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[Cranktrain]

I always have a soft-spot for isometric games, but argh, the art style in this game is beautiful.

I suppose the nice thing about the Loup character is that with the exception of the north/south directions, you can flip the assets. With the Charred Men, and the asymetrical arm, I suppose that's not going to be possible?

[muppetWolf]

I always have a soft-spot for isometric games, but argh, the art style in this game is beautiful.

 

I suppose the nice thing about the Loup character is that with the exception of the north/south directions, you can flip the assets. With the Charred Men, and the asymetrical arm, I suppose that's not going to be possible?

Right on the money. For the CM's all eight directions have to be drawn individually but the for the Loup we can flip a few of them meaning only 5 directions actually have to be drawn(I think I calculated that right) because the patches on his arms are largely symmetrical. We'll start by flipping those sprites that can be flipped and then if anything looks off it's simply a matter of touching up the arm patches as opposed to redrawing the entire sprite.

[TonyManfredonia]

I like how you have a distinct reason for making it isometric. Often times, people will make certain styles for the sake of making that style.

You have drive and purpose behind your choices, which is absolutely crucial in this day and age for indies!

[oahda]

Just slightly disappointed to see all the French. Would be neat if you could reference indigenous languages of the Caribbean too — in general they seem to be in grave danger of extinction. Wikipedia says:

Many indigenous languages (actually spoken with the mainland Caribbean rather than the islands) have been added to the list of endangered or extinct languages—for example, Arawak languages (Shebayo, Igñeri, Lokono, Garifuna of St. Vincent, and the one now labeled Taíno by scholars, once spoken in the Greater Antilles), Caribbean (Nepuyo and Yao), Taruma, Atorada, Warrau, Arecuna, Akawaio and Patamona. Some of these languages are still spoken there by a few people.

Any thoughts on that?

We've taken a lot of care and consideration in the story we're telling with this game and it's great to see someone who is also concerned about the same things we are, namely representation of underrepresented cultures and stories. That said, this is a game about the post-colonial Caribbean. While the indigenous peoples deserve to have their story told, the Caribbean we're talking about is as much European as it is African.

Not to mention that "in danger of extinction" is far from an exaggeration. Personally the only language out of that list I've even heard of is Garifuna and that was a long time ago in a textbook somewhere. I have no idea what it sounds like let alone be in a position to include it in the game. Languages like that are largely the subject of theses and we don't have near enough resources to do them justice were we to include them.

Yeah, it's pretty understandable that you can't represent something you don't know anything about. Wasn't sure how much you knew or what the situation looks like, tho, so thanks for some clarification from a local! I wasn't really thinking of much more than an "honourable mention" tho.

Good job so far!

[oldblood]

Just posting to follow. Love the look and feel and I love a good narrative...

[Zizka]

Looks fun. The artstyle reminds me of a darker Don't Starve (which is good!).

One thing that does bother me as a Francophone (it's a nitpick!) is that Loup-Garou is written with a hyphen in French. It always stings my eyes a bit when I see the title  . Unless you were going for a stylish spelling of the word.

Just sayin'!

 

[Necdilzor]

Definitely going to follow this devlog, I really want to see how it turns out. It seems very interesting so far

[Greipur]

That climbing control scheme looks like something I'd like, looking forward to seeing more gifs on it. Interesting in general as well.

[muppetWolf]

Looks fun. The artstyle reminds me of a darker Don't Starve (which is good!).

One thing that does bother me as a Francophone (it's a nitpick!) is that Loup-Garou is written with a hyphen in French. It always stings my eyes a bit when I see the title  . Unless you were going for a stylish spelling of the word.

Just sayin'!

 

The title comes from St. Lucian creole or patois which, while very influenced by French is a language in its own right and has marked differences. It's a bit like how 'colour' and 'color' have different spellings in UK english vs US english though it's unlikely a french speaker would be able to understand someone speaking St.Lucia patois or vice versa.

I like how you have a distinct reason for making it isometric. Often times, people will make certain styles for the sake of making that style.

You have drive and purpose behind your choices, which is absolutely crucial in this day and age for indies!

Good job so far!

Just posting to follow. Love the look and feel and I love a good narrative...

Definitely going to follow this devlog, I really want to see how it turns out. It seems very interesting so far

That climbing control scheme looks like something I'd like, looking forward to seeing more gifs on it. Interesting in general as well.

Thanks everyone for your interest and kind words!

Josh is working on some more environment art for the test bed, trying to get it closer to the concept art example of what we want the game to look like. Our animator Blaize,is finishing up the Loup's walk cycle and I've been working on the AI for the Charred Man and speaking to our composer about some music. Just like the art, music is going to be a pretty important part of the game so we'll talk a bit more about that once we have some tunes to reference what exactly it is we're going for.

In between all of that we've been having discussions about how we plan on incorporating the narrative into the gameplay since this is after all a story-driven game and we want the story to be something the player is fully engaged in as opposed to something that kind of happens off to the side as you're being hunted by monsters and nightmares.

Anyway thanks again all! Lots more in store so stay tuned.  

[muppetWolf]

Bunch of new art things to show to you guys in this update.

Joshua has updated the chattel house textures, dirt texture, grass texture and created some grass sprites and a new water sprite for testing out. Woo!



I found a neat youtube tutorial on how to do the basic water movement effect in this gif. It's serving pretty well for right now as a first pass at water but eventually I think I'd like to find or write a shader that is more dynamic and reflective while still in keeping with the game's style.




The odd pink light on the grass is apparently what happens when the charred man vision box goes over the new grass texture. It's kind of interesting although I'm not sure we'll keep it. What do you guys think?



I also made a little grass shake animation for the grass sprites; just a little scale transformation that simulates the effect of rustling pretty well and serves as some visual feedback until we can put some actual hand-drawn animations in there. It's not a priority though so it's doubtful we'll be changing this any time soon.




That's it for now. We'd love your feedback on the new art! 

[muppetWolf]

This next update is about the Charred Man's AI. It's relatively simple but it allows me to noodle with any CM's patrol from the inspector and test patrol concepts rapidly.



To do this I made a serializable struct called patrolPoint which has information for a Vector3 point to patrol to, a Direction(an enum for the eight directions in the game) to swivel to once its there and a float indicating how long to hold that position once the swivel has been completed. Each CM has a script which contains amongst other things an array of patrolPoints that represent that CM's patrol.



Making the struct serializable allows or me anyone else doing the level building to to view it in Unity's inspectoror and quickly test and tweak patrols at run time without having to dig through code saving us a lot of time. 

The Charred Man is kind of our base enemy model so once we sort out these basic functions for movement and patrols and attacking the player its EnemyAI script will serve as a parent from which other enemies' scripts will inherit.

[muppetWolf]

Gosh! It's been more than a month but I return with an update: Our animator has finished the walk cycle! Take a look at the Loup in all his eight-directional glory. 

[SimonFelix]

Amazing work on the animation of the Loup! The water in the earlyer blogpost looks great too 

[TonyManfredonia]

Glad to see you back! It's always nice to see updates after a month or so goes by. The new animation is looking great. Can't wait to see it in context!

[muppetWolf]

Don't call it a comeback?

Le Loupgarou is far from dead, we just got so bogged down working on a demo for a local con we neglected to update the devlog.  But they say the third time's the charm so we're back at it again and hopefully, this time it'll stick.

Our writer Mark did a retrospective post on what we've been through and where we're at now so if you're curious about what we were off doing during all the radio silence the details are here!

http://www.couplesix.com/crawl-stumble-build-world/

Thanks for sticking with us!

[muppetWolf]

Some concept art from the art machine! The idea is to use these as a jumping off point for asset and textures for upcoming levels.









We took what we thought were the most interesting concepts and expanded on them in detail. The Caribbean is colourful and wanted to still capture that even in a game that is a little spooky.










We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new art! 

[Greipur]

These are great mood thumbnails and pieces.

I understand that this game takes place in the psyche of the player's character, but I found the last two pieces a bit too fantastical for my taste. As an example; the small clusters of houses clinging to cliffs and bridges between. Personally I think if you're going for a horrific and unsettling game getting closer to reality is preferable. I think there's a risk it will feel more like Psychonauts than say, Alan Wake.

Or, if we make comparisons to film instead I think looking at David Lynch's work (Mulholland Drive for example) or films such as Dust Devil and Jacob's Ladder are better examples. They are all rooted in reality and makes it so much more unsettling when something is off. When everything is off you sort of take it for granted. I find that the nightmares that are the worst are the ones you have a hard time distinguishing from real life.

But, what do I know? If you could explain your intentions in more detail I could perhaps give you better suited feedback.

[Lagahoo]

These are great mood thumbnails and pieces.

I understand that this game takes place in the psyche of the player's character, but I found the last two pieces a bit too fantastical for my taste. As an example; the small clusters of houses clinging to cliffs and bridges between. Personally I think if you're going for a horrific and unsettling game getting closer to reality is preferable. I think there's a risk it will feel more like Psychonauts than say, Alan Wake.

Or, if we make comparisons to film instead I think looking at David Lynch's work (Mulholland Drive for example) or films such as Dust Devil and Jacob's Ladder are better examples. They are all rooted in reality and makes it so much more unsettling when something is off. When everything is off you sort of take it for granted. I find that the nightmares that are the worst are the ones you have a hard time distinguishing from real life.

But, what do I know? If you could explain your intentions in more detail I could perhaps give you better suited feedback.

Thanks for the feedback .

We've been on a slow mission to resurrect our Social/forum presence since working on our alpha.

One of the things we realized while building that version of the game was that we're going to lean more into the magical realism of the Caribbean for inspiration and use it to create more intimidating set pieces.

So the game we're building now is quite different than the one we have advertised on our landing page for this thread - something we'll clean up over the next few days.

Every time we work on a build I think we get closer and closer to THE game we're trying to make - but that comes with its own confusion for those trying to keep up on the outside.

Your comment has made us realize that we need to be ALOT clearer about certain things.

Thanks for following, and we'll have everything tidied and ready to show again right quick!

[Greipur]

I see, I had my doubts about my suggestion so it's good that we've cleared that up.