Hello everyone, here is the news from the front.

Review

In the last two months, I finally finished the last demo to test the game experience.
Thanks to Cédric, Gaëtan and Pierre-Luc for coming to test the game. After deep analysis, I think the game is full of potential, but still requires a lot of work to make it really successful. The level design needs to be reworked, the artistic style improved, the reactions of the NPCs corrected, and there are still problems with the inventory. But the current content is a good base on which to iterate.

Art style v0.2

After long performance tests, I realized that my 3D models needed to be reworked to improve rendering and physics performance. I take this opportunity to redo an artistic pass, improving the current objects, and creating new ones. I am also working on the atmosphere, especially in terms of lighting.

Advent Screenshots

Since my current job is to revisit the artistic style to make beautiful images, I will publish on the site one image per day until 25th december. You will find every day a new image on the devblog.

Since this is still a work in progress, I strongly invite you to let me know your impressions. To avoid spamming you I will send only a second mail on the 25th when you will be able to see all the published images.

Roadmap

I am therefore reworking the art style, in order to redo the presentation page of the game. Also, I am preparing a video trailer which I will use as a promotion base. The idea is to be able to launch a Kickstarter early next year to finance further development.

See you soon,

Arnaud

Hi everyone, here is the news from the front.

Dialogues, missions, cutscenes, story

Good news, I finally completed the first playable version of the adventure. You can play a goblin that has just been hired for three days and does various tasks for the dungeon master, including maintenance of the traps. It is still in a raw state, but it will be my base that I will gradually improve until all levels, characters and stories are done.

3D Characters

I spent a few days working on 3D characters. It also needs to be refined, but I’m pretty happy with the first draft. Do not hesitate to give me your opinion, if you enjoy it or not.
Speaking of characters, they are now able to open doors and fall into pits :)

Next playtest: volunteers?

The goblin demo is almost over. In a week (or two …) I will need volunteers to come and test this new version of the game. This implies to come at my home to play while I take some notes. Tell me if you are interested and I will contact you to organize a playtest when it is ready.

Roadmap

I’m still late, since in the last email I announced the end of the goblin demo to late August … especially as I had originally planned to finish it in February … When it will be ready and the tests done, I will review everything, analyze what work or not in the demos, review objectives and schedules, and move into production. It will also be the moment to start the marketing with an updated website and the beginning of a series of videos to show and comment on the various demos and development progress.

See you soon,

Arnaud

Hi everyone, here is the news from the front.

Playtests

First of all, thank you for having been a lot to ask to come and to test the game. Thanks to Anthony, Gaëtan, Leo, Gregory and Benjamin for playing almost 2 hours each! I’m sorry to have delayed some tests to a future demo: I already had enough feedback to identify what worked well and what did not work, and it allows me to keep “fresh” testers for the next demo, which a good thing.

I have lots of things to fix for the next demo, particularly in terms of inventory management. Feedbacks were still quite positive, especially on things that interested me, and that’s good.

Dialog Editor

This month, I mainly worked on the design of a new tool: the dialogue editor. The editor is fairly standard, it allows you to write text lines and link them together in the form of a graph to create a conversation. One can add conditions, which allows multiple possible branches (eg if a quest was started or not), and the player can select his answers, giving even more branches.

At first I was a little reluctant to do it, but now I think the tool is really great, so I do not regret the time investment. Indeed, I created a custom graph editor, even with rare features, such as hierarchical dialogues and subdialogues. The writing is super fast, and I played a lot with it to write absurd things you will discover in the next demo. The editor works so well that I think to adapt it to also edit the AI behaviors.

Roadmap

I am still working on the Minion’s demo. I still have to finish the mission system, adapt the maze adventurers to make maintenance tasks interesting, improve the AI ​​to make the infiltration even more interesting, complete a first playable version of (a sub part of) the main story, and correct problems of previous demos. I hope it will be done by the end of August, but maybe I am too optimistic.

See you soon,

Arnaud

Hi everyone, here is the news from the front.

New Demo

These two last months, I developed the “Stealth” gameplay, ie everything related to infiltration with guards, and the demo to test all of this is finally ready.

There are three test levels where the player has to find a mysterious artifact. He starts at the entrance of the dungeon and must find and access the secret underground part. It’s a mix of traps and guards to avoid, places to explore and clues to find. I look forward to seeing what you think about it.

I continue to do observation playtests (I look at people playing the game). If you are motivated to come and play on site at the new demo I invite you to tell me :)

Stealth system

For this demo, I made a first version of the AI ​​system to manage the behavior and perception of NPCs. The guards react when they see / hear the player or anything suspicious, and chase the player to try to kill him. My system is largely inspired by the one implemented in the Dark Engine (Thief 1.2).

For noise, I have implemented a system of footsteps: the sound and volume change depending on the surface, for example it is quieter to walk on carpet than on stone, and the moving speed. It is also useful for hearing the guards approaching. Objects collisions make noise that is detected by the guards: for example you can throw a rock to make a diversion.

For the visibility, I implemented a player visibility system that takes into account the dynamic lighting of the scene. This is very generic and work in all configurations. For example the player can pick up, move or unlit torches to decrease the light, the guards may carry torches to light near to them. My goal was to make it consistent with the physical interaction system of the player. In my tests I even found myself moving a table to create a shaded area to observe a guard from the shadows.

There are still a lot of work and testing to make it robust, but I think that it is already pretty fun. We’ll see what you think about it during the tests.

Roadmap

In the near future I will improve the important issues that will rise during testing, and start the last demo: to be the minion of an evil dungeon master. On the menu : clean dead adventurer corpses in the trapped part of the dungeon – without dying, if possible -, recover their treasures and re activate the traps.

At the end of this demo I will check whether the various parts of the experience of my game are fun and if they fit well together. Then I will make a big concept validation, code cleanup, and I will start to prepare the first alpha version of the game. I would also like to start making short videos every month in which I will play the demos to show what I describe in these news.

See you soon.

Arnaud