KickStarter BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION - isometric post-apocalyptic adventure from STASIS developer

[Pyke]

Pyke, suggestion for your next project after BD:
isometric System Shock meets isometric Dead Space.

I really wanna do a take on Star Trek. A captain and a crew going on cool adventures. Even have a fireflesque ship. Now that would be a fun adventure game to make... :D

 

[Metal Hurlant]

I made a thing:

I originally thought this was a cross between D&D and W40K.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-isometric-post-apocalyptic-ad/posts/1798870

THE WORLD OF DESOLATION

As far back as during the development of STASIS, both Nic and I spent time discussing several ideas for future projects. During these conversations we kept circling back to a vivid post apocalyptic world.

A story revolving around a similar theme to STASIS: family. The idea of two brothers, transported to another world fell beautifully into place in a post apocalyptic African dystopia. This setting was a feature of our original story. It was different, inspiring, and considering our location - achievable! For research, we just had to open the door and step outside.

MARK AND DON

While STASIS focused on the a man's desire to save his wife and child, BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION will be a story about brothers. A story about love, loss and accepting the errors of the past and moving on.
Creating this dynamic is a challenge, but something that I think that we can achieve.
Just as The Last Of Us showed the connection that a father can have with his daughter, BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION will showcase a brotherly bond.

AFRODORA

Post apocalyptic worlds are the perfect vessel for exploring. The desire to walk through an abandoned city, and the idea of solitude that is obtained by stripping away of societies niceties. A lawless world combined with the anti-hero always makes for compelling stories. However, that sense of danger and exploration has started to wane. How could we create a world where that 'thing' over the horizon was new and different? Where the world felt truly alien, but still tangible?

Our 'Tribal Punk' art style...

TRIBAL PUNK

Early on we decided that we wanted to show off the incredibly diverse fauna that Africa has to offer. Africa is a rich foundation to draw from and to build on with giraffes towering over the tree tops to herds of elephants leaving wakes of destruction in their paths. We plan on taking local African folktales and myth and twisting it into the social construct of our future apocalypse.

The effects of the Penrose are felt like ripples in time and as such this is reflected in local attire. A mix of technology and necessity is showcased on the daily lives of the local Denizens.

This will make for interesting puzzles and quests that weave through the narrative, and touch on the lives of inhabitants of this place.

P.O.O.C.H - I am sure this stands for something

POOCH

Pooch is affectionately labeled after the nickname of our Labradoodle, Chelsea. ‘A boy and his dog’ are a strong motif that can be an illustrative bond between two creatures. Now, what if that dog could speak and had a precocious attitude? Like with CAYNE and STASIS, we're interested in telling personal stories. A motto of ours has always been to write about ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

Pooch, Mark and Don will need each other to survive this harsh place and we know that you will connect with them instantly in a world of desolation.

 

[Grotesque]

Pyke I think the real problem with reporting on Kickstarters isn't that many Kickstarters have failed, but that it's increasingly uncomfortable to report on what comes across as well, panhandling. You don't want to come across as a site that considers its reader base as a sort of charity mailing list. "Look who needs your money this week, friends!"

And that's why folks for posts like this one we need a "Go fuck yourself" post rating icon/tag.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-isometric-post-apocalyptic-ad/posts/1800833

Something ate the pirates...

A NEW SCREENSHOT

The downed cargo plane is nestled between the monstrous stumps of long dead baobab trees; it will never fly again. Electronic and mechanical components have been long since been stripped away leaving behind an empty husk that's been slowly reclaimed by nature...

LINK TO 4K IMAGE: http://i.imgur.com/SFTonBp.jpg


CLICK THIS IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL SCREEN


The cargo plane was once a refuge from extreme weather conditions and its occupants flourished, however, that was before the warlord, Blahyi, claimed the territory as his own.

Electricity is in high demand and those who control the flow of power control the world. Without electricity, technology is little more than scrap metal. High voltage current is the currency of this new world.

This supply depot is in the hands of battery pirates. At most times the reputation of Blahyi is enough to stop anybody from wandering too close and a depot like this would be heavily guarded.


But something was here ...

... something even Blahyi's warriors couldn't fight against ...

... and the crackling fire means that it's still close ...

ISOMETRIC ART
I've also been flexing my creative isometric muscles and I generated a new fan image, I give you:

ZELDA AS AN ISOMETRIC GAME (NINTENDO ARE YOU LISTENING?!): 4K IMAGE LINK: http://i.imgur.com/cv9UKnF.jpg


ZELDA ISOMETRIC

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-isometric-post-apocalyptic-ad/posts/1801507

KLINGON ANYBODY?

Hey Guys!

We are 76% of the way to our target - we can do this!

Please tell a friend about BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION or better yet, grab them a discounted copy. I had a request from a supporter about putting his beloved cat into the game, and at the $449 tier we will do just that.

On With the show!
Localization is an important factor when gamers decide if they will play a game or not.

We wanted CAYNE, as well as our future games, to feature as many languages as possible. Allowing multiple translations opens up a much wider audience and makes it more likely that non-English speaking sites will feature the game.

STASIS was in English and 6 additional languages, with Turkish coming a little later.

More languages = wider audience and more exposure.

So for us, CAYNE's multi-language support would be importance to its success. Although 60% of our gamers play in English, a massive swash of players wouldn’t experience the game as we intended if we didn’t allow for localization.

Building a translation system into the engine at an early stage meant that we needed to ensure that no text was hardcoded into the game. All of the strings that are displayed (even English) are read out of a language database on the initial load. If we'd left this to a later stage in development it would've been a mammoth task to replace every string. Furthermore, as we test in English we'd possibly miss language display bugs.

My advice to game developers is to separate language data from the main game engine and treat all text as external from the get go, don't try and jam this into the engine at a later date - you will regret it.

With this in mind we also considered fan translations. CAYNE has 8 languages at its launch date and I'm aware that a few more are being produced by fans at this very moment.

IN BRIEF
Our translation system doesn’t discriminate about where it gets the string data. As long as the data is formatted correctly it can be loaded at runtime into the engine.

The ‘official’ translations are loaded from the resources folder (this is not exposed to general users) however, when CAYNE launches it checks to see if the translation folder exists, and if so, it checks if there are any languages that have been included. Using this method we can separate fan translations from the official translations.

TEXT FILES THAT CONTAIN THE TRANSLATION DATA


It also allows easy data sharing – just unzip a file into the translations folder and select the new language.

FANCY STUFF
Technically what happens in Unity is the following:

The User selects a language.

The game loops through the data-files that are specific to that language – each data file contains a specific simple schema (I went with a typical ini type structure because JSON would be confusing for the translators and is far more syntax error prone).

CONTENTS OF TRANSLATION FILE
Example:

[entry_7]
id_0=THIS IS THE MOUSE OVER NAME
data_0=THIS IS THE DESCRIPTION...

The game only stores the language that the player has selected - it loads those strings into a language array.

Every Text Object has a script attached to it. This script contains an ID. The ID relates to where the string sits in the array. So when the player calls a description, it just hops on over to that array, at that specific ID and displayed the correct string. There are a few cases where I do a forced update of all strings in the game when a language is selected, but this works in exactly the same manner.

I did break the translation input files into separate text files but this was for sanity sake and organization. They could've easily been in a single text file.

NOTE: Use Unicode UTF-8 and renamed the .txt file to .bytes when using Unity.

LOG FILE OF THE TEXT LOAD IN PROGRESS...


Commonly a game will load all of the languages into memory (either from a loc-kit or from hard coded strings) when the game starts, however, because our games are so text heavy this could cause issues later on. STASIS has 65,000 words! If I extrapolate that over 8 languages, we're looking at an array containing 500,000 words! It is unnecessary, so I chose only to load the single language set at language selection, treating all languages as separate runtime data (including English).

Interestingly this is why the spinner that indicates the game is loading when CAYNE first opens doesn’t contain the word ‘loading’ – because the text database hasn’t been loaded yet. There are some simple ways around this but nobody has noticed so far!

Roboto.pl did a smashing job and ensured we nailed down the larger language sets.
We had a great opportunity to get some of the languages sponsored by partners. In turn for some publicity, as well as a nice resume item. Polish, Spanish, Turkish and Italian were provided by these partners. If you are looking to get your product localized, please consider sending some work their way – you can try out the translations in CAYNE if you want to get a feel for their quality:

MAIN LANGUAGES & POLISH - www.roboto.pl

OSCAR PARDO – SPANISH - opardo86@gmail.com

TECHNOGAME – TURKISH - http://www.technogame.net

VINCENZO MARINO – ITALIAN - vincenzomarino.tp@gmail.com

If you'd like to take a look at the translation system, download CAYNE and open the game folder, you will find all the info neatly packaged and ready to go.

We'll be able to offer BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION both with official and fan translations. We are very excited about the possibilities.

Talk soon,

Chris & Nic

 

[Boleskine]

http://www.pcgamer.com/beautiful-desolation-from-the-makers-of-stasis-seeks-support-on-kickstarter/

Beautiful Desolation, from the makers of Stasis, seeks support on Kickstarter

By Andy Chalk 16 minutes ago

The crowdfunding campaign runs until the end of next week.


Beautiful Desolation is an isometric post-apocalyptic adventure being developed by The Brotherhood, the South African studio behind the 2015 sci-fi horror adventure Stasis. It was first revealed last fall with a brief teaser and a couple of screens, and more recently it's gone to Kickstarter, where the developers are seeking $120,000 to support its creation.

The Kickstarter has actually been underway since mid-January and is making pretty good progress so far, having amassed more than $92,000 in pledges with 11 days to go. It also offers up some new details about the game, including a few minutes of gameplay footage taken from different parts of the game world, some new screens, and a breakdown of what it's actually all about.

"1980 saw the Penrose appear without warning or fanfare. One day the sky was empty, and the next it was filled by an impossibly shaped monolith. Governments laid claim to this magnificent structure and assembled an investigation team to learn about its origin and purpose," the Kickstarter pitch explains. "Penrose technology was reverse-engineered, accelerating our understanding of physics, materials and computing by centuries. Mankind hurtled forward on an alternative historical trajectory. The world rejoiced..."

And then, of course, the cryptic twist: "Discovered at the very heart of the Penrose, a terminal revealed an unencrypted line of text: 'I WILL FIX THIS. MARK LESLIE.'"

Mark Leslie is one of the main characters in the game, a scientist who by all rights should not have been aboard (or even in the same solar system) as the Penrose prior to its arrival. As to what he will fix, the short answer would appear to be history: Humanity, having been handed the keys to paradise, does what it usually does and makes a mess of it all.

Beautiful Desolation tales place in a post-apocalyptic Africa that promises to open up "a menagerie of bizarre creatures and vibrant characters, alongside a new landscape inspired by Sub-Saharan flora and fauna." To create those environments, the studio is making use of scale models and photogrammetry, the technology behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, "to capture the beauty of Africa."

I really enjoyed Stasis, so I hope Beautiful Desolation comes together. If you're not familiar with the game, The Brotherhood released a free prequel chapter, Cayne, in January, which you can take for a spin here. The Beautiful Desolation Kickstarter runs until February 18. Find out more at desolationgame.com.

 

[Pyke]

Magic!

 

[axx]

Noble thing of Chalk to bring this project back to spotlight. Kudos also to Fargo, Sawyer and others who have retweeted your post. I see a lot of positive energy, they are generally enthusiastic and want this project to happen.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-isometric-post-apocalyptic-ad/posts/1802604

“The end comes soon. We hear drums, drums in the deep..."

We learnt a lot while crafting an audio experience for STASIS and CAYNE.

George Lucas famously said that "sound is 'half of the film' experience". We think that sound is even more important in interactive media and we take great care in building a detailed audio pallet for our players.

When producing the sound for STASIS, we started by watching as many 80s sci-fi and horror films as possible. What we often do is turn off the picture completely and then dissect the background audio atmosphere. Something that you will notice first is that film always has some sort of backtrack playing. Subtle ambient sounds and music is used to prompt the mood of the viewers. They use this to great advantage in horror films where silence replaces the background sound and is as powerful as an orchestral score.

Both STASIS and CAYNE play an ambient ‘back track’ for the entire duration of the game, including over menus and cut scenes. You probably haven’t noticed it, but it is there - subtly piecing everything together. We also include an infrasound layer. This low-frequency sound can apparently cause an emotive response of awe or fear.

We then have scene specific ambience. For instance, a passage in CAYNE may feature mechanical sounds in the far off distance or a garbled PA announcement.

The next layer pertains to scene specific sounds, a whirring fan or a crackling electric fuse.

We've found that creating this multi-layer soundscape further immerses and engages the player.

Often with the newer gaming engines, sounds are post processed at runtime. This means that reverb and other special effects are applied while the game is being played. Our games are 2D and we feel that it we would have more control over the sound if we applied the effects prior to adding them into the engine. This is a stylistic choice that we may revisit at a later date.

On top of the soundscape, we then add a musical score that attempts to convey the mood we're trying to create in this area. This music shouldn’t overpower the events but rather add a rich audio experience to the action unfolding. When we created STASIS we wanted an instantly recognizable melody. Mark Morgan wrote a hauntingly beautiful piece of music which we then based all of our other musical tracks on.

MUSIC OF BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION
This world of DESOLATION gives us the opportunity to create a unique musical score. We plan on creating a fusion of African drum beats, Maasai choirs and the iconic synth sounds of the 80s.

When the game moves into full time production and we start to work with our chosen composer, we'll bring in the strong melodies and weave them into a beautiful and unique soundtrack.

The trailer music was the first piece we created as an attempt at the rough direction we want to take the musical score. In 2 minutes we travel from the 80s through to the alien sounds of The Penrose, and then end with the wonderfully twisted sounds of a post apocalyptic Africa. While all of these scenes are vastly different in their design, the music brings it all together.

INTERVIEW REDUX
twoleftsticks.com did a really nice write up on DESOLATION, you can read it here: http://twoleftsticks.com/beautiful-desolation-refreshes-the-apocalypse-a-tls-interview/

Created by the South Africa-based team The Brotherhood, Beautiful Desolation is the studio’s follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2015 title Stasis. Now, The Brotherhood sticks with what they crafted so masterfully in Stasis, as they present another vision of a world unlike ours.

“I have been a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre since I first saw Beyond Thunderdome. If there was ever a genre that I felt as passionate about as I did sci-fi horror, it’s post-apocalyptic,” The Brotherhood’s Chris Bischoff said. Inspired by what he saw at a young age, Chris wanted to capture that sense of wonder in Beautiful Desolation.

“There was this feeling I had when I played Fallout and wandered out into the unknown… that’s the feeling we want to capture in Beautiful Desolation. The openness of a world that is familiar yet alien, that feels tangible, but has a hint of magic and fantasy around it.”

More here: http://twoleftsticks.com/beautiful-desolation-refreshes-the-apocalypse-a-tls-interview/

MENTIONS
PCGAMER.COM had a nice write up about BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION.

http://www.pcgamer.com/beautiful-desolation-from-the-makers-of-stasis-seeks-support-on-kickstarter/

“I really enjoyed Stasis, so I hope Beautiful Desolation comes together. If you're not familiar with the game, The Brotherhood released a free prequel chapter, Cayne, in January, which you can take for a spin here. The Beautiful Desolation Kickstarter runs until February 18. Find out more at desolationgame.com.”

...

GEEKNODE reviewed CAYNE and said "A unique yet unsettling insight into the world of Stasis"

http://www.geeknode.co.za/2017/02/review-cayne-torment-continues/

SHOUTOUT
BANNER SAGA 3 - "The highly anticipated final game of an award winning trilogy. It's a role-playing game merged with turn-based strategy, wrapped into an adventure mini-series about Vikings." is on Kickstarter - if you like strategy games (who doesn't?) - then head on over there:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/banner-saga-3




Talk Soon,

CHRIS & NIC

 

[Pyke]

Noble thing of Chalk to bring this project back to spotlight. Kudos also to Fargo, Sawyer and others who have retweeted your post. I see a lot of positive energy, they are generally enthusiastic and want this project to happen.

They really have been fantastic to us - I cant even begin to thank them enough for the support.

 

[Jaesun]

Damn! Didn't know you had a Soundcloud site. Following!

 

[Pyke]

Damn! Didn't know you had a Soundcloud site. Following!

I just signed up for the update - but Im gonna add lots of stuff to it in the future!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-isometric-post-apocalyptic-ad/posts/1804234

The early days of CAYNE

Before I dive in to this update, we hit $100k! Congrats to everybody involved.

To celebrate this, we've made an awesome addition to the DELUXE tier ($149 and up) - and that is a limited edition CAYNE box. I must stress that this is a limited run and we won't be able to offer this once the stock is all sold.
You can find out more on the campaign page, along with view a few more pics.

LINK TO THE KICKSTARTER PAGE TO SEE MORE...

DELUXE PACKAGE
PROTOTYPE
As any game developer will tell you, it's vastly important to prototype gameplay before committing excessive resources to the development process.

We're a tiny studio, so we needed to make sure that we could build CAYNE quickly and efficiently. We had STASIS as a model to emulate in function and form so we had an existant blueprint of what we needed to do. CAYNE wasn't supposed to be ground breaking (we're saving that for DESOLATION!) - we wanted to further refine the STASIS interface as well as improve areas like animation and graphic fidelity.

Unity has a fantastic asset that allows a rapid creation of adventure games. We chose Adventure Creator - http://www.adventurecreator.com/

“Adventure Creator is a fully-featured Unity extension that takes the headache out of developing your own adventure games. Its flexible design allows for traditional 2D point-and-clicks classics like Monkey Island, cinematic epics like The Walking Dead, 2.5D keyboard-controlled games like Grim Fandango and even physics-based tablet games like The Room.”

We allowed ourselves ONE WEEK to see if Unity would be a viable platform for this genre of game. While I tinkered with Adventure Creator, Chris created a ‘test scene’ graphic.

PROTOTYPE IN ADVENTURE CREATOR


After importing the graphic into Adventure Creator we had something playable in a day or so. We wanted to build our own framework but AC helped us understand where we'd need to focus our efforts and how to wrangle the Unity beast.

So knowing that Unity was capable of creating a 2D isometric game, and starting fresh, we began testing a few of the systems we would need. I feel that AC is capable of producing a game like CAYNE but being the control freaks that we are, we programmed and built our own framework rather than relying on a third party solution.

EARLY BUILD OF CAYNE WITH PLACE HOLDER GRAPHICS

I USED OLD STASIS GRAPHICS AS PLACEHOLDERS FOR THE CAYNE MENU
CAYNE wasn’t presentable at this point in time but we had to work out the movement and path system before Chris could start generating the animation files.

We then iterated the prototype until we had something playable.

MENU IDEAS - WE DID A FEW OF THESE UNTIL WE GOT TO 'THE BABY' AS IT EXISTS NOW
The lesson learnt here is start building something quickly - don't spend months trying to get the right look in the scene - that will come. Rather get a playable demonstration out as soon as you can. It may seem like straight forward advice but us creative types tend to obsess over the details. When using a rapid prototype strategy I give myself ONE WEEK to hit each milestone. This ensures that you keep yourself motivated and on track to actually completing something.



IT'S ALIVE!
We're going to do a Kickstarter LIVE QA on MONDAY next week.

Head to Kickstarter on (don't worry, we'll remind you just before):

MONDAY, 13 FEB - 12 am PST / 8 pm GMT

See you there!

- Chris

P.S.
UnDungeon is a beautiful and complex Action/RPG pixel art game on Kickstarter. There campaign ends in 60'ish hours, so don't miss out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...geon-pixelart-action-rpg-with-roguelike-eleme


Looks so pretty!

 

[Infinitron]

Got this email:

JUST ANNOUNCED!
By Chris Bischoff

Hi Adventure Gamers,

To celebrate the amazing progress BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION has made - I have the pleasure to announce a free bonus add on to our backers.

YES, this is really FREE!

Here's the deal:

Any backers who pledged at $149 (or MORE) now get this reward
at no extra cost.

Let me tell you exactly what you get:

• You get the SPECIAL EDITION DESOLATION BOX of with red foiling.
• You get this LIMITED EDITION CAYNE box.
• Your name is used in game story.
• Your name is in the credits.
• You get BETA access to play BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION before anybody else.
• You get the Digital Art Book.
• You get the Digital Soundtrack.
• We also throw in an EXTRA digital copy on Steam or GOG.
• You get the DELUXE version of STASIS on Steam or GOG
• You get the DELUXE version of CAYNE on Steam or GOG.
• PLUS you get exclusive backer news & wallpapers...

The printing costs for this box are high and I need to order them 200 at a time, so I need to put a limit on the amount of CAYNE boxes that we have made

I can't guarantee that these will be available after next week.

Click here to check out the campaign and grab this CAYNE box.



CAMPAIGN UPDATES:

We've broken the $ 100,000 mark! That means that we have just $20,000 left to raise THIS WEEK.

Here are the latest campaign updates - read them and let me know!

THE EARLY DAYS OF CAYNE

CINEMATICS

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

MAKING AN ISOMETRIC GAME

BUILDING A SCENE IN ISOMETRIC

DOOOOOOM

THE WORLD OF DESOLATION

PIRATES GET EATEN

TRANSLATION SYSTEM

SOUND DESIGN

Feel free to pop in and say hi to me on the Kickstarter comments page.

CHRIS & NIC

P.S

Thanks for the support and have a wonderful weekend!

If you haven't played CAYNE, you can get it free at STEAM and GOG.

 

[agris]

Pyke did you guys make a box for STASIS like the Cayne/BD ones?

 

[StaticSpine]

Almost $105 000

 

[Metal Hurlant]

agris Yes, there was a box for Stasis but not the same as the ones for this current Kickstarter. These one's look better. I'm pretty stoked that I'll get a Cayne box set. That's three boxes from all three games for me.

 

[toro]

Magic!

Pledged by codex cause I'm a potato whore.

 

[Pyke]

Pyke did you guys make a box for STASIS like the Cayne/BD ones?

We do have a double DVD box with the OST. I think we have a few left over - if you drop an email to studio@thebrotherhoodgames.com we can make a plan.

 

[paintinggrey]

I really hope that the puzzles are a lot harder than Stasis, I felt you got everything right with the atmosphere and music but the puzzles are way too easy, well for me at least. Yet again atmosphere looks great in this one.

 

[Pyke]

We have some really cool ideas for the puzzles, with giving them multiple solutions and as well as a (RPG inspired) skills system that will allow us to play around with some very interesting ways of solving puzzles.

 

[V_K]

We have some really cool ideas for the puzzles, with giving them multiple solutions and as well as a (RPG inspired) skills system that will allow us to play around with some very interesting ways of solving puzzles.

WANT. NOW.
Would back immediately if I weren't in the middle of moving to another country and up to my ears in debt because of that. But now it's a for me for sure.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

(RPG inspired) skills system that will allow us to play around with some very interesting ways of solving puzzles.

Woah, tell me there's melee combat and I'm backing this.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG