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[oddjob]

Killing, My Friend

Story:
Start you career in action movies as Hollywood's newest action star!  Pick your costumes, weapons and equipment and unlock more as you progress through your career by building fame and reaping its fortune.  Film epic action sequences in exotic locals against a seemingly never-ending stream of bad guys.  But watch out, your director likes to improvise on the set and may throw new challenges and goals to up the ante and make your scene the most over-the-top and over budget action sequence ever put to film.  If you survive to the end you just might reap the rewards...  

Gameplay:  
Killing, My Friend is a first person 4 player co-op that's sort of a mash-up between Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer and Action Half-Life with some new ideas and new gameplay elements thrown in.  The core gameplay is a traditional FPS with a stunt system that can be chained together to create combos.  Performing stunts like diving, sliding, wall running and rolling improve your performance and your survivability and multiplies your score. The more stunts chained together while killing enemies, the bigger the multiplier to the score. The higher the score, the more special powers or weapons the player can unlock.

Killing, My Friend's weapon design focus on the player’s personal style. Just like an action movie in which a director chooses the hero's weapon based more on look or style rather than functionality, weapons in Killing, My Friend are treated more like archetypes.  The weapons, while all tropes of traditional FPS's, are class based. The large roster of specific weapons seen in other FPS's, is replaced weapon classes like Dual Pistols, Sub-Machine Guns, Shotguns or Assault Rifles, with the goal that whatever load-out the player chooses it will be balanced against any other set of choices. Leaving the player to figure out what load-out fits their gameplay style best instead of which weapon is best. The weapon customizations are only cosmetic but offer a wide variety of choices of looks or weapon models to choose from to help enhance the player's personal style.

The team:
Hard-Boiled Software is a start-up game devolvement company made of up mod developers with experience stretching back over 15 years, including the minds behind the successful mod Action Half-Life.  


Howdy,

Just wanted to make ourselves and our game known because, as they say, it's never too early to start.  We are just getting into the development phase using the Unreal Engine 4 after a somewhat lengthy pre-production and are moving along at a nice clip.  We're excited to finally get going and have something to share, even if it's just a trickle of information at this point.  We'll be updating our Dev Log here and on web page with different info so please check it out.  There's more info up on our web page about the game design as well.  

Thanks for checking it out.  Glad to hear any and all feedback as we move ahead with development.  

Thanks,

Dwayne Douglass

[oddjob]

We are making an admittedly ambitious game.  One that fits into our wheelhouse coming from the mod scene.  But We are still very much an indie studio (my bank account and credit card bills can attest to that.)  As I'm sure many of you fellow indie gamers can relate, when you are doing it all yourself, you are forced to find creative ways to cut corners and still make something quality and cool and visually interesting.  For our game, we wanted to have a way to set up our gameplay without lots of time consuming animation and props/models that may only get used for the intro and outro for each scene/map/level that helps to support our theme and still gets the job done.  

Our game is set on a film set of an overblown and over budget action movie.  This offers us a few opportunities.  Number one being that we can switch locations and themes for each level without having to rely on story to dictate the setting which in turn offers us a lot of design freedom.  But because of that we needed a way to get the basic backstory to the action that takes place during gameplay to the audience.  And we came up with the idea of storyboard animatics used as cut scenes to introduce our story for each level and tell the story of what happens after the gameplay ends.  Storyboard animatics are something that most movie watchers have become familiar with in the era of DVD deleted scenes. Here's two examples of what will eventually become storyboard animatics by our very talented 2d artist David Smith:

 

  

[oddjob]

Hello again,

Been a busy week but I'm back! 

We've gotten to the point where you can run, jump, crouch, lay down prone and crawl and have just begun to get the first stunt, the Dive, implemented.  Killing, My Friend has a very complex movement system and I have to say, as an artist (specifically an animator), working with Unreal Engine 4 but coming from a Half-Life and Unreal Tournament 2003 background, UE4 is an absolute amazing breath of fresh air.  I can completely design, prototype and iterate and fine tune the entire player animation system with very little input necessary from our very talented coders. 

For example, with the Dive, the player can dive in any direction and change their orientation mid-dive.  So they can dive forward and then in mid-air turn to shoot an enemy that is behind them and end up landing on their back/butt.   So it's a simple prone idle animation wouldn't do.   We had to have something that would have been nigh impossible as a modder on Half-Life, a multi-directional prone idle that seamlessly blends into a prone bellycrawl.  And for those of you familiar with UE4 here's what the Blend Space for that looks like:



For those that don't, each one of those dots is an animation sequence.  On the lower part of the picture, that jumbled mess is actually 8 individual  idle animation of the player model lying in one of 8 directions (forward, back, left, right, forward left, forward right, etc.)  They are arrayed to allow the model to blend seamlessly from any direction they may land in a dive to a belly crawl animation.  Pretty cool stuff.   

I did a short write up the other day at IndieDB of some of the stunts and how they work if you'd like to check it out:  Killing, My Friend stunt system

[Julien]

Here's two examples of what will eventually become storyboard animatics by our very talented 2d artist David Smith:
 

Very talented indeed ! I look forward to see an actual screnshot ^^ Especially if you use UE4

[BeaKManiak]

The storyboards look very good! Keep up the good work and show us more!

[oddjob]

Well, I've had a heck of a week.  Had to buy a new laptop.  My old one is repairable but it will take some time.  Thankfully online back up and Perfoce exist!   More actual game development later.  In the mean time, here's a link to a Features post on the stunt system I posted on IndieDB a week ago:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/killing-my-friend/features/stunts

[oddjob]

Hello again.  The 6 week long crunch time is now over at my day job so it's my goal to start posting a little more regularly.   If you haven't noticed above, we have our official 'movie poster'/box art up.  It takes the characters I posted earlier with the storyboards and fleshes them out a little.  

We are pretty early in development and I was talking to a friend of mine who isn't into games other than as a player and was trying to describe the state it's in.  I its like a large Lego set where you have these partially built structures that are part of a larger whole, but make no sense right at the moment.  He seemed to get it.

[oddjob]

Ok, well I spent the last few days attempting to figure out how to get PhysX Cloth working in Unreal Engine 4 for one of our main characters.  The subject is the trench coat of the yet unnamed Asian male who is the main feature of the movie poster style box art posted above.  But I finally got it working satisfactorily.   I'll have to tweak it so it looks just right.