Incline SHELTER update thread

[toro]

It's official. I quit my job to work on games.

I already did this. It ended bad. This is no joke. After 1-2 months, you will realize the truth: that you are pretty much fucked.

But I wish you good luck. And I would donate for your project if you decide to use kickstarter or a codex campaign. Think about it.

 

[eric__s]

I don't have much to give right now but if you do run a Kickstarter, I'll definitely chip in.

 

[Kos_Koa]

You live in San Francisco right? I lived there so I know how expensive it can get. Hopefully you can make it all work out without compromising your sanity. Good luck man!

 

[villain of the story]

Here's what you should do, shinohage: ask around for the Codex AWESUM RPG feature checklist, promise to deliver all of it and beg for money. Maybe we can raise a few thousand bucks if that will help you and you can always scam us once you got the money.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

It's official. I quit my job to work on games.

Just wanted to wish you luck, we are all counting on you.

Seriously, I hope this works out for you. I'd be scared to bits to try that but with great risk comes great reward, so all the best.

 

[dextermorgan]

Good luck bro.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Good luck! I'll be keeping tabs on this project that I managed to not know a thing about despite the 4 year old videos.

 

[DaViLLaN]

Ant status on this?

 

[shihonage]

Development to be resumed quite soon, avatar bro.

 

[shihonage]

So, let's review the temporal line... via a wall of text.

In October 2010 we (back when there was still a "we") decided to suspend Shelter development and make Dead Colony to create financial stability that would let me quit my job and work on Shelter full-time.

My collaborator (at the time) underestimated the amount of time it would take to convert our adolescent game project from 1996, formerly written in DOS using interrupts and direct screen access, into an actual game. He thought it would take 3 months. I knew it would take an indeterminate amount of time, because I also had to deal with a full-time job. After 2 months he dropped out.

By that time I already ported it to Windows, wrote a new renderer, mastered SDL's OpenGL interface for 2D sprites, wrote a new level editor, and was too far in to abort. Should've still aborted, though. It took too long. My job ate at my eyes and psyche, and dry eye syndrome crippled my speed.

Shelter's been suspended since October 2010. Everyone's forgotten about it, it disappeared from voting threads, games started going through Kickstarter, old-school titles from well-known developers started making a comeback, Fallout-inspired indies and mods started surfacing... and some guy took the Shelter name on IndieDB for his mobile card game. Haha.

In August 2012 I quit my job because I couldn't tolerate cubicles and managers any longer, and started eating into my savings (rent in San Francisco is fun!) to finish Dead Colony.

Dead Colony has been recently released, and although I stand by the fun value of it, the visuals don't generate enough interest in people to bother with it. It is a complete project, but not a successful one. It taught me a lesson about appearances and almost made me wish I was writing MUDs instead.

Recently I had another idea for a money generator. This time it would be on mobile! I would write the prototype and hand it off to a buddy who would push a mobile version, so I don't have to oversee the entire development cycle.

It comes to this: if I don't write the core prototype of this third project, "Dispatch", by tomorrow evening, I'm dissing it and resuming work on Shelter.

After 2.7 years, I cannot bring myself to invest energy into another financial failure. It's easier to accept failure if my heart was fully in it, because then the time spent on it wasn't wasted - it was genuine self-expression, creative growth.

But Shelter is my self-expression, other projects - not so much.

I wrote the core of Dead Colony as a teenager and it represents something I considered fun in 1996. Shelter represents something that I consider fun now.

Regardless of whether I quickly write the prototype for "Dispatch" or diss it, there will be a new Shelter video not too far from now, and people will no longer ask how I got rain effects into fucking Fallout: Tactics because it is no longer going to look like a fucking mod for Fallout: Tactics.

Like I said - some lessons were learned about appearances.

 

[Excidium]

and people will no longer ask how I got rain effects into fucking Fallout: Tactics because it is no longer going to look like a fucking mod for Fallout: Tactics.

 

[shihonage]

"Shelter" has been renamed, partially due to oversaturation - right now there's a post-apoc card game that took its name, and today "Shelter" the animal simulator was approved for Steam greenlight. There's also a post-apoc Flash game called "2012 Shelter".

And mostly because the name no longer suits the non-post-apocalyptic setting, and I wanted to change it for the past 6 months. There's no nuclear war, and no nuclear shelters.

The new name is "Compound".

 

[shihonage]

Note about these screenshots: the only non-original art in them are the light-colored doors and the cursor. The artist and I started experimenting with wall tiles. Apparently they only work well being perfectly rectangular, otherwise there are large vertical seams at the corners, as can be seen here... Floor tiles are of my making, of course, which is why they don't stitch properly.



Oh and the PC is standing with his back to the NPC because he's buggy cool that way.

 

[shihonage]

I all but made up my mind to resuscitate another project, the prototype of which I wrote in 2007 and then abandoned. Unlike Compound/Shelter, it satisfies every requirement of a successful one-man indie game.

It used to be called "CTU", it is procedural, emergent, requires minimal amounts of art, is original, unique and deep, and it can be sold as a growing alpha.

Compound is a niche game for a narrow audience with questionable ROI in an increasingly saturated indie market. It was never planned as a one-man project, but my cousin left in 2010.

When FO:NV came out, the community's thirst for a true spiritual sequel to Fallout appears to have been soothed, and no longer feel the demand will be there. At its heyday of active development, my game attracted a small amount of attention. Simplistic hipster shit like Bastion or Shadowrun Returns will always look better and attract more.

People (and I) love to have emergent adventures in procedural worlds. CTU is not a roguelike, it's not an RPG or an RTS, but possibly a new genre. I've never played anything like it before, and have a good feeling about its appeal.

I wasted 3 years working on Dead Colony, and not a single indie game review site picked it up. Not even for a mediocre review. All my submissions were ignored.

I don't feel it for "Compound". The drive is gone. It will not come back until I stop feeling like a failure and can afford to work on my ugly moneysink lovechild at my leisure.

I need a success in my life right now. Something that is exciting to work on, something that *I* can play and enjoy (despite writing it), and something that can be prototyped quickly. Like, a month of work on the existing prototype to get the basic elements rolling, if my new dry eye pills work.

"CTU" is it. I actually want to work on it. I see a success there. If I don't work on it, I may lose the drive to create games entirely.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Pretty much the way I see things with the S&S series. I have a more accessible project in the works as well. If you have a successful game you'll have a community to pitch your larger project to. They'll tell you if they want it or not. And if the flagship is successful enough you might finish Compound anyway, just for your personal satisfaction and regardless of actual demand.

It may still be a pipedream but at least not as bad as one huge project that is doomed to fail on its own.

 

[tuluse]

I would really love to play Compound, but you make CTU sound interesting too. Can't wait to see it.

 

[Kaucukovnik]

Don't tell me you are going to abandon the game just when I was getting enthusiastic about it!

...narrow audience with questionable ROI in an increasingly saturated indie market...

Do you wanna make an RPG or do you want to study and satisfy the market? I understand it's a real concern especially for an indie dev, but on the other hand there is no big reason to support your opus magnum with other game projects, unless you just enjoy coding them that much. And you are risking getting fed up with it all (as is already happening) before you ever reach your main goal.
Make the game primarily for yourself. If you compromise it AND it commercially fails, you will be twice as mad about it.

Or become an internet celebrity, be loved by everyone and any pixellated retro shit will make you filthy rich. Good games don't get recognized just because of being good anymore.
I'd never think I'll be saying this, but all this is mostly caused by creative tools and means of distribution being so easily accessible, and in hindsight I'd almost rather wish that game, music and video creation remained exclusive to those few chosen who are skilled and patient enough. PS4 with its Share button will just make our internets explode.

If I had the budget, I'd start a very Wiz8-like semi-blobber with user friendly construction set. But because I don't, I spend my free time doing the next best thing - improving Wizardry 8. Maybe going low profile and obtaining funds another way would actually let you develop your dream game in more relaxed manner and slowly, but steadily get there.

If you are truly passionate about your side projects, disregard what I said.

 

[shihonage]

Kaucukovnik : Veering out of our PMs for a moment - I will be discussing with you the possibility of keeping Compound on slow burn if you will be able to design levels for it. First I have to plug in the new art you sent me and figure out how to teach you the editor, and also decide on means of compensation, if any of this is coming true.

Dead Colony was a continuation of what I thought was cool at 19 years old. Compound is what I thought was cool from 20+ years old. CTU is what I thought was cool from 30+ years old.

It is not a throwaway project, this is something I wanted to do after Compound, quite badly. Both Compound and CTU are "for myself", and I see them as incline. CTU however satisfies a ton of other requirements for timely success.

It's not a pretentious indie game. It's not a mobile game. It's not a hopeless resuscitation of a childhood project.

In a month I should be able to find out if CTU prototype is, or isn't, working, in the very basic fashion. Level design and scripting took the longest fucking time in Dead Colony. With CTU that's not an issue.

Also, Compound and CTU share the same language and parts of codebase. Dead Colony was written in Pascal, which complicated matters further.

 

[Saduj]

Been keeping tabs on Shelter/Compound through NMA/Mod DB/Codex for a while and it is definitely the kind of game I like to play. So from a selfish standpoint, I was happy to see the newer screen shots and then disappointed to find out it is on hold again.

But I'd never presume to tell you how to proceed with your career as a developer and it sounds like you have solid reasons for your decision. Best of luck with CTU. I'm a little unclear on the concept but maybe its the kind of game I like to play and I just don't know it yet.

 

[shihonage]

Thanks to Kaucukovnik (environment/level design) and my character artist, this is a small teaser video of Compound featuring no graphics borrowed from any other game, with possible exception of SMG item bitmap.

There hasn't been a new video in years, and, though my former collaborator circa 2010 believed them to be pointless wastes of time, they're important to me because they serve as reminders of the desired atmosphere, and give a sense of progress. In this one, the progress is in the fact that the game should no longer be easily mistaken for a Fallout: Tactics mod.

There's a lot of work to be done in both mapping and programming, and at the moment the plan is to give CTU project a shot (let's see if I can make the basics playable before New Year's) while Kaucukovnik designs Compound tiles and maps and I make minor code upgrades in Compound to accomodate his editing needs.

I also have to resume work with character artist... our character animations are not complete... and we'll have to do non-human lifeforms as well...

 

[Davaris]

Cool music. Its got a 28 Days Later feel to it.

 

[Quilty]

Any new info on the CTU project?

 

[shihonage]

Any new info on the CTU project?

My eyes have been getting worse (I have severe dry eye syndrome which has lately created other symptoms like worsened night vision and J.J Abrams' light halos), which makes it really hard to read code. It's much easier to look at video than text. So I mostly was narrowing down gameplay mechanics, algorithms and UI on paper, old fashioned way. It is 80% clear to me that this project will work as intended. Leaving other 20% for something catastrophically unforeseen.

For the past 4 days I've switched to a promising supplement which had encouraging trial data. Maybe I'll be getting my eyes back. I can't comprehend people who can just look at computer screens without moisture goggles or eyedrops and their eyes don't explode. I long for the time when I can just have the luxury of coding without feeling a ticking endurance timer behind my eyes. It makes focusing pretty fucking impossible.

 

[hexer]

My eyes have been getting worse (I have severe dry eye syndrome which has lately created other symptoms like worsened night vision and J.J Abrams' light halos), which makes it really hard to read code.

I've battled with that for years and now I'm fine. PM me if you want medical advice on how I got rid of it.

 

[Hobbit Lord of Mordor_]

Just watching a piece of the playthrough... same post-apocalyptic non-postapocalyptic garbage as in FO3 and NV. She talks to the doctor, and doctor says things like "let's talk about you and your health" and "I can't recommend [other doctor] highly enough".

It's as if the NPCs live in our normal world and just vacation into the desolate wasteland for a few hours now and then.

Hey shihonage, where's Shelter?