next »

[skarik]

I'm Skarik from EpicHouse Studios LLC, a small and extremely poor game development studio that started as a joke and quickly grew into a non-joke. We have this game thing we call AFTER.

AFTER

A.F.T.E.R. is open world fantasy RPG that takes place in a randomly generated world. It will incorporate action adventure, city-building, and dungeon crawling elements. Borderlands 2, Skyrim, and Terraria were massive inspirations for this game. We made it through Greenlight in 2014.

We're planning six playable races for the first release. The world generation's math is based more by looking at Legend of Zelda games than real-life maps, since we think it helps with remembering areas and improves gameplay layout. The world is to be filled with towns and eventually cities filled with NPCs that you can talk to, evidenced by the "Press [E] to Greet" caught in the GIF below.

The game will probably be free.

VIDEOS

Promotional

Devlogs DevLog about Ears

SCREENSHOTS AND GIF(S)


And for reference, here's a late 2013 screenshot

HOW ABOUT SOME ACTUAL DEVLOG NONSENSE

I am the engine programmer and the main artist. I have done about 90% of the work on this project so far with only moral support. It sometimes can be tiring.

I'm very tired from the work sprint over the last few days. For some reference, when we were supposed to start recording content on Thursday for the video, it was discovered that the terrain would not work with walls higher than 2 feet (0.61 m, 1 block), freeze when trying to move more than 300 or so miles (483 km, ~800000 blocks), and generate incorrect normals and vertical surfaces. These were all one-line fixes, and very frustrating to find. By 1AM the next morning all of the issues, and all the terrain and biome content seen in the video was both created and recorded over the next two hours.

The next morning, after 4 hours of sleep, I got the actual first draft recording, which included NPCs and Komodos. I hadn't recorded NPCs and Komodos. I wanted to record NPCs and Komodos, but there was kind of a problem. Most of the systems were not compatible with the new terrain system.

THINGS THAT WORKED WITH NEW SYSTEM Zones.SampleBlock NPC::Manager->SpawnNPC NPC::NPCBase->Unstuck

---

THINGS THAT CAUSED MEMORY ERRORS NPC::Manager->Anything not SpawnNPC NPC::Spawner->SpawnFauna NPC::Komodo->Unstuck World::Events->Update (spawns NPCs World::Weather->Update (for some reason the event system uses this) World::WindSimulator->Update (weather system uses this) World::havokWindVolume->Update (Wind simulator makes these)

I fixed all of these for the new terrain system over five hours on Friday, recorded more content, and continued to panic and throw fits until the video content was finished that Friday night.

GOOD FOR YOU. WHAT NEXT?

Before we create our Kickstarter in May, we got a fair amount of work ahead of us.

First off, one of the main issues is the speed of the engine. On my laptop (granted, it is an integrated graphics card) I can only squeeze out about 10 frames a second. Part of it is from some phantom object taking up 30ms every other frame in LateUpdate, but the other part is just the sheer amount of triangles rendered is too much for my poor little card to handle.

Of course, once that's taken care of, I'm focusing more on the AI and NPC scripting. Lua integration will be skyrocketing in how much one can do with it, the cutscene system should be able to handle in-line lua (pretty easy), and the facial morph+voice acting keyframing tool will finally be getting some love.

I'll be forced to do more animation and artwork when working on the combat, of course, but I've been getting steadily better at it. Pretty stoked to get at it again.

Stuff I don't need to worry about but I do is the writing. We're doing some bad and hammy voice acting on the April 20-26 week, and we have a small but fairly ranged cast. One girl can do both a manly woman and the maddening moe-desu-desu voice. Unfortunately, I have no idea how much is actually written. The short skits the guy has written before have been tragically comedic (sad because his life is the same), so I'm looking forward to it.


Thanks for reading. We could use some love, but even if you hate us, please comment on how much you hate this project! Your hate fuels our love!

[SolarLune]

Combat's looking interesting, and I'm a fan of open-world action RPGs. I like the cell-shaded look, too - not a lot of indie games go for cel-shaded 3D anymore. Are you planning to open this up to mods and the modding community? What about online or local multiplayer? Lastly, you mention both the game being free as well as a Kickstarter - are you just going to use the funds from the KS to make the game and release it as free? Would the backers get exclusive content that others wouldn't?

Anyway, great looking game! Following with interest.

[Impmaster]

Yeah looks cool man, keep up the good work.

[skarik]

Thanks guys!

@SolarLune
Thanks, melee combat is still needing some work, and don't get me started about the western magic mixing, eastern magic mechanics, or nature magic mechanics, but it goes along slowly. The cel-shading was actually a fairly late development in the project, and ended up looking really excellent for what we were doing, so we decided to attempt to give the project more of a comic and anime inspired feel.

We plan to leave a lot of the functionality exposed with Lua and leave a lot of the assets and development tools open to people to mess with. Already, most of the AI is external in Lua files, as is all of the race-specific stats. As for multiplayer, we were planning both online server list and LAN multiplayer, but that's down the road.

As for the game being free, we're not totally sure how we're going to do it. On the Kickstarter, we're not planning to be asking for a lot of money, only just enough to pay for licensing costs of Havok, FMOD, and some fonts. It would probably cause panic if we got more money than that, but we could definitely just use the Kickstarter funds in that case to sustain the game's development. We don't want to have exclusive content, but we would go for physical goods or in-game content acknowledging backers as backer rewards. We're definitely open to suggestions there.

[skarik]

Not a whole lot got done, as the intro video took a lot out of me, and I sliced open my typing pinky deep enough to where I'm still wary of typing too much.

However, developer log video! Yay!





How about something nifty
Fine. I'll talk about the AI a little bit.

When I dived into it yesterday to streamline it, I quickly realized something: while the terrain may have the most amount of sub-systems and source files all dedicated to its function and implementation, in terms of lines of code, the AI is the largest system in the game, by far.

9:44 PM - de3Sol: Also, as I'm working on the AI
9:44 PM - de3Sol: I realize it is THE largest system in the game
9:45 PM - de3Sol: beating out the terrain by a few hundred lines
9:45 PM - de3Sol: and it still sucks

The reason for the size is possibly because of all the small subsystems. The AI contains looking around, eye twitching, path finding, target selection, caution calculations, the Metal Gear Solid style aggro system, and the behavior management.

I ended up reworking completely the attack requests from Lua, sending an entire structure to and from the stack to give finer and more predictible control, instead of letting some buggy C++ code that was extremely hard to debug control all the requests. Doing it this way is nice since the Lua can be tweaked while the game is running. In addition, I reworked the access to the C++ implementation of the AI object. All the states were made private, and the queries and state changes in the base NPC object were all updated to reflect this. A side effect is that the first NPC, the Komodo, had to have some special time to fix the issues caused when I made all the AI information private. The Komodo implementation is not based on the base NPC object. They don't share code beyond the terrain character zoning.

I should mention again I'm programming with 4 fingers on my left hand. I sliced open my pinky when preparing dinner, paring the ends of a yam. It's not so much it hurts (which it does, it's painful actually, but when you're a klutz, you stop caring), but that it keeps bleeding with how I type. I've gotten blood in this keyboard before, and it's a pain to clean. It soaked a good portion of the bandage, even with it wrapped tightly. Slows things down, especially when you can't feel the difference between Control, Caps Lock, and Shift. I have to say, Visual Studio has a lot of strange shortcuts that I never knew about.

The end result of the "rewrite," although more of a remix than anything, was that the AI made more sense, was more configurable, and is more predictable for players. Essentially, we made it more dumb, but with the benefit of better gameplay. In addition, the Lua interface, while still really raw, was improved greatly. Specifically, the attacking request the AI performs was simplified to a one-way struct, improving the readability of the Lua greatly. Support for Ranged and Magic focused actions or attacks were also added. The organization of the AI was also clearly defined: queries are in C++, and behavioral aspects are in Lua.

In addition, all of Lua scripts are left in the open. Everybody loves modularity.

TL,DR. What's Next?
Writing lines for all 6 races and more deadlines.

1:35 AM - de3Sol: Oh
1:35 AM - de3Sol: so the AI
1:35 AM - de3Sol: is better structured
1:35 AM - de3Sol: before shit didn't make too much sense
1:35 AM - de3Sol: now, you can configure the ranges for "alert threat level" and "danger threat level"
1:36 AM - de3Sol: so say a bandit walking around wouldn't mind you being around him, fighting shit nearby with your weapons and spells and bolts flying
1:36 AM - de3Sol: while a gaurd would get on alert the moment he sees you
1:36 AM - de3Sol: and you'd aggro him if you got too close
1:36 AM - Chief Masamune: Ah.
1:37 AM - de3Sol: So, a lot of configurability there
1:37 AM - Chief Masamune: That's good.
1:38 AM - Chief Masamune: I feel like my verbal skills drop when I'm tired, yet I can keep my focus while playing Magic just fine.
1:38 AM - de3Sol: You're a gamer
1:38 AM - de3Sol: you're goot at that
1:38 AM - Chief Masamune: Goot.
1:38 AM - Chief Masamune: I'm goot at it.
1:38 AM - Chief Masamune: Goot.
1:38 AM - de3Sol: damn straight
[critical bashing of other games occurs for 3 minutes]
1:42 AM - Chief Masamune: Awesome.
1:42 AM - Chief Masamune: I just hope it doesn't completely invade the way I play.
1:42 AM - de3Sol: more based on skill, less based on numbers and luck
1:42 AM - de3Sol: hahahah the stealth?
1:42 AM - de3Sol: well it shouldn't
1:43 AM - de3Sol: until voices are added anyhow
1:43 AM - Chief Masamune: hahaaha
1:43 AM - de3Sol: and how about we don't add any "you've been seen" music unless you're sneaking actively
1:43 AM - Chief Masamune: It's just that I always try to be stealthy until I decide that I want to destroy everything.
1:43 AM - Chief Masamune: Yeah.
1:43 AM - Chief Masamune: Definitely.
1:43 AM - de3Sol: XD so there's that
1:44 AM - de3Sol: and then there's the fact that sound is a pretty big clue in for the target stuff
1:44 AM - de3Sol: not done yet, ofc, but it'll be a big clue in
1:44 AM - Chief Masamune: Yeah.
1:45 AM - de3Sol: i mean, I got the sound system to work as lights in the deferred renderer
1:45 AM - de3Sol: how hard could it be for the AI
1:45 AM - Chief Masamune: hahahah
1:45 AM - Chief Masamune: XD
1:45 AM - Chief Masamune: You invite ruin and disaster with your words.
1:46 AM - de3Sol: sounds like a normal sunny day

[SolarLune]

Sounds great. I like the changes you made on that devlog video - it really seemed to stand out and make the gameplay more fun. The generated world looks interesting, too. Nice work!

[baconman]

This project is looking quite goot. Dangerously, enviously goot. But that's what happens when a few high-level people mesh together.

[Vovosunt]

This looks goot. Very goot.
And your devlogs are amazing! Can't wait for the next one

[Pemanent]

Yeah sweet devlogs. I actually watched most of them almost all the way through.

[skarik]

@baconman Thank you so much, but we're not high-level people, just overly motivated.
But thanks to you all for the kind comments! Glad to hear the devlogs are actually are an entertaining watch. We'll be sure to keep making more of them through the summer.

So you actually do anything these past weeks
With school projects and studying for exams we've gotten more done than expected.
One of my favorite bits that got sort of done is the automaton.

And after a day or so of modelling, rigging, and too much cursing became

They run, hide, and climb, and are twice as tall as the player. Super fun to be around!

Boring, I'm going to go play Titanfall
Wait a moment!

Huh.
And resulting from a collective stroke of idiocy, the game is now on Greenlight.

Other stuff got done, but those are my favorite bits.

And again, thank you all so much for the support!

[SolarLune]

Wow, this is looking to become my next favorite game to play! Great graphics and cool new movement features. Are you going to add any third-person camera modes?

[skarik]

Hey, sorry about not replying! And thanks. There is a third-person camera mode. The aiming is currently a little whack, but it's already in.


As for actual updates, we've have been busy. I uploaded an

and we pushed back our Kickstarter to a later date. Finally I got the team together and motivated to working, so I can finally work a lot more on the artwork instead of the engine. Things are going slow, but we're staying busy and still working on the game.

Plus swords. Who doesn't like swords? Almost 200 variations of horrible swords!

[SolarLune]

Cool video - it seems like it shows the features pretty well. I like the wallrunning - are you planning on adding other parkour-like features (like maybe a vault)?

I tried the SVN download a little while back and it BSOD'd my computer, haha. That's why it's unstable, I take it. An older version worked, but ran really slowly. Anyway, keep it up - the game's looking really unique!

[skarik]

Hooo boy. I haven't updated in more than 6 months.
Because of school (it was my last semester of college) and it is mostly a solo project at the moment, almost nothing got done. Last thing I was doing was starting a complete rework of the combat system - the current one just wasn't fun after a point.

But I did smooth out the motion system a bit.

And the engine's 3D mode has been moved to use only the deferred renderer on the main layer and is working really well on NVidia and Intel cards.

Got some weird bandwidth problem on AMD's where there's a gradual slowdown/speedup cycle proportional to the number of characters on screen. Not sure what up with that. That was reduced when I cut the bandwidth of skeletal animation in half and reworked the bone system to be used for cloth and things like

Works on men too.