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[Raptorgeddon]

Oh boy do I have a bumper update for you all today. My apologies for not updating this sooner than now.



Recently added is a main menu screen. the buttons are mainly for proof of concept reasons, and the underlying systems may be too work intensive to warrant creating for the May degree show.



Going forward, this map selection screen will remain for aesthetic purposes, with my follow-up goal being semi-procedural maps using UK Ordinance Survey data. This is incredibly long term and will probably not be in the May release of Bleak.



A minor addition to the buildings now allows you to do this, which is pointless, but it's fun to push the tiny people around, and at its heart, that's what BLEAK's about. Making life for your citizens as hard as possible, for whatever reason you want. In addition, everything's now aligned on a 10m grid, and buildings turn red if they cannot be placed, for reasons such as insufficient space, funds, resources and population. Later iterations will have a UI element to detail what's missing.



Some small steps have been made in terms of aesthetics, emission maps have been added, along with the shift to HDR rendering with a bloom image effect, the tilt shift's been increased but that's up for debate and finally, two greyboxes have been replaced with tentative final versions, the starting tier farm, and a claypit. The claypit was finished today, and on thursday it'll probably be made more shallow, to look more like a hole and less of a hollowed mesa.

And under the hood, changes have been made to the interactions between buildings and their relevant managers. Instead of the old system where the manager produced resources on occasion in numbers based on how many relevant buildings are present in the scene, the new system has the individual buildings running themselves, updating the manager on their own time. This has the benefit of making income and resource changes more responsive.

[Raptorgeddon]

BRRRRRR

Here comes the ultraheavy crawler of big business, here to ruin your sweet pastoral idyll

[Raptorgeddon]

Very sparse in terms of actual game content today. Sorry!

But that doesn't mean that it's not an important. Lots of number crunching to come up with tentative values for all the goods and items available to the player.

However, there is one addition in the form of this beautiful thing:



Who doesn't love the idea of ruining someone's pastoral idyll through the use of a superheavy crawler. This is how the game starts, mechanics wise. Pick a spot, and your trusty behemoth with level anything in its way until it reaches its position and dumps the start of your dystopian empire down on the ground.

The farms are going to be remodelled, to keep more in line with the twee british idyll of the starting point.

Other additions include:


Tenement buildings have five variants that are randomly chosen when they're built


The game now supports negative height buildings, such as this claypit


There's a trade system, where you sell your crafted goods in return for raw materials.

The final deadline for this alpha version is the 7th of December, so brace yourself for a flurry of activity as I cover all of the bases in regards to the criteria I have to meet.

[Raptorgeddon]

Today, not a lot got implemented. But that's not to say I didn't do anything. Today I'd like to talk a little about what has been implemented since the last devlog, and about the smaller inspirations for BLEAK.



The above screenshot is from Mohawk Games' product, Offworld Trading Company. This game was the main seed for the aesthetics from a game play perspective, with the works of L.S. Lowry providing inspiration for details and overall feel.



For the parts of the game where information needs to be given to the player, one of my intentions is to use the grinding, impersonal language seen in corporate and legal missives, such as this example taken from Google:



There's something about the language that's perfectly suited to the genre and to not capitalise on that would be a mistake.



There has however been a minor graphical addition, in preparation for a feature that will be implemented sometime soon. Power Generation and use is a hallmark of the genre, and a fairly large aspect of modern infrastructure. Tying into the precedent of there being vehicles, but no requirement for roads, power as a requirement will be present in BLEAK, but power lines will not exist as requirement to utilise that power. The issue is that they're still a staple of the English countryside, as the above image will attest. That image is of the winning concept in the National Grid's [year] design competition to design the replacement for the traditional lattice pylon. Whilst an argument could be made for the pylons in BLEAK to stick to the traditional design, for the retro-futurism kick, I think a blend of the two designs will be the most interesting overall.

To that end, here's the pylons in game in all of their set dressing glory:



The underslung cables are a little hard to see, so they'll need to be thickened in Maya, but they'll do for now I guess :D

[Raptorgeddon]

Fair amount of work has been done since the last update. In no particular order, here's the big changes


Primary control of the camera has been switched from WASD keys to the Keyboard Arrow Keys. Whilst WASD is more common for control schemes, this switch frees up the QWERTY key line for hotkeys.

Hotkeys you say? Why does Bleak need hotkeys all of a sudden?


Because gone is the old buildings area of the UI, instead now replaced by this smaller, lighter, brighter, more adjective-y Contextual area. Contextual in the sense that it changes depending on what building in the game scene the player last clicked, to take a leaf out of Starcraft's book. The different panels can also be accessed from the QWERTY keys, providing the contextual building has been built at least once.

To help sell the mood in the upcoming private alpha, I've added a tentative musical track, which can be listened to here. Music fans might be able to recognise this as a portion of Holst's Jupiter Movement. For the purposes of BLEAK however, it's been slowed down 50% to turn this recognisable, patriotic tune into something quite redolent and sinister. It captures the mood of the game quite well, and suits as a useful track to convey what I'm looking for in a main track.


The map selection screen got an update, it's now got another side that details what the player's going to expect on the other side of this screen. It's just got the one map, and I don't think there'll be any others for the hand in, so there's an element of fiction to this screen, but it's helping to convey what I want to get across.



And finally, I'm proud to announce that the generic buildings no longer include any temporary greyboxes, although that's not to say that what they do have are the finished assets.

Next devlog: A glimpse into the creative process behind Bleak.

[Raptorgeddon]

I lied about the next update being a look into my creative process, here's an impromptu Video!

Enjoy!

[Raptorgeddon]

So yeah, as mentioned in the previous devlog, today is about the creative process behind making assets. The example for this will be the Housing Department, the 'manager' building for the generic population type.



This is a building in my hometown, which although it's freely available online, I've felt the need to pixelate out any identifying marks on the photo, for as much good it'll do. Why this building though? Well, it's familiar to me, and looking at it, you've got to agree that it's drab office exterior is perfectly generic for the purpose we need it for.



Google Maps shows us that the building's an L shape, so let's work with that.



It's basic, and servicable, but one of the narrative themes for BLEAK is that everything that's happened, when it happened in the BLEAKverse, it was bigger, badder and just generally more. So let's bring that into the visual design. What's better than an L? Well I'd say a U shaped building, since it'd have another wing, and the benefit of the courtyard being enclosed, with the two wings looming over it.

So let's see how that'd work.



Well, that looks better, doesn't it! This design also has the added benefit of making more efficient use of the 30x40m footprint I've given it. Whilst stranger, tetris piece shaped buildings is something that I'd love to have done, to implement it now is much more work than I'd feel comfortable undertaking.

And here's what the 'final' design looks like:



Not much changed from the sketch, other than the addition of a courtyard area, which eventually got filled by a pointless statue, because oh lord do I love the concept of these kind of Plop Art decorations

[Raptorgeddon]

Final update before everything that's been worked on thus far is handed in for Christmas.

So here's the last minute mechanical additions to BLEAK.



Power, as a resource has been added. It works a little bit different to the other resources as it's not produced regularly, instead being produced in one lump sum when the building is created. That total is then subtracted from by any power-producing buildings (currently only the Brickworks, but that's going to change after Christmas) and the remainder is sold on to the BLEAKverse equivalent of the National Grid. Power currently has a value of 5 Currencies for every nebulously-defined unit, so right now it's not a particularly useful money making idea, given that the only implementation thus far of a power producing building is:



A solar array, it's small, produces one whole power, and probably isn't very good value. It's got an upkeep cost of 4, meaning that you're only getting 2 currencies back from it.

What? It's a Solar Cell, in England. What did you expect it to do. The solar arrays inefficiency is also down in part to certain hallmarks of the dystopian genre, Solar just isn't grim enough. It's too clean and harmless. Coal, Gas and Nuclear is where it's at in the Cyberpunk Dystopia's BLEAK takes its inspiration from.



Here's an example of how the solar array looks in the two lighting states. I know the shadow is super low resolution, but you're never going to be playing at this zoom level, so it's okay.



And here's a gratuitous shot of a settlement, with a meagre turnover, and no power surplus.

[Raptorgeddon]

Had a lovely break from this project for Christmas, and I hope everyone reading had a good time too.

Getting back into the swing of development by updating the much-ignored character model.



This model replaced the incredibly old placeholder character I affectionately nicknamed Red Pegman all the way back in March 2015. It's done a wonderful job in project since then, but it's no longer fit for purpose. It's way more detailed than it needs to be, given the physical scale of the game. Back to the drawing board then!


So after some brain storming, and some quick sketches, these options were modelled. From left to right we have;

• A transparency-equipped texture of the Unicode 'MENS SYMBOL' seen adorning toilet stall doors everywhere. The initial inspiration for the character stylisation, but that's no reason to keep it. This massively drops the polycount, from 156 to 2.
  An optimised version of the placeholder model. The distance between the populace and the camera is large enough to negate the benefits of any fine detailing, so I can skimp on the polycount quite significantly, this version has a polycount of 90, which I could conceivably take even further lower, but that depends on how it looks during gameplay.
• The original model. This'll only stay if there's absolutely no possible replacement.
• A further stylized design based on a lowercase i, Prison Architect uses 'i' to denote people on the UI screen in one instance, so I thought I'd give it a go and see how it looks. This takes the polycount to 78, but much like #2, it could be taken even lower.
• The same idea as #3, except rounder, polycount of 138. which is probably too high for a meaningful replacement.
  Experimenting with alternate body shapes, this one hints at a figure, bulging out at roughly mid-torso height, and tapering to a point. The memory of Red Pegman lives on! This one's got a polycount of 44.
• Same as #5, except with the quite dissonant circular head replaced with an octahedron. With a polycount of only 16, if this looks suitable, it'll help reduce the amount the game has to render.
• Same idea as #5 & 6, but more cylindrical. It having a polycount of 60 means it's more than twice as small as the original.

Why am I so focused on the polycount of these models, when in the grand scheme of things, they're incredibly small already? That's because there's going to be quite a few of these characters meandering around the game space, and I don't them to drag the game down to a snails pace.



 Here's a shot of the designs taken from within the game. Even then, this is at twice the normal max zoom, so in normal play you'll struggle to see them like this.



The most you'll see of them are like this, despite the distance, they all seem to he holding up well, apart from #1, which is the very thin black line furthest to the right. This can be easily fixed by scripting a behavior so that the plane always faces the player, preventing it from being seen from a very oblique angle such as what is happening above.

If anyone has any comments, queries or suggestions, I'm happy to help!

[Raptorgeddon]

Still not used to writing 2016. Suppose it has only been a week after all.

After spending some time looking into the changes brought to the project after upgrading to Unity 5.3, which mainly entailed implementing the new SceneManager items, I started to implement more buildings. They're not fully plumbed into the various systems, but that won't take long. The placeholder assets I made are as follows:


these two represent the Coal power station on the left, which will be based on the iconic Battersea Power Station, and the Artistic Bureau on the right. The Artistic Bureau allows you to place space-filling decorative items around your city, like walls, checkpoints, roads etc.



This block of eight buildings belongs to a mid-game resource that until someone takes offence to, I'm naming NIPS. NIPS are an abstracted resource, they're stand-ins for those crazes that appear every few years. Each faction will have at least one building that allows them to create NIPS from one of their finished resources, which can be anything from bottles of SEPSISCOLA, Surplus military munitions, pharmaceutical drugs, and feature films.

This devlog sponsored by Sepsisco. The Sepsis Globule is ©2090 SEPSISCO, INC.

[Raptorgeddon]

So not much development wise has happened, nothing that's tangible and easy to show anyway.

Biggest change is that I took one script, and split it into six separate components because it was physically hurtful to look at given how out of control and overgrown it had become.

But that's not the only thing that's happened. Below is a mockup for what I'm envisioning the Bleak UI to look like, if it's too small, clicking it will take you to the full-resolution version.



there's also a small amount of colour correction going on, which I'll hopefully implement into the game itself soon :D

[AlexVsCoding]

Just wanted to pop in and say that despite the crime that is the lack of comments on this post, the work you're doing is ace. I think this project has the potential to strike chords with quite a few UK residents in a time of cuts and austerity (My local council announced it's losing it's A&E today).

The other thing I like about the project is the focus on taking something scenic and ruining it. It always happens in strategy games - By the end of most matches all animals are dead, the seas are empty of fish, more or less all trees have been felled and huge chunks of the map are covered in buildings. Having this actually effect the mindset of your citizens is something rather exciting. Definitely keeping an eye on this project and am intrigued to see how it develops.

I was also wondering what the balancing point is - Can your residents become too miserable to work, at which point your economy suffers?

Thanks again for building this and genuinely hope you consider developing this beyond your submission - It's the projects you do outside of classes at University that make the difference in your success after it. If you need any feedback of gameplay, I'd be more than happy to throw my hat in.

[Raptorgeddon]

Just wanted to pop in and say that despite the crime that is the lack of comments on this post, the work you're doing is ace. I think this project has the potential to strike chords with quite a few UK residents in a time of cuts and austerity (My local council announced it's losing it's A&E today).

The other thing I like about the project is the focus on taking something scenic and ruining it. It always happens in strategy games - By the end of most matches all animals are dead, the seas are empty of fish, more or less all trees have been felled and huge chunks of the map are covered in buildings. Having this actually effect the mindset of your citizens is something rather exciting. Definitely keeping an eye on this project and am intrigued to see how it develops.

I was also wondering what the balancing point is - Can your residents become too miserable to work, at which point your economy suffers?

Thanks again for building this and genuinely hope you consider developing this beyond your submission - It's the projects you do outside of classes at University that make the difference in your success after it. If you need any feedback of gameplay, I'd be more than happy to throw my hat in.

Thank you so much for your comment :D I agree with it striking a chord with a lot of people. The inspiration for much of the game is my hometown, a grungy little town that used to be a big deal, but hasn't really recovered from losing is industrial base. I wanted to see if I could apply that feeling not only to the country at large, but to a game as well.

Right now no, the only gameplay penalty associated with the discontent of your residents is that once it reaches or exceed the cap ( which grows or shrinks according to how many residences you have) the game locks you out and you either have to quit or go back to the main menu. Any sort of 'at 25% of total discontent x happens' won't be noticable or effective purely down to how fast the damn thing rises right now. Hoever this week I do plan on implementing a large swathe of content, including one of the three discontent-lowering buildings* With those implemented, it'll be remarkably easier to control the flow of that variable, meaning I can implement a tiered system, to really drive home the breaking down of order and society.

* Discontent Lowering Buildings

• Generic: Motorcar Showroom. If your residents have the ability to purchase motor vehicles, they'll be happier in and of themselves.
• Academic: Dispensary. No-ones going to be dissatisfied with your neo-despotic rule if they're too medicated to care!
• Military: Guard Towers: Who's going to voice dissent if they risk a high explosive 50. cal in their head.
• Criminal: Narcotics Peddler: let your residents escape, if only mentally through these High-potency illicit subtances
• Prisoner: Outlet Shop: Ooh look! Cheap things! AND they're made in the UK! That must be good!

And I totally forgot! Bleak's now got a proper domain! Right now there's only the pre-existing blog, but changes are incoming. Hit me up at thebleakgame

[Raptorgeddon]

Hopefully not the last Devlog of January, but here's what's gone down since the last one.

There's been a large push to implement the buildings that currently are not, and here's the point we're at now:



 As you can see, there are many greyboxes which will need to be removed in the coming weeks.
In the image as-is, there are:

1. Tier One Generic Tenenment, the backbone of your city.
2. Tier One Generic Farm, The breadbasket of your city.
3. Tier Two Shale Gas Array, Gotta get the few precious hydrocarbons that are left!
4. Tier Three CineStudio. Even in the grim, dystopian future that awaits us all, cheap consumable hollywood media needs to be made.
5. Tier Three Uranium Mine (Placeholder Design) - There's green glowing rocks down there, get them and get energy from them.
6. Tier One Claypit, The first step in making any building, is making the bricks and making bricks needs Clay.
7. Panopic Nexus, your home-away-from-home. Hopefully it'll look bigger and better as time goes on, but sadly that's not implemented yet :c.
8. Housing Authority, the bureaucratic centrepoint to being able to build all those useful things like farms, tenements and clay mines.
9. University, the central hub for those brainy folks you predominantly hire from.
10. HMP Bentham, the central hub for those down-on-their-luck folks the afore mentioned brainy folk 'hire' to do the heavy lifting.
11. NIPS Regional Ofice, The place where you'll negotiate the licensing deals to operate your productions as a franchise of the NIPS conglomerate. They're in everything you know! From Cars to bullets, High end fashion to branded drinks, all is NIPS in the end.
12. Tier One Coal mine. Not-so-glowing rocks, that you can dug up and burn to keep the lights on.
13. Solar Panels (x2). Once hailed as the ecological solution to all our power needs, they're not a forlorn reminder that the hopeful years never really paid off. Like the loans given to the Eco-friendly companies that have since folded.
14. Coal Power Station. It's big, it's ugly but it gets the job done. It also won't be quite the carbon copy of Battersea when I'm finished, I swear.
15. Academic Student Housing. Where the soon-to-be-brainy folk live.
16. NIPS Motorcar reseller. Take off the Brittech badge, replace it with a shiny NIPS badge and some faux-wood finish, and you've got yourself a luxury vehicle.
17. Tier Two Motorcar Showroom, lack of jobs, food and et cetera dragging your people down? Give em something to strive for, like the new Brittech 119, six wheel drive!
18. Tier Two Prison Block, despite our best efforts to get it changed, it's still illegal to let prisoners sleep outside, so to utilise this wonderful workforce, you'll need to build some of these.
19. NIPS Pharmaceutical dispensary, NIPS-Branded headache tablets have been guaranteed to be up to 100% as effective as the generic brand!
20. Outlet Mall, Under the NIPS Banner you should feel no guilt over fleecing your patrons for everything they have here.
21. Cineplex, where people go and pay a serious premium to watch a NIPS-Approved flick, whilst stuffing themselves with butter-and-salt drenched polystyrene.
22. Luxury Outlet, since not even the 1% can avoid being scammed out of their not-as-hard-earned money.
Still to Implement are:

1. Tier Two Shale Gas Power Station
2. Tier Three Nuclear Station
3. Tier Two Generic Automotive Plant
4. Tier Two Chemical Synthesis Plant
5. Tier Two Pharmaceutical Dispensary
6. Tier Three Rocket Fuel Cracker
7. Tier Three VAB
8. Tier Three Spaceport
9. Tier Two Inmate Processing
10. Tier Two Labour Yard
11. Tier Two Assembly Line
12. Tier Two Market
13. Tier Three Import Office
14. Tier Three Sweatshop

So as you can see, I've technically surpassed 50% in terms of actual content. Not quite seeing as many are still using greyboxes, and even more have no assigned variables for actual production or function, but that will come in time.

Here's the screenshot without the annotations, if you're interested:



If you've got any questions, comments etc. Leave them here OR at the end of the month I'll be partaking in the Reddit /r/gamedev Quarterly Showcase!

And before I go, here's one of the films that the cities in BLEAK will be capable of producing:

[Raptorgeddon]

Hi all, had a peer review session and I've got a sizable amount of feedback. I'm going to widen the net somewhat more by uploading the build and asking for further feedback here.

What I've got so far is as follows:

Pros:
The aesthetic of the finished assets look good.

Cons:
As is, the game's kinda confusing and overwhelming
It needs a win condition and a tutorial.

Comments and Observations:
The logo on the main screen is very pixelated.
All of the main screen UI is over sized compared to what it needs to be
Maybe slow the spinning on the main screen

Image of the settlement in the map selection screen is quite pixelated (and also outdated)
Crawler segment takes a little too long and could do with being tweaked
Cursor can get lost when it's on a dark background
Maybe add a particle effect on the crawler when it demolishes an object
Swap ALT with ENTER in regards to camera rotation, given the switch from WASD to Arrow Keys.

you can download the game files above from Google Drive. Please bear in mind that this build is Windows only at the moment. A Mac build may be incoming.

[Raptorgeddon]

Experimenting in photoshop, if I wasn't such a fan of how the UI's developed so far I'd totally try and carry this through into the actual game grin emoticon

[Raptorgeddon]

Experimenting regarding UI, this time the Trade panel. As it was, the trade panel wasn't really fit for purpose, being severely overdesigned and missing core features. This soon-to-be-implemented replacement will hopefully be easier to follow and use.



So the main feedback I've gathered is that as of right now is that the progression of the game is a little hard to follow. I've resolving this partly through making the progression more visually apparent through enabling the relevant placement buttons as the prerequisites are met.

And to make things a little easier to follow early on, this lil guy's going to be making an appearance over important buildings:

[Raptorgeddon]

Nothing much tangible has changed within Bleak, partly due to the fact that this week not only has my dissertation hand in, but the vast majority of the course staff are away in Berlin for Transmediale.



I've been working on a sort of progression system, which involves the buttons for building creation being initially disabled and re-enabled on the fly. I'm happy with the effect on the buttons icon, which reduces the objects opacity whilst the buttons disabled, and brings it back up to full when it's enabled. The only thing I think I need to change is how the transition is called. Currently it's an if statement within Function OnGUI. Next up is changing the button if it's enabled, and hasn't been clicked before. this will also need to be connected to the row of quick access buttons on the row above, so that players know to navigate to other tabs.

Also on the usability front is this faction selection screen, which was described as being hard to follow. Here's it's replacement as it stands. It's a little easier to follow and also has the benefit of using the new UI guidelines

[Raptorgeddon]

So recently I've been readdressing the UI within BLEAK. Built up over time, it's inconsistent and kinda bad looking. The first GIF is the first three scenes as they were, followed by as they are now. Readability's better, it's easier to follow, and it's in line with the rest of the UI within the game.





Additionally, there's possibility of hinting at world building, there's a space for a description for both the companies hinted at, and the places. What happened in the Plymouth Flux State? What's up with Heisen Inc?

[Raptorgeddon]

Well, since it's probably passed midnight by the time I've finished writing this out, it'll be the 20th's Devlog.
Sorry for the utter radio silence since the 9th, I've been floored by a cold for most of this week.
Here's what's changed:



There's now and optional gridline layer that's toggled by pressing the G key. This, along with most of the changes made this week are from a feedback session from the Director of Design at Supermassive Games, who gave me some very concise and thoughtful feedback

Next up is this:



The top right UI segments have tooltips when you hover over them which are somewhat context sensitive. This is being rolled out across the UI as a whole, and will eventually be available on every relevant UI element.

Finally, a minor change, but the cursor's been changed to this: