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[Mr. Virus]

Cheers very much :D! We'll hopefully have a gameplay trailer happening soonish too!

[Mr. Virus]

Started the blog posts rolling again, so here's a quick art update . read the original here: 1

(The cheese wasn't me, honest!)

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Phew! We've been polishing up the game for EGX London and now that it's over, it is time to update you all with another art blog!

We have been going back and polishing up many parts of the ship, making things look better where we rushed them, and adding in new transition parts to blend one area to the next.

Our old main stair-well went straight into the lower deck of the ship whilst retaining the upper deck theme. It was very immersion breaking when you'd walk straight from the crew living quarter themed hallways, straight to the rusty metal lower deck corridors so we've now gone back and added a proper lower deck stair well with an appropriate transition piece so that it blends the two sections together well.

Here are some screengrabs taken straight from Autodesk Maya...

Adam has also started thinking about how the exterior of the ship will fit all the sections together properly. Here are some mock-up shots of the exterior fit to a smaller size ship. This will most likely change a lot as there are still many considerations that haven't been taken into account but it's a start to what might happen outside.

He also considered changing the corridors around the container holds to make it more open when he has the time. These corridors leave a clear view into the container room to help the player identify where they are in the ship, however it means that more needs to be rendered in an area where framerate is already to poorest.

This issue will most likely apply for the exterior as well.

Here are some other shots of some rooms and assets that have been polished up to look a lot better than before.

New bathroom theme with new asset textures.

Polished up engine room textures and human sized piping additions.

Strange wall growths..... wait. What?

Polished up.... door .....fra.....

...do you hear something in the vents?

[Low_Chance]

The game continues to look amazing!

Whatever that thing is whose shadow(?) is visible in the last screenshot there, I don't want to meet it. No thank you.

The wall growths, on the other hand, are totally fine by me. Put some hats on those guys, draw a little smiley face, and you've got a party goin on!

[Mr. Virus]

The game continues to look amazing!

Whatever that thing is whose shadow(?) is visible in the last screenshot there, I don't want to meet it. No thank you.

The wall growths, on the other hand, are totally fine by me. Put some hats on those guys, draw a little smiley face, and you've got a party goin on!

Complete with glowsticks too!

Cheers though :D! We're working on the next press build which is due to go out this week, so back on radio silence again until it's sorted . Hopefully won't be too long until we have more update posts!

[Mr. Virus]

In between sending emails and bug hunting I managed to get another one of the radio tracks done! Probably the last of the funk one's I'm planning on sharing before the game is launched. Gonna get started on the other genres soon too!

Soundcloud

[Mr. Virus]

Our latest blog post talks a bit about the audio system the programmers pieced together in Unity, and how we're going about things like occlusion. It's from a coder viewpoint, but if anyone wants to a bit more of the details on the hows and whys from and audio point of view (or more info in general) then will be happy to oblige! The original post is here: 1

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When we first started work on Monstrum we realised that we needed to do more than just play sounds in the right places to give you scares every now and then. We decided we would need to do everything we can with the sounds and use sound to its full potential. This includes cross-fading between various sound sources, audio being occluded by walls and also sounds that affect the game itself! So how does it all work?

After Gary imports the raw sound files into the assets of our game we import those files straight into our audio system. Basically, the audio assets are all broken down into folders in Unity. These folders are then used to create Audio Libraries, with each folder being its own separate library. These allow us to edit all of the monster's roars all at the same time in one easy to use system.

Behold what is possibly the least scary screenshot of a roar to ever exist:

Once this Audio Library has been created we can start to mold the sound into what we want it to be.

So do we:

(Audio Type) Want it to be a sound effect or a piece of music?

(Loop Type) Want the sound to loop or to only play once?

(Randomness Type) Want to pick a sound from the library at random or just list through them?

(Occlusion Type) Want the sound to be occluded by walls?

(Start Granular) Want it to play right away or after some time has passed?

(Start Volume) Want it to be loud or quiet?

(Start Pitch) Want to increase or decrease the pitch?

(Fade This) Want this sound to fade in or just play it right away?

The most eagle eyed of our readers will also notice that there are some randomness variables in there as well. These are to give us a bit more variation from a fewer sources, as pitch shifting a group of 10 samples is lighter than having a group of 50 hanging around!

These variables let us finely tune each sound's playback properties. When we call for a sound to be played within the game the audio source refers back to the Audio Library of the sound needing to be played and follows what the library tells it to do. Therefore our lovely monster roar behaves in a completely different way from your character's footsteps, falling over traps... being killed by the monsters. You know, all those things that you might do in the game.

Occlusion? What's That?

Monstrum is a procedurally generated horror game where you encounter a monster that occupies the ship you are stranded on. So, you are not the only thing on the ship making sounds, and these sounds may not be coming from the room you are currently in. It may be the monster walking about in the rooms close by, up the stairs, anywhere. By changing how you hear the sound you are given an idea of where that monster is. We do this by occluding the sound to make it sound quieter and more muffled depending on how many things are between you and the monster.

Every wall that is between you and the sound's current location will decrease the sound's volume and lower the cutoff point of a Low Pass Filter. The filter modifies the sound by stopping frequencies above a cutoff point from being played, only frequencies below that to pass through. This gives the impression of the sound being muffled by the walls. The more walls between you the sound means you will get lower volume and a more muffled sound. So when you are hiding terrified in your metal coffin (sometimes referred to as lockers) you will be able to say something like this:

“I HEAR IT! I HEAR IT! IT'S THERE! IT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!”

or

“It's to the right, but it sounds quiet and a bit muffled. I think it may be safe now”

Sounds That Affect The Gameplay?

All of the above just tells the game how to play the sounds, how does all of that affect how you play Monstrum? What's missing in the post is an extra little script not only allows you to hear the sound, but it allows the monsters to hear it as well! Some sounds have greater effect than others but all have the ability to alert them towards that area. During your time on the ship this feature could be a blessing or a curse. You could use it to your advantage and try to distract the monster to another location or you could just bring him right to you as you were making too much noise. No matter how you cause these sounds, expect to have company soon.

[Mr. Virus]

Ho boy, been a while since the last update here. I'll pull together a bigger art one soon, but we've recently been working on our destruction system for doors, which now looks like this:

The programmers said it was a fairly simple implementation - each hit just activates a new collection of physics objects and disables the previous ones. Objects that need to carry over between hits are re-parented out of the system upon activation to prevent them being disabled.  They said the physics still needs a little bit of work though!

So, sorry about that! More soon!

[Mr. Virus]

Right, big ol' art update time! As always, the original complete with cheesy pun: Link

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Helicopter

So we've been working on our 3rd escape route. Adam's been rather excited about this one as the player must escape by air via helicopter. Which everyone knows how to pilot right?

Originally, he had thought of modelling something similar to the Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter (image above courtesy of Wikipedia), what seemed to be a common model of helicopter around the 1970s. However, he had wanted to make something that looked a bit more sea-borne to really fit with the setting.

Adam took a lot of inspiration from the Sikorsky S-61 (Shown above), an American amphibious helicopter with a rather interesting looking boat-like hull. This helicopter was however far too large for us, so in the end, we ended up with a mishmash of the two helicopter models:

Isn't it cute!

The orange/blue livery was chosen, not only to make it stand out, but to make the colour scheme consistent with the other escape routes as some sort of abandoned rescue helicopter.
(Just a note. These images are taken from the Maya viewport. They will look slightly different in our game's Unity engine)



Adam also tried adding some floatation devices in an attempt to better fit the helicopter into the ocean setting, but as the player was unable to reach the door without a set animation over these devices, he ended up removing them for simplicity. The tri-count for the model is a little high as the interior had to also be modelled.

New Items

In addition to the helicopter, we modelled new equipment for the player to play about with...

We've got some bolt cutters which are part of some new gameplay mechanics that are being implemented. I'll leave it for the design blog to talk about these mechanics but here is an image of them in the Maya viewport.

We've now got GUNS! Now you can shoot your way off the ship like James Bond!
Okay. Maybe not “lethal” guns....but still a gun nonetheless.
We've got a rare flare gun in which the player can use tactically against the beasts of the ship.

Andy cheekily branded it the “Dart” gun as Adam has a thing for modelling weapons...

Lastly, we've got this device above. Who on earth knows what this could be used for?

Hmmmmm.

Exterior

We gave you a sneak peak at the exterior in our previous art post and we've made quite some progress in this area.

Though some of this is still currently being implemented into the game, we can show you more textured shots in Autodesk Maya....

“It's kinda like Lego for boats” describes our artist Andy. Above are only some of the many pieces that he is working through that make up the exterior.

The pieces we made allow for great flexibility in changing the size and shape of the ship. When put together, our programmers are to make the ship as wide or long, tall or short as they wish. An example of it all put together is shown below.

As there are many repeating parts, one of the challenges our artist Andy has to overcome is to make sure the texturing looks right repeated. Too little variation, and each piece looks really plain. Too much, and the repeating gets really noticeable. This also varies depending on how close or far the player can see these pieces. This isn't so much a problem inside, as the player is always close up to these pieces, but on the outside, they can see much more and this is where repeating textures that are too “unique” start to break immersion.

On top of the walkways shown above, we will have lots of deck-specific deco that we are almost finished with.

Lighting Tests

Finally, Adam has been doing some more lighting tests in Unity as he feels that some parts of the ship are far too dark. These are not currently in the Alpha build yet.

Lower Deck Workshop

Upper Deck Bunk Room

Main Deck Walkways

That's all for now!

[Mr. Virus]

Quick little design blog based on the door stuff from earlier:



and how monsters interact with them. The original, complete with bad jokes, is here


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Why do we keep talking about doors? Well a lot of it comes from this excellent blog by Liz England of Insomniac, about how a good way to help people understand your role as a developer is to describe to them your part in getting something as everyday as a door into a game. It's also great at conveying the challenges of the job, as it shows how something so commonplace can become incredibly complex when it comes to sticking it in a game. Needless to say that blog has been invaluable in helping us explain what we do to people at parties.

What is going to be mentioned here is how we use doors to convey aspects of our monsters to the player. There are several types of doors in our game, some wooden, some metal,some lockable and the ways in which each monster interact with them indicates to the player some of their characteristics.

How they deal with a closed door that opens in towards them shows their intelligence, e.g. a smarter monster will open it properly while more animalistic ones will simply attempt to break it down after realising it can't be pushed. The speed with which they do this displays their physical strength; a strong monster can break down a wooden door almost immediately, while the others would take a few seconds to demolish it.

This can be extended into a gameplay mechanic; for example if a player were to learn these behavioural differences they could use this knowledge to their advantage. If, say, they were on the run from a weaker monster they'd know locking the door behind them would buy them a few precious seconds to hide, whereas if they were running from the Brute it'd be a waste of time. Another example would be locking a monster behind a sturdy metal door unlocked via switch. A strong but dumb beast will spend some time breaking it down, while an intelligent hunter will just flick the switch.

Hopefully we'll have some more visualisations of it soon!

[Eldan_Knight]

It looks impressive and terrifying! The graphic style is also great, I love the color and the ambient... It looks like a kind of cell-shading, but it isn't... Really good!

[Mr. Virus]

Cheers very much :D! The lead artist is going through the lighting just now, so hopefully will have some things to show from that too.

[Mr. Virus]

We posted a fairly chunky general update on our Steam Greenlight and IndieDB pages, so seems only fair to share it here too! Some of we've shared here before too, but there's a few new things in there . We've recently been pretty busy with a whole number of things that, while maybe not all that showy, make the game a lot better on the whole. If you read our dev blog, Monstrum Facebook page, Team Junkfish Facebook page or Twitter you can keep up to date with what we're doing at the moment!

Bear in mind everything's still a work in progress, so might not look like it does just now when the game's out.


Dare Protoplay/EGX

In August we took Monstrum to a locally run event called Dare Protoplay, which itself is tied into the Dare to be Digital competition that runs each year. This was the first outing for one of the new areas, the lower decks, which seemed to go down alright!

At the end of September we were at EGX down in London, complete with a test run for the second monster (the Hunter) and escape route. Also there were our buddies from PhiGames with TinyKeep and Hidden Armada with Mutiny!, with boothmates from Boneloaf with Gang Beasts and the World's Greatest Victorian Explorer: Bertram Fiddle.

Both events were pretty packed out, and we got a lot of screams from terrified people trying to power through the Oculus version! Lots of good feedback too, which we've been taking on board as we work on other parts of the game!


New Areas!

But which parts you might ask? First the bits we've mentioned already. There's the lower decks, which look a bit like this:



and this:




Dark, grimy, miserable and a bit dangerous in their own right, if you don't keep your eyes and ears open you'll be dead long before you run into any sort of monster. There are also some workshops down there, so maybe you'll find something that will help you escape?

There's also the cargo hold:



Up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards, the maze within the labyrinth houses some interesting goodies if you can get through it, but at the same time someone might drop in on you. Just don't forget your torch.

Finally, we've been expanding the outer decks a little. So here's a sneaky peek at some newer things we've been doing.




The cargo hold sticks out from the middle of the ship. Maybe it's blocking the way to something? There are also some extra ways in and out, but don't take in the sea air for too long. There's not much shelter out there...


New Stuff!

Of course it's not all areas we've been working on! We've got some shiny new toys for you try and avoid the inevitable, oncoming doom that lurks around the decks of Monstrum. We'll not spoil everything, so here are a few little sneaky peeks.



There are a few interesting ones in amongst there that could save your skin if you use them at the right moment. Sometimes you might find yourself safely hidden, but with one of your predators stalking the corridors just outside. If you're lucky enough to find a pair of walkie talkies, you can set up a triggerable distraction to get them out of the way to give you enough time to make a run for it.



You might also see a gun like object there. Sadly, it won't do you much good in a fight, but it does shoot some bright, fairly noisy flares (just like 70's fashion!). It may also have other uses, but you'll have to find that one out for yourselves...



We've also been sorting out some new and old escape routes. Then there's this weird looking stuff that's been appearing all over the place...




But at least the radio's got some new tunes on the go!



Current Happenings

So what are we doing just now then? Currently we're bug hunting and polishing up the escape routes and monsters as well as some optimisation, which sadly isn't all that exciting! Like we mentioned above, we've been doing some fairly regular blogs on a number of things, like how we make different elements of Monstrum, general game dev stuff and more, so here are a few recent that you may want to have a read through:

Coding The Journal

A few different approaches to creating art assets

Developing the Hunter's Soundtrack

Designing Procedural Tutorials

We'll have a few more updates soon (for real this time) so do check back!

Cheers,
Team Junkfish

[Mr. Virus]

Over the past few months I've been doing a little series of blogs relating to audio in storytelling and world building in games for the Team Junkfish blog. This one is about how we're going about the general audio design and considerations for Monstrum, so figured it might be of interest for people on here too .

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In a previous blog on the site I looked at the IEZA Framework and broke down Animal Crossing: New Leaf's sound design using it. In the first blog of the series I looked at music in games and applied that logic to Monstrum's soundtrack, this time I'm going to break down some of Monstrum into the four components, what the sounds are for, why are they used and how do they make the world that the player is in feel more believable.

For reference, here's the graph:

Effect

Effect sounds are a huge part of Monstrum for one major reason: the monsters can hear them too. This means that almost everything that the player can interact with or do requires a sound in response. Be it from crawling around under tables to using a giant rusted crane, running around a maze of shipping containers to throwing away a glowstick, if it makes a noise in the game world then it makes sense that the player's character isn't the only thing that will hear it. This ties quite heavily into the monster's tracking AI, which we've sort of discussed before in relation to audio distractions (link). The fact that they'll head towards things that are making noise can be a hinderence as well as a boon. So that giant rusted crane from above? You might just need to use it to escape, and it's not in the best shape so chances are its moving parts are going to be pretty noisy...

A really early WIP shot. Still rusty though!

We also have some standard use of effect sounds like differing footstep sounds depending on the surface the player character is on or how they are actually moving. The various interactables all have relative sounds too. As well as this the use of reverb plays a big part in giving the ship a sense of space. The corridors have long, hyperrealistic reverberations that echo down its (mostly) empty halls, while the various rooms sound... roomy.

Affect

On that note, we'll jump into the Affect section. There's a bit of a deeper reason as to the obvious difference in between the reverbs. While they are being used to try and replicate the sound of the space the player character is in, the corridor's long decay tails encapsulate the seemingly endless series of halls the player traverses through, which the rooms feel boxed in and smaller. I wanted the players to “feel” like this to a degree, especially at points when they have to deal with a monster. You're trapped on this big, labyrinthine ship, but even within that there are microcosms, little pockets that can just as easily result in you being locked down even further. In the corridors you can run far and wide if a monster spots you. Dive into a room are your options are immediately less free, and if you chose to hide the area that the player inhabits becomes smaller still.

Some times you can pick the right place too!

There's also the different themes for each monster, which has been covered in a few previous blogs. For a basic recap: each game starts with the same “wandering” music until the player is discovered. After this point the music changes to a different “bank” of songs depending on the monster in the level. There's a “chasing” theme while being hunted, a “hiding” theme while you're under cover but the monster is still actively chasing you down and another “wandering” theme, which replaces the original one after the initial chase and utilises some of the motifs that each respective monster has.

Interface

Monstrum doesn't have much in the way of a HUD, but we do have the journal! It's responsible for holding the player's notes and objectives, which they can flick through, so natrurally it has page turns and paper flutters when you use it. It is in real time though, so do be careful when having a read...

Zone

The diegetic sonic space in Monstrum is of crucial importance in multiple ways. While the Effect sounds not only provide (realistic) responses and tie heavily into the gameplay the Zone sounds define the environment, which is a fairly big part of any horror game. There is a low level base ambience across the whole ship to provide an “air”, removing the silence that could occur if nothing was playing. Similarly, the different parts of the ship will have their own airs on top of this to give some subtle sonic changes, in addition to the reverb changes mentioned above, as players move through each area.

Additionally we have our random ambience generator, which allows triggers various creaks and rumbles of an old ship at sea. This works by spawning an audio emitter somewhere within a sphere around the player after a randomly picked delay. These are limited so that there's a decent amount of time between each sound so that they don't get too repetitive and lose their effect. Finally, they're also affected by occlusion and reverb to help them sound a bit more distant in the ship. So we have:

randomly placed sounds + random time intervals + reverb and occlusions = mysterious spooky ship noises!

I'm sure one of the programmers can go over the system in a bit more detail for a code blog. The outside of the ship doesn't really have this effect going on as the sounds have fewer points of origin and nothing to reverberate off of, which gives it its own character. It plays more with silence, and being in the open provides a bit of a reprieve from the visually and sonically claustrophobic interior.

It's also dark. Really dark.

But of course, how the audio is implemented is only part of the battle, how it sounds is also a key factor. This is quite relevant to the Hunter as it is, at times, part of the environment too. But that doesn't exclude the others from this! We want to keep players on their toes, even before they know what they're up against. Was that thud in the distance a footstep or just the ship? Was that noise above you just water in pipes or something creeping through the vents? Well, you'll find out when you play the game!

There is a lot more in the game that I've not covered, such as the radios and other spoilerish stuff, but hopefully this will give you an insight into the general audio direction in Monstrum on the whole!

Cheers!

[Mr. Virus]

So we're going down the Early Access route for Monstrum in January, which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

More details and that are here!

[Mr. Virus]

Here's a quick little blog on the pathfinding solution we use in Monstrum for our monsters that one of the programmers knocked up.

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The monsters in our game use a custom pathfinding solution to navigate the ship, allowing it to take the dynamic layout of the ship and a multitude of obstacles in to account. The pathfinding can sometimes take a short while to calculate, especially if it is from one side of the ship to the other with lots of twists and corridors in the way. The delay between starting the calculation and getting the path can cause issues with the monster – the monster will be following its old path whilst the new one is being calculated, so when it starts following the new one, the start of the path might not be at the monster's feet. At best, the monster still lies on the new path. This usually happens during a chase. The worst case scenario is the monster is 'far away' from any part of the path, which can happen if the monster goes in one direction and the new path goes in another. We resolved this before by simply assuming the monster couldn't get too far off the path in the time and making it follow the closest node on the new path. However, we wanted to correct this assumption, to ensure this wouldn't cause a problem, and to fix the odd occasion the monster would turn around mid-chase when this didn't quite work.

To explain how we improved this issue, an understanding of the pathfinding process is necessary. The current procedure is as follows:

Find a Path → String-Pull → Improve Path

The first step is to find a path. We are not concerned with this right now. Step 2 can be described in layman's terms as placing a string along the path from the start to the end, and pulling until it is taut. In code, it actually just removes any nodes where the two nodes on either side can see each other, creating a similar effect. Step 3 is a collection of other algorithms that operate on the path to make it suitable for the monster and make the path better for following.

In order to reduce the problem stated, the game inserts a path back to the start node at the beginning the calculated path, just before the string-pull step. It does this by recording the monster's position whilst calculating the path, instead of doing actual pathfinding. By inserting the extra path at this point in the process, it piggy-backs off the remaining pathfinding functions and undergoes the same algorithms as the calculated path. This means the string-pulling removes any surplus nodes from the extra path and ensures the path ends up heading in the right direction.

[Mr. Virus]

So a marvelously belated Happy New Year! We've been working away on Monstrum in preparation for its Early Access launch at the end of the month. Here's a little video walkthough of some of the environmental and lighting updates that the artists have been working on:

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

I'm speechless, the details are incredible.

[Mr. Virus]

Thank you! The artists have been doing a fair amount of retouches, so glad that people notice .

[Mr. Virus]

Early Access launch is next week too, after which we'll get back to blog updates!

[Mr. Virus]

Monstrum is now available on Early Access! You can grab it from here:

Steam

Humble store