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[SomberPixel]

Update 9: Stealth mode preview

Last time, we talked about our return after 3 months unable to post updates. As we promised, we will now post updates more often so here is one for you! On this update we show you a preview of a simple, yet interesting mechanic we are preparing ... Stealth mode!

How much noise you make plays an important part in Lost Hope. Some mutants may detect you if you are just running around the place or shooting. This is where stealth mode comes to play.

First of all, let's be clear about the name of this mechanic. Lost Hope is not a stealth game but we did not find another name to call this mechanic! Stealth mode consists on reducing how much noise you make by adopting a special position. It can be triggered at any time and its main purpose is to avoid being detected by mutants. We decided to embrace this mechanic since this is a survival horror game and sometimes the best strategy is to just avoid dangers. This might save you some bullets and health problems.

*Work in progress

In stealth mode you will be able to move while reducing the odds of being detected by a mutant. If used correctly, stealth mode can save your life and some precious combat items.

This will also help you to pass through some places which are impossible to pass while standing.

Keep in mind that now each time you change direction, there is an animation to keep things smooth.

That is all for this update. As you can see, this is a simple mechanic since we don't want to lose the immersion of the game but really helps you to avoid some encounters.

As always, your feedback and suggestions are appreciated. We are still thinking of other way we can make the most out of this simple feature without loosing the immersion that this genre needs. Stay in tune! Until next update.

[SomberPixel]

Update 10: NPC design preview

Character design is one of the most important parts in Lost Hope's development. Even though the last months we have published articles about gameplay and features of the game, we have been designing the story, the characters and how they will interact with you and between them.

This article covers the non playable characters' design. We will show some NPC we have designed but will not talk about their role in the story and the relationship they have with you. We will leave that for later.

The strong and proud woman

A woman who will not let herself be devoured by a mutant so easily. She is strong and her desire to survive is unique. Compared the other survivors, she gets things done even risking her life in some cases. She is proud and would not accept help so easily.

The confused little girl

A little girl whose parents are nowhere to be found. She is still wondering where might they be and, no matter what happens, she will not separate from her best friend teddie bear.

The boy who thinks of himself an adult

A young boy, barely entering his teenage years. Both of his parents are alive but are way too naive. He wants to protect his family but his parents tell him that he should let that to the adults. Most of the times, he acts as if he was older and does not measure the dangers ahead.

The big guy

Do not let yourself be fooled by his appeareance, thisbig guy is actually a really good person. He wants to keep the survivors together to raise their chances to survive. He is always putting everyone before him and will not hesitate to help anyone who is in danger. He worries about what the people lack to survive and would find a solution to problems.

There are way more npc, everyone with a different personality. We want each npc to be unique based on a personality. There will be other npc that will only care about their own survival and so on. We will post more about this in the future but this serves as an idea of our approach when designing characters.

As always, feel free to tell us what you think. Stay tuned for more updates!

[SomberPixel]

Update 11: Equipping weapons and using strong attacks

On this update we will talk about equipment and how melee weapons work, introducing a new feature for the game : the strong attack.

First of all, we will talk about equipping weapons from the inventory window. For this, we wanted to make it simple so each item has a number of actions that can be triggered by pressing the positive button. For weapons, one possible action is Equip/Unequip. Pressing the "Equip" action will enable you to use that weapon depending of its category. There are two main categories for the weapons : melee and ranged.Melee weapons are equipped in the left square and the ranged weapons will take the right square. You can see it for yourself here!

We will not talk about the numbered slots right now nor the equipped ranged weapon.On this article we are focusing on the melee aspect of the game.

As you can see, we added a new section in the bottom-left part of the inventory!Its main purpose is for you to see your currently equipped items.

When equipping a melee weapon, you will have access to a combo and a strong attack.Strong attack deals more damage than a regular combo attack but takes more time to execute and will consume more stamina.

*On this GIFs, we have not added any kind of darkness to the weapons so that you can see them more clearly

The GIF above shows the strong attack with a wooden bat. Imagine how much that thing hurts!

In Lost Hope, we plan to have a plenty of weapons to keep things always fresh. You can see now a regular blunt combo with a fire axe that you can get in the game.

Of course, that hurts a lot more than a bat! But mutants in Lost Hope are known for being strong and vicious creatures, so you need more than that to get rid of them.

We are still implementing similar aspects such as the ranged combat. We will talk more about that in future updates.Keep in mind that everything so far is work in progress and we would really like to have your feedback. Lighting is also WIP, we don't have any definitive lighting so far but we are looking for something that really fits the game.

Stay tuned! We are progressing more and more in the development. Until next update!

[SomberPixel]

Update 12: Aim and shoot!

Living among deadly mutants is not easy.If you don't equip yourself well you may end up dead. Melee weapons are awesome and are essential means to stay alive but, sometimes, they are not enough.With this in mind, we will talk now about ranged weapons and how they work in Lost Hope.

As we always repeat, we want Lost Hope to be a fluid and immersive experience. That is why, in order to open all kind of possibilities, you can aim at any angle you want.This way, you can have more strategies at combat because you are not limited by fixed positions.

Another feature we added is the possibilty to walk in both directions while still having control of the arms to change the angle. This allows you to keep your distance while trying to kill a vicious mutant

Some updates ago, we showed the gun fire animation.That animation was just for a fixed position. Now Lost Hope is programmed to support ranged combat at any angle, therefore, you can now shoot at any angle as shown in the following gif

Also, we did not want you to be limited to just one direction while aiming, so we added a turnover animation that plays whenever you want to change direction while aiming

This feature was designed thinking about the mutants from the game. Having the freedom to shoot wherever you want was the only way to fight some mutants we have not yet revealed! But expect more updates about them soon.

It is important to note that there will be various ranged weapons in Lost Hope. In the previous GIF images you can see a M9 pistol, but there will be more types of guns and other ranged weapons such as shotguns.

We hope you enjoyed this update! If you have any question,advice or anything to say to us, you can always comment or contact us directly! We always enjoy reading your feedback.Stay tuned, until next update!

[SomberPixel]

 

Marty McFly just visited Lost Hope! Will he survive? - Back to the future day !

[lobstersteve]

Following because of pixel horror
Lone survivor was an influence also, right?

[SomberPixel]

Following because of pixel horror
Lone survivor was an influence also, right?

Thanks a lot for the follow lobstersteve! Yes, Lone Survivor was a great influence for Lost Hope as you can see!Other games that are great influence for Lost Hope are Resident Evil(1,2,3), the Silent Hill franchise and such! (:

[SomberPixel]

Happy Halloween!

In Lost Hope, Halloween is being celebrated! Which costume would you choose? Have a spooky day!

[SomberPixel]

Christmas time in Lost Hope

It is incredible how fast this year has passed. A lot of things happened during this time in the development of Lost Hope and we want to share our experience with you.

First of all, let's talk about the team and how Somber Pixel was formed. We are 2 guys in the team, basically the artist + programmer combo. Adolfo(me) is the programmer and Arturo is the artist. We met during an random accounting course. He had just released a mobile videogame made with awesome pixel art. During that time, I was developing an action rpg game so we kind of talked about videogames and game development for a while. We realized we both liked the same kind of games (Dragon Quest, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Divine Divinity, Shin Megami Tensei and many more) so we thought it would be fun to work together and make our dream of making our own video games for a living come true. We began developing an action rpg, but the scale of the project was so big that we decided to work on another project first. A project that Arturo had posted in Steam Greenlight concepts and received lots of positive feedback before: Lost Hope. Since we both loved survival horror games( we really do, seriously) we said: Let´s make of Lost Hope a real video game! Later, we founded Somber Pixel, with the aim to develop solid video games that leave something special within you.

The first concept of Lost Hope



We ended up with this art style!


When you are developing a game, the most precious resource you will ever have is your time. Time is the most precious resource you can ever have and , believe or not , developing a game makes you appreciate every second. Keeping in mind that we are not robots, we also have to spend time on our daily responsibilities and studying/practicing in order to become better at what we do. It becomes necessary to manage your projects and overall time with methodologies and frameworks to make the most out of every day.

Overall,there are lots of personal sacrifices such as not being able spend all the time you would like with your beloved ones or stop doing other activities because you have to spend that time developing your game. Our economical situation is not the best either but we both think that developing a game is worth every single sacrifice we have made so far and we will continue to pursue this objective until Lost Hope is delivered to you.

But enough about us, we now want to share the joy of this holidays with you! Spend some time with your family, friends, playing videogames, dancing, eating or doing whatever makes you happy. What matters is that you spend it the way it makes you feel better! So...

Somber Pixel wishes you a Merry Christmas!

About the future


We have lots of things prepared for this 2016. Expect more articles and updates, more images and information!

[SomberPixel]

How good are you at surviving a mutant menace?

[SomberPixel]

Lost Hope Update 13:Progress, player animations and a new enemy

During the last 2 months, we have been working hard on many aspects of the game. Our main goal during this time has been to develop a detailed event system that can help us finish the game sooner and with great quality. It may take some time right now, but it will help us to build the game in a way we can compare it with LEGO(easy to construct once you have the required pieces). We know there are some options in the market that can manage events and help with the development but none of those had the level of customization we wanted. That is why,in order cover our own requirements, we decided to invest some months in the development of our own program to handle the game flow and then attach it to the game engine Unity.

But enough about the internal aspects of the game, on this article we want to share some of our progress regarding the player and the enemies.

Player


As you may have read in another article, the player has the option to equip different types of weapons. We introduce to you the shotgun!

This weapon can deal quite a lot of damage to enemies that come close to you, so save your bullets and use them wisely! In Lost Hope you will be able to collect different shotguns so you can have an idea of how they work in the GIF image above

Now, something we already showed in-game but wanted to show it without light effects. The fire axe!

Most of the blunt weapons in the game will play a similar animation, you can find stronger, more durable weapons in the game but nothing like an axe to make those mutants perish and save yourself some bullets! We were thinking about changing some details in the animation to have a more natural swing with the axe. But we also want it to be a fast and fluid animation so we are still debating what changes should be made.

Learn to use your weapons, if not ... you may have an horrible end!

That is one of the death animations from the main player. There will be other death animations depending on the circumstances of death. This one may be triggered from a violent slash of a mutant from behind.

Enemies


You already know the devourer but in case you have forgotten about him, here is a GIF image of a strong attack that serves as a reminder you should not mess up with it!

As we stated in other articles. we will have variety. We introduce to you your next nightmare, a mutant that shows suffering and madness but is as thirsty of blood as the devourer:

We will cover this mutant in another article in the future, but in the meantime we can only give you an advice: Look at your surroundings.

That is all for this article! We will continue developing Lost Hope with great enthusiasm and create a significant experience for you. Of course there are a lot of things we have done such as new streets, rooms, designs, story and many other aspects we will show when the right time comes. Stay tuned for more updates!

Somber Pixel: @SomberPixel
 Adolfo:@adolfojo777
 Arturo @Artan0728
 Tumblr: http://somberpixel.tumblr.com/
 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomberPixel
 Or directly here!

[lyoy2]

Hi everyone,
,I just fall in this thread as a survival horror game old school guy.
i think your game is really cool and even the projet looks in "standby" i hope you won't give up !

Keep your great works

lionel

[SomberPixel]

Hi everyone,
,I just fall in this thread as a survival horror game old school guy.
i think your game is really cool and even the projet looks in "standby" i hope you won't give up !

Keep your great works

lionel

Hello lionel, your comment is inspiring! We are glad you like the game. This is a big project that requires a lot of time and effort. Lost Hope is still in development and there is no way we give up. Thank you and take care!

[SomberPixel]

Lost Hope special message: Healthy, alive and decisions

Lots of things have happened these last months that really benefited our projects.But first of all you may be asking why we have not published anything about Lost Hope in the last months.

The truth is, we have been working hard in Lost Hope this last months but we have not been able to post much about it as most of the progress is about internal systems and modeling solutions that help us make a better game. About the art, we plan to show more about the game in the future but we want to make clear that Lost Hope is alive and healthy.

Even though we are always making progress, we have to face a reality: We are making a game with lots of details and content. This means more pixel art and programming, which also means more time we have to invest working on this. We really want to deliver a meaningful experience in Lost Hope so we need that Somber Pixel stays alive while the game is being developed.

Us vs reality

Swinging our way through reality!

That is why, in order to achieve goals as Somber Pixel this year, we plan to release an all new videogame we have been developing to keep things fresh during our free time. It is important to mention that this will not have a negative impact in Lost Hope's development, on the contrary, it will help us to continue developing a great and detailed experience we want to share with you all. The mentioned videogame is also a detailed experience but has the benefit of high replay value and immersion without the need of so many assets like Lost Hope.

We introduce to you... Dungeons of Asfore!

We keep the visual style we love to draw

We are creating an all new page for Dungeons of Asfore in the next few days so you can check our updates! We are planning a swift development thanks to the experience we have acquired during the last years.

We are so advanced with Lost Hope development that we would never plan to abandon it. When you develop a game for so much time it becomes something special, we want to share our feelings and experiences with you all in Lost Hope so stay tuned!

Lost Hope will be back soon and better than ever! And we really hope to count with you all!

Sincerely,

Adolfo and Arturo (Somber Pixel Team)

Somber Pixel: @SomberPixel
 Adolfo:@adolfojo777
 Arturo @Artan0728
 Tumblr: http://somberpixel.tumblr.com/
 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomberPixel

[lyoy2]

Hi guys,
I just started my own project of survival horror, so that wa can keep encourage ourself and progress

Cool to know to that the project is still alive.
Will your next game be diablo like, survival or rpg ?
 good luck for Dungeons of Asfore !

lionel