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[Alain]

Nice, great screenshot and I'm looking forward to the video!

[irn]

Nice, great screenshot and I'm looking forward to the video!

Thanks 

[cepnox]

This is how the bloody journey begins.

We are so excited that we finished the very first stage. It utilizes so many different triggers, camera movements, and effects. We wanted it to have a cool atmosphere, but we also did not want the player to wait too much before getting control.

[Beastboy]

Oh yea, very polished scenary

[cepnox]

Oh yea, very polished scenary

Thanks. IRN spent a lot of effort on creating the design for this stage. Although it is relatively short, we wanted to give it a strong atmosphere. That required many unique assets, elaborate lighting, and other special effects. E.g., each light has its reason - they are pointing to points of interest and hugely changing the energy of scenes.
IRN is planning to write a post where he will point out all the ideas behind the design more thoroughly - I can't wait

[Alain]

This is how the bloody journey begins.

We are so excited that we finished the very first stage. It utilizes so many different triggers, camera movements, and effects. We wanted it to have a cool atmosphere, but we also did not want the player to wait too much before getting control.

So great, I love that intro. The backstory is giving me a Hellboy vibe, which I did not expect for Tendril!

[irn]

So great, I love that intro. The backstory is giving me a Hellboy vibe, which I did not expect for Tendril!

Thank you! Yea, this time, Alien is a full-fledged otherworldly bloodthirsty unmerciful demon

[fall_ark]

Nice. Good to see news of the project and the intro is great. Wonder if a new demo is planned or something like that?

[irn]

Nice. Good to see news of the project and the intro is great. Wonder if a new demo is planned or something like that?

Thanks! We have added tons of features since the last demo and we are now reworking how NPC gun projectiles work. We would like to make a demo as soon as possible to gain some feedback. We are also reworking switches/levers that open doors and activate devices. With all those graphics changes we did, they started to look out of place a bit.

[Ramos]

This scene is so freaking polished!
I saw it on youtube a few days ago but didn't have the time to post here.
I love and appreciate all the small details you put in this it is all so alien based, that ground fog is so hot and omg the animated flare from the wall at 1:53 looks so damn good.

You guys did an amazing job! 

[irn]

This scene is so freaking polished!
I saw it on youtube a few days ago but didn't have the time to post here.
I love and appreciate all the small details you put in this it is all so alien based, that ground fog is so hot and omg the animated flare from the wall at 1:53 looks so damn good.

You guys did an amazing job! 

Thank you for your kind words!

Yea, we spent a lot of time thinking about each light and each corner We are quite happy with how it turned out in the end, but we will tweak some timings and text later as we go...

We used our new particle system for that flare. It is composed of three systems - one for the base light, one for sparks and one for the smoke. A wasn't a big fan of particle systems before, but I must say, that I am really happy with how Cepnox implemented them. They are easy to edit yet they are strong in terms of what cool effects we can achieve.

[irn]

I spent a day reworking our switches. They were bugging me for a long time. Now they are much clearer and have overall better feel.

There were several points I wanted to achieve with each switch.

First the player should be able to say which type of switch deactivates which device. So the white wheel opens white ventilation shafts. The military notebook with the anthena belongs to military turrets and the power switch belongs to lasers. The wheel and the power switch should also feel more like they are part of the complex infrastructure. All the military stuff, on the other hand, was brought later by security forces, so it should pop out a bit.

Animations were supposed to be punchy, especially at the beginning. The player should feel the impact of their actions. So there is always a strong action at the beginning of each animation. It is then followed by one or more actions, each of which should also have a bit of punch, but not that strong. It is similar to reload animations in FPS games - they are just satisfying to watch I for example like to stretch some elements in the first frame and color them in pure white to achieve this.

[Ramos]

I love all this attention to detail, this is a very constructive dev blog entry.

How far are you in development at this moment?

[Riv_]

Just found this thread, this is such an awesome game, love the visuals and how controlling the character feels

[irn]

I love all this attention to detail, this is a very constructive dev blog entry.

How far are you in development at this moment?

Thank you!
Development is going pretty well. It is hard to say exactly how far we are, but we have the most of gameplay mechanics in place. We are currently working on ability system and we are adding more enemy NPCs. Then we will need to generate stages, graphics, polish stuff, finish the story etc. We still have much ahead of us, but the most important decisions have already been made, so that's optimistic

Just found this thread, this is such an awesome game, love the visuals and how controlling the character feels

Cool, that's awesome, thanks! I cannot count how many times we reworked and polished the character control. We knew that it had to be snappy and responsive. It had to be fun just moving and jumping in an empty room, then the player should want to be challenged to test how they can control the character on enemies.

[cepnox]

Today we would like to show you changes that we made to enemy projectiles.
 
Previously all projectiles had infinite speed, so they were just ray casts. It had a big impact on recovery from a failed stealth attempt. Although we have multiple delays implemented (before moving to alert state; before taking the first shot; etc.), when the firing started, the recovery was too much relying on output randomness, as you can see here:

Therefore we moved away from infinite fast projectiles and instead changed them in a way that you can see them flying:

And if you are crazy enough, you can do a badass bullet-dodging:

It also gave us options to create more variations to enemy guns.
Now the bulky cultist has a shotgun instead of a puny rifle.

And projectiles of witches are causing explosions, but they are slower. Therefore, it is easy to dodge them in open spaces but will prove devastating in closed quarters.

[Alain]

It seems to be a great improvement to see projectiles flying, it is a lot clearer to understand what is happening. The bullet-dodging seems to give the player a lot of agency in such a "simple" encounter. Great job!

[irn]

It seems to be a great improvement to see projectiles flying, it is a lot clearer to understand what is happening. The bullet-dodging seems to give the player a lot of agency in such a "simple" encounter. Great job!

Thank you!

[Beastboy]

I can see a lot of work was invested in those animations, gj guys

[irn]

I can see a lot of work was invested in those animations, gj guys

Thank you! Animations are one of the pillars of our graphic design. They take enormous amount of time to make and polish, but I think it is worth it.