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[damagefilter]

Hello folks! First-timer here although I've been hanging around every now and then :3

Today I thought I'd start a DevLog for my latest project which, for a change, will hopefully see the light of day.



The Vrennman Case is a 2D top-down adventure game where you play as John Amry and, alternatively as Ellen the ghost.
Stop the Vrennman cult from raising hell (or worse, who knows) and find out what keeps Ellen in the world of the living.

I spent the last months (I think 10 or so) on creating the fundamental technologies for creating the adventure game
I have in mind. Famously, Editor Tech is always a great deal more complex than the runtime tech.
So it took quite some time to visualise some of this.

For instance this:

(orig. http://imgur.com/zde0mvo)

Some might even recognise this ... with a lot of fantasy.
It's sort of an implementation of the Source Engines I/O system with which you can rig up entities and make magic happen.
I made that for Unity where I can rig up components on GameObjects and make any kind of magic happen I could possibly imagine.

The very screenshot there does something like this ingame:

Super re-usable. Super simple.

Also featuring there the combo-gameplay of the main character, John Amry and the ghost Ellen who is more or less involuntarily following John around the world and helps him solve puzzles by doing things humans can't.

Like walking though walls and interacting with beings in the ghostly spheres.

Since it'll be a dialogue-heavy game with lots of branching and depending on all sorts of conditions,
I implemented a simplified version of the Java Behaviour Tree library and added on top an editor
for rigging up all sorts of branching dialogue and also other things depending on the models used in the tree.


(orig. http://imgur.com/GCzDMyx)

This here marks the beginning then.
From here on out it will mostly be creating assets and levels.
There are still some BT models I want. For instance one that will feed the messaging dialogue with choices
the player can make and execute sub-trees according to these choices.

Now, I do have a day job and I'll probably not going to update very often but I'll try my best.
It will come down to a lot of art updates I think. Currently, I must admit, I'm not so super with art.
I'll learn eventually though  

I hope you like it a little :D


Cheers,
Chris

[damagefilter]

Hello everybody!

Time for a little update on things.

Basically I've been too busy with RL to get much work done but that's how things work.
Apparently.

I did some things though.
I've been looking at my "lightmapping" technique which was really not so nice to begin with.
Here's how it would behave in the dark.



The candle light sort of looks like dried stains of some unwelcome fluid on the floor.
So there was work to be done and here's the result.



Also there you see some of the new assets for the basement.
Basically basement-ish stuff. Pipes old boxes and crates, because people store(d) stuff there.
I'm not happy with the barrels yet. They look sort of, for lack of a better word, cute.

And a demon sigil. Which is important.
There ought to be one in every good demon house basement.

There has been some behind-the-scenes work too.
The basement is mostly rigged up now and the important puzzles are done and ready for progressing further.
I'm currently fidgeting around breaking the linear flow of the basement. It shouldn't take too long to get through
but there are things to discover down there and I want to work out how to hint that to the player.


And that's it for today, good sirs and madams.
Thanks for reading!

[damagefilter]

Hello!

It's sunday and I've been busy bringing some loose ends together and get the current map done.
I've yet to create the final sequence which will lead John into the inner yard of the Vrennman mansion.

Mostly I was working on improving controller support.
There were a lot of loose ends when it came to focus management. Meaning if it happened that none of the UI elements
had control focus it became unusable to use with the controller.
It now works as every good menu does, it'll force control focus to the element that last had the focus or
if that couldn't be found the first element found on the currently active menu.

Additionally to that I've been fixing some animation transitions which would have been weird with controller input.

That was most of the work behind the scenes.
I've also reworked the menu graphics a little.
It's not final yet but it's a step in the right direction.
I didn't show the previous versions of the menu here but rest assured it looked awful.
Here's the messaging UI now:


Also reworked the Actions menu.


Aaaand last bot not least the ingame menu:


The menu is, apart from the optics and button rebinding , fully functional.
Saving and loading (with up to 6 save-slots) works.
I'm not sure about button rebinding though. It's on the list for later.
Definitely possible of course.

I added a bit more eye candy.
Flickering candle lights.
These are also CSP system compatible so I can hook up game events when they go out (or on, for that matter).
Makes for some Zelda-Style puzzles (like turn on all the torches), hehe.


Okay that's it for todays update post.

Hope you like it and feedback is, of course, appreciated.

Cheers and thanks for reading!

[damagefilter]

Hello there and happy new year, y'all!
Lets hope 2017 will be less of a pain in the neck, eh?   

I was on vacation during Christmas and the new year.
So there was some time I used to flesh out some of the less interesting bits of the game.

Namely scene management and background music management.
So I added a scene director that can be instructed to change the current scene and put a loading-screen in between.
There's also better image fading (based on a shader rather than a black quad in front of the camera xD) now
so that scene changes also are faded out and in again.

As for the music director, it's basically a class that has 2 audio tracks and can do transitions between them.
It'll also take care that music won't just abruptly stop when changing scenes.

I also started making music for the game but my composing skills are ... sort of rusty.
I'll get there eventually.

On the side I've added a dev-scene from where I can jump into any scene.
I probably should have done that long before now but there you go.

And that's already that.
Thanks for reading guys (I know you do! )

Have a happy new year.

[damagefilter]

Man.
I've been a while, right?

Between RL work and some other projects on the side I was able to continue working on VC.
I'm mostly busy with refactoring graphics.

But. What did actually happen since january?
I don't know. lets ask the git-lord for help.

git log
* 0fc5a57:
| - Added a whole lot of new props to the game. That's electrical boxes, barrels, fences, boards, generic junk, new foliage,
| building pieces, new ground and wall textures, benches, fountains, evil helldogs ... and so forth

|
* af7b023:
| - Finished the first pass of the mansions logical units. That is puzzles and all that jazz.
| - Also finished the logical units for the second mansion level which will lead to a third level,
| that holds the final part of the first chapter.

|
* 3638705:
| - Fixed a whole lot of issues regarding serializing the behaviour tree structures and weird unity serialisation behaviour
| - Soundscapes! Quite like Source Engine soundscapes in userland-functionality. I can do all the sounds!

|
* 62d4e4b:
| - More changes to the lighting system. I used a library before but that kept breaking so I looted the code and pieced
| together my own zombie version of it. It doesn't have dynamic shadows anymore.
| But at least it's not breaking every other day.
| - Added a light-bleeding effect to said shader
| - Changes in camera setup to improve the smoothness of movement without getting pixel stretching artifacts

|
* 2a888e9:
| - Pulled the project to Unity 2017
| - Starting second art pass on the looks of the mansion itself


And that's that, good folks.

It's, of course, just a summary of what I did.
There's an awful lot of code adjustments and fixes in between.
More CSP components and BT behaviours have been created on the way.
There was also an efford to persist the game state. It generally works but I have to configure
each thing that needs its state to persist into the save game manually. So it happens along while
I'm polishing the first 2 levels. Once that is done I intend to begin the third.

There's a lot of time that I need to invest in this. Time I don't have as a whole.
But I'll get there eventually.

Cheers 

[damagefilter]

Warning. This topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.

I'm a real slacker, am I not?

So in the more than 120 days stuff actually happened.
Git says I mde 116 commits in that time.

That includes:

New design for the player character.


And here's the man in a moving picture.

Sorry about the super bright glow around him. It was supposed to make the animations more visible.
It worked but it could have worked better
But as you can see, there are now animations for walking and running cycles.


lightv3

Basically, I've redone the lighting sytem. Implemented custom dynamic shadows.
Works entirely on the GPU. Does no raycasting on the CPU and does not require generating meshes.

It also comes with the ability to apply a LUT to the screen buffer.
That comes in handy for the ghost mode.




More assets!

New trees and grass textures!
Not happy with the grass yet though but I have ideas on how to fix it.


Made a new set of assets for the underground library.

These are for a demo build I'm working on. Of course this is going to be part of the full game too.
But you've got to demo something and it'll be that



Text typer speed variations and a whole of of work on dialogues and scripted sequnces.





Did a screen-shaker too.



internal stuff
Lastly, I've removed some older systems and replaced them with new ones.
Such as the DI and the text rendering itself.
I removed all my custom depth sorting scripts from everywhere as I've discovered Unity can do that for me and do it more efficiently.
Cleaned up the proects structure, putting in work on the level design tools, upgraded through at least 2 versions of Unity.
Which is a bad idea, in most cases. But I really wanted the new tilemap stuff they had to offer.
That caused me to throw out any and all homebrew tilemap tools. So less stuff to maintain there.
There were a whole lot more of these little things happening.


Aaand that is a very brief summary of what exactly happened the past 120 days.
Should you want to stay up to date with the project, you can check out the #vrennmancase tag on twitter.

Cheers! 

[damagefilter]

Ooooh hello again.

Time for another catching-up.
Since the past "at least 120 days" there has been a whole lot of progress.
There's new content for one.

Or this:


There's more of that but most important now: There's a teaser.
You can watch it here.
There's also a demo.
You can download it here.

So there has been quite some progress.

Hussah.