[Prologue]

Kikai - a 3D dark-themed mystery game with focus on story and AI

Prologue

During his gradual recovery from a chronic disease, a musician and luthier had traveled to a beautiful foreign land. Just to get away, relax in scenic beauty, and maybe find some musical inspiration. He left the crowded, distracting cities to travel all the way to a border town so he could enjoy the best sceneries there were.

Then the war broke out.

Everyone lost their minds and chaos ruled. In the midst of all this, he found a boy with a broken leg, crawling against the stream of people running away from the fighting.
He couldn’t just leave the poor boy. He tried to pull him away from danger, but the kid showed him a picture of a girl and pointed deeper into town. With haste, he helped the boy get to where he wanted to go: a large laboratory. There was screaming coming from the inside.

They followed the sounds deeper into the building until they encountered a small girl stabbing a female scientist to death.

The girl passed out and the boy crawled to her immediately. There were three corpses at the scene, two in white lab coats. A picture on the wall showed the dead people and the two kids, all happy and smiling.

The musician was still shell-shocked, but with the war outside, dangers were already on the doorstep again. He took it upon himself to protect the kids from the war. The boy’s name was Kai and the girl’s was Kira. They showed him the few underground lab rooms that they had access to, and the three of them made it their home while the war raged on outside.

Introduction

The game will have action and stealth mechanics as well as puzzle and visual novel elements. We want to focus on the story, the AI and the immersive atmosphere of the game. Playing as the foreign musician, you will explore the mysterious labs, the war-ravaged town and the scenic landscape surrounding it, looking for supplies and answers, while trying to take care of the children and teaching them right from wrong. With our robust AI learning system, the children will respond to your actions and gradually change. Our goal is to deliver the truest, deepest and most emotional experiences.

The kids’ AI will be developed with Machine Learning, which means they can learn through experiences. For example, if you always kill enemies upon met without mercy, the kids will grow to be violent. If you help other people frequently, they will learn to do the same, etc.

Art & Screenshots

The Light Novel

We’re going to demonstrate the game world and tell some stories through a light novel written specifically for the game. We’re not going to spoil much and might even insert some lies as well as misleading clues. The point is to make sure everyone can feel the game better and imagine what kind of mysteries there are. One has to play the game to truly understand its characters and mysteries.
Hai is the writer, Trieu is the illustrator and Jaco is the editor.
The Light Novel will be available in English. A Vietnamese and a Japanese version are also possible.

You can read all chapters here  

The team
- Hai (writer, programmer)
- Trieu (concept artist)
- Jaco (proofreader, editor)
- Lucas (3D artist)
- Josh (composer)
- Ian (animator)

I only have 2 pics for this update. Have spent more time on rendering & players' movement than I should. At least It's getting smoother and more robust now. Still doubts if it's good enough for multiplayer though.

Anyway, a game of castcube will have from 12 to 23 rooms with different size and pattern. All rooms are randomly generated, except the center room, which always has the big cube in the middle. In the morning phase, players are required to enter the cube to discuss then blind vote. Initially, there's no map to navigate through the random rooms (only available via collecting items), so if a player fails to get to the cube on time, or chooses not to participate, his/her vote will be automatically set to himself/herself.

Players are not assigned names, they are normally recognized by their distinct color (randomly chosen at the start of the game). Rabbits with different color have different traits. Pink rabbits move faster, Yellow rabbits have better vision in the dark while gray ones have keen ears to catch private talks ect. As you can see in the right pic, players leave traces at places they recently came through. This makes stalking, hunting and investigating more fun (I hope   ).

I'm also working on item design, room patterns, strategies and all but let's save them for the upcoming updates. I haven't got much too show anyway. I will try to push harder and probably record gifs or so soon. As always, any comments are greatly appreciated, thanks guys  

Thank you for the nice responses guys 

I myself really love mind games like werewolf where there are just too many cool possibilities and tactics. You know the wolf's identity but will other players trust you? Should you risk your life trying to accuse the wolf? You either successfully convince others to eliminate the wolf or become the wolf's biggest enemy. But if the wolf kills you right away, it'd definitely become suspicious. The possibilities go on. Deceits and lies are pretty interesting aren't they?

Anyway, to reduce the random factor that players vote blindly without clues. I would love to let players move around to find clues, leave anonymous notes, set up traps, run, hide, approach others for good or no good,.. Plus the randomly generated maps, it should be fun as hell

It sounds over-ambitious already but it's still reasonably small, right? I should definitely focus on finishing a playable prototype first. AI sounds fun yet should be hard and time-consuming as hell to implement a deep and fun system. Multiplayer should be a technically easier option (still pretty rough though) Making stuffs work in Meteor is pretty fast so I should stick with it for now. I do intend to release the first version around mid-February next year so it's basically 3 months, that should be a reasonable plan.

I would try my best to finish a playable prototype for us to mess around as soon as possible. Please join me then Again, any comments are greatly appreciated, updates will soon come!

[castcube]

castcube or cast your vote in the closed cube is a dark themed game about trust & deception, based on the infamous game of werewolf / mafia. It's a multiplayer web-based game, currently developed in Meteor.

There are 6 players in a castcube game, 5 rabbits and a wolf in disguise. The rabbits want to find and eliminate the wolf while the wolf wants to eat all of the rabbits.

The game has 3 phases: morning, afternoon and night. Each morning, players gather to discuss who is the real wolf then start blind voting. Who gets the most votes is hung. The afternoon follows when every player can roam around finding clues, deceive others, setting traps,... in the randomly generated rooms of the game. The night eventually comes when all rabbits lose their vision, run and hide desperately in the dark while the wolf finding one to eat.

The phases repeat unitil either:

• the wolf is hung in the morning, the rabbits wins
• there's only one wolf and one rabbit left, the wolf comfortably enjoy its final meal
• each player votes himself/herself in the morning then everyone wins big prizes

I've been programming for some years now but have never finished a real game. In order to finish my first game and progress even more, I need all the help and advises from the amazing people here So I do have some questions:

1. About game engine. I'm quite comfortable with Unity but is it hard to do multiplayer? What about HTML5/Javascript engines, have never used one before. I'm currently using Meteor and HTML5 Canvas to produce a quick prototype like the picture above. The game works, I can render maps, move players around, do multiplayer, store data easily but it feels a little bit wrong, without a game engine, would the development get slower and more frustrated?

2. Though it's my first game, I really want to 'release' the game and get many people to play it. Should I aim for a profitable product or aim it low first. Since overly ambitious is the biggest mistake for someone just starting out like me. Especially when I only have around 3 hours a day to work on the game anyway.

3. About art, assume I could make a nice unique dark themed gameplay, will people still play the game with minimum art?

I'm inexperienced and all but really willing to learn, replies are highly appreciated and welcomed

P/S: Early concept arts were quickly done by a cool friend of mine, check him out!

The art style is beautiful, the color is a little too bright for me though.
Anyway, good luck with the GREENLIGHT thing. Great work, sir

Great work folks, definitely following this

The game has progressed so much since the last time I checked. It looks so amazing, that art style \m/
Keep going, sir!

Just checked out the first prototype and sent some feedback.
Good luck with the project!

Leaving computer screens hours before bedtime is healthy for our sleep. I follow that and it seems to work for me. More time for books, music and relaxing thoughts. No more alarm clocks!

Anyway, do you guys sleep at noon time? I sleep 7 hours a night and it should be enough. But then as lunch is my main meal, I always feel too full to do anything. I end up sleeping for 1-2 extra hours  instead of a 30-min nap. I guess splitting main meals into many lighter ones should do the trick, anyone has any good ideas? Will 5 meals a day viable?

This looks incredibly sick guys.
Can't wait for more progress.

Have to follow this wonderful game.
Keep up the good work dude 

Really love the art style.
Keep up the good work, dude.

Hi,
My name is Hai, I'm 16 years old and from Vietnam.
I've been doing serious programming for just like a year so i still have a lot to learn. I really love programming, games and the indies community so i decided to start posting things after lurking for some time.