Do you intend a non-VR version, and if so, how do you intend to have the UI work there? Perhaps a button might cause the UI to slide onto the screen?

[edit] In all fairness, I suppose that looking down might work in a non-VR version too, come to that. ^^;

Yup, will be doing a non-VR version as well. In both cases I'll probably have a button to reveal the UI (or at least make it easier to see without having to look down).

So I've been debating how best to offer some critical feedback to the player in VR, specifically, health, some key inventory items, and the minimap. Originally I was toying with the idea of a helmet or visor, but I found it to be a bit too obtrusive. And besides, it doesn't really fit with the story.

I'm now leaning towards some kind of watch or PDA. I'm thinking the player will look down, and possibly press a button, to view it. Going to inject a good dose of Alien Isolation and Fallout retroness for good measure.

On that note... introducing the MonPro 2000, the state of the art in vital sign and navigational monitoring! This particular unit in pretty rough shape from a nasty fall, but still works respectably well.



Other than that, I've been focused heavily on the apparently endless number of optimizations that are needed to get a decent framerate in VR. It doesn't help that the levels are generated from fairly small prefabs (2x2 units), and Unity seems to insist on drawing most of them via separate draw calls.

I've been experimenting with dynamic occlusion culling (via InstantOC), but am finding that it's adding a lot of CPU overhead, as well as some undesirable pop-up. May need to roll my own.

The other thing I'm looking at is dynamically combining meshes to force Unity to do fewer draw calls. Not exactly exciting stuff but I figure it's good to get this outta the way early on!

And here's a sneak peek at some of the original sound design and music I've been working on:

https://soundcloud.com/snugsound/sets/undermine-ost

Some early environment concepts courtesy of Ricardo:





And a concept for the toxic waste barrels:

Working on some new prefabs to add a bit of variety to mines, and of course, build suspense. Bloody writing on the walls, a must-have in any survival horror!

Made directly in Unity using ProBuilder, QuickDecals, and some Megascan textures (among others).

It looks as though progress is being made. ^_^

I hope that the VR experience proves scary!

Everything is scarier in VR, I confirmed this last night I also confirmed that I need to make some optimizations if I want to play it on my rig without throwing up, heh.

Here a few shots from a recent build that show some of the new features (minimap, beacons, rudimentary HUD), and some of the new (placeholder) props that will tie into the backstory (barrels, toxic waste).













Video coming soon, just need to do a few optimizations and deal with a couple more obvious bugs first.

In other news, I upgraded my video card over the holidays (GTX 1050 Ti), and my Oculus Rift should arrive today or tomorrow; can't wait to do my first VR run of the game! :D

Wow, you've done a really great job in a bit more than a year. How many of you were working on the game?

Thanks! It's just two of us

Interesting! ^_^
First, points for (as far as I see) not including a "battery charge" mechanic for the torch, and for the screen not being pitch-black outside of its circle of light. ^_^

Thank you

As to the actual gameplay, right now it feels a little... empty to me, I think: there are several "rooms" to explore, but they're all more or less the same, and have little to offer.

Agreed, the above video is a very early prototype that demonstrates the basic level generation, but not much more than that.

It might help to differentiate them visually, but perhaps more important, I think, might be to include some additional gameplay elements that add some purpose to rooms other than the entrance, exit, and the room that holds the rope. A few ideas, off the top of my head:
 - You might follow traditional roguelike design and include a variety of items (passive or otherwise) that may or may not be found in various side-rooms.
 - You might follow other horror games in providing optional backstory and lore. At their simplest, these might take the form of pages from diaries or lorebooks, or text/images on the walls; conversely, you might implement a mechanic of some sort into them (perhaps representing translation), adding risk to the counter the potential reward.
 - There might be stationary objects that can interact with the monster--noisy things that catch its attention, or that release scents that briefly drive it away, for two examples.

Also agreed. The plan is to try to give rooms a more unique look/feel, as much as is aesthetically possible for a mine, and an early incarnation of the journal entry system can be seen in the video above. A few of the items I've been working on adding lately: minimap, beacons (used to mark a spot on the map, and also detect nearby enemies), pick-axe, barrels (can be knocked over to create a distraction).

Thanks for the feedback! I've got some new footage and screenshots on the way soon, stay tuned!

Release trailer is done, just putting the finishing touches on the final build and then we're going to pull the trigger on the full release, probably some time next week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=382ox8J8Ptg&feature=youtu.be

Well, we're ramping up for full release! We spent last weekend making a ton of visual updates, including several new backgrounds, tileset updates, improved weapon sprites, improved particle FX, etc. Overall, I'm quite happy with how things are shaping up.

Here's the new palette and background for the Infected Planet Level, for example:


And a totally overhauled tileset and parallax background for the Super Secret level:


This week, I captured a bunch (~30GB) of footage for the release trailer, and have started piecing it together today. Once we've wrapped up the trailer we'll deal with the nit-picky functional/design stuff (finalizing par scores/times, fixing UI quirks, etc.).

The only other big thing is the difficulty; we introduced a health system a while back, and I think it's made things a bit too easy. The good news is we have many ways to increase difficulty across the different difficulty settings (number of starting lives, damage scaling, health pick-up scaling, etc.).

Beta build 1.8 uploaded to Steam:

• possible fix for blur shader left on camera whem gamepad unplugged
• fix for whiskey pickup giving player shield instead of whiskey
• Cave: fix for missing ambient music
• new challenges levels (2 for now, more to come)
• Cave, Cave Secret: visual and design updates
• Mountain: visual and design updates
• Mountain: move boss camera target up a bit
• Mountain: split map into separate segments to improve rendering performance
• Infected Planet: visual and design updates
• Infected Planet: push cacti and fire-breathing heads back a bit so gore pieces render in front
• water drops in secret cave now use 2D physics/collisions

Has it been a month already? How time flies! After a brief diversion--an idea in my head that I had to get out--it's back on track with OH.

The focus right now is two-fold:

• replacing free/open game tilesets with original ones
• preparing for Hal-Con, which is now less than a month away!

Regarding the former, as you can see above we've totally overhauled the City tileset. We've also made decent headway on the Forest and Cave tilesets:





For Hal-Con, the plan is to demo an early Xbox One build of the game. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to go about this. Originally, I had hoped to run an "internal beta", but this is proving more difficult than I had thought. I'm now looking at the possibility of doing a UWP build, and putting their consoles in consumer "dev mode" to load it.

[Links:]

TOXICANT is an upcoming survival horror game that offers a unique twist on the survival horror genre, featuring procedural level generation and roguelike elements.

I started prototyping this in fall of 2016 and have since picked up the pace since the launch of my last title, Operation Hardcore.

The basic premise is that you're trapped in a mine and need to find your way out. As you progress, you find journal entries that allude to something having gone horribly wrong, and eventually, come face to face with it.

My plan is to run a ~6 month early access campaign on steam, hopefully kicking off within the next few months, and use it to really help shape the final experience. (the way I feel early access was intended to be used!)

Here's a video and some shots from recent builds:



(right-click -> View Image for 1080)























Links:
Steam store page
Website (old)
Presskit (old)

Edit log:

• Apr 30/19: update to reflect name change from Undermine to TOXICANT
• May 20/19: update with recent shots
• Feb 8/20: update with latest trailer

I recently started experimenting with a health meter/health pick-ups (via enemy gib ) in an effort to balance the difficulty and make the game a bit more accessible. Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. The changes make it a bit easier to "storm" a level, but also easier to become over-confident, so I'd call it an even trade-off.



I've adjusted the difficulty settings accordingly:

• Easy:  3 lives /  double health recovery
• Medium: 3 lives / normal recovery
• Hard: 1 life / normal recovery
• Hardcore Badass: 1 life / 50% recovery

I've also removed enemy projectile speed scaling; projectiles are now the same speed regardless of difficulty.

This is live in the beta branch on Steam now, feedback is very much welcomed/appreciated before we push it to the main branch!

Well, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded Unity. First from 5.2.3 to 5.3.5, and then to 5.4.0. Overall, no major issues. In fact it went a lot more smoothly than past upgrades.

I'm happy to see they finally fixed an issue that was causing me major grief: rotations on negatively scaled objects now behave as one would expect them to! (obviously negatively scaling an object is not really ideal, but kind of a necessary evil in a 2D side-scroller IMO). Suffice to say, it took a bit of refactoring to remove all the hacks I had put in to work around this, but well worth it.

Subsequently, we're now in a much better position for the Xbox One port, which we intend to start in the next few weeks (we'll be demoing an early build at this year's Hal-Con in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)

And on that note, I'd like to announce that build 1.6 is now live on Steam. Highlights includes better explosions, more blood, floating gib, PLUS improved rendering performance (thanks to the 5.4.0 upgrade). (full details)

Here's a quick demo scene showing off some of the new stuff:

I took some time this week to redo the UI in a more "minimalist" style, inspired by NES menus. I think it suits the overall aesthetic of the game much better and the initial impressions of others seem to concur. Here are some before/after shots:



This is now live in the current beta branch on Steam (1.5.1) and will likely be promoted to the main branch over the weekend.

Here's a quick demo of the new velocity-based knock-back which I implemented over the weekend. It makes for all kinds of frantic and crazy randomness, especially in some of the later boss fights (in fact, I revamped a couple of them to really play off of this):



I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! This supersedes the previous (rather clunky) approach of "immediate re-positioning", and also extends to player weapon recoil.

This went live yesterday in build 1.5 along with a ton of new stuff. Full details here.

I've also been playing around with Ferr2D, a really awesome 2D terrain creation tool for Unity, which I highly recommended:



I'm going to try to resist the urge to update all of my tile-based maps, and instead, be strategic by only updating segments of levels that would benefit the most from the more "organic" platforms that can be achieved with Ferr2D. We'll see how that goes.

One thing's for sure, I'll definitely be using this for future levels and 2D projects! (well, depending on how things go with Unity's own 2D tools... one of which looks strikingly similar to this)

I've been experimenting with a "charging laser" behaviour in an effort to add more variety and uniqueness to the different weapons. Check it out:



This is now live in the beta branch along with a bunch of other fun stuff, including more screen-shake, bigger bullets, better camera tracking, whiskey pick-ups (previously, whiskey could only be purchased between levels), and new weapon icons.

Going forward I'm going to be tracking changes to the beta branch via this Steam community discussion.