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[Johnny_M]

Excellent atmosphere!

[electrolyte]

Thanks for the comments  

Recently the main focus has been around combat, how it works and how the other characters in the world might react. I set out to have melee attacks, and with the bare bones of it working - even a 'wrench' that needed collecting by the player to begin combat - it just hasn't turned out to what I was hoping. The game was trying to be too many things and a top down combat game this isn't.

Returning to the core pillars of what I'm hoping the game will achieve is very much about exploration and puzzle solving. I do want to have some challenge to the players life though, and so I changed focus to something a bit more stealth like which folds nicely into the puzzle element. After a rewrite of chunks of code, there are now autonomous robots that can be interacted with and woken. These have a line of sight, so crouching behind objects starts to become a game-play mechanic. If they spot the player they can attack on sight, they also have close range defence fields which again impact a players health if you get too close.

All in all I feel at the moment this is the best course to take. Removing combat away from the player and instead posing challenges around avoidance and stealth feels more fitting.

The screenshot is from one of the newer rooms with one of the robots taking a pot shot!

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

[electrolyte]

A brief update on how things are progressing.

I'm starting to edge towards a final sprint. I need to replace the holding voice over with something other than my own voice and sort out some bugs. One aspect of the build that began to really trouble me was the frame-rate.  The game started out as an experiment in Unity's HDRP, over a year ago, and its seen a fair few updates in that time as the HDRP framework made it's way out of beta and into a full release.  As the game has developed along with this render pipeline, I started to see frame rate dip ... in some places hitting 28fps on a desktop PC running a 1070 gfx card.

Troubled with this, I bit the bullet and spent a good amount of time reading up on refining the pipeline and a few weeks ago, one Saturday afternoon that magical performance boost came out of no-where after tweaking some settings under the bonnet and discovering I had two global post processing volumes (although I don't think this really effected it too much) I'm now glad to say the game regularly hit's 70 - 80 fps which is a massive performance gain. Phewieeee!



I also discovered that you can render gizmo's at runtime in the game view - this may have been a feature that's been around for ages, but it's great for debugging.

[vdapps]

Glad to read your update and resolving FPS issue. Btw, that's why I'm not with Unity. I must just have everything under control. On the other hand, not having powerful engine at disposal means that game ambitions must be adapted to it, so everything has its pros and cons.

Keep up the good work, looking forward for next updates. Atmosphere you set up with game has great potential.

[electrolyte]

Thanks for the kind words @vdapps

Forgot this in the last post but wanted to share this quickly. It's a change to the user interface and a lot more streamlining. Moved all the input prompts to a standard location bottom right - taking a very reductive approach ... kinda.



I've also found some old walkies talkies which I'm going to rig up to a mic to start the voice over recording, had a thought that everything will be on two way comms and I think it's fair to say my audio skills a non-existent! Rigging up a real life radio comms will hopefully add to that authentic touch. Will see 

[electrolyte]

It's been a while since the last update, but just to say I'm still chipping away at getting the release ready and this first chapter done. My main focus has been to get the game play loop as tight as possible and add story narrative. In the process it's meant some redesign work of rooms and general puzzles which will hopefully make for a tighter experience.

Other updates include building a music engine that will adapt to rooms and environments. Super excited about this as it was quite a simple solution to build in the end using a texture and 'painting' areas of sound.

Lots more bug fixes and refinements have happened but for now here's four more fresh screenshots - mainly from the Catacombs.

That's all for now, and thanks for reading.

[vdapps]

As always, excellent atmosphere.

[electrolyte]

Hi there, a small update on things.

Full gameplay and rooms for Chapter 1 is done and now doubling down on VO and story. Slowly edging towards releasing this first chapter, for free, to get feedback and interest.

I've also put together this thirty second teaser of gameplay. It's not meant for explaining story but more a feel for what Nascent Prophecy is.





It's been over 18 months of slowly getting this into shape snatching the odd spare hour here and there. Determined to see this through to getting it into other players hands!

[JobLeonard]

Very stylish! No idea what the gameplay is like though

[electrolyte]

Ha, yeah.

On list of things to do will be a longer trailer with more gameplay. Suffice to say there's running, jumping, climbing, picking stuff up, using stuff, opening stuff and even some light crafting stuff ... Oh yeah and some avoiding stuff 

[retrophilion]

Very nice indeed! 

[electrolyte]

Development continues on Chapter 1 with the full game play now done. Sorting out bugs, play testing and polish are now the main tasks with the addition of a slight camera zoom when a player opens their inventory - Just so you can get a closer look. One massive dev task was to allow the game to actually load other chapters. I realised that the way data was being stored was painting me into a corner so this has been a huge time sink refactoring it. Good news is it's all in place and I can successfully load and save data between the games story chapters phiewweee.

Also been messing around with HDRP shader graph trying to get the water / mud stuff to flow better. Watching hours of YouTube footage of model makers building real life dioramas of water out of clear reisin layers and paint effects has been a super informative source of reference.



[ Some water flow updates ]

To double down on the feel of Dioramas, I've also started to 'chop' scenery and slice it more into the individual room views. In the example below the rock formations of the walls used to spill upwards but the resulting new slice now cuts them away leaving solid cross-sections. A lot more like polystyrene and Polyfilla coated scenery sculptures!



Thanks for reading.

[vdapps]

Nice progress, excellent post. Also water flow looks cool.

[electrolyte]

Hi there!

As we head to the end of 2020 I thought I’d do a quick update and look back as to where things are with development and my current thoughts, reflections on what Nascent Prophecy will become - and some with a heavy heart.

As some backstory, I started noodling ideas a couple of years ago. Experiments with much closer over the shoulder third person controllers and even first person. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that the diorama / isometric view was established quite by chance. In terms of game play it was still very much finding it’s feet but slowly a puzzle exploration style game emerged.

It’s not been easy and the time that’s been committed to this project has been great. I’ve reached a point where Chapter 1 is complete. The voice over is placeholder and the written story is very much a rough edit. But as this year draws to a close I’ve spent some time thinking about what this could become and the truth is I don't think I have a big enough vision for a further set of chapters.

Working on it as a solo developer and artist, it was very art led and working in isolation has been a challenge and the probably cause of its slow progress and this final thought process.

I’m going to be wrapping up the build as it stands and putting it out into the public domain as a final offering. I’m nervous and excited at this prospect, but one hope is to hear feedback, ideas and possibly stimulus!

Watch this space for a final build link or follow on twitter @16bitsperpx
Thanks to those that have followed.

[vdapps]

Hi @electrolyte!

Not hearing from you for quite a time. I remember your project well (is one of the firsts which attracted my attention when I signed up to TIG). Sad to hear that you're stuck, as game has lot of potential and one of the most atmospheric looking games here in development.

For sure, I'll look at your build and give some feedback. Hopefully, you're restore your work on it. It happen with many projects and it happened also to me (I started RTG, then paused, started another project, and then resumed RTG). Checking you on itch!

[electrolyte]

Thanks @vdapps. Yeah who knows what the future holds for this project, paused but maybe not forgetting.

How do you tend to handle going back to older projects and picking them back up from a code point of view? I find I have to keep lots of stuff fresh in my head - the logic - and picking stuff up can be a challenge. I guess cleaner code / structure 

Have appreciated your interest over the past year. 

[Schrompf]

I noticed this project just now, and I'm amazed at your use of colour and depth of field. The style is great!

But yeah, sometimes you lose your teeth for a thing, and I think that's naturally. Sometimes you return later, sometimes you don't. Returning to it is always difficult, though, even the best code structure won't help you much. I personally noticed that the better a structured my code into layers, classes and so on, the worse I found it to return to it later. Abstractions have a cost, too, basically a toll on your brain.

[Alain]

Hey electrolyte! Nascent Prophecy has a great look to it and I hope you will maybe return to it in the future.

[vdapps]

Thanks @vdapps. Yeah who knows what the future holds for this project, paused but maybe not forgetting.

How do you tend to handle going back to older projects and picking them back up from a code point of view? I find I have to keep lots of stuff fresh in my head - the logic - and picking stuff up can be a challenge. I guess cleaner code / structure 

Have appreciated your interest over the past year. 

You're welcome, I hope that you either return to this one or start another similarly good looking project.

Regarding returning back, first I have to say I returned to project after just 2-3 months, so for sure it's different than someone returning to project after year or so. And my project was in less developed state than yours, which made it easier to return back.

From the code point of view. I have own engine, and project is split between engine and game specific sources. Engine is shared between projects, so I'm not loosing contact with it when on another project. What is game specific is not so much, basically, levels and their logic, plus some level specific objects. So I lost contact only with this game specific part. Of course it took me some time to refresh things back, but in my case it was few days.

[buto]

Hey, just wanted to say that the game looks gorgeous. I somehow missed your devlog.
The dioramas look absolutely great - both from a technical point of view but also how they are composed. The diorama idea is really cool, too.

I think I understand that after all the time you've put into the project it is sometimes hard to remember what it looks/feels like to people seeing it for the first time. Really hope that you finish that first episode. Maybe you could give the idea of putting your stuff into public domain a second thought. I would first evaluate feedback on the actual playable episode before deciding on the next steps.

I just wanted to emphasize that the what you've shown so far is really impressive.