Progress Update, February

Howdy all, it’s been a good few weeks since I last updated so I figured you were all due some progress info, how time flies eh!

Progress is marching on at a nice and steady pace, we could probably do another dev video with what we have done but we’re thinking of waiting until we have the enemy AI stuff working before we do that.

Interfaces

Interfaces are now fully ported, improved and are hooked up to drive the game through events.

Portals

I’ve recreated the portal code which allows you to move between maps based on the other improvements done already and also added Spine artwork which makes portal creation more straight forward. The portals now also use Spine based hit box detection to make them more accurate to interact with. They also now use the same interact prompt as objects so when this gets more advanced you’ll be able to choose actions such as picking the lock or kicking a door down.

Combat Animations

I’ve made a bunch of new animations for Will which are going to be used in combat. Animations such as crouching, aiming and firing along with variations for when Will is unarmed and armed with a pistol, other guns will come later. I’ve learnt a lot through working with Spine and figured out quite a few areas where I can speed up the work-flow meaning I’m now working like a well oiled machine with the entire process so I should be able to build a lot more art in a smaller space of time. Here, have a sneak peak…

Player Sprite Shooting

Combat Interface

Something else that I’ve tackled has been a brand spanking new first pass interface for the combat screen, it doesn’t have any hooks to the game code yet but it’s ready for when we start on the combat mechanic itself and uses the same event driven UI as the rest of the game meaning it’s extremely simple to have it talk to the main game screen. Here’s a sneak peak at it running in game, note though that it’s all using place holder art for now, certainly don’t take this as any inkling of what it will look like in the end…

In Game Combat UI

A sneak peak at the new in game combat interface.

Enemy AI

And finally Dan has been busy working on the enemy AI, he has them patrolling about and is currently working on player detection and vision cones. They sometimes have a tendency to not stop walking however, so when the code is a bit more stable and they are behaving themselves we’ll look at getting a dev diary up to show you it in action.

Hopefully soon we can start looking at some combat!

That’s all for now folks!

Alex

In Game Screens

I’m a day late on this but as promised here are some images displaying the new tiling world art and objects as well as a glimpse of the player and alien sprites used in the world. These are actual screen grabs taken from the prototype running in 720p on the PC.

It’s all starting to come together which is great and I’m hard at work knocking off the tasks on my check list and glueing all the cracks together to form one cohesive whole, I’ve also registered for development on the Playstation Vita/Mobile. It’s getting rather exciting!… Anyway, have some pretties!

Prototype Screen: World

A screen grab of the prototype world as it currently looks.

Prototype Screen: Inventory

An in game grab of how the inventory looks with some new item art and overlaid onto the world.

Prototype Screen: Safe House

A screen of how the safe house currently looks in the prototype.

Character Art

Here’s some slightly older artwork of the main game character which I’ve realised wasn’t on the blog up until now. The first is for use in cinematic cut scenes.

Player Cinematic Art

Player art used in cinematic cut scene events.

The second is a piece of concept artwork done to try and figure out what the lead character was going to look like, there were many sketches drawn before arriving at this point and the character evolved slowly as the project has progressed.

Player Concept Art

Concept artwork used in developing the main characters look and style.

Hopefully this should show what I was trying to achieve on a smaller scale with the sprites in the previous post.