Incline SHELTER update thread

[Xzylvador]

Don't do this kind of thinking. If it means what I think it means, it's counterproductive and self-defeating. I followed your game somewhat from a distance back when I registered on NMA (2009?), and I've always wanted to see where it was going (understandable you had to shelve it with the eye problem, though).

I think he said it because the last two/three pages or something (starting from "Hey shihonage , where's shelter?") were originally posted in the F4 launch thread.
At least for a while, that thread was about an RPG.

 

[shihonage]

For 6 years now I've been working in a gaming company. First 4 years were great. I really cared about this company and was behind major technical solutions that are being used to this day. But we got too big, and everything changed. Like many people I know at the company, who really cared and gave a crap about our work, worked on weekends, etc., I will either be getting fired or quitting this year.

I am setting up a measly source of passive income and I hope to be able to simply NOT WORK for a while. NOT to keep stacks of work scripts in my head, NOT sit under ultrabright office lamps, NOT have to deal with "management" or "HR".

Working on my own projects is impossible when I have a Real Job, there's too much code to keep in my head at once.

Previously I made a mistake of quitting my job for 6 years in order to work on games, and immediately ran into the issue of money ticking out of my bank account, which made it impossible to calmly work on something like Shelter.

If I manage to survive on passive income, I should be able to work on Shelter without this sense of money ticking away and "worry about audience demands". The only audience demands I care about, are my own.

This 4-hour Fallout video reminded me of why Fallout is the greatest RPG ever made, and why Fallout 3 started tremendous decline, which ultimately resulted in the SPIT IN THE FUCKING FACE that is Amazon's "Fallout: Rings Of Power [Armor]".

"Land this chopper, dipshit, I want to shoot something", finally we have Todd Howard-level dialogue in a TV show. We have arrived at Full Idiocracy, scrot.

Even my crappy 2007 trailer using early version of Shelter renderer with its funny "hurt" animations and FO:T graphics, had better writing and atmosphere than this show.



In 1997 we were given a masterpiece. Today, "Fallout" is dead. The Amazon show confirmed it.

Fallout was stolen from us; some crazy clown is wearing its skin, dancing under its banner, while millions of salivating idiots Consume Product, never knowing What Could Have Been.

What I want to do, after my job gets rid of me, is to just resume work on Shelter, quietly, at my own pace. The goal is not to create an entire game, but a limited demo, similar to Fallout's "Junktown Alpha demo", which was distributed IIRC on PC Gamer discs.

Proof Of Concept. Small. Contained.

I want to see if I can really make the engine parts work together to make the vision work. A vision of a franchise which inherits what I liked most about Fallout.

And no, Bethesda can't sue me. I will not be using proprietary Fallout lore like the 1950s themes, Radscorpions, Nuka-Cola, Deathclaws, Brotherhood Of Steel, or SPECIAL. You can't just stop someone from making a post-nuclear RPG of their own just because you own the rights to one post-nuclear RPG franchise.

But, those details are NOT what made Fallout stand out.

Fallout wasn't a carnival or an exhibition to visit. It wasn't a "game" with "levels to beat". It was a world, a harsh yet believable one, and you were merely a guest in it, entering at your own risk. It didn't try to impress you or emotionally manipulate you, you didn't feel the heavy-handed puppeteer behind the show. It merely showed WHAT its world IS, and thus, any feelings it may have generated in you, were genuinely your own.

This 2008 gameplay trailer, still using FO:T graphics and a simpler renderer, is 16 years old. However, it reminds me of direction in which things were supposed to go.



The next gameplay trailer showed skill use, inventory management, sidekicks, critters following player from encounters on World Map, town guards killing them and looting them, behavior-based attributes such as "Innocence [have not killed anyone]" and other ideas like PwRT combat.

It tried to do too much. Previous trailer was more on-point with the game's direction and had better examples of dialogue. And I'm no longer a fan of Pause-With-Realtime combat.



There was also this clip, "Interference", inspired by an encounter in Fallout 2, using Shelter's scripting language driving the entire encounter, i.e. it wasn't "hardcoded" into actual C code:



Finally, the current state of environment tiles ( tremendous work by Kaucukovnik ) and character graphics (by another artist).



To end this sentimental rant... I hope my passive income is enough to survive and resume work on this project in peace - when my job parts with me sometime this year. I need to make a small, playable demo.

 

[Habichtswalder]

Good luck on your passion project, man. Very must be annoying if a daytime job turns into sth. annoying.
The trailers are still looking good.

 

[Krice]

Working on my own projects is impossible when I have a Real Job, there's too much code to keep in my head at once.

How much code is too much? Why do you have to keep it in your head?

 

[shihonage]

Working on my own projects is impossible when I have a Real Job, there's too much code to keep in my head at once.

How much code is too much? Why do you have to keep it in your head?

Because that's what happens. You work a software job, you keep a lot of knowledge in your head, code and other structures. Then you try to work on game in your spare time and you need to switch to a completely different ecosystem, because a game is a complex thing of its own, with variety of interacting file/data structures, not to mention having to keep an understanding of the code itself.

Switch back and forth, back and forth between large "knowledge stacks"...

It's easier when you're in your 20s, but after you hit 40, it's no longer feasible, in my experience. Plus, I'm a "senior engineer" now, with more pressure to drive massive projects, no longer able to hide in a hole within a giant company. Things are not the same.

My former (last good) manager just quit our company to make his own games. He said the same thing to me - it's impossible to keep switching like this, the game project has to be your One Thing to ruminate on.

 

[MarathonGuy1337]

For 6 years now I've been working in a gaming company. First 4 years were great. I really cared about this company and was behind major technical solutions that are being used to this day. But we got too big, and everything changed. Like many people I know at the company, who really cared and gave a crap about our work, worked on weekends, etc., I will either be getting fired or quitting this year.

I am setting up a measly source of passive income and I hope to be able to simply NOT WORK for a while. NOT to keep stacks of work scripts in my head, NOT sit under ultrabright office lamps, NOT have to deal with "management" or "HR".

Working on my own projects is impossible when I have a Real Job, there's too much code to keep in my head at once.

Previously I made a mistake of quitting my job for 6 years in order to work on games, and immediately ran into the issue of money ticking out of my bank account, which made it impossible to calmly work on something like Shelter.

If I manage to survive on passive income, I should be able to work on Shelter without this sense of money ticking away and "worry about audience demands". The only audience demands I care about, are my own.

This 4-hour Fallout video reminded me of why Fallout is the greatest RPG ever made, and why Fallout 3 started tremendous decline, which ultimately resulted in the SPIT IN THE FUCKING FACE that is Amazon's "Fallout: Rings Of Power [Armor]".

"Land this chopper, dipshit, I want to shoot something", finally we have Todd Howard-level dialogue in a TV show. We have arrived at Full Idiocracy, scrot.

Even my crappy 2007 trailer using early version of Shelter renderer with its funny "hurt" animations and FO:T graphics, had better writing and atmosphere than this show.



In 1997 we were given a masterpiece. Today, "Fallout" is dead. The Amazon show confirmed it.

Fallout was stolen from us; some crazy clown is wearing its skin, dancing under its banner, while millions of salivating idiots Consume Product, never knowing What Could Have Been.

What I want to do, after my job gets rid of me, is to just resume work on Shelter, quietly, at my own pace. The goal is not to create an entire game, but a limited demo, similar to Fallout's "Junktown Alpha demo", which was distributed IIRC on PC Gamer discs.

Proof Of Concept. Small. Contained.

I want to see if I can really make the engine parts work together to make the vision work. A vision of a franchise which inherits what I liked most about Fallout.

And no, Bethesda can't sue me. I will not be using proprietary Fallout lore like the 1950s themes, Radscorpions, Nuka-Cola, Deathclaws, Brotherhood Of Steel, or SPECIAL. You can't just stop someone from making a post-nuclear RPG of their own just because you own the rights to one post-nuclear RPG franchise.

But, those details are NOT what made Fallout stand out.

Fallout wasn't a carnival or an exhibition to visit. It wasn't a "game" with "levels to beat". It was a world, a harsh yet believable one, and you were merely a guest in it, entering at your own risk. It didn't try to impress you or emotionally manipulate you, you didn't feel the heavy-handed puppeteer behind the show. It merely showed WHAT its world IS, and thus, any feelings it may have generated in you, were genuinely your own.

This 2008 gameplay trailer, still using FO:T graphics and a simpler renderer, is 16 years old. However, it reminds me of direction in which things were supposed to go.



The next gameplay trailer showed skill use, inventory management, sidekicks, critters following player from encounters on World Map, town guards killing them and looting them, behavior-based attributes such as "Innocence [have not killed anyone]" and other ideas like PwRT combat.

It tried to do too much. Previous trailer was more on-point with the game's direction and had better examples of dialogue. And I'm no longer a fan of Pause-With-Realtime combat.



There was also this clip, "Interference", inspired by an encounter in Fallout 2, using Shelter's scripting language driving the entire encounter, i.e. it wasn't "hardcoded" into actual C code:



Finally, the current state of environment tiles ( tremendous work by Kaucukovnik ) and character graphics (by another artist).



To end this sentimental rant... I hope my passive income is enough to survive and resume work on this project in peace - when my job parts with me sometime this year. I need to make a small, playable demo.

Its a really interesting concept for the game glad your getting back to working on it

 

[Krice]

not to mention having to keep an understanding of the code itself.

My experience is that the source code should not be hard to "understand" if you keep it clean and modular. I use project management data to track individual modules (.cpp files in this case) of a project. That way I don't have to remember what problems are in what source files. I find the actual game design much harder, especially working on my own RPG systems, that stuff is quite difficult to make.

 

[shihonage]

not to mention having to keep an understanding of the code itself.

My experience is that the source code should not be hard to "understand" if you keep it clean and modular. I use project management data to track individual modules (.cpp files in this case) of a project. That way I don't have to remember what problems are in what source files. I find the actual game design much harder, especially working on my own RPG systems, that stuff is quite difficult to make.

My code is far from perfect, and it has zero classes, which may have been a mistake. Nonetheless, I already released Monsterland on Steam, ASCII shooter with FAR dirtier code structure than Shelter, which taught me how to actually complete a project.

Code would be a lot easier to keep up with if I wasn't forced into office 3 days a week after RTO, where they changed my spot from a secluded corner, into something with corridor next to me and 2 conference rooms behind me. People are constantly yapping or passing in my vicinity. This "open office" is unworkable, and I end up catching up on work in off hours and weekends.

The work "knowledge stack" never leaves my head, really. And I am really, really, REALLY tired of it. I need to purge all that useless knowledge and fill my head with Shelter knowledge again, so I can move forward.

 

[Krice]

My code is far from perfect, and it has zero classes, which may have been a mistake.

Is it C with structs? Nothing wrong with that, you can make it structured (no pun intended) and clean as well.

 

[shihonage]

Yeah it's C with structs. It would've been easier if I made "actors" and "objects" and "inventory items" into a class. There are some fundamental data exchange issues that I had to overcome. Everything can be cleaned up, it's just a matter of whether it will take longer to clean it up, than the time gained by cleaning it up. Sometimes rewriting code is counterproductive, despite the common wisdom suggesting that it will "save time in the future". It's a lesson I learned.