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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsReturn of the Obra Dinn [Releasing Oct 18]
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Author Topic: Return of the Obra Dinn [Releasing Oct 18]  (Read 927516 times)
Voltz.Supreme
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« Reply #380 on: October 28, 2014, 01:49:54 AM »

It's harsh on the eyes but I have to say it looks unreal! Excellent work so far.
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MrElmo
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« Reply #381 on: October 30, 2014, 12:00:57 PM »

Very excited about how this is turning out.

I have a problem with the movement keys. I use Colemak instead of QWERTY (using the Windows Language settings to select the keyboard layout). So in QWERTY terms, I had to play the demo using WADG, since my S and D keys are where your D and G keys are. For some games, this isn't a problem because their controls are mapped using a standard code that is layout independent. At the least, I'd hope the movement controls would be configurable. Otherwise I'd have to reset my Windows keyboard preferences.

I like the idea of how we get a snapshot of the entire boat at the moment of death. After I found the bald guy jumping down during the second moment of death, I realized the potential for being able to try to account for the wherabouts of everyone at every available moment. Sure enough, he's climbing the stairs in the first moment of death. Looking forward to what you have planned for stuff like this.

During the third moment of death, it seems the door to Abigail is open, and we can see a blank silouette of her head, with no details. Was that intentional? Does it represent something?

And while I'm here I must also say:
Great voice acting!
The stairs were very immersive!
Why are the skeletons naked?
« Last Edit: October 31, 2014, 10:30:07 AM by MrElmo » Logged
ReverendTed
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« Reply #382 on: October 30, 2014, 05:06:34 PM »

Why are the skeletons naked?
I think I can answer this one.  In one of the character design timelapse videos, he mentions that he tried adding tattered clothing (procedurally?) and it didn't work out.
(They're wearing shoes because, ugh, footbones are a hassle.)
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euanrichardson5
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« Reply #383 on: November 01, 2014, 11:03:08 AM »

This looks really nice, it reminds me of

(minus the murder pirates/sailors).

Good job and good luck. Smiley
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Voltz.Supreme
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« Reply #384 on: November 02, 2014, 12:23:40 AM »

This looks really nice, it reminds me of

(minus the murder pirates/sailors).

Good job and good luck. Smiley

Hahaha what!?!
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BottledBacon
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« Reply #385 on: November 02, 2014, 04:52:56 AM »

This looks really nice, it reminds me of

(minus the murder pirates/sailors).

Good job and good luck. Smiley

It's settled. Lucas, you need to make a bit of the game where the main character accidently shuts the watch in a door and gets stuck in an infinite time loop hell.
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tracey
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« Reply #386 on: November 03, 2014, 06:26:38 PM »

Rendering

Ok! By request, here's how I'm doing the rendering.  It requires two passes and one final combine shader:

Pass 1: Surfaces


This is the same pass described before. Each face is colored based on the object position and the face normal. These values are amplified to keep adjacent normals from being too similar. The one addition since last time is the ability to manually dampen the influence of the normal; useful to prevent gradual smooth surfaces from generating lots of edges. For that, I use the the vertex color red channel, which is multiplied by the calculated normal before combining it with the object position to make the final face color.

Thanks so much for sharing this!
I couldn't understand how cyclinder on the left has a uniform color.
I tried the shader you posted earlier with a cyclinder and cube, and here is how it looks like:


I tried to dampen the effect of normal, but it's still a somewhat smooth gradient rather than a single color surface.
I also noticed that o.pos was unused in the shader.
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CosmicCastles
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« Reply #387 on: November 04, 2014, 07:40:51 PM »

The demo evoked some pretty heavy memories of the HyperCard days, great job on your unique work so far.  Hand Metal Right
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dukope
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« Reply #388 on: November 04, 2014, 09:43:13 PM »

Thanks again for all the great comments guys. Some quick general responses:

Taking Notes

Any kind of note-taking system will be entirely manual. The magnifying glass is a good idea, but maybe too complex. Something along those lines. I think it'll be a while before I implement anything though. Want to get more of the story/bodies in place to see how it feels.

Brute Force

The way the game is set up now, it's possible to brute-force all the fates. There are a lot of fates, and going back to check the first page takes a long time. But if you're down to just a few names and a few known deaths it will be tempting to just guess. I'll spend some time working on a way to prevent this but I'm not sure how far to take it. I like the immediate feedback of knowing when you got something right. Brute-forcing is cheating yourself out of the game's puzzles but I can understand the temptation.

Wave Motion

The ship's rocking motion from the waves is intentionally subtle. Anything more and I get sick. I may play around with rotating the camera very slightly, but the last time I tried it was too much.

Non-dialog Clues

Putting clues in non-dialog stuff is going to be one of the bigger challenges in this game. Even having clues in dialog is tricky - you can't have everyone addressing everyone else by name in the moments before they die. Also, I really want to avoid having readable notes. I have a bunch of ideas so we'll see how it goes.

Naked Skeletons

I crunched pretty hard to get the dev build ready for IGF, and the skeleton clothes were a casualty. They'll look more natural eventually.

@tracey
I use vertex coloring to override the normals for any curved surfaces. You can see this in action in the ship aft-balcony modeling video.

Short Break

At the moment I'm taking a short break from this game to work on another top secret project. I should be back on Obra Dinn by the end of the month. Hopefully I can post a few more updates here though about the dev build; some small technical things and details about the voice and effects work in the flashback audio pre-rolls.
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Jinan Dangor
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« Reply #389 on: November 05, 2014, 01:04:59 PM »

Hello!

I was just reading what you said about a way to make it easy to tell if you have something right, but not be able to brute force it, how about you only get notified of success when you complete a page? That way you get feedback but also it makes it substantially harder to brute force it (at least as long as you don't have all but one fates on a page or something).

And one other thing about doors opening, will they stay open when going back to previous fates, to allow for more clue-finding? For example, after unlocking the door to the right on the main ship, you can get past the captain and get inside through the door he isn't blocking in the first death.

Loving the game so far!
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eigenbom
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« Reply #390 on: November 09, 2014, 06:11:27 PM »

Didn't realise you were running a devlog here again. The game is looking great dude Smiley
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Erestyn
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« Reply #391 on: November 09, 2014, 07:41:00 PM »

I literally can not wait for this. Have a loooot of devlog to read through (and I'm probably going to love every second)
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nemryn
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« Reply #392 on: November 14, 2014, 05:15:38 PM »

The Crew Log feels a little immersion-breaking and video-gamey, what with magically knowing how many fates you got right. And why does the Obra Dinn even have a log listing the fates of its crewmembers, anyway? It might work better as a mystical artefact you got from the East India Cpy, like the watch, rather than something you find on the ship.
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Zaphos
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« Reply #393 on: November 15, 2014, 09:27:31 AM »

Brute Force

The way the game is set up now, it's possible to brute-force all the fates. There are a lot of fates, and going back to check the first page takes a long time. But if you're down to just a few names and a few known deaths it will be tempting to just guess. I'll spend some time working on a way to prevent this but I'm not sure how far to take it. I like the immediate feedback of knowing when you got something right. Brute-forcing is cheating yourself out of the game's puzzles but I can understand the temptation.
I like immediate feedback too ... I think rather than trying to make it inconvenient to check answers, it might work better to just make an easy but explicit way for people to check answers, and to note how many times they guessed incorrectly?  So we can cheat if we want to, but the game kinda makes it obvious that it knows we're cheating (even if it's not going to do anything about it) ...
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« Reply #394 on: November 15, 2014, 09:57:36 AM »

I like immediate feedback too ... I think rather than trying to make it inconvenient to check answers, it might work better to just make an easy but explicit way for people to check answers, and to note how many times they guessed incorrectly?  So we can cheat if we want to, but the game kinda makes it obvious that it knows we're cheating (even if it's not going to do anything about it) ...
Maybe the number of correct fates could be shown on the face of the watch?  That way, all the mysticism is contained to one artifact.
Ooh, or...the number of fates correct increases the amount of time you're allowed to spend in the past - perhaps some of the critical mysteries could be contained in the earliest memories, but you can't get to them until you've nearly got it all figured out?  Hrm.  This isn't really feedback now, it's backseat development.  ;-p
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dukope
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« Reply #395 on: November 15, 2014, 10:01:34 AM »

The Crew Log feels a little immersion-breaking and video-gamey, what with magically knowing how many fates you got right.

This is one of those things that I personally don't mind. I used to be very against video-gamey stuff but at some point decided it's ok if introduced as a mundane thing and without fanfare. At least, this is what I tried with Papers Please and it seemed to work ok. As with the citations in that game, I feel like getting immediate feedback is important enough to bend some reality.

Quote
And why does the Obra Dinn even have a log listing the fates of its crewmembers, anyway? It might work better as a mystical artefact you got from the East India Cpy, like the watch, rather than something you find on the ship.

Muster rolls were a real thing. One of their main purposes was to keep track of how and when crew members were killed or injured so surviving family members could collect their unpaid salary when the ship returned home. I guess in that case, one problem is that this muster roll hasn't already been (mostly) filled out by the captain.

Also, I like sending the player into a few flashbacks at the start without the context of having the muster roll.

I like immediate feedback too ... I think rather than trying to make it inconvenient to check answers, it might work better to just make an easy but explicit way for people to check answers, and to note how many times they guessed incorrectly?  So we can cheat if we want to, but the game kinda makes it obvious that it knows we're cheating (even if it's not going to do anything about it) ...

That's not a bad idea. Definitely gonna think about that.

Maybe the number of correct fates could be shown on the face of the watch?  That way, all the mysticism is contained to one artifact.

Ooo, another cool idea. I like that one quite a bit! It feels a little weird but just the suggestion that the feedback comes from something besides the muster roll itself is a good one.
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mtarini
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« Reply #396 on: November 15, 2014, 03:47:46 PM »

[Just seen this, finished playing the demo now.]

Dear Lucas Pope,

Thanks for being such an awesome fucking genius.

I mean it.

I can't express I much I like your crafts at game making.

Your inspired creations have the power to truly absorb the player in a world which feels authentic, meaningful and important.

I can't wait to see how this will progress.
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SubterfudgeMan
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« Reply #397 on: November 16, 2014, 01:47:40 AM »

What is the origin of the name 'Obra Dinn'? From the little research I did, Obra directly translates from Spanish to English as 'play' or 'work', but dinn apparently isn't a Spanish word.  Huh?
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dukope
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« Reply #398 on: November 17, 2014, 08:53:54 AM »

Did you agonize at all about the title?  I ask because a ship returning with nothing but corpses aboard (as far as we know) might qualify for, say, "The Curse of the Obra Dinn", or perhaps "The Scourge of the Obra Dinn".
The Fate of the Obra Dinn?
The Tale of the Obra Dinn?
Remembering the Obra Dinn?
Obra Dinn: The Quest for Curly's Gold?

The main reason is that the Obra Dinn isn't cursed; the problem isn't with the ship. The dev build doesn't set this up well, and I'm not sure if I can do it even in the final, but I want to emphasize that the ship should not be back. So it "returning" is a big deal. Scourge, Fate, and Tale are all really good actually and I probably would've used one of those if I'd thought about it more.

The backup reason is that my original (set in Egypt) game idea for this 1-bit rendering tech actually did have "Curse" in the title. I may go back to that game later so I wanted something different for this one.


What is the origin of the name 'Obra Dinn'? From the little research I did, Obra directly translates from Spanish to English as 'play' or 'work', but dinn apparently isn't a Spanish word.  Huh?

AFAIK, "Obra Dinn" doesn't mean anything and is just a name that popped into my head. Sounded exotic and cool, that's all. I agonized a bit over the spelling, alternatively trying stuff like "Obre Dinn" or "Obora Dinn" before just settling on "Obra Dinn". I looked long and hard for an actual old ship named something like Obra Dinn, but couldn't find anything.
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Zeyes
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« Reply #399 on: November 17, 2014, 04:05:08 PM »

"Obristan Obra Dinn above all"?  Wink
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