And... I'm back. I've been in crazy crunch time at my regular job since before Xmas and it's just now letting up so admittedly I let the devlog slide in lieu of working on the game at every spare moment. We did post some screenshots a little while back of the Long Beach port map we've been working on:
But I do have some really cool news. We cast the part of the Director, who is both the game's announcer and the villain who will ultimately be responsible for any player's untimely death... The part is going to be played by Jeremy Carter of the Superego podcast. Check out Superego here: www.gosuperego.com they are funny as hell. We'll be recording on the Feb 20th, can't wait!
Ok, well I spent the last few days attempting to figure out how to get PhysX Cloth working in Unreal Engine 4 for one of our main characters. The subject is the trench coat of the yet unnamed Asian male who is the main feature of the movie poster style box art posted above. But I finally got it working satisfactorily. I'll have to tweak it so it looks just right.
Hello again. The 6 week long crunch time is now over at my day job so it's my goal to start posting a little more regularly. If you haven't noticed above, we have our official 'movie poster'/box art up. It takes the characters I posted earlier with the storyboards and fleshes them out a little.
We are pretty early in development and I was talking to a friend of mine who isn't into games other than as a player and was trying to describe the state it's in. I its like a large Lego set where you have these partially built structures that are part of a larger whole, but make no sense right at the moment. He seemed to get it.
Well, I've had a heck of a week. Had to buy a new laptop. My old one is repairable but it will take some time. Thankfully online back up and Perfoce exist! More actual game development later. In the mean time, here's a link to a Features post on the stunt system I posted on IndieDB a week ago:
We've gotten to the point where you can run, jump, crouch, lay down prone and crawl and have just begun to get the first stunt, the Dive, implemented. Killing, My Friend has a very complex movement system and I have to say, as an artist (specifically an animator), working with Unreal Engine 4 but coming from a Half-Life and Unreal Tournament 2003 background, UE4 is an absolute amazing breath of fresh air. I can completely design, prototype and iterate and fine tune the entire player animation system with very little input necessary from our very talented coders.
For example, with the Dive, the player can dive in any direction and change their orientation mid-dive. So they can dive forward and then in mid-air turn to shoot an enemy that is behind them and end up landing on their back/butt. So it's a simple prone idle animation wouldn't do. We had to have something that would have been nigh impossible as a modder on Half-Life, a multi-directional prone idle that seamlessly blends into a prone bellycrawl. And for those of you familiar with UE4 here's what the Blend Space for that looks like:
For those that don't, each one of those dots is an animation sequence. On the lower part of the picture, that jumbled mess is actually 8 individual idle animation of the player model lying in one of 8 directions (forward, back, left, right, forward left, forward right, etc.) They are arrayed to allow the model to blend seamlessly from any direction they may land in a dive to a belly crawl animation. Pretty cool stuff.
I did a short write up the other day at IndieDB of some of the stunts and how they work if you'd like to check it out: Killing, My Friend stunt system
My 13 yo geeked out when I showed him your game. He's a total Gameboy fan (he'll eat through batteries on my generation 1 Gameboy I still have)and loves Indiana Jones with Raiders being his favorite movie so Jack B. Nimble just grabbed him. Awesome stuff.
Thanks! And your welcome. I have to say, I look back now and I'm humbled and amazed at the influence AHL had. I did start a dev blog here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=43533.msg1065671 I had a crazy 60hr week at my day job so I hadn't posted anything in a week but that's changing today! It's definitely a relative of AHL's so I'll be interested to hear what you think.
We are making an admittedly ambitious game. One that fits into our wheelhouse coming from the mod scene. But We are still very much an indie studio (my bank account and credit card bills can attest to that.) As I'm sure many of you fellow indie gamers can relate, when you are doing it all yourself, you are forced to find creative ways to cut corners and still make something quality and cool and visually interesting. For our game, we wanted to have a way to set up our gameplay without lots of time consuming animation and props/models that may only get used for the intro and outro for each scene/map/level that helps to support our theme and still gets the job done.
Our game is set on a film set of an overblown and over budget action movie. This offers us a few opportunities. Number one being that we can switch locations and themes for each level without having to rely on story to dictate the setting which in turn offers us a lot of design freedom. But because of that we needed a way to get the basic backstory to the action that takes place during gameplay to the audience. And we came up with the idea of storyboard animatics used as cut scenes to introduce our story for each level and tell the story of what happens after the gameplay ends. Storyboard animatics are something that most movie watchers have become familiar with in the era of DVD deleted scenes. Here's two examples of what will eventually become storyboard animatics by our very talented 2d artist David Smith:
I haven't posted here in a while with my nose firmly planted on the grindstone these last few months, but we've had some vast amount of progress and additions to our team. Two of the devs behind Double Action: Boogaloo joined up and have been working on Killing, My Friend. Also we've launched our Kickstarter as of yesterday which you can find here:
We should be releasing a prototype demo within the next few weeks as part of our campaign as well. There's a ton of info on our Kickstarter page if you'd like to see what we're all about.
Yeah, I was lead designer on Action Half-Life. The game we are working on now has it's roots in AHL. Glad to see there's still some name recognition. I'll have to dig around and see what the Specialist guys are up to. Back in the day there was a bit of a rivalry between AHL and the Specialist and even the Opera. But I look back now and it's just kind of flattering that people liked our core ideas so much that they wanted to build their own games off it with their own ideas which is what the mod scene was all about.
The HL mod scene was where the most creative and innovative game design was happening at the time. I think as new distribution channels opened up like Steam, and game engines became accessible the mod scene has morphed into the indie scene. At least that's what it looks like to me having taken some years off game development. Now it's the indie scene that has the majority of the creative and innovative design. It's really great to see.
I got my start with a Q2 mod but really cut my teeth making Action Half-Life. I was just wondering if there were any other modders out there that have made the jump to indie dev. I took a long break to raise a family and work my day job but decided to start up development again now that things have changed so drastically and there are so many opportunities nowadays that didn't exist 10 years age. Just curious to find out if there's others with similar experiences.
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I have to say, I look back now and I'm humbled and amazed at the influence AHL had. I did start a dev blog here: 
I'll have to dig around and see what the Specialist guys are up to. Back in the day there was a bit of a rivalry between AHL and the Specialist and even the Opera. But I look back now and it's just kind of flattering that people liked our core ideas so much that they wanted to build their own games off it with their own ideas which is what the mod scene was all about. 