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Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

Zombra

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1) Get off Facebook and get back to work!

2) Who picked that music? jesus

3) Huh, this is "open world"? I really did not expect that. I guess I have no idea about this game at all really, just that there are monsters and a greyish color palette.
EDIT: I guess previews from last year do say open world. I suppose it didn't register on me because why would it?
 
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Zombra

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Scrawled, please contact Frogwares and give them some basic tips on how to sell horror in their promotional materials. I like cute teenage girls, but there's a time and a place! Tell her to at least not stand in front of a cheerful blue sky with puffy white clouds like cotton candy!
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014


Take a look at our "City Generator" tech tool that we developed. With it, we are able to generate a rich, visually varied, open-world city in merely a few moments. And the best part is, when The Sinking City arrives, we are planning on sharing this tool with you.

 

Zombra

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OK, I'm impressed by this "city generation" thing. I keep being surprised that this is going to be a big open world game, wasn't expecting a huge GTA-style sprawling city. I just hope there's some good detective work to be done in it.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-sinking-city/frogwares-unreal-engine-4

Making it in Unreal: how Frogwares built The Sinking City so they could drown it

the%20sinking%20city%20unreal%20engine%204.png


Frogwares have long been purveyors of historical fiction adaptations in the form of the Sherlock Holmes games, beloved for their period setting and investigative slant. The Ukrainian studio’s project finds them hopping from the pages of Conan Doyle to Lovecraft, where a private detective visits a city ravaged by a supernatural flood.

In doing so, Frogwares have set themselves a formidable challenge: to build a convincing 1920s Massachusetts city from scratch in Unreal Engine 4, and then sink it.

City builders
the%20sinking%20city%20steam.png


The city of Oakmont might be fictional, but it is situated in the heart of the very real Roaring Twenties, and rooted in the construction techniques of the time.

“We actually have an architect here, Katerina Frolova, who explored all these different styles in New England,” community manager Sergey Oganesyan tells us. “And then based on this research, we made a bunch of different buildings that would be similar to those you could see in Boston or other cities in this period.”

Frogwares imagined Oakmont to be dense: a 2x2 kilometre urban grid of mansions, landmarks, decaying shacks, and commercial buildings. It was far beyond the studio’s ability to build by hand within a realistic timeframe, and so those building types instead became categories in a custom city generation tool.

The team modelled their approach on the work of Ubisoft - who revealed some of the secrets behind Assassin’s Creed’s city generation in a GDC talk - and have spent a year and a half perfecting their own tool. It proved to be time well spent.

“We needed to automate as much as we could,” lead technical artist Alexander Oskin explains. “Almost 80% of the city we can make just by drawing a grid and pressing a few buttons.”

Each district is assigned its own logic, which the generator abides by when building Oakmont’s streets. This was the era of prohibition, gangsters, and xenophobia, and that division is visible in the results.

“It generates districts entirely based on the requests that we make,” Oganesyan says. “For example, that we want a building there and only a certain kind of people to live there. Then the generated algorithm does the rest.”

One of the tripping points of modular, repeating toolsets like these is what Bethesda call ‘asset fatigue’ - the danger that you will begin to recognise the patterns as a player, and that the game’s sense of place will be compromised. Thankfully, Frogwares are cognisant of that risk.

“There’s a whole bunch of rules that govern the placement of buildings,” Oskin says. “We can preset that certain larger buildings should not appear too often. And the same goes for the environment - objects like electricity poles, cars that are parked at the side of the road, and so on. But then, of course, it’s still never perfect, so there is always the possibility to edit.”

While generic buildings show up often, Frogwares’ level designers add landmarks as the finishing touch - placing one-of-a-kind factories, prisons, or city halls.

“It’s a lot of procedural generation rules,” Oskin notes, “and it’s also a flexible system to change stuff.”

The flood
the%20sinking%20city%20quote.png


Oakmont is no conventional 1920s city. It has been physically and culturally cut off from the US mainland by an unexplained but definitely Cthulhu-related deluge. Some of its streets are no longer connected by roads and sidewalks but boats and makeshift bridges.

“Inside our city editor we have a button you can use to select a street and tell the system that it should be lowered underwater,” Oskin says. “Our architect made a map of the city and designated where the flooded places are, so we basically just follow them up and set the streets to be flooded.”

That water then feeds back into the city generator, affecting the algorithms just as it has the locals.

“When the streets are flooded there is a different neighbourhood preset,” Oskin expands. “Buildings [are covered in] dirt and seaweed. They have the ocean’s influence on them.”

Sherloch Holmes
the%20sinking%20city%20oakland.png


All of this effort is in aid of The Sinking City’s open-world investigation. Frogwares have committed themselves to an undirected sleuth experience that offers “no hand-holding and no tips.”

“If you get a side-quest you need to analyse evidence, find clues, and then decide where to go and what to do,” Oganesyan warns.

“We have a special system just for making quests,” Oskin adds. “In the engine, we have a narration editor for scripting the quest logic.”

This editor makes use of Unreal Engine 4’s node-based Blueprint scripting system, keeping track of exactly what the player has found and which clues are in their possession.

“Basically our quest designers make these graphs and specify what happens when and under which conditions,” Oskin says. “It’s a very useful and quick-to-master tool, but it’s also quite powerful.”

When Frogwares speak of generating a city and plunging its streets into the depths, they sound a little like dread subterranean gods themselves. I suspect we might uncover more evidence of at least one more once The Sinking City comes to PC.
 

Zombra

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Are they reading my posts? This talk about hard core detective mechanics where you seem to be allowed to fail and miss stuff is giving me a weird warm feeling inside. Is this what you people call "hope"?
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Are they reading my posts? This talk about hard core detective mechanics where you seem to be allowed to fail and miss stuff is giving me a weird warm feeling inside. Is this what you people call "hope"?
I suppose I'm more of a LucasArts kind of adventure game guy in that I like it better when you have to solve everything properly to progress, tho I can see how someone would consider being able to fail utterly a key feature in a detective adventure game (I still feel a tinge of shame about failing my deduction in that vanished train case in Crimes & Punishments due to overthinking far too much).
 

Zombra

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I suppose I'm more of a LucasArts kind of adventure game guy in that I like it better when you have to solve everything properly to progress, tho I can see how someone would consider being able to fail utterly a key feature in a detective adventure game (I still feel a tinge of shame about failing my deduction in that vanished train case in Crimes & Punishments due to overthinking far too much).
I'm pretty much done with mind reading games (i.e. ones where you need to intuit exactly what one drunk designer was thinking, nonstop for 20 hours straight). Having to cut an electrical cable in half because it's too long to plug into things, or having to pour rancid apple juice on impassible thorn bushes so a goat will come eat them, and having the game become completely unplayable unless you guess to do these things (or cheat and look it up of course), is now beyond my tolerance level.

Not ripping on you Vaarna_Aarne or anyone who likes traditional "adventures", but I can't pretend I'll ever be that perfect any more. Games like this that promise to let me "fail forward" are the ones that will get my money. I'm OK with not getting the 100% Clues Found achievement as long as I can still catch the murderer.
 

MRY

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Having to cut an electrical cable in half because it's too long to plug into things
The customer is always right, but just as point of reference, actual manuals (example) for building scintillation detectors specifically warn against using cables that are too long. Given the signal loss from the connective putty, and general poor materials, Horatio's energy detector would simply not have worked with a cable that long. But as Aristotle says, a writer "should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities," and cutting a cable is probably a bridge too far. (With a plasma torch no less!)

(Also, it's not like the engineering in Primordia is all that realistic anyway, so to be sure you couldn't actually build a scintillation detector the way Horatio does. Don't try it at home!)

EDIT: I'm serious about the customer always being right -- the dumbest possible response to, "I didn't enjoy your game, it made no sense" is "You're wrong." Ultimately the game's job is to sell itself to the player; the player owes the game no obligation, having invested his time/hope/money/energy in the damn thing. I mention this not to disagree with your main point (you don't like traditional adventure game puzzles) or your minor point (that Primordia's cable cutting was obtuse), but just as a point of fact that the puzzle didn't come about via a drunk designer making things up, but a drunk designer doing superficial research.
 
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Zombra

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I don't mean to keep picking on Primordia. :) This was just the most recent example of the many times adventures have let me down.

The issue isn't that any one "puzzle" or solution is unfair or senseless; it's that the bottleneck for success in traditional adventures is as narrow as anything can possibly be without being completely closed off. You might say it's one pixel wide. There is exactly one thing I'm expected to do, and if I miss that solution for whatever reason, the game is over. (And if I do solve it, my next solution must be equally perfect; and the next, and the next ...) In Primordia's case, I wasn't aware that as a player I am expected to be conversant with scintillation detector construction manuals! And that's the point: I can never really know what an adventure game's author expects me to know or how he expects me to act, no matter how much I admire his writing and perspectives on a message board somewhere. :obviously:

So I celebrate games like Crimes & Punishments, where failing to "get it" leads not to a game over, but to a simple, "You missed that one, now keep going". The bottleneck is wide enough that I can play the game without reading the author's mind 100% of the time ... and to me, having failure as a viable option makes success all the sweeter. For The Sinking City to allow me to miss clues and make wrong decisions would be wonderful. But I'm probably reading too much into what was said in the article.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm quite comfortable with the customer being wrong. I work in a restaurant, and we don't want your money if you're going to treat the staff like garbage, for example. Any customer who cites "the customer is always right" is likely an asshole whose business we can do without. It's fine for adventure games to simply not be for me.
 
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Vaarna_Aarne

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I suppose I'm more of a LucasArts kind of adventure game guy in that I like it better when you have to solve everything properly to progress, tho I can see how someone would consider being able to fail utterly a key feature in a detective adventure game (I still feel a tinge of shame about failing my deduction in that vanished train case in Crimes & Punishments due to overthinking far too much).
I'm pretty much done with mind reading games (i.e. ones where you need to intuit exactly what one drunk designer was thinking, nonstop for 20 hours straight). Having to cut an electrical cable in half because it's too long to plug into things, or having to pour rancid apple juice on impassible thorn bushes so a goat will come eat them, and having the game become completely unplayable unless you guess to do these things (or cheat and look it up of course), is now beyond my tolerance level.

Not ripping on you Vaarna_Aarne or anyone who likes traditional "adventures", but I can't pretend I'll ever be that perfect any more. Games like this that promise to let me "fail forward" are the ones that will get my money. I'm OK with not getting the 100% Clues Found achievement as long as I can still catch the murderer.
Oh I definately agree when it comes to the enjoyment of deciphering coked-out madness the game designers can have in adventure games (I could only ever manage to play Darkseed with a walkthrough, and even then it was mostly worth it just for the Giger pixel art), but overall I feel Frogwares' games have avoided the worst sorts of moonlogic you might encounter in the genre. Like, most they get in this regard there after the moved out of ghetto production values with The Awakened (which still being the best HPL game adaptation so far makes me look forward to The Sinking City) is the times you need to combine items in your inventory and the order can be counter-intuitive, or when in Jack The Ripper you need to distract the police by fixing a perfume container and filling it with catnip and giving it to the fat prostitute who hates cats (albeit that's mostly just in that it's a very odd solution to the need to distract the police, they drop plenty of hints to the chemical's effect on cats and that the fat prostitute hates cats).

I think to me the thing about Crimes & Punishments and Devil's Daughter's shift in style, albeit I definately greatly enjoy both games and it's great to see Frogwares moving up in production values, is that I do get kind of stressed about possibly missing any possible clues or details. For me that mildly detracts from the enjoyment, but it's not really just something limited to adventure games anyway.

EDIT: And regards to customers being supposedly right, I also agree. One word of advice for storytellers that I think is overlooked far too much for how poignant it is:

Alan Moore said:
My approach to writing is never 'give the audience what they want' because the audience don't know what they want. That's why they're the audience. It is the job of any artist or writer to give the audience what they need, which is not the same thing as what they want.
 
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MRY

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"Give the audience what they want" != "in telling you how he feels, the customer is always right." The former describes pandering to the customer's state of mind before you have had your turn with him, the latter describes listening to his state of mind afterwards. Moore is right; your job is to meet the audience where it is, but also to lead them toward where you think they ought to be. But if in response to your efforts to do that, your audience says, "I don't want to go there," it's not really productive to disagree. You extended an invitation to them, they accepted, and then you let them down. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have tried; it doesn't mean you need to change what you do; but it does mean you failed.

So when a player says, "Primordia's puzzles made no sense to me," the statement, "But the puzzles are sensical!" isn't an answer. It might be a point to be made to third-party listeners (i.e., that just because the puzzles didn't work for him doesn't mean they won't work for you). But between you and that player, the only answer is an apology. (My policy is to typically offer someone who doesn't like Primordia one of the many bit-rotting keys I have from Kickstarters and charity bundles I backed with Primordia profits; it seems only fair, and I'll never get around to the games anyway.) Beyond the apology, it is usually worth considering the possibility that the player is not just accurately describing his own experience but also identifying flaw in the game that many others will experience as well. Players who are willing to take the time to tell you why they didn't like your game are giving a fourth gift on top of giving you time, money, and attention for your game: their judgment. Even expressed caustically, that judgment has value, and when expressed thoughtfully, it's a pearl.
 

Darth Roxor

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I'm pretty much done with mind reading games (i.e. ones where you need to intuit exactly what one drunk designer was thinking, nonstop for 20 hours straight). Having to cut an electrical cable in half because it's too long to plug into things is now beyond my tolerance level.

I have a cable
I have a cutting tool
Cable is too long

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE THE ANSWER TO THIS CONUNDRUM :x :x :philosoraptor: :shredder:
 

V_K

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The issue isn't that any one "puzzle" or solution is unfair or senseless; it's that the bottleneck for success in traditional adventures is as narrow as anything can possibly be without being completely closed off. You might say it's one pixel wide. There is exactly one thing I'm expected to do, and if I miss that solution for whatever reason, the game is over.
To be fair to Primordia, some of its puzzles had more than one solution. I think this is generally a good solution for this particular problem, although it does require a lot more work on the designer's part. Another is to have an open-ish world rather than linear narrative structure of most adventures, so that when you're stuck on one puzzle you could go solve something else and return later with a fresh mind. Goetia is a particularly good example of both, with a lot of freedom of movement and some RPG-like power-ups for you character that provide with alternative paths (until the late game, that is, when it throws two unfairly hard and unskippable puzzles at you).
 

Zombra

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The issue isn't that any one "puzzle" or solution is unfair or senseless; it's that the bottleneck for success in traditional adventures is as narrow as anything can possibly be without being completely closed off. You might say it's one pixel wide. There is exactly one thing I'm expected to do, and if I miss that solution for whatever reason, the game is over.
To be fair to Primordia, some of its puzzles had more than one solution. I think this is generally a good solution for this particular problem
It certainly helps! If I can guess what the devs were thinking (even the hard stuff) 90% of the time, and they give two solutions to every problem, then instead of reaching for a walkthrough every 10th puzzle, I'll only need one every 100th puzzle. Of course two solutions to every problem is way too much to expect. Another device I've seen occasionally is "gather 5 clues to solve the crime", and there are 6 clues to find ... so even if I would never think to check the inside of the light bulb socket in a million years, I don't have to because I can find the other 5 clues to proceed. Naturally other players might check the bulb first but have a hard time with the bookshelf, but that doesn't need to stop them either and we can both feel smart. I'll never forgive System Shock 2 for making me find all 16 of those fucking black eggs, can't miss a single one!
 

LESS T_T

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Glimpse of gameplay:



Welcome to our fifth The Sinking City update video. With GDC and EGX just around the corner, we are preparing to showcase the game for the first time to the public at these events. In this video, we wanted to show you the "in's and out's" of making a public demo - the highs, the lows, and the temptations that go with it.
 

Beowulf

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"Our goal is to show as much diversity as possible. Diversity of our gameplay features, and cultural aspects as well."

But other than that, they say things I like to hear.
 

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