Synnah
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« Reply #80 on: July 09, 2008, 05:06:58 AM » |
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It'll probably be a few artists contributing, with a different track to fit each level's mood. I've already had someone cool offer to do some material.
General direction-wise I've always heard stuff like Aphex, Autechre, Squarepusher et al in my head when I imagine the finished game. Agreed; the stark, experimental IDM vibe is definitely the way to go for this. If you're interested, I can put together a demo track in that vein. I've had a quick play of the game, but not long enough to give any useful feedback yet (I'm on my lunch break!). I'll have another pop at it when I get home, and get back to you.
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"What's that thing at the end of the large intestine? Because that's exactly what you've done here." - Ray Smuckles, Achewood. My music. Will compose for free!
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JP
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« Reply #81 on: July 09, 2008, 08:37:58 PM » |
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the grappling laser/hook could be more useful in the game when one could move the camera freely while climbing up. just place the hook and it will move you automatically towards it. shooting while climbing would be possible this way too. I'm going to revisit the grapple movement at some point. One of the few things I like about the current style is that it does actually make you a more predictable target, because you're moving along a relatively straight line (your original aim vector). So you're risking something to gain height. But there are probably other implementations that don't handcuff the ability's all-important expressiveness as much that accomplish the same tradeoff. Worms-style ninja rope with swing etc, and offhand grapple are definitely things I intend to explore. the term 'abstract expressionist' is maybe a bit extreme (it's a jump'n'shoot fps, right?). painting=color=explosion could be something maybe to make it more "expressive". the movement-shooting-action as action-painting? + interactive sound = weapon-instruments? exaggerated 3d-sound (e.g. heavy reverbish footsteps, or hollow, metallic explostion-bursts) ..and dark fog is something which is rather cheap and adds a lot to a denser/deeper mood... a minimal soundscape (breath, wind) seamed always a very powerful thing to make it emotionally more tangible. - or in which way should it be expressive? should the game or the player(s) be expressive? or both?  Abstract expressionism was more an ideology than a consistent, coherent aesthetic, so it's in that respect that I've taken it as a starting point (along with minimal IDM and twitch action I guess). A lot of the artists in the mid 20th century doing that sort of work emphasized the act of creation over the end product. Pollock's "action paintings" in particular aren't the sort of thing I enjoy looking at a lot but it looks like it would have been fun and deeply personal to create. So in a high level sense, it's my metaphor for the relationship between the designer and the player. A lot of game designers right now are searching for the holy grail of artistic expression, which I think is quite attainable but in some cases it's come at great cost to the (imo) equally important facet of player expression. I ramble about this idea more towards the end of my Expressivity post. It's a bit highbrow but I'm stickin' to it  nice idea to use weapons as tools! the concept could be enhanced to avoid shooting completely... (e.g.: bubble cloud making weapon -> new platforms? phys sics :/, stilt weapon: shoot a solid beam to the ground and circle around the anchor point, bombs as "jump-tools" etc.) The solo.run and duel.run game modes I have planned are basically solo and 1v1 racing, so movement is at the forefront there - your points scored via attacks aren't even counted. As for augmentations to the movement effects, I want to stick with the 4 core attack types, but extend them via level objects... some of which are very conventional like jump pads, but others are like the grapple surfaces: particular attack + particular level object = twist on that attack effect, context-limited implicitly by the level design. Oh and I do want "wall walk" surfaces, like magnetic boots effect, which change navigation significantly but it's pretty hard to code and I may push it to version 1.0 or beyond... lightmap generation is such invaluable tool! ah, wanna have too  but the big plain black/gray areas were a bit disorienting sometimes. ambient lightning? polygon outlines? In the past day or two, I've switched over to my Art hat and done a bit of style exploration. The large swaths of undifferentiated grey are easily the game's biggest visual problem at this point. So I've roughed in the stuff I've known I wanted to do: rough lines emphasizing the architecture, more texture to the surfaces (including an additive pass on top of lightmaps to make dark areas more interesting), different lighting and compile schemes to bring out the contrast, etc. Here's an early shot of my first art test space:  This is just the first baby step towards the style of that gorgeous 90 degrees film I linked in the first post. Needs a lot more work. Looks decent in motion already though. detail... why this big speed display in the hud? In future builds that may only show up for the *.run game modes, just like score will only show up for the *.attack modes. NPRQuake and Rez are kind of what started me down the road to making this crazy game, so many years ago.
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2008, 08:46:03 PM by JP »
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JP
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« Reply #82 on: July 09, 2008, 08:38:41 PM » |
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Agreed; the stark, experimental IDM vibe is definitely the way to go for this. If you're interested, I can put together a demo track in that vein.
That would rule. You rule.
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Melly
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« Reply #83 on: July 09, 2008, 10:58:43 PM » |
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This game WILL be part of Tigs Game Night someday, garanteed.
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Synnah
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« Reply #84 on: July 10, 2008, 08:40:47 AM » |
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Okay, I've had a good bash at it now. First I'll say that after the initial fumbling around experimenting with the mechanics, I really like the way movement works. I'm not particularly good at it yet, but I can see the potential for awesomeness there. Some feedback/suggestions:
- I found what seems to be an undocumented feature of the PULS weapon; If you use TRASE on a PULS projectile, it kind of drags you along the floor towards it. Is this intended? There's no reference to it in the readme. It has two rather nice uses. First you can launch yourself into the air with a PULS, then shoot another one ahead of you, and TRASE towards it, which is a good way of gaining momentum. Secondly, if you shoot a PULS at a grapple surface and fire a TRASE at it, you get dragged towards it much faster, as both effects are being combined. I really like this, you can shoot towards a surface with serious speed, and then use SPHEER to bounce off it. - You mentioned offhand grappling. Does this mean you'll be able to use two weapons at the same time? It would be nice to be able to charge up a PULS or BOM whilst using a TRASE; drag yourself towards a grapple surface, charge a BOM, fire it up into the air before your reach the surface, teleport up higher, find another grapple surface. That kind of thing. And being able to fully charge a PULS while you TRASE would be nice for saving time. - I agree with Melly, the BOM attack is pretty hard to use well at the moment. I always feel like I haven't moved far enough, because I can't tell exactly where it is. I don't know if the Q3 engine supports dynamic lighting, but it would be helpful if the BOMs cast a green glow, so you could tell where they are in relation to the surrounding geometry. I do like the fact that you can explode them with the SPHEER and use the shockwave to jump, though.
I think that's all for now.
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"What's that thing at the end of the large intestine? Because that's exactly what you've done here." - Ray Smuckles, Achewood. My music. Will compose for free!
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Melly
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« Reply #85 on: July 10, 2008, 09:56:33 AM » |
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I too like the idea of allowing different attacks to be used/charged at the same time. Of course, this would be at your discretion on how you think it'd affect balance, but I feel it would be something very much worth exploring.
One idea for the TRASE attack would be that if you fire and hold it you'd move towards a surface or repel from it as you do now, but if you just fired it and let go you would latch on the surface like a grappling hook, inertia handling your movement tied to it. You could detach by trying to fire the TRASE again. I can imagine some awesome grapple-based levels with this.
I also noticed that one of the levels had a shimmering static-like surface which cancelled the SPHEER attack. Will you be having versions of those for the BOM and PULS as well? Could be interesting to create some levels that limited what the players could use to race through it/kill eachother in it.
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JP
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« Reply #86 on: July 10, 2008, 09:14:13 PM » |
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- I found what seems to be an undocumented feature of the PULS weapon; If you use TRASE on a PULS projectile, it kind of drags you along the floor towards it. Is this intended? There's no reference to it in the readme. That's the trase + puls "waterski" movement effect, which is there in such a crude first form it's embarassing. Ultimately I'd like it to work much like waterskiing... it drags you along in the direction it's traveling, plus the sort of emergent uses you've found. There are a lot of ways I could improve it, it's on my "to explore further" list. Offhand grapple being another thing on that list. One idea for the TRASE attack would be that if you fire and hold it you'd move towards a surface or repel from it as you do now, but if you just fired it and let go you would latch on the surface like a grappling hook, inertia handling your movement tied to it.
Yep, I like that and it's probably how I'd attempt "off-hand grapple". Anything that maintains the current level of simplicity of using the attacks. I also noticed that one of the levels had a shimmering static-like surface which cancelled the SPHEER attack. Will you be having versions of those for the BOM and PULS as well?
The grey skybox surfaces already absorb (rather than allow explosions) puls projectiles, it's just that neither that or the anti-spheer surfaces are very clearly fed back at the moment. Eventually I want to use specially tagged, visually distinct surface types for a few different things, like one that bom projectiles stick to and become prox mines, ones that puls projectiles and trase beams reflect off of, ones that allow aftertouch control of projectiles that initially target them, etc. Stuff like that is for when Purity is mature enough that I can use it as a 3D game mechanic toolbox, which is a long-term goal.
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Melly
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« Reply #87 on: July 10, 2008, 09:24:57 PM » |
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Now that I think of it, however, the TRASE-latching could cause a little bit of trouble if you're just trying to hit another player with it and latch by mistake. Not sure how bad that would be.
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JP
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« Reply #88 on: July 10, 2008, 09:33:27 PM » |
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like moveable objects, longer drawable paths, destructible objects, free texture painting with special tools and other stuff like that, but i guess it's very hard or not possible at all with the quake engine, nor would it be with any other engine i know. Hard for someone with my modest level of programming ability, but definitely not impossible. I chose to use the Q3 tech specifically because it was simple, widely documented tech with enough flexibility on the content side to do almost anything possible within the graphics hardware generation it targets, ie pre pixel shaders (which are nice but imply an order of magnitude increase in the time needed to create quality art content). ... the only exception of creative gameplay is when the human factor comes in, like in every mutliplayer game! then, players really could gain something with a unique strategy, or different movement, which adds to the gameplay besides score-/win-oriented actions.
A lot of the ideas for Purity originally grew out of things like trickjumping and speedruns - examples of game playing that went way beyond merely satisfying the goals of the game ("kill the monsters / complete the level") into playing in a stylish and unique way. To acquire the skills needed to do the things you see in hardcore Q3 / Warsow trickjump videos, you need to devote yourself heavily to those games. Which is quite respectable, but I wanted a game that changed the baseline of what was possible, so that "ordinary" players could do fairly crazy things like climbing walls and get to experience that feeling of expressive play. recently i tried a bit around with sauerbraten, the in-game-edit-mode is great fun there. but it's not part of the game. it's just the editor... it could probably be used as such a human-enhanced-game by defining goals like: "who builds the nicest tower?", or "the funniest jump-park" and so on... Ooh, yeah sauerbraten is very cool, and when I was evaluating engines I was tempted to use it and maybe have some crazy game mode about shaping architecture. Maybe for another project sometime. after some more time in your "game", i have to say that i really love this project! your approach to expressive gameplay is attainable, and integrates well with a normal reach-the-goal-gameplay (what is it? a button on the highest platform or something like that?)... and yes, hm, it was quite surprsing to read about 'Action Painting' on your page, cause i've really came on that term while playing by myself, so just think: it works!  That's wonderful to hear, and it's good to know there are people out there thinking similar thoughts.
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JP
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« Reply #89 on: July 12, 2008, 11:31:19 PM » |
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I'm now a little more confident that I can make this game look decent:  (click the image for the full size version) This is the latest version of the run1 map, where I took some reasonably viable level geometry and tried to make it look more like the intended aesthetic. Nothing in the way of fancy shaders, just a different lighting scheme, an additive grit pass above the lightmaps, compile settings that simulate very simple ambient occlusion, and the pencil line meshes - which are just two crossed quads with some pencil stroke art, scaled and rotated in various instances. Like a lot of non-photorealistic styles, it looks better in motion when you're moving through the space than just looking at a screenshot. Still not what I'd call polished and ship-worthy but the basic idea seems sound. The good thing about this is that it only took me a few hours of work to make these changes once I'd prototyped the look. One of my guidelines for the environment style has been that if it takes me longer to decorate and prettify a level than it does to build out, refine and test the gameplay-critical geometry, it's probably not a viable process because it will take me too long to finish a single map (I have some UT2004 maps that will never get finished for this very reason). I'm now pretty sure Purity will look reasonably close to the way I initially envisioned it. This is good because it was a major area of uncertainty for me. I'll probably go back to coding mode now, I've solved the problems I wanted to with this art prototype.
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William Broom
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« Reply #90 on: July 13, 2008, 04:10:02 AM » |
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 I can't wait to see this chalky style in motion.
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JP
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« Reply #91 on: July 13, 2008, 03:09:21 PM » |
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Holy crap, I'd somehow never seen the Gantz Graf video. Amazing stuff, thanks for the link.
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« Last Edit: July 13, 2008, 07:28:03 PM by JP »
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agj
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« Reply #92 on: July 14, 2008, 11:04:10 PM » |
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I know you're trying to go for the style of 90º, but this doesn't cut it, really. The more austere look you had before was a lot more compelling. The lines look awkward, too hand-drawn, and the texture for the floor looks neither organic nor designed, it stays clumsily in between.
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fish
DOOMERANG
Level 10
cant spell selfish without fish
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« Reply #93 on: July 15, 2008, 02:14:31 AM » |
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weird.
i saw 90° a few years back in school, and it blew my mind. i still show it around to new people i meet to this day. but the reason it totally blew my mind os because it was so close to how i envision and dream project of mine, which is basically Rez + HL2 is a super abstract, minimalist environment.
your stuff looks awesome. im so glad we're starting to see more and more abstract games of different genres. FPS is certainly a genre that could use the freshness.
i want more abstract everything. i want an abstract dating sim.
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JP
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« Reply #94 on: July 15, 2008, 07:50:35 PM » |
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The more austere look you had before was a lot more compelling. The lines look awkward, too hand-drawn, and the texture for the floor looks neither organic nor designed, it stays clumsily in between.
Fair points. On the one hand, I am very intentionally trying to embrace analogue-ness, noisy scratchy real-world artifacts as part of the style instead of the simple perfect digital stuff you get by default in a digital medium. On the other hand, I've a ways to go before I get there, and looking at that shot after a few days of not looking at it (always a good idea for some perspective) it looks a bit more like just a crummy little sketch. Part of this is just because all the assets used were cobbled together very quickly, hence prototype (two textures, one mesh and some BSP). At some point they'll be replaced with a better looking, higher res, more diverse set of decoration art and meshes, base textures, etc. Certainly by throwing out 90 degrees as an inspiration I've created a lofty expectation, which is always foolish no matter how excited you are. The biggest insight I got out of seeing it for the first time was that it was possible to do a lo-fi analog look that's bold and simple, instead of the rez-like digital style I'd shelved a few years before. So I want to evoke "austere" but with enough drama (in the lighting and dynamic range) and texture (if only to give you a sense of scale and movement/parallax) that it's unique, readable etc.
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JP
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« Reply #95 on: July 15, 2008, 08:17:33 PM » |
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weird.
i saw 90° a few years back in school, and it blew my mind. i still show it around to new people i meet to this day. but the reason it totally blew my mind os because it was so close to how i envision and dream project of mine, which is basically Rez + HL2 is a super abstract, minimalist environment.
your stuff looks awesome. im so glad we're starting to see more and more abstract games of different genres. FPS is certainly a genre that could use the freshness.
i want more abstract everything. i want an abstract dating sim.
Word up. Thanks man. I really want to see more abstract stuff too. Particularly in 3D, where there are a lot of viable aesthetics that indies could do well, in stark contrast with AAA's incredibly expensive near-misses at photorealism... I can't wait to see the blossoming of styles that will happen when good indie artists start messing with really easy to use shader tech. Oh and my next spare time project, once Purity is finished, might be the high school social sim I've wanted to do for a few years now. So, close enough.
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agj
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« Reply #96 on: July 16, 2008, 12:27:16 AM » |
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it was possible to do a lo-fi analog look that's bold and simple, instead of the rez-like digital style I'd shelved a few years before. So I want to evoke "austere" but with enough drama (in the lighting and dynamic range) and texture (if only to give you a sense of scale and movement/parallax) that it's unique, readable etc.
I really dig your feelings for the aesthetics that you want to convey, but do you really think that Rez would be more difficult? It doesn't use any sort of filters or textures other than some glow here and there. It's all in the architecture and the choice of colors. Of course, the modelling is perhaps too complex; I wouldn't know, since I have never used any 3D modelling software.
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Melly
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« Reply #97 on: July 16, 2008, 12:39:25 AM » |
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I think he means that he's not interested in the Rez look, not that it'd be difficult.
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JP
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« Reply #98 on: July 16, 2008, 07:54:29 AM » |
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I think he means that he's not interested in the Rez look, not that it'd be difficult.
Correct. It's simpler in some ways, I've just been down that road before and it's not what I want here.
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dcalogue
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« Reply #99 on: July 17, 2008, 07:04:54 AM » |
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a space, dynamic enough that it could be edited freely in a individual way in mutliplayer mode in the game... this concept is already visible and playable like it is, so all that would be just more advanced step in that direction.
have you seen http://www.quelsolaar.com/? its one of those projects in my watch list...
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