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KickStarter Studio FOW's Subverse - Explore a wacky galaxy full of hot alien babes! - now on Early Access

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
Hmmm.
Something about shmup musics reminds me of Stardust.
 

oregano12

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Dev Diary #10 - Calamari Creampie
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Posted by FOW Interactive
October 14, 2019
Creator
Dev Diary #10
Beta Feedback

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the beta of our SHMUP module! The biggest surprise was the overwhelmingly positive response of the backers to the gameplay. Out of the 3,200 or so current participants, I can count the number of people who didn’t have fun on 1 hand, which says something about how well we nailed it. Still, there is still a long road ahead so we have to stay humble and focused. The dev team and myself read all the feedback so keep ‘em coming – and if you haven’t claimed your beta key yet be sure to head over to Discord and do so. (Note that you have to be a Beta Backer on KS) There's a 1-year Discord anniversary party going on right now so it's the perfect time to pop in!

The beta will keep running and we’ll add more stuff to test independently. There will indeed be more weapons and loadout configurations - based on which waifu you take with you as your copilot, no less...

And of course, style is paramount to these babes, so your copilots will get cute helmets when they’re in the cockpit with you…

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Squidgirl

Squidgirl modeling actually went much smoother than anticipated. I expected us to have a lot of trouble due to her…uhh…unique anatomy but as usual Dzung and his team did an exceptional job. I’ve attached a collage below so you guys can see her model from more angles. Like a true bounty hunter, she’s got a tool for every situation. Having a melee weapon as well as a ranged pistol means we can experiment with making her a “hybrid” type unit in grid combat. Can’t wait to see her in the beta testers’ hands once the tactical combat is ready for testing!

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We’re gonna take a crack at Empress Celestina’s model next, since she appears much earlier in the game than Sova. And she is actually a hugely important character in the game, and somebody I feel needs special attention, so it’s important to dedicate a bit more time to her model than originally planned.

Music

A lot of you have asked about the soundtrack and I’m here to reassure you that we haven’t forgotten about it. Music and sound play an integral part of our movies and we want to continue this trend into Subverse as well. We’re working with several talented, young and hungry artists who will be contributing to the game’s soundtrack. One of them is Fadent, whose “Time Apart” track will set the scene for some of the game’s key moments. It’s great to have him onboard and contributing to the Prodigium Galaxy! In addition, we'll have character themes in place for each waifu, navigation, grid/space battles, and some bosses! We've got it all covered!



VO

On a personal note it’ll be great to have the main actors back for Chapter 4 and I can’t wait for recording to get started. Samantha has been doing a great job setting everything up and making sure we’re prepped for the mammoth task ahead. Since we’ll be recording remotely for the most part, giving the actors as much lead-time as possible is important, especially for the newer cast members.

Next update we’ll hope to give some more technical insights into the game from the programmers themselves, to give people a break from all the art-stuff. See you then!

-DC
 

santino27

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Dev Diary # 11 - Planet-O-Matic
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FOW InteractiveCreator
October 28, 2019
Dev Diary 11
As promised, this week's dev diary will focus more on the technical side of things and lay out how we solved the issue of populating our galaxy with planets. Stalwart code-junkie One Eyed Jeremy here, and I'm here to explain everything in gory detail.

Our resident madman/director DC came down to our basement some time ago (was it weeks? Months? It has been so long we last saw the light of day…) and asked us to write some form of development tool to help us efficiently put all of your awesome planet ideas into the game. Because there are over 600 planets and nearly 100 systems in Subverse we needed a kind of easily-usable-editor to plot the galaxy out for the benefit of progression. The editor would allow the director to populate the world, essentially. He named it the Planet-O-Matic.

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Eagerly we obliged and started work on it. Since we’re all about Data Driven Programming (a quick explanation for those of you who don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-driven_programming), we figured we only needed to write a GUI to display/edit data: planets, and other orbiting objects, their respective loot events, their encompassing solar systems and nebula. All of these were already described in different Data Tables (Unreal Engine’s equivalent of good ol’ Data Sheets: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Gameplay/DataDriven/index.html).

Logically, we came up with the architecture depicted in the stack diagram:

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Figure 1 Planet-O-Matic Stack Diagram

Possibly one of the least complex systems we devised, the Planet-O-Matic strives for its simplicity: It features 2 levels in the UI layer (depicted in green), 3 in the application layer (shown in blue) and one data layer level (illustrated in yellow). The first layer, the UI, strongly depends on Editor Utility Widgets (https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/UMG/UserGuide/EditorUtilityWidgets/index.html). These utilities allow us to extend the UE editor and even run Editor-only code. They even come with several convenience methods (e.g. changing assets’ names, selecting all actors inside a umap, save a umap, etc.). In our current architecture, this widget-type comprises several other regular widgets, responsible for input and showing the planets/objects/solar systems’ attributes. However, it is worth noting that, Editor Code cannot run on regular widgets, even if they are components of Editor Utility Widgets.

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Making our way toward the second layer, we start with its upmost level: Widget Blueprints. As you Unreal Engine techies already know, user widgets (and their editor utility counterparts), already come equipped with the ability to edit/run blueprint logic. This is where the magic happens, namely which widgets to show, what happens when you click on a button, reading Data Tables, etc. Unfortunately, while Editor Widgets have some exposed code to manipulate aspects of the editor itself, it didn’t have available what we wanted. As such, we developed our own wrapper to expose ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) what we needed. This came in the form of a C++ Blueprint Function Library (so we could reuse this on other dev tools). This was easily achieved by creating a class deriving from UBlueprintFunctionLibrary and writing static methods for it (As a side note, editor-only code cannot go with code used in the game or the project won’t build, our solution to this revolved around creating an Editor plugin: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Programming/Plugins/index.html).

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In the end, we were able to write methods that allowed us to update data tables, delete assets, access UE4’s color picker and asset selector, play a umap in PIE mode, etc. While the latter 2 tasks helped improve our tool’s usability, the first one, updating data tables, provided us with a means to write on the data layer since UE4 already exposes data table reads.

This way, we could directly transcribe the user-inputted values on the layer’s data-tables without having to open them. In the end, it allows for users with limited UE4 experience to design rapidly and iteratively. With the foundation in place, our directors and artist can get down to the fun part, designing and implementing all the planets for you guys to explore. Thanks for reading!

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- OneEyedJeremy
 

Commissar Draco

Codexia Comrade Colonel Commissar
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Space ships in 2D Spaceh: Check!
Wombyn not resembling drag queens and dykes: Check!
Story more interesting and better than Capitalism and Patriarchy are bad M'kay?: Check!
Will be on Steam instead of Origin spyware from Glolious Han Empile: Check!

:d1p:
Take this Obshitian Cucks.
 

PulsatingBrain

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
https://www.kickstarter.com/project..._email_backer_project_update_registered_users

Update #31
Dev Diary #12 – Procedural Madness
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FOW InteractiveCreator
November 14, 2019
Dev Diary 12

Hello everyone, HungryJJ here, this week I’ll be discussing some of the space combat-related tech that I’ve been working on. I hope not to bore you all too much.

I want to share some insight on how we handle environments that are associated with the various levels you will encounter during space combat gameplay.

The goal was to make it easier for us to design cool-looking backdrops more efficiently so that when a player starts a space combat mission, the environment is relevant to the nebula and anomaly you are exploring.

As the space combat developed over time through prototyping, we noticed a trend of the most common environmental elements that we primarily used. Some of the examples are dust clouds, debris fields, relevant background scene objects (i.e. planets, suns, derelict ships, skybox), post processing effects, skylights and fog effects. With each element, we exposed corresponding properties so that anything can be tweaked. Depending on the element, these tweaks can manipulate color, scale, position, rotation, quantity and much more.

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The tool is setup in a way that all the compatible settings are exposed so that environment designers with limited experience can jump right in and begin creating a scene. Once a designer is happy with their scene, we can populate the configuration onto any mission and override the look if necessary. They can also serve as templates for a specific type of mission. E.g. a mission through an asteroid field in the Hydra nebula would generate asteroids with a green nebula backdrop

It was important to us to provide some variation in the environments to the player, in order to make their experience cohesive whilst traveling through the Prodigium. Even subtle changes in the space scape like tweaking a star’s intensity can provide a different visual experience. Enough talk, here are some example screenshots of the settings we use, and how it translates into a procedural environment ingame thanks to the streamlined tools.

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The modeling team in the meantime has finished up Empress Celestina. She’s looking good, check her out below.

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We've also been finishing up some "Mantics" (your pets, or should I say Lily's pets) that the player evolves and breeds inside the Lab. Ugly critter, aint he?

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I hope enjoyed this small insight on what we have been up to. Look forward to sharing more results in the future. Later.

-HungryJJ
 

santino27

Arcane
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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
New update:

Dev Diary 13 – Thanksgiving
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FOW InteractiveCreator
November 28, 2019
Dev Diary #13
Hello pervs, Director-sama here - first of all, on behalf of the team I would like to wish all our American supporters around the world a very happy Thanksgiving! Now let us give thanks for DAT ASS:

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So this week we are gonna be talking about some of the Kickstarter rewards and their status as we near the super-busy holiday season. I know you guys have a lot of questions regarding the release date of 1.0, but if the movies have taught me anything it’s that you should never reveal your release date too early – we’ll let you guys know of the release date when we’re confident of hitting it and not a moment sooner.

Studio 69/Smenchkin
These were completed a few months ago, and we’re working on testing a few mini-games out for Studio 69 since it’s way ahead of schedule. They're just silly little “Yakuza” type minigames at the moment so we can see what works and what doesn’t. If it feels like we’re just tacking stuff on then it’s not gonna be worth putting in, but I have an idea for a little mini-currency system in S69 that lets you view some funny stuff that has no effect on gameplay. We’ll see how this pans out and keep everyone updated.

Calendar
Pretty much on schedule and should release at some point during January 2020. Creating these pages served as a great exercise for testing the limits of some of the models, so we killed two birds with one stone and didn't have to hold up development in any other areas. The pictures need some tidying up and its gonna be either me or beamwire that does it, so we’ll see if we can get them ready for Jan 1st. It will be the first time you guys get to see some of the waifus in risqué poses, so I expect many boners to be popped! It will also be the first time you'll see one of the final waifus to be recruited...

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Curious Colonists
Planets are being implemented as we speak! Overall there were massive logistical issues with this one as many of the entries needed serious editing for a variety of reasons (copyright infringements, not being written by native English speakers, business advertisements, etc.). We let literally anybody submit stuff, and it became extremely convoluted. As a result, I’m never doing another “design-your-own” anything probably ever again, but at least it was a harsh lesson learnt…

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Boin Boin Weekly
I’m still waiting on art from a few people, but as soon as everything's received we can implement the magazine pages and start populating the planets’ loot tables with them. I actually really liked how this reward turned out. There were a lot of very creative and funny submissions, so thank you to all the Boin Boin Weekly Editors!

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Space Whales
We’re starting principle animation on these in December, and a lot of the scenarios are quite interesting to say the least! Most of the animations the spacewhales wanted were focused on the xeno side of things, so in order to maintain the balance we replaced some plans for our own xeno animation ideas. After all, we’re trying to keep the majority of the scenes focused on the Captain. Fear not, xeno lovers - more scenes can always be added after 1.0 is released if there is large demand.

Art Book
As of writing, we’re looking at about an 80 page artbook filled to the brim with waifu sketches, hairstyles, ship and weapons, storyboards, and whatever else we could thrown in there. We won’t have a lot of environmental concept art, because I have very clear vision for this game and I’d rather spend the money on the devteam implementing that vision.


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Mangaka
This one is turning out spectacularly well - I’ll hand the floor over to V.Mantis, who is our Japanese translator, and also the guy who has spent the last 6 months locked up in my den, attempting to translate my lunatic ramblings as politely as possible to legendary mangaka.

-------------------------------------------------------

Hello, everyone! I'll keep this as short as I can; I'm not usually known for brevity.

I go by V. Mantis for professional stuff (the people from the Fantia might recognize me as フォザン), a name I decided to use to keep my family name off of things because some blood-relatives aren't very nice people. Right after I finished my first novel, StudioFOW put out the call for a Japanese translator. I hadn't gotten to use my degree for anything yet - yay, job market - so I applied, expecting to never hear back. Instead, I've spent nearly a year trying to work with Japanese artists and our insane director.

These are artists, after all, so there's been some ups and downs - I know as well as anyone how temperamental artists can be sometimes - but luckily StudioFOW has been gentle with me (I haven't had to Nihongify anything too much) and things have worked out better than I ever expected. The job's been a blessing I never saw coming, and these kinds of opportunities are what I live for. I’ll be translating the manga for you guys early next year, so we get an accurate as possible translation.

I hope y'all enjoy what we cooked up with the help of these wonderful people across the water. We’ll have no less than FOUR manga for you guys to peruse – all of them take place in the Prodigium galaxy and can be considered non-canon side stores. The artists are all stellar names hentai fans will recognize - one of them, in particular, was a recommendation from me. A collaboration between a videogame studio and mangaka have been a long time coming, and I'm sure you'll cry tears of joy. Anything else can be submitted to FOW-chan in mail-safe vials.

~ V. Mantis"

Sounds like another new dev studio has learned the lesson of design-your-own-content tiers in Kickstarter. :P
 

oregano12

Educated
Joined
Apr 14, 2019
Messages
42
Or maybe porn is the last bastion untainted with SJW bullshit !? Different strokes for ...

I have a hard time believing these 20 whales were thinking on the IZ-JAY-DOUBLE YOUS while coming up with scenes of aliens banging hot chicks.
 

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