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[Rube]

This is the devlog for Sojourn, a 3D roguelike. Here are some videos of progress, the latest at the top.

April 2013, miscellaneous additions

March 2013, new tileset

September 2012, combat overhaul

June 2012, sound and basic inventory

April 2012, pre-alpha footage

There's also a blog which will feature an updating roadmap here.

The basic foundation of the game is now feeling a lot more solid and robust, so development is going to focus on adding a whole bunch of items (in the form of weapons, armour and animations) as well as the system that governs how weapons and armour interact!

[laxwolf]

Nice work, the procedural dungeon generation will defiantly add a lot of playability and your gameplay ideas will make it a fun but challenging game.

[LaughingLeader]

This looks really interesting, and it's giving me a big Demon Souls/Dark Souls kind of vibe(which is GREAT). I really like how you can see your hands/feet when you look down, by the way. Seems like a simple-ish thing to do, but it's still weird in some mainstream games when there's absolutely nothing when you look down.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but the audio level in the development video was really low. I maxed out my audio levels and it was still pretty hard to hear.

[Rube]

Current work is on an inventory system. The basic user interface is in place. By default you have no inventory space, you have to drag items from your left or right hands into equipment slots to equip them. All inventory space will come in the form of pouches and rucksacks you have to equip the same as armour.

Here's the inventory UI so far;




And here's the format of the creature data that defined those equipment slots;

[creature]
[type:Human]
[mesh:human]
[stats:5:5:5:5:5:5]
[speed:3.2]
[equipmentslot:Left Hand:0.3,0.55,0]
[equipmentslot:Right Hand:0.7,0.55,0]
[equipmentslot:Helmet:0.5,0.15,0]
[equipmentslot:Body:0.5,0.4,0]
[equipmentslot:Legs:0.5,0.6,0]
[equipmentslot:Feet:0.5,0.8,0]
[equipmentslot:Left Pauldron:0.43,0.3,0]
[equipmentslot:Right Pauldron:0.57,0.3,0]
[equipmentslot:Left Gauntlet:0.4,0.5,0]
[equipmentslot:Right Gauntlet:0.6,0.5,0]

I'm not sure if it's just me, but the audio level in the development video was really low. I maxed out my audio levels and it was still pretty hard to hear.

Yeah a lot of people have commented on that, I think the audio levels of my PC must be out of whack. If it's any consolation I'm nothing saying anything very interesting.

[Rube]

First pass of the inventory system is done. There are no equippable grid inventories yet, you have to carry stuff around with your hands or wear it, but you can equip armour and it will disable any submeshes on the body. This is all moddable through textfiles too.

Next thing on the agenda is sound. Currently there is none, so this should be fun!

[Rube]

Sound has been done. There's background ambience, footsteps that are synced with animations, sword swooshes and clangs, lowering of pitch when going into slow motion, etc. I didn't bother taking screenshots.

I'm currently working on ragdolls. This was partly done because the individual bones were already in place for hit detection. All I had to do was add joints and let the physics system take over upon death. Easy, right?

You'd think so. I'm about 12+ hours in now.

[Rube]

Another video showing the sound and inventories!

[Rube]

Work continues. There was a month of not very exciting changes as I rewrote the underlying action system to an extensible, object orientated system. I cleaned up some other stuff. Nothing very fun but it needed to be done.

I also released the very first closed alpha version of the game. It was predictably buggy. I'm not sure if anyone actually got the game working in the end, I only got feedback on immediate crashes. Most irritating was the 0x000007b crashes. The problem wasn't mismatched 32/64bit dlls, absent VC redistributables, or meddling anti-virus, so I'm stumped as to what causes it.

There wasn't much game for them to miss out on anyway, currently it just dumps you in a random dungeon full of skeletons. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do but kill skeletons or die.

Oh, but I did add the most awesome feature so far - punching! You can punch skeletons right in their smug faces. That'll show 'em. Not so smug now.

[unsilentwill]

Wow, not sure how I missed this one. Looks super promising. A bit rough around the edges with animations and and design. The camera looks a bit difficult also. The concept and combat could be great, I hope you study some of the best things about rougelikes.

It'd be nice to plan for some randomly generated outside features as well like bridges, cliffs, and trees but not necessarily a full open world.

[Ben_Hurr]

I certainly hope there will be less pillars in the final release.
Although, sparingly having a great hall of pillars could be a cool level feature.  

But wow this thing is like, Darksouls: The Rougelike.


edit:
Is the entire dungeon just going to be super tall unseen ceilings?

[Rube]

Thanks for the feedback guys!

I certainly hope there will be less pillars in the final release.
Although, sparingly having a great hall of pillars could be a cool level feature. 

But wow this thing is like, Darksouls: The Rougelike.


edit:
Is the entire dungeon just going to be super tall unseen ceilings?

The dungeon generator just happened to create a massive room full of pillars so I used it! Dungeons are generated using an external python script, so anyone can rewrite it to create different dungeons. I went with tall ceilings because I needed a way of creating a unique aesthetic that doesn't require decent 3D modelling skills.

I haven't played Dark Souls, but I've got the upcoming PC release preordered so I'll probably be, uh, "borrowing" some ideas from it after I play.

Wow, not sure how I missed this one. Looks super promising. A bit rough around the edges with animations and and design. The camera looks a bit difficult also. The concept and combat could be great, I hope you study some of the best things about rougelikes.

It'd be nice to plan for some randomly generated outside features as well like bridges, cliffs, and trees but not necessarily a full open world.

It's all programmer art for the moment, so it's all a bit crummy. The human and skeleton models are freely licensed stuff that I textured and animated (poorly). Everything else is stuff I mashed together in Blender. If I get ahold of a 3D artist we'll go through everything and recreate it from scratch.

Doing a full open world isn't so hard, but I'm only going to focus on it after completing a full dungeon crawling game with mature code behind it. For a simple open world you just create heightmap noise terrain and dot some trees about. I've done it before for a Master of Magic inspired game I was working on, took about a week. Again, crummy programmer art.

[CowBoyDan]

Looks very nice, just lurking/skimming projects and this seemed worthy of a thumbs up.

[_Madk]

I am really loving the looks of this. 

[Rube]

Work forges ahead at the kind of pace you'd expect from a legless slug. And slugs don't have legs to begin with. That's just how slow it's been.

I've been redoing the combat system, junking the directional attack/block system in favour of something faster paced. I've been playing some Dark Souls and Dark Messiah for inspiration. I had to add an animation movement system for the new combat, so that animations could move the player by automatically stripping any movement within the animation then reapplying it the physics character controller. This was a pain to do and took entirely too long.

Also I finished up the first pass of the external scripting system, as this scintillating screenshot shows. This way users can create their own objects and code some limited behaviour into them via the use of the pictured tags. This code is for a door - it shows a picture of a hand when you mouse over it, then when a creature interacts with it it moves towards the caller's location at 20000 force units. Traps and moveable barrels/crates will be done using the same system.

Looks very nice, just lurking/skimming projects and this seemed worthy of a thumbs up.

I am really loving the looks of this. 

Thanks!

[Rube]

Very brief video showing the new attack animations. These are the animations that have had their movement stripped out externally and then readded to the physics system.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQe6n0ZzLNU

Next up - redo blocking and add rolling!