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Ascent of Ashes - Colony Sim Set in a Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia; also with Vehicle, RTwP Combat and Alien Pets

cyborgboy95

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Aug 24, 2019
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https://camlanngames.com/portfolio/ascent-of-ashes/





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ABOUT THIS GAME​

BUILD A NEW HOME​

Build your survivors a base where they can rest and trade stories between adventures. Farm crops, tame alien beasts, incorporate salvaged technology and fortify your home against hostile intruders
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ENGAGE IN DEEP TACTICAL COMBAT​

Prevailing in combat will require more than just point-and-click. A detailed hit simulation and health system will mean that even non-lethal hits can render a survivor unable to go on. Suppressive fire might pin an enemy in place, but the ammunition used up may leave you ill-equipped to fight the next encounter effectively
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DRIVE RESTORED VEHICLES​

It's a big world out there. To get around you will need better transportation than your legs can provide. One of the things setting Ascent of Ashes apart from other games of this genre is the ability to restore and drive vehicles.

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LEAD YOUR SURVIVORS​

Each survivor has their own unique personality and motivations. As colony leader it is up to you to find and recruit capable survivors to fill gaps in your roster against ever increasing challenges. Can you keep everyone happy, secure and motivated?

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EXPLORE A STRANGE NEW WORLD​

You will find yourself in an expansive, procedurally generated world filled with different biomes and points of interest. To survive the post-apocalypse you'll have to brave the pre-collapse ruins and the many dangers that they hold.

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CHALLENGE A DYNAMIC AI​

It's not enough to just have an in-depth combat system with a variety of mechanics. You also need opponents capable of using those mechanics to challenge you. Enemies will possess varying degrees of intelligence. Taking on a disorganized band of raiders will play very differently from fighting a squad of well-trained Remnant soldiers.

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FROM THE ORGINAL CREATORS OF COMBAT EXTENDED​

Combining the deep simulation of classic post-apocalyptical survival titles with the tactical challenge of classic real time and turn-based gems, the original creators of RimWorld's heralded Combat Extended mod present a fresh take on the colony sim genre that emphasizes exploration, tight balance and strategic gameplay.

MODDING SUPPORT​

Our team has its roots in mod-making and we've been fortunate to have been part of many great modding communities over the years. That's why with Ascent of Ashes, we want to give something back to those communities. We're building the game's engine from the ground up to be easily extendable, and thanks to our extensive experience in creating mods ourselves we know exactly what kind of support mod-makers need. Ascent of Ashes is a game developed by modders, for modders.
 
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normie

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Character Customization and You
Hey guys.

It’s time for another dev log. Usually I use these to give you an overview of the progress made over the last two weeks. This time I’d like to do something a bit different and take a deep dive into one aspect of the game in particular.

One of our major goals for Ascent of Ashes is to make sure each survivor feels like a unique character with their own distinct personality. This is easier said than done, seeing as we’re generating them procedurally for each game, rather than writing stock characters by hand.

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Survivors, not faceless pawns. The goal is to make sure every one of them is a unique character.
To be memorable, characters need to distinguish themselves in ways that matter to the player, meaning they must be different in how they interact with the gameplay mechanics. Looking at XCOM for example, many people have tales about a rookie who took down a sectopod with a clutch critical hit, or a sniper who always missed their shot when it really counted.

The other requirement for characters to feel distinct is for players to be able to distinguish them in the first place. An RTS game might have one particular unit perform great acts of heroism, but it’s hard to tell when it looks exactly the same as every other unit.

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That is why we’ve put a good amount of thought into how we can make sure that players can tell apart who is who during base management and combat. “But Max,” I hear you say, “survivors all have individual names, isn’t that enough to tell them apart?” This is technically correct, a name does allow telling one survivor apart from another. The problem however, is that text is a poor way of conveying information.

When you see letters on a screen, your brain has to work overtime to identify them as letters, parse them, then combine them into a word that has some meaning associated in your memory. According to studies this process takes as much as 60.000 times as long versus processing visual information like images. What we need is a way for players to look at a survivor and immediately tell who they are, without reading their nameplate.


In real life, we can tell people apart by their individual facial features, hairstyle, skin color, and so on. The problem is that our art style has facial features largely abstracted and even if they weren’t, you spend most of the play time in a zoomed out camera perspective where any such details disappear. Hairstyle and other body features are largely covered up by clothing. Therefore, if we want to make characters look unique, their clothing is precisely what we need to work on.


With an art style omitting facial features, a character’s look is largely determined by their outfit.
Making unique and good-looking clothing is not as simple as you might think however. For starters, we still have the issue of the zoomed out camera. That means that minor details quickly fade away into noise. Our clothing designs must therefore use fairly large details and accessories that players can still see from their bird’s eye view.

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Concept sketches like this are easy to set up and allow us to quickly evaluate how well a particular design fares when viewed from an ingame camera perspective.
Another problem is build optimization. Since different apparel items provide various stats and benefits to your survivors, players will generally try to equip whatever is the most optimal for their situation, or the most convenient. RimWorld for example has players setting up crafting bills for long-sleeved shirts or t-shirts depending on climate, with one particular cloth that is in ample supply, and before long everyone is running around in identical uniforms.

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Military body armor may offer superb protection from bullets, but makes for samey survivors if every suit looks identical.
Our solution to these problems is to keep the actual gameplay apparel fairly high-level and generic, while providing a way to customize each survivor’s individual appearance: by interacting with a wardrobe, you can bring up a customization menu where you can define which visual variant and color tints you want for each individual survivor.

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Interacting with a wardrobe allows you to customize the appearance of each survivor to your liking
While the variant gives you a unique look and indicates which type of apparel item your survivor is wearing, the primary and accent colors create consistency between different outfits. Even if you swap out one apparel for another, you’ll still be able to identify your survivor by their unique color combo.

With this system in place, you’ll be able to tell exactly who it was that turned a losing fight around with a clutch shot, who is always lounging around the rec room, and who turned an entire faction hostile with a botched attempt at diplomacy.


Two styles of overcoat, side by side. Even zoomed out, it’s easy to tell a poncho from a duster.
And if you don’t feel like customizing everyone by hand we have you covered as well: by default everyone generates with a random combination of colors and variants, so you don’t need to dive in if you don’t want to.

This about wraps up the apparel system for now. We hope you enjoyed this look into the kind of things that factor into our design process, more to come soon.
Until next time, stay safe and keep surviving.
 
Joined
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art looks fine, even good to me, does not bother me, like the combat shown, not sure why some dudes have TV's on their heads, maybe they are robots? But the game looks pretty cool, hopefully someday it will come out..
 

Norfleet

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Jun 3, 2005
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Of course the art looks fine. That's because it's FAKE. There is no actual game.
 

Victor1234

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Dec 17, 2022
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This game is from the creators of the Combat Extended mod for Rimworld. Cautiously optimistic.
Emphasis on the word cautiously. I like the mod and never play without it, but it's very micro intensive for an otherwise streamlined game that make big fights a pain especially. They seem to realize that it might be an issue so they've started to introduce some options into the mod (setting firing modes automatically based on range to target was a huge step forward) that do make me optimistic for their standalone game though.
 

normie

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Combat Update - Simulated Accuracy
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Hey guys,

Today we’re looking into the art of pointing a gun at people. Contrary to popular opinion, hitting someone with a projectile several hundred meters out is far more complicated than simply pointing a cross-hair at them.
Spotting the Target
It’s hard to hit what you can’t see. The first step is to spot and identify your target. At a gun range you’re typically shooting well-lit paper targets standing out in the open at a specific range. Unfortunately, real targets aren’t quite that easy to spot. Ambient conditions like poor lighting or heavy rain can make it difficult to see out at a distance. Large animals wandering around in the open may be easy to spot, but intelligent enemies looking to stay hidden will reduce their profile by crouching and use surrounding objects for concealment.

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You also typically don’t have the luxury of knowing the exact range to the target. This is important because bullets don’t fly in a straight line, but follow a parabolic trajectory that is further affected by drag forces and crosswinds. Therefore to hit a target further away requires raising the initial angle of the barrel higher. Getting the range wrong can cause your shot to fall short or overshoot.


There are more factors to consider, such as barometric pressure, the distance between sights and bore, and so on. However, given that Ascent of Ashes is not a sniping simulator, most of these are too minute to bother with individually and can be abstracted under an individual survivor’s shooting skill. For target ranging we can reuse the visibility mechanic that already exists within the game: as you gain better vision on a target, your accuracy improves accordingly.

Got you in my sights
Once you have your target, the next step is to line up your sights. First-Person Shooters like to dumb this down to a simple cross-hair and bullets flying in a straight line from the center of the screen. Given that we want skill-based (in)accuracy, that won’t do for us.

We can mathematically determine a maximum angle of inaccuracy easily enough using a formula based on the shooter’s dexterity, shooting skill, their current stance, and so on. However, we don’t want inaccuracy to be a static angle, so we need some way to randomize it. A simple approach commonly used is to have each shot using a random angle within a cone. This works, but leads to very unsatisfying results as shots fired in rapid succession simply fly off into random directions with no rhyme or reason. Instead, we can use a mathematical equation known as a Lissajous figure to determine inaccuracy.

By evaluating our Lissajous curve with the current game time, we can generate a consistent sway pattern for our weapons. That means if you fire multiple shots in a burst, they’ll be grouped roughly within the same area of the pattern, rather than being at opposite ends of a cone. To make sure each gun has its own pattern, we add the weapon’s hash to the current time as a unique offset. It even has some performance benefits as we avoid expensive calls to our pseudo-random number generator.

Managing the Recoil
Those of you who paid attention in physics class know, each action carries an equivalent reaction. As a firearm expels a projectile and high-velocity gases out one end of the barrel, the same force that accelerates them also accelerates the gun into the other direction. This creates a vector of force that forms a fulcrum with the shooter’s shoulder or hands, leading to torque and the muzzle rising upwards.


The physics calculation behind this is fairly complicated, depending on many different factors such from the cartridge’s powder load and burn time, barrel length, grip ergonomics, etc. Fortunately we’re not trying to simulate recoil to the nth degree of accuracy. We can approximate something reasonably close from factors we already track, such as projectile muzzle velocity and weapon mass. After calculating the raw physical forces we get our final muzzle rise by adding a skill component and some randomization to account for the fact the shooter would be acting to bring the muzzle back on target.

Mechanical Deviation
While machines can achieve a degree of accuracy far higher than a human, they aren’t perfect either. Even with perfect aim, you will still see some degree of mechanical deviation from individual differences in bullet shape, powder load, barrel condition, etc. While Match ammo is made specifically for high accuracy in competition shooting, buckshot from a shotgun will produce noticeable spread. Fortunately, this is the one case where simple conical deviation is sufficient, and once we apply it we have the final (in)accuracy for our shot.

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This wraps up today’s look at accuracy mechanics in Ascent of Ashes. We hope you enjoyed the overview, and we’re looking forward to showing these mechanics in action soon.
Until then, stay safe and keep surviving.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The minimalist art style kinda fits the apocalypse, I think. I would prefer something else, but it's not too bad for the setting.
 

normie

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we have a gameplay trailer, boys

Ascent Of Ashes Has A Brand New Gameplay Trailer!
Hello Survivors!

As we had announced our our socials a couple of days ago, Ascent of Ashes just got a shiny, brand new gameplay trailer that you can't check out below!

We won't spoil it for you but, so far, it's the most thorough trailer we've released and shows a lot of the stuff we've been working on in the past few months! What do you think of it?
 

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