This looking great. I wondering though maybe put some stuff be higher? Everything I like the idea of climbing actual mountains  instead of hills. Also the clouds felt really low too.

I guess the main reason the mountains are so low is because with the current map size, the slopes would get quite steep and that was causing some trouble with the camera (at the time). However, we will definitely be experimenting with these parameters, and also perhaps adding some variety to mountain faces. Maybe if we have mountain trails and step-like scramblable cliffs, mountaineering would be pretty nice!

I think the clouds will probably come and go depending on the weather, the current fixed height feels very claustrophobic when underneath, which is meant to contrast with the feeling of being above the clouds.

I found the third camera (the one farthest back) the clouds were usually in the way.

Ahh yeah.. I really should remove those other camera modes. I think we're pretty much settled on the default over-the-shoulder one.

So, it's all procedural, right?

Landscape and placement of trees etc is procedural, yep. The clouds are just a solid layer at the moment so are only procedural in a trivial sense. Depending on priorities, design decisions, etc, we might have some sort of cloud pattern. Sprites and textures are pre-authored. Happy that you like the clouds!


Code tasks for this weekend: Improved towns, roads and farmland, and maybe some little features like forest clearings and SPOILERS

Nice one, thanks!

I just realised that I forgot to say it requires .NET runtime

There aren't enough Dadaist games, that's for sure. Not since the Spectrum anyway... I think I'm thinking of Terramex

I hope there will be some



Doodah Band action

Hello - here's that
build. It *should* have all the DLLs and stuff, but I reserve the right to do some hasty editting in a few minutes...

Anyway, hopefully it runs ok. There are plenty of obvious and not-so-obvious glitches and rough edges. One bug I am expecting on some machines is the landscape not being lit... haven't looked into that since the previous thread.

I put in the region names, which appear in the bottom left. These will probably only appear in NPC dialogs etc rather than in the "HUD", and also they'll be based more on the real features of the area, once these sort of details are in.

I'm not sure how often we'll be posting updates - we might try and get something a bit more finished before revealing too much/building false hopes (as applicable)

Regarding exploration/quest balance, it will probably be heavily exploration-biased, at least at first. If there's a quest it will be fairly abstract. Maybe the exploration is the quest... hmmmm...

Non-violent conflict: there might end up being something rather Miyazaki-ish going on, but... see above

Oh also: Regarding Hunter/the Hunter - it's funny because Ray (co-developer) and I were talking earlier about the nice open world of the Amiga game "Hunter", but I reckon you're probably talking about the online hunting thing.

This is relevant to my interests 

I especially like the idea of it being "awesome"

Yeah, definite potential, although it hurts my ears too much at the moment 

As it is now, I think it would be cool if it was some kind of freaky-interlude in a less dissonant game version of the same thing, if that makes any sense at all. Reminds me of the ending of 2001 (which I like)

Survival-horror-rhythm-action!

Thanks again for the encouragement!

JLJac - Yep, they're sprites. The buildings are the main things that look bad as sprites (apart from the silliness of the sprite assets themselves), so they will probably be first to be switched over to models.

In general the visual style is totally placeholder, but I guess it has a naive charm 
We will try not to ruin it by turning it into some kind of failed Elder Scrolls clone!

Chevy - this is exactly the idea! I hope it works.....

Thanks guys! give me a couple of days to sort out the build. I am slightly dreading machine-specific graphics problems 

Proteus is not dead, just sleeping! We're hoping to have it ready for GDC, and then downloadable shortly after.

Just posted this for #screenshotsaturday:



Older stuff:

Current state (click for video):

This is the early stages of a procedural RPG/exploration game. It doesn't really have a name yet except Proteus (a bit of a joke about the lack of a definite design) or Nodeland, which is just based on the theory of how the stuff in the world is laid out.

The landscape is generated as a series of regions, and then region-level features are added in like mountain chains, valleys, areas of water etc. Forests and towns are also added at the region-level and then the whole thing is converted to a heightmap, a terrain terrain is generated and objects are added (trees etc)





The particle-system-ish cloud layer is the start of some sort of weather/atmosphere system which will probably change over time to add a bit of variety to the feeling of exploration and how the world feels.

You can move about, run jump, slide down cliffs and that's about it at the moment.

Final gameplay will be probably a bit like a very simple take on the Morrowind games. Not sure what combat will be like, or even if there will be any real combat. Non-violent would be cool! We're mainly thinking about focusing on exploration and quests. Also some fun movement modes like skiing and gliding, maybe riding some creature(s)? I'm also hoping to figure out some very lightweight survival-style gameplay, so you can choose to live off the land or pay for food and shelter in towns.

At the moment I'm adding generated names to features and regions in the world, just for fun. There's a context-free grammar system in there that I wrote ages ago and haven't really used for anything yet, so I'm feeling sorry for it. Next up is to put some logic in the town placement and have stuff like mineshafts and farmland in neighbouring areas, as well as connecting roads.



Currently the art is either my programmer-art or programmer-mutilated artist-art... so the next-but-one task is to fix up the .obj file importer and get some decent models and textures in. More on that later...

Tools:

• C#
• SDL.NET
• Tao framework for OpenGL
• Alex May's and my Wuwei framework (pretty much all of the graphics code is Alex's  )
• Acunote (project management web app)
• SVN

[The project evolved from this... the thread that I put in Feedback and then realised it should have gone in the Developer forums, so I let it die. Anyway, thanks to stephen and bezzy for the comments there - the feedback has been incorporated into the new terrain generator!]

So, yeah. tl;dr

I'll put up a test build when I have a bit of time to make something presentable...

[/size]

I personally got the idea that they were taking screenshots of beautiful video games and displaying them as screenshots of beautiful video games.

Ah, that would make sense. The exhibition description seemed more inclined to treat the screenshots themselves as art.

Yeah I think that is about right... both of those. Pretty much. I thought it was good to limit the scope of what they claimed to be showing to "visual design in games" rather than gameplay-mechanics-as-art, although an exhibition of that might be more interesting, if harder to stage.

Not really sure what the idea was of the "joke" entries like Bikini Karate Babes. Maybe just to keep people on their toes...

Apart from that, I guess it's probably good for exposure of how nice and "artistic" games can look.

Thanks again guys - still haven't got round to trying it but should manage later today

bateleur: Yep - I'm just surprised it was factored out of the final formula. My current code for this function is such a mess of experimental stuff, I wouldn't have spotted it 

Boris: Currently I have the character's horizontal speed modified by slope, so this is partially solved. I think it'll need reworking as it's too slippery at the moment. As for the "wall" problem, I think I'm going to have to solve that in a combination of ways: Marking slopes (procedurally - the world is PG), having a gradual transition from full-speed on flat to blocked on cliffs, and also having more of a state-machine for the character. We'll see!

Aik - thanks! Devlog plus test build containing this character movement to follow...

Hey, thanks! That looks reassuringly/embarassingly simple. I would have thought horizontal velocity would have to come into it somewhere, but maybe not! I'll post back when I've had a chance to try it out.

Hello, I'm currently trying to get a character walking nicely on a heightmap.
The main problem I have is how to handle walking down slopes nicely. Currently (well, until I broke things ) I had pretty decent results from snapping him to the ground on every frame, except when he jumps, when he gets an upward velocity and then resnaps onto the terrain once he lands.

HOWEVER, what I would like is for the player to be able to run off cliffs, and run down steep slopes with that kind of skipping motion that occurs when gravity isn't quite enough to pull him down to stay in contact with the slope. This is basically what you have in FPSs and stuff like Morrowind.

What happens when I have tried this is that I get horribly juddering stepped movement down slopes. So I was wondering - is there a standard approach to getting this movement on a slope working nicely? Any tutorials or pseudocode kicking around?

Cheers!

For context, the game looks pretty much like this:

(I'll probably start a devlog sometime, in case anyone's curious about the rest of it)

Braid wasn't there, although I agree that it should have been. I mean that in a nice way! As should Dyson, and tons of other indie stuff!

The selection of games and of shots from games was pretty odd and occasionally for deliberate irony or maybe comic effect. Like Bikini Karate Babes. Right. Gears of War. Hmm.

The most pretentious thing about it is that text on the website (and also the same thing in leaflets), I was actually hoping for an enraging experience but was let down

Copyright - they did have "(C) Core Design" etc. It did seem pretty bizarre though. They also had "No photography" signs, but I reckon I can claim "fair use" 

I'm a bit worried about autolooting filling your inventory to the point of insanity. Now knowing there items end up, like which player is carrying what, is also probably fairly frustrating.

Automatic coin pickups and a (shared party) purse is a great idea, though! =D

Ah sorry, I didn't mean automatically pick anything up, just
1. User clicks on coin/key in world
2. Coin/key goes direct to purse/keyring without any further user effort

And then for equippable stuff, the ability to drag it onto a portrait and have it be automatically equipped if there's nothing in that slot, as someone else said above. 
Or, maybe, auto-equip if it's clearly better than the current item?

to simply list all the items along the bottom edge of the screen, just on top of the character panel.

I was imagining this one, or something similar. I don't like the sound of adding duck just for picking up nearby stuff, but maybe you have other uses for it in mind!

The grid-based thing might be interesting. I tried something like that briefly but I didn't have any interpolation between positions and it ended up fairly unpleasant to look at. What's the old game that had that sort of interpolated 3D world movement? Space Hulk?
edit: ...ah no, it was Etrian Odyssey on DS. Nevermind!

I was on holiday in Slovenia recently and thought this exhibition would be rather amusing, in light of the perennial games-as-art debate. It turned out it was fairly inoffensive after all, and had a nice room of enormous Shadow of the Colossus images and a looping video. Maybe not quite entertaining enough for the ~3 euro entry fee, but nicely presented...

It was also nice to see Aquaria and Crayon Physics in amongst the mainstream stuff:



The shots seemed slightly weirdly-chosen. I don't know if they took these screengrabs themselves or if they're just publicity shots off the web. Most of the trailers on the big screens had the GameTrailers intro and logo 

Weirdly the only thing that really grated my eyeballs in that video was his Chain-Scythe(tm). But thinking about it, that one item pretty much sums up the entire thing.

I'm not saying I liked the rest of it, I just zoned out. 

Hey, I enjoyed my short play on this! It's really slick and has a great feel to it.

As other people have said already, I think it could be made more accessible/usable with a few (hopefully) minor additions, like the auto-equip and some kind of auto-attack. For the latter, maybe you click on the equipped weapon to toggle a highlight on it (so the button lights up or whatever) and then whenever an enemy is in front of the party the character automatically attacks with the weapon.

Depends how far you want to go with automating this stuff.

The other (minor) thing I found frustrating was that you effectively have a minimum range for picking up items - when you're standing on top of something you can't see it onscreen so can't pick it up. Perhaps all items within the "minimum visible range" could appear in a row of buttons in the UI or something?

Perhaps also keys and coins could be automatically placed in some keyring/purse. I kind of resented having to put each coin in an inventory slot manually

Fun stuff though, keep going!

Haha brilliant - I was hoping someone would do this 

However, the concept is incomplete without some reference to penises.

A Jam on my birthday? Oh boy!

Hey, it's my birthday too!  Cheers!
Although in my case it means I probably can't really participate... I'll try and post some kind of build of my Lo-fi RPG anyway, and poke my head in the forums, just to make a token effort.