xenoargh]

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.

[Nick XR]

Nice work!  Looking forward to seeing how it progresses!

[Sundog]

Looking good!

[Morrokain]

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!

[Havoc]

the flamethrower looks nice
what graphiclibs/language do you use?

[xenoargh]

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.