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Void Bastards - strategy/FPS from Jon Chey of System Shock 2 and Bioshock

sser

Arcane
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Solid game, agreed. I'd say look for it on discount though - not only cause I think $30 is way overpriced, but also because it's likely to have better content by then.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Also they are still fixing stuff. Like right now you can't remap mouse buttons at all. You can map two different keyboard keys to 'reload' for example, but forget MMB!

One thing the Codex will enjoy though ... you are constantly killing children in this game.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...insights_from_the_making_of_Void_Bastards.php

Three interesting insights from the making of Void Bastards

At the end of May, Australian studio Blue Manchu released Void Bastards, a strategy/shooter hybrid that casts players as a rotating group of prison convicts conscripted to explore a deep space nebula to repair their prison ship.

It's a fascinating game with procedural elements that do a great job varying the player experience. On one run, the player character might be color-blind, but the ship they board has one group of friendly enemies. On another, the ship might have random power-outages, forcing the player to double-back to the ship's generator to keep the lights on. Combined with a clever oxygen system to encourage player action, some cheeky Commonwealth humor later, and you have one of the year's most fascinating indie releases to date.

Blue Manchu collaborator Farbs (just Farbs) was kind enough to drop by the GDC Twitch channel a week after the game launched. Farbs (who famously quit his job at 2K games by making a small Mario game) was kind enough to share some design insights from the making of Void Bastards, including what influences it takes from System Shock 2, how it approaches randomized levels, and how it creates his unique look.

Where did Void Bastards come from?
This is entirely head-canon for me, I wasn’t in the room I don’t really know what happened. But in my mind, System Shock 2 kind of had two leads designing it and that would have been Ken Levine on one side thinking about the story and the narrative and how that all fits together, and then John thinking up all of the different systems that actually run within that game and how they interact with each other.

vb1.jpg


If you look at the lineage of that game- so you’ve got Bioshock which was built as this spiritual successor and there’s been what…3 Bioshock games now? As you look at that you see that the Ken’s side of it’s really been built on time and time again and John’s sort of helped out a bit but they haven’t been John games. They’ve been Ken games.

This was really about having John have his turn at what if you know, there’s a story, but we approach this whole thing from: here’s a game system, and another game system and another game system and we let them all run and try and find a way for them to all work together in exciting ways.

That’s in my head what it is. It’s like an alternate reality Bioshock. What if instead of branching down in this direction it went that way. So it’s like an [alternate history] after System Shock 2.

I don’t know if [my role is] lead programmer or tech director or something like that but yeah I get the harder programming problems. That’s sort of my day-to-day on the project. When we started this project we staffed up a bit over time but when we started it was just three of us sitting in a room— well, not even in a room, three separate rooms.

Everything was just collaborative. I guess another way to think about this is we started with extreme grey boxing, right? Literally grey levels but very simple game systems and kept adding them and adding them. The early phases of the game was all just prototype, prototype, prototype.

To the point where the main game project is still in a folder labeled “prototype”. In terms of design contributions and things it was all sort of early on thinking about things like, you know “Do we need oxygen systems to speed you along?” “Do mines really work in this game or do we need to not have mines?” “What’s the game loop?”

We all spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. Like what are the actual penalties for death, what do you keep, what do you not keep…how do we want all that to work out? So It was interesting before the stream you both used the word rogue-like and that’s something we tried very hard not to make.

I mean you’ve got to think, at the moment people have started to talk about rogue-likes and rogue-lites...I think this falls on the rogue-lite side of the spectrum but that distinction was a lot less obvious back four years ago.

And so you know for us hearing the word rogue-like just meant oh yeah permadeath, you get one shot at this, its impossibly hard, and for us all of those games it was something that you’d play for a little bit and go “it’s going to take me 30 hours to play that first level again before I get good enough to actually win this game. I don’t feel like it.”

Whereas we would look at things like Rogue Legacy was a really helpful point for us there, where every time you play it you get a bit further because you’re banking your progress. And so that was something we really want to get from the start.

Making Void Bastards' randomized levels work
So our focus really was to not do that through the levels. You’ll notice that...the ships have actually been handcrafted and then there’s randomization within each one.

Sometimes there’ll be a wall here, sometimes this door will be locked. Sometimes there’ll be containers over here sometimes there won’t. The way that game engines really like to work is not very friendly for procedural generation. You want to bake your pathfinding data so that you don’t have to generate that at runtime.

You want to bake your occlusion data so you’re not drawing bits of the scene that should be occluded by geometry. All that kind of stuff runs better as an offline process as opposed to real time.

vb4.jpg


So our focus really— although you know, Jon Chey did a good job of varying things a bit and making sure that they can be randomized and mixed up. So I think the helms are a really good example of that. They all feel a little bit different because you know, maybe there’s a wall here, maybe there’s not. Maybe there’s a char, maybe there’s not.

With tweaking things like that, the navmesh and stuff at run time, but most of our randomization comes from all of the other systems. And so it’s from where do you actually enter? You’ll notice that each ship has multiple airlocks and so that gives a very different feel.

Where are you going? Like what part are you looking for? You can think about you now the easy ones like the FTL nozzle what’s going to be in the FTL drive? And so you don’t actually have to go to the helm for a map or anything you can just look at it, think about it, and go find it.

But that draws you to different parts of each ship. Our goal really as well was to create a game where you don’t most of the time try to clear each ship. When you go in you’ve got specific things you want to do, you go to those locations maybe you change your plan on the way and then you duck back out.

So that again is a way of varying your experience with each one. Cause you might go to a particular ship with the aim of getting fuel and the next time you’re there you go to get food and you don’t need the fuel.

And then we vary the enemies, and then we vary the ship traits, we vary the character traits, and all that stuff changes. And that’s what we did to try and create that sense of not always being in the same space doing the same thing all the time.

We also wanted the ships to make sense, right? To always have the drives at one end, the helm at the other. Stock them full of stuff that they would be full of. It was good to be able to do that by hand.

Using sprites to make Void Bastards look like a comic
The first thing we can’t do is full, 3D animated characters. It’s not gonna work. But we’ve got Ben Lee here and he can draw real good. So that’s why all of the characters in the game— well, most of them anyway, are sprites. And that seems to have worked out fine.

We were a little nervous about doing that at first, we thought people are gonna look at it and go “Oh it’s some shitty retro game” but we thought if we make it high-res, we make a modern attempt at doing sprites then that’s going to help.

vb2.jpg


So that kind of gave us a start. And as Ben started working through the concept of the game, like drawing environment concepts and characters and having ideas about what things might look like, it started to get kind of that comic book look. I think that’s partially through virtue of a style that he’s developed.

And not long after he did some concepts for what the world might look like using SketchUp, and when you make models in SketchUp you’ve got big, flat panels of grey and you have this line work everywhere. We saw that and just thought “yeah, that looks exactly right.”

We want the line work— which is a shame because that’s not a thing 3D engines like to do. So we then had to invest quite a lot of time in trying to figure out how to actually draw that stuff. And I think that’s a big part of what’s given the environment of the game its own distinctive look.

If you look down a corridor, you can see that the line near you are about one and a half pixels thick and they head off into the distance and they stay one and a half pixels thick, almost as if they’ve been drawn by the same pen. That’s part of what gives it its comic look. Normally in a game you know, something closer will be thicker and get smaller.

That’s one of the things that kind of helped us to do that. The other thing that I think really helped was we went into this project knowing that we wanted a distinctive visual style. We saw that that helped us a lot in Card Hunter, it seems that that had helped with Bioshock.

If you ever happened to walk past a video game magazine at this time it had a BioShock screenshot on it and just from the colors alone you could go “oh! I know what that game is.” We wanted something that straight away you could see it and go “that looks different. That looks interesting. Maybe I’ll check that out.”
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
Good interview confirming Ken Levine is a hack and not behind any of the fun parts of SS2.
 

Sarissofoi

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Mar 24, 2017
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761
A disappointing game.
Story and settings are not really funny or interesting. Hopeless is the right word.I get why people get wary from the start.
Gameplay is fine but is simplistic really. Ironman is hidden behind story mode completion and to be honest its just not good roguelike game.
In story mode all your clients are expendable and you progress through upgrade tree and amassing parts and resources. On death you only lose client perks and ammo. So best solution is just speedrun grab parts and evacuate. Just boring grind as there is limited ship designs and limited enemies. You usually don't have enough 02 to try to stealth or wait or bait enemy anyway.(at last early).
Ironmeme is better - early is pretty tense on highest difficulty levels but its always play the same with the same upgrades in the same order. You have hard time early but after you get few of them you should be fine as long you keep to low tier wreaks. You can amass enough food and fuel and merit to - if you decide to dive deeper - be able choose only doable(easy) salvages.
Overall idea is not bad but it lack content and ironmeme mode is really lacking in replaybility.
You don't really unlock anything like in FTL for example.
Having different starts with different starting equipment and different limited clients would be much better(especially if you can rescue some more clients alongside the game tom replenish your ranks), not having static upgrades would help too.
 

Jenkem

その目、だれの目?
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Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
if you want to play it without pirating it just pay the dollar to microsoft, it's part of the game pass on PC. I bought it and enjoyed my time with it but there isn't much to go back to after finishing it once, imo..
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
As a follow-up, I started a new game on Hard difficulty and lost interest almost immediately as I was still cleaning out ships with no deaths so it just felt like the same game again. Maybe I should try again on maximum ("Hard Bastard").
 

Sarissofoi

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The biggest problem is that even is idea is nice(scavenging derelicts for survival) and gameplay is not bad(even if repetitive) the game is just shallow.
Somebody mention FTL so I will use it as comparison(as probably most of Codexers know FTL at last from hearing).
First Story mode(that is actually only real mode) is pretty long, repetitive and quite boring. IT ALSO HAVE NO LOSE CONDITION. Essentially you cannot lose here. There is also no need for travel to deeper layer of the vortex as you can construct all parts(including quest one) from normal garbage resources(that all are only used for constructing parts mostly, you can sell some small amounts on K-Mart stations for merit but that is all). So you can beat it just by grinding. There is no pressure to go deeper but also little risk if you do. Clients are expendable and at worst you lose some good traits and spare ammo. In the end nothing matters really(the ending fit it perfectly).
>imagine FTL where if your ship is destroyed you get it back and what you lose is Crew EXP(and maybe extra Crew) and all extra stockpiled missiles/drones/fuel. also there is no rebel fleet coming afetr you and you can go back to previous lower level sectorsz to grind more resources
Extra difficulty increase enemy dmg and reduce player Oxygen plus some other stuff (like turrets reacting faster) which make typical speedruning more preferable if more riskier.
But that lead us to 2nd issue.
Upgrades.
They are completely linear and there is zero variation. Most upgrades are passives that either allow you to find more ammo(Hunter branch) for weapons and devices, allow hacking(and/or reduce cost - Managers branch), grant othe bonuses(like more HP or Oxygen, extra loot etc). Weapons have their upgrades too but they are again linear with next upgrade needing previous one.
That make game play completely the same all the time. Sure there is some devices that change things a little but they are available later and you can't get them early(its also impossible to find better parts in easiest layers and you would need grind resources to get them if you stay here). Sure you get stronger but gameplay don't really change.
There is also issue with weapons you can take to missions. There is 3 categories and you can only take one from each which lead of course to rather limited use of some and not allow many combinations.
Its also not really roguelike/lite/whatever as progress is completely linear.
Another thing is resource management.
You manage fuel(that is needed for travel and food that is use for healing and without it character lose health). Thing is Recovering HP is based on % of your max health. Which lead to tight early game9as low HP and not much food) but later food become plenty because single rest heal like few times more HP.
Not even mention that on regular difficulty HP amount allow to just run through most of enemies even in deeper layers.
Clients are mostly the same but still there are some traits that make game much more easier(or are necessary on harder difficulty when playing Ironmeme). Shallow Breather that reduce Oxygen usage is one(as without upgrades on Void Bastard difficulty you have really little time before you run out Oxygen), Brawny(that increase base HP) is another(again VB ironemem as you can take more punishment and heal faster/more effective, it later become obsolete with better armors), Sixth Sense(that allow see enemies on minimap) is amazing, Eagle Eye(that allow to see items outside containers on minimap) allow to easy plan and loot or Infiltrator(that increase time when security elements react). But they are only really i,mportant or Ironmeme mode.

Ironmeme mode is little better as it introduce scarcity(only one client) but it not add any pressure to go deeper(quite opposite as you lose all your progress) and after early game scarcity in ammo/food/fuel it became simple grind when player get few essential upgrades(like more HP, better healing, more Oxygen one). But its only available after player beat the whole game and thus is probably bored with the game already.

It would be much better as quick tutorial that let you unlock other starts(with different clients, starting equipment etc). Kind like in FTL where games are rather quick(sure there could be longer) but after beating game player unlock new starts. Having starts with limited amount of clients would be great too. Some pressure to go deeper also.
If upgrades/equipment wasn't linear it would be much better. Clients should be able to choose suits(that have different slots, resistance and caring capacity) that player then equip with weapons, spare ammo, devices, different types of radars etc. More weapon variety and weapon modding(with excluding upgrades would be good too).
Of course basic stuff like more types enemies/crafts/stations etc.

Also more utilization of stealth elements. There are some shortcuts/vents and luring enemy with noises already but currently just speedruning is mostly best option(even on ironmeme). making game more tactical would be good. Also having some rewards for eliminating all enemies/contain them into locked rooms to make speedrunning not that preferable. Changing whole upgrades table...
Well basically you would need to redone whole game.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014






https://steamcommunity.com/games/857980/announcements/detail/1581249578058330098

VOID BASTARDS BANG TYDY DLC ARRIVES ON SEPTEMBER 18TH!
That's right. In one week, you'll be back in the Sargasso Nebula

c0aa4914b33b2a4e8aed4e61cabc9e9f4b3bc789.png


It's time. It's time to BANG TYDY.

On September 18th you'll either be playing the Void Bastards BANG TYDY DLC, or you won't. Those are actually the only two options in this life.

If you decide not to buy the DLC, that's cool too, we've got a massive totally FREE update with new challenge modes that you'll get just for being awesome and owning Void Bastards.

That's it. I'm out. See you next week, clients.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Still not biting, random level generation just turns me way the fuck off. Wake me when it's <$10.
FWIW, map layouts aren't procedural, it's just the distribution of enemies and resources. The floor plans all make sense. Sometimes you'll find a rare mechanical part in the engine room, sometimes it's under lock and key in the captain's office. It all feels right for the idiom of the game.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
What else exactly has Cara Ellison worked on?
I know she did the writing on Void Bastards. Wasn't bad.
Haven't played the game, but first thing on wikipedia for Void Bastards is "received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised its comic-book art style, dark humor, and gameplay, but criticized its lackluster story and replay value." Not too confidence inspiring.
Maybe I was being too harsh in my first post. I don't know the first thing about this woman, but senior writer on a RPG matters more than senior writer on Fortnite. Some credentials are in order.
The "story" in Void Bastards can be summed up in 15 words. It's a popcorn game about looting spaceships in a comedy dystopia to try to put together the proper paperwork that allows you to be alive. (Spoiler, they kill you at the end anyway.) It would have been dumb to try to make it into some epic narrative. Moment to moment writing was certainly good enough for what the setting demanded.

I certainly agree that doing the writing for a game like Void Bastards won't win you a Pulitzer. Just saying, she has done more than write an RPS column.
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
The writing of Void Bastards is unremarkable. The game is fun, though, worth five bucks if you are a big rogue-lite guy - this one is an FPS one.
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
Game's free right now if you have Amazon Prime. Got it and so far it feels like an inferior Prey: Mooncrash but it has a nice art style.
 

DalekFlay

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Zombra I clicked redeem and it told me to download the Amazon client. Maybe there's a "just download" option somewhere I didn't see though, their MP3 does that.
 

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