TIGSource Forums

---

---

---

---

Presently the game's in a very early alpha state, I only started on it around the beginning of September (so two months & a half months now.) I'm developing it in Unreal 4. I'm trying to get it into Steam Early Access to help fund the game's development.

I'm hoping the control scheme will feel like the controls in Mirror's Edge (my favorite video game), for the levels I'm actually being inspired more by Spelunky / Super House of Dead Ninjas though (so where Mirror's Edge is about figuring out platforming puzzles, this is more about using platforming skills to get through the level without being killed.) I do not plan to have any form of combat for the player to use to fight back, just platforming to run away. Though I can't say how things'll change in the future.

Right now the levels are about 0.5 kilometers by 1.5 kilometers, and the goal is to follow the Zero Road (the golden line in the image) to the end of the level.

oh dude! i love the aesthetic; those colored flares are amazing

Thanks! The artstyle is very experimental/uncertain, like you can see how the graininess in the screenshot is like waaay stronger than the video (I turned off the graininess awhile ago so I could see the game more clearly for experimenting with the other visual aspects, no clue if the graininess will be in the final game - plus there was a bunch of squashing/squeezing in turning gameplay into a video & uploading it to youtube.) There's a bunch of screenshots in imgur albums (http://carlmaxwell.imgur.com/) if you wanna see some more of the artstyle & experimentation.

The graininess is good. Real good.

Made a new gameplay video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQvSKuM54-Q

Mostly just shows off Death Grids and running around.

It's actually too long, but it took me like two hours to get the video to a reasonable quality level, so I'm not working on it anymore. If anyone has any advice about how to take videos of gameplay I'd be interested to hear it. I'm using Open Broadcaster Software for recording and Blender for the video editing stuff. OBS can't make the videos at higher than 20fps without skipping and Blender can't seem to edit them without adding in a bunch of lossy blurry artifacts. But at least it's an improvement over the last video!

Some stuff I've gotten done since the last update:

• started getting the procedural generation stuff to scale the difficulty of each level as you progress.
• fixed some issues with the way the distance fog was working before
• made a tutorial level (I don't think I had made that when I last posted, it's been awhile though)

Made another new gameplay video! Slightly shorter! And WITH SOUND!!! (will link it in the top post.)

I've mostly been working on camera animation stuff (animating into a crouch. Got animations in place for sliding/landing/crouching/breathing.)

I've been experimenting with new ideas for threats to interact with, currently the game only has 3 threats (death grids, turrets, spikes) and I think that would get repetitive, so I'm hoping to get somewhere closer to 11 threats. Not sure when/if I'll reach that target, so far I've prototyped two ideas (spinning laser turrets, roving death spheres) that have both failed, so, dunno.

saw the dev video 2, and the artstyle is pretty great, kinda remind me of Tron.

also, i think currently the game looks more like a Half Life 2 bunny hop speedrun thing than Mirror's Edge kind of control. i don't know which aim you're going but if you actually look at how people parkour in real life, the motion does slow down from time to time, especially when falling down and rolling, climbing wall, etc etc.

Hmm. That's concerning that it looks like that, I'm not aiming for a bunnyhopping style game.

I have been watching POV parkour videos. And yeah sliding / vertical wallrunning does slow you down in Itinerant (a vertical wallrun nearly returns your speed to 0 - I do need to refine it more though.) I haven't decided how landing after a fall will work exactly, I had decided earlier that not having fall damage was more fun, and since it's an arcade-ish game I figured realism didn't matter for that. I'll go revisit landing after a fall to see what I can do there, guess I'll have to implement rolling.

Another thing that would really help with that would be proper full body awareness with animations, which I hope to get at some point.

Edit: Also, thanks for the feedback! That is something I should be paying more attention to.

I like the movement. Gotta go fast.

An obvious suggestion:
Everything is flat! Sure you have buildings and little dips, but everything takes place on a main plane. If this is parkour then there needs to be some ground height changes! You gotta have some height for parkour! A few BIIIIG crevices would be nice too.

I've been trying to think of good ways to add verticality to the game. The problem is that players will be trying to go as fast as possible, and climbing up more than 1 level will take a fair amount of time. I'm considering adding in rainbow colored logs (like the ones in skifree) that would allow you to jump really high, maybe having a level that's entirely vertical, dunno. I do think it makes a lot of sense to have more vertical movement.

In other news, I did my first playtest session not long ago, the game is now much more user-friendly in certain ways (I had had wallruns only trigger when you were looking right at a wall, and only when you held down spacebar, now they trigger if you jump parallel to a wall, and will trigger regardless of whether you hold down spacebar. This actually loses some platforming control, but I had never actually taken advantage of the ability to "cancel" a wall run so losing it doesn't strike me as a bad thing. I just wasn't really thinking about it the right way before.)

I've also added a bunch of camera animations to the game, previously I had camera shake effects but I hadn't defined any actual animations, now I have some. Haven't quite figured out how to do all the animations (there's a falling animation I want to do but can't get to work right. Meh. It was taking too long and I didn't want to spend too much time on purely cosmetic stuff, though the game feel for movement related stuff is really important for this game.)

I've been experimenting with the spinning lazer turrets...

---

---

Riding on them is quite enjoyable. I haven't quite gotten them working in a game design sense though. I'm currently thinking their spinning will be nice because it could add a timing challenge to the game. Presently they just end up shooting you in the back when you aren't looking (& usually have no warning), which is not what I want.

---

---

At the suggestion of my playtester I'm experimenting with adding in a Zero Road Bridge that shows up after you die, it helps you get back to the spot you were at in the level, sortof like an autosave feature (that's a picture of it). It turns out the game is quite difficult without it, he wasn't able to get through the first level after twenty minutes of play, so, the difficulty probably needs adjusting.

Also I've added a presskit() to the website and made the first post in this thread prettier and started making gifs and stuff. Gifs of this game are terrible due to the graininess & speed of gameplay, but whatever.

How bout slope? Or something like spring in Sonic and Mirror's Edge(where Faith step on some object and use it like spring), or plank that goes up the building a little bit.(like 1 floor, or half floor where you have to climb the rest)

So I haven't posted anything in a bit, but I have actually been doing stuff, so, update time!

---

---

I've added Rainbow Logs now, (though they're currently green cause I had a green material lying around that wasn't being used & the rainbow effect I want would take a bit to create.) They let you jump up smoothly onto platforms up to 12 meters taller than you. They need like camera animations to make the effect look more... Juicy! I can't think of a better word.

---

---

I also added Pillars, they're 12 meters tall and 2x2 meters horizontally. The tallest buildings are currently 12 meters tall.

The purpose of pillars is that they add a reason to now be in the center of the "lane", whereas everything else in the game (rainbow logs, occasionally openings in "fences", doors, etc) tells you to stay in the center, pillars pull you to a dead stop if you're in the middle. Just helps break up the gameplay planning stuff a little bit.

---

---

I added staircases, they're very rough and do weird stuff quite often. They do add more verticality to the game though, it's just like visually they're positioning is awkward currently, need better procedural generation stuff to improve them mostly.

Also this gif also shows you how running straight into pillars is detrimental to your velocity.

---

---

I just added these, I'm calling them crenellations -yes I know that doesn't make sense-, like pillars they make you think about whether you want to be in the middle of the lane, and they also only show up on buildings, never on the ground level, which is important because Death Grids and the Spikes/Fences never show up on the buildings, so being on buildings is currently too secure of a position, I need stuff to help break it up a little bit.

I'm also thinking about making it so that you can duck-jump over crenellations if you time the jump just right. It'd be interesting cause then it'd be a choice of, do you want to try that and risk dying but maintain your speed, or do you want to go around them and lose some velocity and lose the 'center of the lane' position that's so ideal for getting through doorways.

---

---

I added "railings" to the sides of the Zero Bridge to keep you from falling off by accident (when you get up to 30 meters per second and the camera's shaking all over the place it gets hard to stay on a two-meter wide bridge without any support at all.)

Edit: also, as a side note, this gif is incredibly awkward. I mean, look at it. It looks like it's standing still most of the time. I guess moving at 20 meters per second isn't easy to see using 10fps and 1 meter squares. The character is actually continuously accelerating throughout the gif. Might add more variation along the Zero Bridge to make motion more obvious.

---

---

I did a bunch of stuff this week, I refactored the procedural generation code so it's better now (slightly more optimal and easier to work with.) I got the fog working properly and added distance culling which fixed some performance glitches.

Also there was this cool time period where I had the distance culling set to less than the fog distance so that whole buildings would just pop in a few dozen meters away from me. I thought it looked really cool and made sense with the whole Tron-esque atmosphere. I want to experiment with it more in the future, but for now I'm trying to not have pop-in.

I figured out how to fix the crouching and sliding animations (timelines (https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/67332/crouching-smoothly-shooter-game-example.html)!), I made some progress on getting the camera to rotate along its roll axis while doing horizontal wallruns, I added rails to the Zero Bridge, and got objects spawning on top of buildings properly. I also made progress fixing some important issues with the ledge vaulting / wallrunning code, which resolved at least two important bugs (one where wallrunning into a ceiling would get you stuck and one where you couldn't climb onto platforms that were inside rooms.)

Also I had another playtest session somewhere in there. I think that was more than a week ago actually, I should post updates more often.

Also brainstormed some good ideas for more threats / platforming challenges.

Also the game used to be a tutorial and three levels, and yesterday I reduced it to a tutorial and two levels. Also the levels used to be 2 km long and 0.5 km wide, and now it's 1.5 km long and 0.5 km wide.

I experimented with a 0.6 km wide by 0.5 km long level, thinking I could use it for like a tutorial-like level or something, it showed some promise. The 1.5 km by 0.5 km is really just my early rough guess at what would make sense, and I need to refine it at some point. It works for now though. Playtesters would make it 75% of the way through the old levels but not 100% of the way, so that's why I bumped it down from 2 to 1.5.

I've really been feeling the stress / emotional effects of being in crunch time for two months lately, so that's not been fun. If you notice my words not being eloquent/rational, that is reason most.

Joseph Elliot is & has put(ting) together some music for the game, so that's cool. Gonna update the presskit to reflect this fact.

Today I'm hoping to get a good workflow setup for video editing, probably gonna go buy the Adobe Creative suite. Wish me luck!

That video's mostly what I'm waiting on for putting up a greenlight campaign, so, that should be going up at... some time... Soonish. Soon as in like, days, to be clear.

I've decided to post updates more often, so,

---

I was working on the video editing and video recording stuff, but OBS and Adobe Creative suite did not work together. Like at all. However I can now record reasonably quality video on obs. Unfortunately, I can do absolutely nothing with that video once I have it.

---

---

So since working on materials and post process effects is my happy place I gave the rainbow logs colors! I need to refine the colors and the material and stuff.

---

---

Also I made a platforming challenge pressure plate + door thing that I'm calling a portcullis trap because of what inspired it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1QpsNcX5-E) rather than because of any actual portcullis-likeness. I plan on making the pressure plate blue instead of red (to indicate that it is not a deadly obstacle. I'm using red to indicate deadliness in the game.)

DEVLOG #4 :

---

Thanks to the help of reddit user /u/CooperAMA & some posts from /r/letsplay I have a video recording & editing workflow largely worked out! Bandicam + Adobe Creative Suite is basically what it took. Though trying to use Dxtory for it made me realize that my hard drive isn't fast enough for video capturing, so, I repartitioned a solid state drive (which otherwise contains an ubuntu install) to store videos on, and now it seems to be working out!

Now I just need to sit down and record lots of video, do some editing, hook up some music and voila! A trailer.

Also if anyone's wondering I use GifCam to record gifs.

Also I just realized how huge this page is (because of all the gifs.) So maybe I should like, start posting these things as videos and have images of them linking to the videos? Dunno. For now, here's a still image!

---

---

I do not know what to call this. I'm just calling it a Depthslide... Cause... It looks deep, and you slide on it... Or maybe you will someday...

Mechanically it works similarly to the ice in Chips Challenge (&c) where once you step on it you can't stop your forward movement, so the idea is that these rooms will force you to decide ahead of time if you're going to dedicate to going through the room and dealing with whatever is on the other side of the room (which you have to look through and figure out what that is  - while also realizing that you're walking onto a Depthslide - and decide if it's worth it / possible to get through, or decide to turn away and try another room / another path. They are not in themselves dangerous so you shouldn't just like always avoid them, but if they lead into something dangerous they make that thing more deadly. Also I think they look cool (hopefully they'll look cooler after I get more work on them. Hopefully they'll also work when I get more time to work on them...)

---

I think that's actually all I added to the game recently. I got some helpful feedback about the game. At some point semi-recently I slightly redesigned the site (http://itinerantstory.com), going for like a itch.io landing page sortof style, with gifs from the devlog and putting words next to things... After I get the video together I'll probably embed it like at the top & center it, to provide a good starting point to hearing about the game, then have the gifs & descriptive text below.

DEVLOG #5 :

---

The game is live on Steam Greenlight, go vote now (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=343434423) if you're interested in the game!

---

---

That's right, after communing with my beard for 8 days, at long last it has bequeathed upon us a mighty trailer!

Unfortunately, in all that communing, I have not had time to get much like actual gameplay stuff done. So, this is just a notice that the trailer & greenlight campaign are up.

DEVLOG #6 :

---

I've partially adopted Mirror's Edge's Wallclimb/wallrun terminology, dropping my own horizontal/vertical wallrun terms.

Wallclimb is much simpler to say than Vertical Wallrun.

---

---

Changes:

• reduced the wallclimb speed by a little more than half, feels much smoother now. This has actually interfered with the feel of wallruns. One thing at a time.
• now rotating the camera's roll 11.25 degrees when doing a wallrun (screenshotted above)

Experiments:

• tried to refine the jumping/wallrun-jump movement, the height you can get from those things is not quite right. Made some progress, got a good experimenting "gym" setup.
• nearly got a wallclimb camera motion in place, it's got a few glitches left to iron out.
• trying out a new respawn mechanic: storing player's position each time he lands and respawning him at the last landing location

The new respawn mechanic makes the game significantly easier. It has problems though, at the moment it is entirely disorienting.

In future a more idealized version of this would record the player's position and rotation every 0.2 seconds (give or take) and when they die play through the last few seconds.

Maybe erasing the saved states each time you land.

It's a good solution for now because it took like 3 seconds to implement, and does not have the problems the Zero Bridge had.

I'm not confidant that it's the best respawn mechanic for the game & I'll probably use something else ultimately, but it's a good fit for the time being.

---

All in all, I'm pretty happy with today's progress, the wallrun roll angling thing is something I've been wanting for awhile and had tried to implement before (and almost got there! I had just missed a spot in the math.)

DEVLOG #7 :

---

Made some good progress on various platforming challenges & threats. Should really find better terms for referring to that stuff someday.

---

---

A super simple menu, the Settings button doesn't work yet, the others do. This tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBADl-gbITQ) was pretty helpful when making it.

---

---

Cube Spikes. Just a cube with spikes. They extend as you approach.

Cube Spikes are interesting because they're actually really easy to go around completely, there's plenty of space in the room to just walk in and walk around them, but doing so loses a bunch of velocity, but when having a hard time with one it's nice 'cause you can just walk by it. You can also duck jump onto it and then over it. It might also be possible (if traveling at great speed) to duck jump over them entirely.

Needs more spikes on the sides. Also needs to not be so awful looking in general. (It's not as bad from this distance, but up close they look really bad. Just reducing the size of the cube by half would probably help a lot. Didn't even start on the visuals for this thing, just hooking up the game mechanical stuff.)

---

---

Doors made of sand. Really just sand that's piled up in a doorway. It breaks apart if you run into it, slowing you down a tad (haven't figured out how much it should slow you down yet: 7% feels like too little and 20% too much.) Also haven't configured how fast you have to be going in order to break them. Probably the amount of speed you can build up from 10 meters of running, -ish.

The height of the "door" makes it so you can sortof see what's inside the room (and behind it) unless it contains a Depthslide (which aren't working yet) in which case you need to think about what's in the room after that room. This is also (part of) why the Cube Spikes have that funky ceiling-fan-looking cube floating above them, it provides a cue that there's a Cube Spike in the room if there's a sand door on the room.

I'm thinking I'll go in and add bevels and such to make it look... Different.

---

Stuff I made some progress on:

• Timed Spikes (spikes in a room that present a timing problem, I'll amplify when they're working better.)
• Falling Rooms (rooms with floors that fall away - having a hard time getting Unreal to realize the floor is falling faster than the player - I know I saw code in the movement component that does that, hopefully I'll spot it next time I work on this.)
• Also experimented with adding additional sections to the tutorial in order to help encourage players to learn skills incidentally while progressing through.

The new respawn mechanic really makes the gameplay a lot easier. It's nice... Sortof. If I end up keeping it I'll probably end up making the levels less wide, since there won't be much use in a super-wide level anymore, the original respawn mechanic encouraged exploration, cause if you had already tried progressing through the level via one path a couple times and been frustrated, trying the other paths would seem like a pretty good idea. The new mechanic respawns you right before whatever killed you, so you might end up beating your head against a problem that you're frustrated with. This is the problem that roguelikes solve beautifully: if you have a hard time with a problem, you die and are immediately released from that problem and given random new problems.

It could be just me, but every time I see the title I think it says Internet Story or like it's supposed to be spelled Internet and it's misspelled? That's probably not your intention, just and observation.

DEVLOG #8 :

---

I ran out of space on my hard drive, so I spent some time today clearing up a hundred gigs (clearing out old MMOs I haven't played. Apparently I still had World of Warcraft and Dragon Nest installed.)

This gave me the space to start recording videos of testing, so the work leading up to the work on the next trailer has begun!

---

---

Lazy Turret!

Yeah.
He just sits there
All the other turrets like jump into the air when you show up and twirl around to shoot towards you
They try really hard
And they fail so much.
But they keep trying!
This guy just sits there
If you move yourself into his line of fire he'll fire at you once
Then he gives up forever
He's just like, "I tried guys."

---

Less visual stuff:

• Fixed some bugs with text displaying badly in some places (it still displays badly in other places.)
• Got the wallclimbing camera motion working! Can't wait to do some longer playtesting with it in place. It was totally glitched out before, and it hugely detracted from game feel. I think it still has a overly strong feel to it, like the landing motion is really sudden and jarring. But adding like easing & stuff should be easy. Very happy that this is working now. It's funny though cause the problem was just that I hadn't hooked up two of the nodes in blueprint. D'oh!

I realized I forgot to add stand in sound effects to the things I made yesterday, which (in hindsight) is particularly noticeable on the Sand Door and Falling Room/Floor.

I built & cooked the game and did a run through today, and found that the text in the menu vanishes in actual builds of the game. I don't know why. I've tried experimenting and I got some text to show up, but have not yet figured the problem out. Offputtingly the menu still works fine, you just have to remember where the buttons are and what they do.

DEVLOG #9 :

---

• fixed a clipping issue where the player would get stuck on edges when stepping across a corner of a Death Grid.
• Deleted a bunch of unused content that came with Unreal (reduced size of game builds?)
• openings in floors now swap sides with each storey of a building. This allows you to climb to higher levels of a building from within.
• refined sand door collisions: minimum velocity + greater slowdown, better particle effect on breaking through. Still needs more work.
• got an initial version of "platform hopping" in place. By default in Unreal 4, if you were jumping through the air and your foot snagged on a wall or obstacle, you would stop completely and lose 100% of your velocity. This felt very unfair in Itinerant, so "Platform Hopping" detects collision cases where you're jumping/falling and your legs collide with something and lets you just hop onto that thing, without losing much speed.