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[HellaciousPuppy]

Hi guys and gals,
I have recently been working on a 2D top down survival horror game.
It's going to be mainly stealth, but with a tiny bit of action thrown in.
Still a long way to go but it's shaping up nicely.







Video can be found here: 


And more details/media here: http://hellaciousgames.com/?p=36

I am hoping to be releasing early next year on OSX and Windows, with linux and iOS coming a bit later.
It's still a bit rough, but a lot of the mechanics are in there. Let me know what you think.
Cheers

[Fenrir]

Hey,

I think we have a lot in common! Love your line of sight and lighting system, is it GPU based? And are you using an existing engine?

[HellaciousPuppy]

Hey,

I think we have a lot in common! Love your line of sight and lighting system, is it GPU based? And are you using an existing engine?

Hehe, thanks. It's my own 2D engine that I have been working on for many years, just C++/OpenGL(ES). The LOS is just projecting points away from the player to turn collision lines into black quads, plus some textured triangles for the penumbra. There's a little more to it (projected midpoints) so I will probably discuss it in a blog post sometime.
Anyway, glad you like it. I am currently working on a aural/visual model for the stealth aspect.
 

Edit: I just saw your devlog. Cooooool! That's basically where I am heading. Your system seems a lot more sophisticated than mine. Nice job!

[Fenrir]

I just saw your devlog. Cooooool! That's basically where I am heading. Your system seems a lot more sophisticated than mine. Nice job!

Thanks! I'll also make a devlog about it as soon as I find some time!

And the blue lines we're seeing in the screenshots, what are they? You're using a sort of grid based system for the pathfinding?

[HellaciousPuppy]

I just saw your devlog. Cooooool! That's basically where I am heading. Your system seems a lot more sophisticated than mine. Nice job!

Thanks! I'll also make a devlog about it as soon as I find some time!

And the blue lines we're seeing in the screenshots, what are they? You're using a sort of grid based system for the pathfinding?

It's my semi-dynamic navigation mesh. It is basically a bunch of circles (initialised in a grid but soon move out of it) that jitter, grown and shrink within the environment and perform line-of-sight tests with neighbours. They are all put into uniform grid buckets for fast lookups. I want to have quite a dynamic world, with destructible walls, doors, windows, moving obstacles, etc, so I wanted a robust/dynamic system that I could just forget about and be confident that it will eventually find the right path.
Then I use A* pathfinding on the mesh and pull it taught to find the shortest path between any 2 points. It's pretty fast.
The mesh is constantly being updated so it adapts to any changes. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to give a rough path, which gets optimised later.

[Sirowl]

Visuals are very nice, I am jealous of your nice shadows.

Do you plan to focus on the stealth-and-escape-if-detected part or will there be other mechanics as well? "Tiny bit of action" = shooting? Escaping?

[HellaciousPuppy]

Thanks. The shadow are pretty easy because I can just splash black over all the screen. hehe
Yeah, escape is better than fighting for the most part. I am planning to have a kind of resident-evil-like limited ammo. If every bullet is precious and shooting a gun draws the enemies, I tend to be very very cautious about using it. That difficult choice increases the stress I think, so it's actually better than simply having no weapon.

[HellaciousPuppy]

For those that are interested, I have written a short blog post about how I do the wall shadows.
http://hellaciousgames.com/?p=49
It's pretty basic, but the result is blisteringly fast and perfect for my needs.