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[Christian Knudsen]

First environment assets
July 17th

I've been working on assets for one of the environments encountered in the game's first mission: the parking lot outside the building where your target is.

(Click to enlarge)

There isn't much stuff yet, but it's a start! If you look closely, you'll notice a small red dot in the lower corner of the gray car's windshield. This red dot blinks to indicate that the car has an alarm. Car alarms can be triggered and act as diversions to lure guards away from their post or drown out gunfire. That's just one of the ways you'll be using the environment to stealthily kill your target.

[Dysposin]

Nice and informative devlog. A few points that came to mind while reading through this:

* Ditch the drag and drop from the inventory. Right click puts gun to the right hand, left click to left, shift + click drops it. I've learned from a few hours of Minecraft (without the shift shortcut) that too much of drag and drop can ruin even the greatest game...

* I don't see what you gain from the slots for each hand, except if you plan to make some kind of dual shooting etc. Now it seems to be just another inventory slot. Of course, putting it behind a hotkey would make it useful.

* Just a visual thing, but right now everyone's walking around dressed in skintight latex and leather. If you'd throw in some more baggy clothes, maybe a trench coat or a hoodie, the npc's would stand out from one and other. Like TF2 and friends showed us, silhouette is pretty important for graphics, and these guys all have the same silhouette right now.

All in all, I love what you have going on here. I've always loved these fallout'ish graphics, and from what you have here, the gameplay seems pretty solid.
By the way, this clothing system you have here just screams for customizable avatar. I'd love to go all Deadpool on this thing... I mean, there's nothing like a good old lawsuit from Marvel, right?

Sorry if this didn't make any sense, I'm trying to write this from an on-screen qwerty...

[Christian Knudsen]

Nice and informative devlog.

Thanks!

* Ditch the drag and drop from the inventory. Right click puts gun to the right hand, left click to left, shift + click drops it. I've learned from a few hours of Minecraft (without the shift shortcut) that too much of drag and drop can ruin even the greatest game...

Drag and drop is a lot more intuitive. You'll also be dragging items from your inventory onto things in the game world, for example to give items to NPCs or open doors with keycards. But don't worry, you won't be doing anywhere near as much inventory management as you do in Minecraft.

* I don't see what you gain from the slots for each hand, except if you plan to make some kind of dual shooting etc. Now it seems to be just another inventory slot. Of course, putting it behind a hotkey would make it useful.

You can have a ranged weapon in one hand and a melee weapon in the other. Also, if you get shot in one arm, you'll probably want to switch your weapon to the other hand.

* Just a visual thing, but right now everyone's walking around dressed in skintight latex and leather. If you'd throw in some more baggy clothes, maybe a trench coat or a hoodie, the npc's would stand out from one and other. Like TF2 and friends showed us, silhouette is pretty important for graphics, and these guys all have the same silhouette right now.

There'll be more and more varied clothing for the full game. I'm using a limited selection for the demo, since making the clothing subsprites takes quite a bit of time (there's about 24,000 subsprites for the character looks currently in the game).

By the way, this clothing system you have here just screams for customizable avatar. I'd love to go all Deadpool on this thing... I mean, there's nothing like a good old lawsuit from Marvel, right?

The game probably won't have a customizable avatar. Beyond the issue of cutscene images relying on a specific avatar look, I'll also be making unique animations for the player's character. If the look of the player's character was to be customizable, I'd have to make clothing subsprites for all the clothing items in the game just for these special player animations, instead of just making them for the player's clothes.

I missed the Deadpool reference?

[jotapeh]

Heh, car alarms are a nice touch. I definitely want to try to abuse those.

[Dysposin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadpool
Otherwise, pretty solid points.

[Christian Knudsen]

Ahh, of course. I'd forgotten he's a mercenary. I was just thinking "pyschotic superhero" and couldn't quite get it to fit.

[sonicblastoise]

Wow! This is looking GREAT

I love the fallout-y feel. Your animations are also fantastic.

If you need a writer/playtester, let me know!

I also keep a blog with a decent readership (~200hits/day), so if you want some promo or just want to see how I write, you can check it out here: http://mediocritycodex.blogspot.com

[Christian Knudsen]

I'll certainly need playtesters at some point. My plan is to release the current version when the basic engine is completely up and running, and then make incremental changes and improvements to that until it's a complete demo. I'll then start working on the full game, which I'll need playtesters for when it's done. Which will probably be in a couple of years, at least...

I plan on doing all the writing myself. It's actually what I'm looking forward to the most.

[sonicblastoise]

sounds good! Love to see that you're planning on taking your time with this project. I also love anything that remotely resembles fallout because of its nice balance of visual feedback and reliance on flavor text.

The combat animations look good so far too. Excellent work on the engine

[Christian Knudsen]

Z-layering
September 10th

The world of Hostile Takeover has been pretty flat for a while. There's been no z-layer, meaning that everything has been on the same level. That's changed now. In the below images, you can see a building that's currently 2 stories high (it'll probably be 4 stories when done, but there's really no limit to how many z-layers I can add). When you enter such a building, none of the layers above will be drawn, giving you an unhindered view of the level you're on.

   
(Click to enlarge)

I've also added doors that automatically open and close when you need to pass through them, as well as windows. I'm currently working on adding elevators to transport you between the levels of a building (I really don't want to make an animation for walking up/down stairs -- at least not yet). You can already see the elevator doors on the first level of the building.

One final thing I've been working on is the map editor. It runs completely in the game engine, so I just press 'D' (for 'developer mode') when playing to move walls and stuff around. I'll probably include the map editor with the game to allow players to make their own maps. Along with the scripting language, this will let players create missions for the game, so there will probably be two modes: the campaign with the full story and individual player made missions.

The map editor is still a bit buggy. It works fine for my own purposes as I'm aware of its limitations (such as placement of walls and stuff only working as intended when the map isn't rotated), but I need to clean it up a bit before it can be used by other people. Look for it in the next development video, which I'll probably make when I've got elevators working.

[Christian Knudsen]

Shadows or no shadows?
September 21st

I'm currently optimizing the map drawing code for Hostile Takeover's isometric engine. It's basically all about minimizing the amount of tiles and layers that the code has to loop through each frame to check for stuff to draw - and also trying to minimize the amount of texture bindings for OpenGL. Anyway, as part of this, I tried disabling the wall shadows (which I originally added to create an ambient occlusion effect) to see if they had any substantial impact on the time it takes to draw a frame. They don't really, which didn't surprise me much, but the test has left me with doubt as to whether or not wall shadows should even be in the game.

The image on the left is with wall shadows, the image on the right is without:

   
(Click to enlarge)

On one hand, I think the wall shadows make the structures pop a bit more and make everything feel less flat. On the other, I can't shake the feeling that the wall shadows make it seem as if the walls are floating ever so slightly above the ground. So I can't decide if I should keep them in or discard them. What do you think?

By the way, the shadow for the "Hensley International" sign is also missing in the right-hand image. That's just because I completely disabled environment shadows for this test. Stuff like that sign will have shadows - that much I've decided on. Of course, it might just be weird if walls don't have shadows when everything else does...

[jotapeh]

I think the shadows would be good, but yeah, it DOES look like the walls are floating an inch off the pavement. And I think the direction they're cast in implies some weird sun positioning, especially in consideration of the sign shadow and the pedestrians shading/shadow underneath them and the car's shading.. it's all very oddly in contrast with each other.

edit: ok, yeah, the problem as I see it is that the wall is very brightly lit, but the shadow implies a cast ever so slightly from behind. meanwhile the characters imply that the sun is somewhere behind the observer and slightly off to the right perhaps. basically the wall shadows would be behind the structures in this view.

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, the shadow directions don't make much sense from a rational point of view. The reason for this oddness is that you're able to rotate the map and view it from 4 different angles, and if the shadows had to make sense, I'd have to make 4 version of all sprites with the 4 different sun positions and shadows. So I just decided to have the sun behind the observer so there aren't clearly visible shadows on characters and objects, but have their cast shadows directly beneath them.

I think I can make the wall shadows a bit fainter to decrease the floating effect they create. I kinda want to keep them, I think.

[Christian Knudsen]

Icons
October 10th

I think I've come up with a solution for the floating wall problem. I'll just make a shadow stripe that runs along the bottom of walls on the ground, so it looks like the shadow is cast on the ground and the wall, not on the ground below the wall. I haven't quite implemented it yet, but it shouldn't be too hard.

In other news, I've been making some cursor icons while finishing up the optimization stuff. These are the ones I've got so far that cover the player actions currently planned for the game:

I'm pleased with most of them, but I'm not sure if the middle one is clear enough. Can you tell what it is? And can you guess what action it signifies?

[Zaphos]

it's hard to tell ... maybe a fist, for punching?