Corpse Crew Alpha Version 0.4A (Want your input)

[asper]

Well, you know what to do.

Re-do Grimoire in the Unity engine :twisted:

 

[Wyrmlord]

Instead of just a prototype, actually sat down and did an inventory manager mockup in Unity. Took me less than an hour to have some crude inventory management including drag'n'drop of items from one slot to another.

Complete in-game GUI in Mono C# is a little easier to use than my C++ GUI for Grimoire. A 2 week job in Grimoire is like 2 minutes in Unity. Labels, toolbars, listboxes, text editor, icons, scrolling panes, buttons, widgets of all kinds come ready-to-use. If I went for a minimalist look like Fallout 3 it should be pretty easy to do.

By the way, there is something you need to know about these drag-and-drop-inventory systems.

In alot of inventory systems, some items take a larger amount of space than others. But even if there is space for an item, you can't "fit" it inside.

Like Deus Ex, which you just showed. A sniper requires 4 squares, but its inventory dimensions are 1 X 4. So even if you have 4 spare squares in your inventory. The sniper might not fit. You have to rearrange items to leave a 1 X 4 space to place your sniper.

And yet, a much much older game, Betrayal At Krondor, had the programming for auto-arranging items to make space for them. So that you did not have to bother with it yourself. All the game did was that whenever you placed a new item inside the inventory, it would arrange itself by placing larger items first, top to bottom and then left to right. And in all the residual space, smaller items for automatically placed.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I did some investigation into randomizing entire cities.

Since a lot of my building assets are standalone units, it's possible. I have changed from a continuous environment to clicking on a door to enter an interior like Fallout 3.

I don't think I will invest time in it but in researching it I have learned how to do an entire city map fairly briskly.

The secret is to layout the roads first, then the lots and expanses of concrete, then drop the buildings onto the lots. Then you add all the external detail, highly instanced overgrowth and tree foliage, then toss a ton of standard props around like streetlights, stoplights, signs and abandoned cars.

Since I have several themed sets of building assets I purchased, I can give each area it's own unique flavor pretty easily. I can have one region a typical suburbia and the next map a heavily bombed warzone. I figure travel between these maps will take place when there is enough fuel to put in your vehicle and get out.

Now that I am doing the interiors as separate scenes, I am thinking of using a tool like FPSCreator's map editor to flesh out an area, texture it with all the static features and then export it to Unity where I can then detail it properly. This might help me work really fast.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Now that I am doing the interiors as separate scenes

I hate that shit.

 

[Andhaira]

You should really put in a fully fleshed out bunker as an easter egg Cleve. Put in ThinkBoy as well.

 

[nomask7]

I hate that shit.

That's because you're a man of passion. (Whereas some of us have learned to compromise.)

PS. I liked, back in 1996, how in Resident Evil some zombies required more hits than others to take out, so there was often something intense about standing still (since you couldn't move while aiming) and popping a bullet after bullet into a zombie while it was scuffling closer and closer toward your neck.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

Has anyone SEEN anything of the game yet?

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Has anyone SEEN anything of the game yet?

Like that would be important in this discussion.

 

[Andhaira]

Isn't Cleve's word good enough?

 

[burrie]

Where are you getting your models from tho', by the by? I haven't found any place where I can get them fairly cheaply.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

Where are you getting your models from tho', by the by? I haven't found any place where I can get them fairly cheaply.

Turbosquid?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Where are you getting your models from tho', by the by? I haven't found any place where I can get them fairly cheaply.

Turbosquid?

Yeah, $620 for a zombie you can get free elsewhere on the internet.

Turbosquid is a net scam. If it isn't free, I advise you to look around before you buy anything off that site.

 

[Wyrmlord]

By the way, are you positively sure that making interiors seperate hubs from exteriors is a good idea?

There's just alot that a seamelssly integrated environment can do, like blowing up the zombie's head just as it bursts through the door. Or switching between fight the zombies inside and going to the balcony to fight the ones outside.

Look, do you have STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl? Just check up how they made the city of Pripyat in the game. You could be walking inside one of those abandoned apartment buildings, and you'd nearly be hit a by a railgun shot through the window from a mindwarped militiaman sitting on a balcony of a building far away. Also, it is the most detailed post-apocalyptic location ever made in a videogame, completely built to model the real city exactly as it is.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

By the way, are you positively sure that making interiors seperate hubs from exteriors is a good idea?

There's just alot that a seamelssly integrated environment can do, like blowing up the zombie's head just as it bursts through the door. Or switching between fight the zombies inside and going to the balcony to fight the ones outside.

Look, do you have STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl? Just check up how they made the city of Pripyat in the game. You could be walking inside one of those abandoned apartment buildings, and you'd nearly be hit a by a railgun shot through the window from a mindwarped militiaman sitting on a balcony of a building far away. Also, it is the most detailed post-apocalyptic location ever made in a videogame, completely built to model the real city exactly as it is.

I don't think I can handle the assets otherwise as a one-man band. I will have to create monolithic models complete and import them in one gigantic fell swoop instead of assembling them ad hoc from components in Unity. I might be able to consider it if I had a full-time guy doing nothing but assets/modeling but on my own I'm much better prepared to do it as interior/exterior environments. There's also the problem of culling and performance which adds a great deal of complexity to what is otherwise a straightforward affair using the Unity editor.

In looking over my massive catalogue of assets, I have realized I actually have enough for two games, one of them a supernatural horror and the other a zombie seige game. For example, I have some fantastic rotting zombies more appropos for an EC-comic book than a Romero style zombie fest, a floating dark Lich Lord nightmare, a shriveled troll, a half-man/half-dog creature that would look out of place in a Romero-genre zombie game.

I did an experiment last night with Google Sketchup Pro to see if I could import and texture a decent interior model for Unity3D with it and the experiment was a success. It takes about 15 minutes to do a decent interior using push/pull with Google sketchup and then if I go in and populate the static model with all the physics objects, control regions and game objects the result looks pretty good. In all fairness it looked so good because of the absolutely beautiful wall textures I purchased three years ago, rotting plaster and decaying wallpaper with bumpmaps and specular, astonishing results with very little work. I threw some rusty bedframes around, paper decals on the floor, put a swinging lamp overhead with realtime shadows and you would have thought you were looking at a grade-A console game on the XBox.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

... because I have so many horror-themed assets, I predict I am going to end up doing a Lovecraftian RPG using these game elements discussed. It's just proving easier for me to map this stuff than my post-apoc zombie scenario.

My assets look unbelievable in Unity once they have had their lighting baked and applied with shaders. Unbelievable.

 

[Satori (original)]

Are you putting most of your effort into this or Grimoire? What is your goal for this game, to simply be good or is it a stop gap till Grimoire?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Are you putting most of your effort into this or Grimoire? What is your goal for this game, to simply be good or is it a stop gap till Grimoire?

No matter what happens, I work on Grimoire two hours a day every day without pause. At the end of the day when I get home, I am using that time to R&D this game which I hope to have out before the end of this year as well. It would make me very happy to release Grimoire plus a Penumbra Overture style game in 2009.

I am curtailing my ambitions as of tonight, which were as of Sunday again getting so heady, extravagant and vast I was starting to think I definitely needed somebody else to work on it with me. I had put aside 16 high quality zombie models (each of them with different strategies and attack specialties), thought up 9 different huge maps that would be part of the game with thousands of resources and then began to plan out the intricate, detailed user interface similar to FO3. The way I was going I would be likely wrapping it up around 2024.

I got a grip on myself today. I've been thinking, what I need to do is think in terms of Penumbra Overture, a game which initially had around 8 hours of play, 2.5 enemies (mostly dogs) and which sold for $19.95 intended to be released as a serialized adventure.

I could break my massive sprawling maps into 9 different episodes and they'd be fun to play, each one of them. I could sell each one of them at $19.95 instead of all of them at $24.95. I think this is a far saner approach to the development as a series of small, concrete achievable goals for an indie developer.

If you could see the two zombies I picked out of 16 to go in this first area, they are pretty hair raisingly creepy. More Silent Hill than George Romero.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

You're just tempting us for a while before saying "NO GAEM 4 U", arn't you?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

... and look, I found somebody has put up a mini-game on the internet using the Unity Engine that is remarkably similar to my alpha version with the difference being I have about $400.00 worth of quality assets in my alpha version and you could leap out one of those windows and explore an entire city in mine.

http://www.wooglie.com/playgame.php?gameID=7

Very similar to what I had a week ago.

I am thinking now of incorporating the seige into parts of the story just like Resident Evil 4 as a natural part of the dramatic narrative. For example, when you first blow this death horn in the cemetary, you see all the zombies rising and have to pick a nearby building to shore up and defend - there's no way you will survive by standing your ground. This combines my burning desire to do a Lovecraftian style RPG, Penumbra Overture game and zombie seige mechanic all in one shot.

 

[Wyrmlord]

My goodness Cleve, have you ever had a full night's sleep in the past decade?

 

[Andhaira]

Cleve, you should programm Thinkboy to assisst you in game designing.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

You will have to see the screen shots of my New Orleans style Necropolis/Graveyard to believe it. Would give Anne Rice the creeps. I am learning a lot about the terrain editor doing it. One problem with Unity3D terrain is you can't as yet punch holes in it. I think I can fake cave interior pretty well with it, however.

 

[wrathofdog]

I give you my word, I am going to do a new map using everything I have R&Ded and will post some screenshots of that within two weeks.

6 days remaining! Will the Codex see screenshots? I can hardly take the suspense!

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Figured out the GUI system, got drag'n'drop designer working for GUI, learned how to make custom GUI skins for canvas system. Learned how to use GUI manager to open and close windows and interfaces, parent interfaces to objects onscreen.

Worked some more on massive master map. This is definitely looking like a Lovecraftian horror RPG at this point. All the assets I am using tend to look that way and my skybox is definitely eldritch full moon cosmic horror stuff. Thinking of doing something akin to THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Got radar going for motion detector! Looks amazingly cool as the zombie hordes converge on your position. Very useful for knowing what side of the building is under seige, as well.