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[Blind_dgo]

Katharsis - Devlog #1 -

What is Katharsis?

The love child of an RTS, a Survival game and an Adventure game, Kathars places the player in the role of Arka, an emergency AI tasked with the mission of protecting a group of survivors on a mysterious alien planet.

Explore the 3D Low Poly planet K32-Alpha and assign work tasks to your people. Gain resources to craft tools and gear while unraveling the secrets of a long civilization and the reason it is gone. Be quick though because at night it is too dangerous to walk about. It is then that the player must prepare and distribute rations, establish guard duties and plan future expeditions.

Who are we?

Welcome one and all, we are WIP, a university group made of 5 designers and developers: Marcel García, Rafael de Miguel, Pablo Campos, Yeray Pachón & Diego García and our goal is to create a full downloadable 3 hour-long video game in 6-8 months.

This is very exciting for us because we have all worked on projects, prototypes and gamejams but this will be our very first commercial game. We may be a little green but we assure you that our resolve is not.

Check out the current state of the game!

We are currently running an open playtesting session, check out the following link and you will be able to download the game.

  Katharsis Website

Please don't forget to fill out the questionnaire after playing.

Any kind of feedback will be appreciated!



Feel free to follow us on twitter and instagram

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[66Gramms]

Interesting. I really love this low-poly, blocky visuals. Can't wait to see what the final product be like 

[Blind_dgo]

Interesting. I really love this low-poly, blocky visuals. Can't wait to see what the final product be like 

Thank you!!   Expect regular updates from us!

[Blind_dgo]

Hey guys! New update time. Specifically let us talk about the Night Raid system we've implemented.
Every day the player will be attacked by up to 5 creatures which try to steal the player's resources. In order to prevent this the player must be wary of their Security and Danger values.
The Security value can be raised 2 ways:
 - Security Buildings
 - Assigning Guard Duties at night (Characters on Guard Duty don't recover Stamina)
The Security value can decrease by building Non-Security Buildings

During the Day the player can open an Attack Panel where the currentday's attackers are shown. Each attacker has a Danger value, shown as a range of values, and a small description of their passive abilities.

Night Raids occur right before the end of the Night phase. The player is shown cards (which represent the attackers) flip over and show their final stats and if they were Repelled or if they ran away with Resources.

This system allows us to play with many interesting parameters like: the position of the attacking creatures, their abilities and the amount of information shown to the player. Imagine a Security Building which targets specific positions or an upgrade station that allows the player to change the attacker's position or silence their abilities.




We'll keep you guys updated with future updates!

[Blind_dgo]

Hello again! Another update for you guys. This time we'll be looking into the Construction Mode in Katharsis.

During the Day Time the player can open up the Construction mode via a UI button or with the C key. The camera will shift to a fully top-down view and the construction menu is displayed.

The interesting aspect is how the player controls the placement preview. They must move the A.R.K.A. avatar around and use the mouse to rotate the building.

Buildings will cost Carbon, Antheros or ZX-22 as well as modify the Security value (Security buildings add and Non-Security buildings remove).

Some buildings require Energy. In order to supply this energy the player must build Generator Relays and place the buildings inside their range. This range is shown as a spacial UI ring around the relays.

Relays must also be placed within rage of another relay, in order to slow down expansion.

[Blind_dgo]

Welcome back! New devlog for you guys, this time focused on the Creatures that crawl about the world of Katharsis. In the future we hope to have around 5 or 6 creatures classified into 3 categories (Burrowers, Roamers and Territorials). I will now explain how each of these 3 types of creature will interact with the player.

First is the Burrowers, which get the name from the fact that they all have a specific Home, or Burrow, on which they can rely on to escape. These creatures never go very far from their home and have 3 different states: Idle, Curious (once the player is within a given range) and Scared (at which point they dart off towards their burrow).

Currently we have 1 Burrower implemented: The Garagoo



Next up are the Roamers which do exactly what their name suggests and roam. They will walk all around the map stopping from time to time to graze and do other alien stuff. These creatures only have 2 states: Idle and Scared.

Currently we have 1 Roamer implemented: The Maganantee



Finaly let's talk about the Territorial creatures. This aggressive beings act as blocks in the level, scaring off any workers that try to enter their area and forcing the player to have to Hunt it in order to access the guarded resources. How do you Hunt? That's a story for the next Devlog 

[Blind_dgo]

Hello again! Today I wanted to show to you guys a quick sneek peek of our new Level as well as a couple of features that a currently being implemented. Oh and I finnally learned how to place regular sized images on tigsource so that's a bonus!

First let's look at the level, or "chapter" I guess would be the best way to describe it. It's actually an interconected Map full of different biomes, secrects and navegational decisions. The player will have to explore in order to find the best places for certain resources as well as break through blocks and obstacles, all while being pointed toward a main narrative-driven objective.

As for the new features we have for you guys today a look at the new Trait system for our crew members. In order to give each member a dinamic way of individuality we decided to go the same route of X-COM and Crusader Kings II. Characters will have both personality traits as well as work-related traits. That way long-lived characters will seam more important thanks to their strategic advantage.

Finally I want to show our new models for up-and-coming features like Escape-Pods that fall from the sky and contain new characters, traps that once baited can lure creatures and allow you to catch them without Hunting. Or new resources and food items.

[Blind_dgo]

Update time! Today is trap day, hunting trap day.

Players can choose to build traps in order to hunt animals without having to buy weapons for your crew members. Once built the player must add a bait. This bait is chosen from the inventory and must be a peice of food. Some animals work as whitelists and only go towards specific types of food, while others are blacklists and simply hate specific food types.

However, getting an animal to go for the bait isn't a guaranteed success. Traps can malfunction which results in the animals running away and the bait being lost.

[Blind_dgo]

New devlog! Sorry this new update took longer than previous ones, we are trying to reach a systems complete and the schedule is tight. Anyway, let's talk today about our new Music Manager System.

The first step was compiling a list of necessary characteristics we needed for our Music Manager:

• Play any sound whenever and wherever we want
• Be able to tweek any sound through inspector in the same place
• All these sounds must not clutter up the heirachy
• The music manager must work for both 3D and 2D sounds
• The music manager must work for both looped and non-looped sounds

After about 4h we finally managed a Music Manager we were proud of. Let's go over how it works.

First of all the entire system is based around 2 singleton scripts (MusicManager, MusicBank) and 1 new class (AudioInfo). This class cointains varables for volume, rollover and a string for an AudioClip. Basically the MusicBank is a collection of all of the AudioInfos in the game and the MusicManager is the one who uses them to play the sounds.

Music Manager has 4 main functions:
PlaySound3D(GameObject location, AudioInfo theInfo, bool isLoopedOrNot) => Spawn sound as child of the gameObject
PlaySound2D(AudioInfo theInfo, bool isLoopedOrNot) => Spawn sound as child of the manager
StopLoopingSound3D(GameObject location, AudioInfo theInfo)
StopLoopingSound2D(AudioInfo theInfo)

P.S. If the sound is not looped then the resulting spawned gameobject is destroyed at the end of the clip.

See you guys next time!

Any kind of feedback will be appreciated!

Feel free to follow us on twitter and instagram:

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[Blind_dgo]

Another Devlog for you all. Today let me show you how characters are added to your crew in Katharsis. The anwser? Escape pods falling from space.

First lets explain how the mechanic works and then we can go into further detail. During the night there is a chance that the game will stop and a cutscene showing a falling escape pod will appear. The next day the player can go to where they saw the escape pod land and find a crashed escape pod and a new survivor.

Now let's go over the logic behind this system. Everything is controlled by an invisible GameObject called EcapePodController. This controller has an array of possible landing spots, a camera reference and 2 prefabs (Falling Pod and Crashed Pod). The decision to activate a new pod or not is decided through 4 variables: MinCrewMembers, MaxCrewMembers, TargetCrewMembers
and PassingDayMultiplier. In a nutshell this system asks the following questions:

• Is the crew member amount equal to the MinCrewMembers? If so then send an escape pod 100% of the times
• Is the crew member amount equal to the MaxCrewMembers? If so then send an escape pod 0% of the times
• Is the crew member amount between MinCrewMembers and MaxCrewmembers? If so then the chance of escape pods is daysSinceLastPod*PassingDayMultiplier. However if the TargetCrewMembers is surpassed then daysSinceLastPod*PassingDayMultiplier/2.

This system allows us to control how many characters we would like the play to have for each level. We might still tweek it in the future but as of now we are really pleased with the results.
Until next time!

Any kind of feedback will be appreciated! 

 

Feel free to follow us on twitter and instagram:

 

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[Blind_dgo]

New devlog! We just recently finished our first iteration of an agressive animal. This AI is actually fairly simple, it only has one objective: "Do not let any non-player characters enter the area". In other words, it's a Block that requires the player to build an armory and hunt down the animal in order to access the resources in the area it's protecting. 

Now let's talk about the logic behind the AI. The behavior is controlled by States (Patroling, Running, Scaring).

While in the Patrol state the AI simply finds a random destination point inside a radius given through the inspector (we use OnDrawGizmos to see how big the area is). Once it arrives, it begins an idle animation which can be interrupted randomly and given a new destination point.

When a non-character enters the area, the Ai switches to the Running state. While running, the animal gains extra speed and dashes towards the invader. Once it reaches the character the AI switches to the Scaring state. The scared character runs away, canceling his current assigned task, while the animal AI switches back to the Patroling state.

There is one exception to this logic. If the player brings a Hunting party to get rid of the animal, the AI will only switch to the Running state if a character shoots and harms the animal. The player will have to bring a large enough party to bring it down.

Any kind of feedback will be appreciated! 

 
Feel free to follow us on twitter and instagram: 

 
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