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[brynsane]

The Game

Dreadline is the working title for a game that a few of us have been working on for a number of months. It's like a mix between an Action RPG, Gauntlet, and a racing game.

You control a team of monsters who, through their time portal technology, visit different calamities in human history, to kill those who will die anyway. It's like the monster's version of morality, I guess.

The Team

We're called Eerie Canal Entertainment. It's mainly me (Bryn Bennett), and Steve Kimura along with a number of friends who help us out when they can. Steve and I have worked on a number of games over the years (System Shock 2, Freedom Force, Bioshock, all the Rock Bands, etc.) but we had a lot of ideas of our own, and thought we'd give indie development a try.

The Project

I've spent quite a while on the base tech for the game/engine now. I came up with a rendering technique that I think capture's Steve's "sketchy drawing style" pretty well. Here's a shot of our character named "Ghost" from our animation tool:

(He's actually a little boy in a sheet, who only thinks he's a ghost.)

We're really inspired by Edward Gorey and those creepy-ass animations from the '70's like "The Hobbit."

So, I have a lot of the base tech in. Renderer, Sounds, Input, Physics (using Bullet Physics), Animation, Particles, Pathfinding (using Recast/Detour), etc. I also have some simple AI in there for the poor humans that you're slaughtering, but they are still pretty dumb.

On the art side, we have a test level (The Titanic, ha) and a number of monster and human characters.

Info
We currently have a website at http://www.eerie-canal.com and a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/EerieCanalGames. You can follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/eeriecanalgames

This DevLog

I'm going to be writing it, so it's going to be mostly code/design based. I keep a daily log of what I've been working on, so I thought some people might be interested in reading it and seeing our progress as we go. Feel free to ask me about anything, and I'd love to hear your comments.

[brynsane]

- Today I'm working on importing animations from an fbx file to move objects around in the level. (I currently have skeletal animations working, but I never moved things around in the world that didn't use physics.)

Also... how do I get one of those cool "percentage things" on the main page for this DevLog? I'm a n00b.

[Paul Jeffries]

I love your art style on this, and the game concept sounds interesting.  Are these going to be genuine historical calamaties, however?  I can see that coming across as a little in poor taste...

[brynsane]

Thanks Paul!

Some of them are going to be inspired by actual calamities, but none that you would put in the "too soon" category. There could be a number of future calamities (Space Marines with an alien on the ship?) as well as alternative universe calamities too. (Zombie apocalypse or something? Who knows.)

The humor will definitely be dark, but hopefully not in a way that people find offensive. Well, I guess some people find everything offensive.

[brynsane]

Sometimes doing the right thing hurts...

I've known for some time that I should rewrite my animation system. I wrote in a very generic and reusable way so that animations, and things that were a lot like animations (scripts that send messages to game objects, etc.) could all share the same code.

Unfortunately, my object-orientedness is not the fastest thing when it comes to loading, cache misses, memory size, etc.

So, after nearly finishing my task today, I've decided to rewrite the entire animation system. ugh.

[brynsane]

Sweet! In under 1 day I was able to completely rewrite my animation system. It runs faster, loads faster, takes up less memory, and I was able to get rid of a few classes I wasn't happy with. I always put off these huge changes. I should really get more aggressive with them.

Unfortunately, I broke my effect system somewhere along the line. I'll have to look into that next.

[-Rob-D.]

You control a team of monsters who, through their time portal technology, visit different calamities in human history, to kill those who will die anyway.

Do we play as Ghost who controls the "team of monsters" or is Ghost not a protagonist? And so this is a mix of action RPG/racing? Can you elaborate on the racing part?

[brynsane]

You control a team of monsters who, through their time portal technology, visit different calamities in human history, to kill those who will die anyway.

Do we play as Ghost who controls the "team of monsters" or is Ghost not a protagonist? And so this is a mix of action RPG/racing? Can you elaborate on the racing part?

Ghost is one of the "monsters" in the team. So, yeah, you control him along with the other monsters. The current control scheme is a mix of Diablo and Starcraft, although that will probably change a bit since we're early in development.

As far as the "racing game" concept goes... your monsters are on a race against time when the calamity actually happens, so I want to add in a number of old school racing game-type systems like check points, powerups that increase your time until the next check point, etc.

One cool idea my friend Morgan had was to have certain events go off at pre-defined times that cut off the optimal way through the level, so you're not only racing against the clock, but racing to make it to shortcuts that close off if you can't make it there in time.

[brynsane]

I hoped to add a screenshot with most of my posts, but since the new animation system basically did what it used to do (but faster, but also breaking the effects...), I guess I'll just post another character shot.

Here is a shot of our werewolf, Candice Lupus, getting ready to do a backflip.

[Paul Jeffries]

One cool idea my friend Morgan had was to have certain events go off at pre-defined times that cut off the optimal way through the level, so you're not only racing against the clock, but racing to make it to shortcuts that close off if you can't make it there in time.

This sounds like an interesting idea although I suspect it may backfire a little in gameplay terms since you're penalising people who are playing badly by making it even harder for them, while the people who are playing well get a helping hand that they don't really need.  Either way you're making it less fun for the player - it's kind of like rubber banding but in reverse (steel springing, perhaps?).  It might be OK if the time limit is pretty loose and works more like a score mechanic than a failure state (although then I would argue that the limit itself is redundant).

[Franklin's Ghost]

Interesting game idea, like the sound of it and the calamities is a great idea.

What program are you guys using to make it?

And I'm the opposite of Paul in that I think the time specific events is a good idea in that the players playing well deserve to have a helping hand where as the ones not don't. Not the biggest fan of game's when they cater to the worst player possibility rather then providing a challenge.

[brynsane]

One cool idea my friend Morgan had was to have certain events go off at pre-defined times that cut off the optimal way through the level, so you're not only racing against the clock, but racing to make it to shortcuts that close off if you can't make it there in time.

This sounds like an interesting idea although I suspect it may backfire a little in gameplay terms since you're penalising people who are playing badly by making it even harder for them, while the people who are playing well get a helping hand that they don't really need.  Either way you're making it less fun for the player - it's kind of like rubber banding but in reverse (steel springing, perhaps?).  It might be OK if the time limit is pretty loose and works more like a score mechanic than a failure state (although then I would argue that the limit itself is redundant).

Yeah, normally negative feedback loops are a bad idea. I like this one though because it's like a concrete example of a checkpoint that isn't just a clock ticking down. It's a more concrete gameplay element of not doing something in time. I hear what you're saying though.

[brynsane]

Interesting game idea, like the sound of it and the calamities is a great idea.

What program are you guys using to make it?

And I'm the opposite of Paul in that I think the time specific events is a good idea in that the players playing well deserve to have a helping hand where as the ones not don't. Not the biggest fan of game's when they cater to the worst player possibility rather then providing a challenge.

Thanks!

Yeah, I think players that are really good should strive to get a bigger payoff. These shortcuts that get blocked off shouldn't be a deal breaker for finishing the level, but would be a cool payoff for good players that go for them.

On the coding side, I'm using Visual Studio Express and have written most of the tech and tools in C++. I'm also using some libraries, like Bullet Physics, Ogg-Vorbis, and Recast/Detour. For my bad temp 2d art I just use Paint.net.

Steve uses 3DS Max and Photoshop. Our friend Aaron is currently cutting a trailer using After Effects, and who knows what else.

[Quarry]

System Shock 2, Freedom Force, Bioshock, all the Rock Bands, etc.

AHDSFBUSDKFBFYABUDFBSDYF

[Paul Jeffries]

And I'm the opposite of Paul in that I think the time specific events is a good idea in that the players playing well deserve to have a helping hand where as the ones not don't. Not the biggest fan of game's when they cater to the worst player possibility rather then providing a challenge.

Just to be clear, I do think that time specific events and rewarding players for playing well are both good ideas - I'm no fan of rubber banding either.  But you don't provide a challenge for people by making the game less challenging when they are doing well.  The problem here as I see it is that you are rewarding skill in one mechanic with something which gives them a leg up in that same mechanic - it's like giving the player special bonus health packs for being at full health.  At best its redundant and at worst it actually harms their experience of the game.  I think shortcuts are an excellent idea if they are unlocked through some other means and that time-locked alternate routes are an excellent idea provided they have some benefit to travelling down which is not strictly time-related - more health, less enemies to face and so on.

[brynsane]

Cool idea Paul. I'll definitely give it some thought to see what other fun things I could reward fast players with. I do like the idea of making it orthogonal to what you're currently doing well.

Then again, if I was in a calamity, and trying to get to my time machine before something really bad went down, I'd have to say I'd be ok being rewarded with a shortcut. Ha.

[brynsane]

So, the Eerie Canal team (all 3 of us) got together today to talk about the changes made this week, and the upcoming trailer we're working on. We have just started these face to face hangs in the past few weeks, and I have to say that they are totally worth it. I know it's not possible for a lot of people on here due to distance, but we get so much more done when we're all together in a room than we do with IM or gchat or whatever. I would totally recommend if for you dev teams if it's possible (and you have more than 1 person.)

I'm pretty excited for the trailer. It's going to be the first time people have seen anything about our project besides some random screenshots. It's also kind of terrifying.

On the coding side, I updated our level editor to be able to trigger world animations through our scripting system, which could be pretty cool. (Walk into a room, and all the doors slam shut... or maybe a wall comes crashing down when the player comes near it.)

Since a lot of programmers are on here and might be semi-interested, I thought I'd mention the animation compression system that I just wrote. Basically it works like this:

1) All keyframes are originally sampled every 1/30th of a second.
2) Let A be the 1st keyframe, B be the 2nd, and C be the third.
3) Write A to the new compressed list.
4) If C isn't the continuation of motion from A to B, write B to the new list, and increment A, B, and C to the next keyframes
else,
increment B, and C, but don't write anything.
5) Always write the final keyframe into the compressed list.

Figuring out exactly how "close" C needs to be took a bit of messing around for me, but I was able to find some values that worked well enough to give me about a 50% compression reduction, and not have much of a visual impact on the animations.

I could probably get quite a bit better results by having the "close" factor take into account how far each bone is from the end of that bone's chain, since small changes on inside bones could create drastic changes farther down the chain, while bones towards the ends wouldn't have nearly the impact.

Also, my keyframes are made up of a position, and a quaternion, but this algorithm could conceivably work for any type of animation.

Here's a sweet example of what it looks like when my math isn't quite right:

[brynsane]

Today I:
- added the ability to set off other scripts or animations from a script running in the world
- fixed a bug that would cause a series of bones to be in the wrong position if one of their positions was queried at the "wrong" time
- put together a night where a few of us can record the music for our upcoming trailer. (That should be fun.)
- Updated a few of the monster skill effects

[Quarry]

Hot

[brynsane]

Just added the trail effect to the fx editor. Here's a quick test I put together with our character Ghost.



It's not much to look at yet... It's pretty cool in action though.