Incline Das Geisterschiff - turn-based cyberpunk dungeon crawler

[lightbane]

I'm disappointed you didn't make a "red, blue green" joke in these "alternate color modes". Also, you forgot to add a button to skip content if you want to make it more player-friendly.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I'm disappointed you didn't make a "red, blue green" joke in these "alternate color modes".

That would be too boring and too predictable.

Also, you forgot to add a button to skip content if you want to make it more player-friendly.

Insta-win the battle as a $0.49 microtransaction? Where have you been all this time?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

The cockteasing ride never ends.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Posted the postmortem on Gamasutra.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RomanusSurt/20190412/340291/Das_Geisterschiff_Postmortem.php

Das Geisterschiff Postmortem

What started as a crazy idea one would brush off and never dare to try ended up taking 2.5 years to make. Spoiler: many lessons were learned, but we're not disappointed.

What is Das Geisterschiff?

Das Geisterschiff is a turn-based dungeon crawler where combat is handled inside the dungeon rather than on a separate screen, an adventure game where you find your way through the dungeon while avoiding or dealing with traps and puzzles, a survival horror where you constantly lose resources and have to learn the rules to survive, all at the same time.

It started as an idea for a very short adventure game inspired by Carmine (developed by ArrowSoft/MicroCabin in 1986), set in a distant future and taking heavy inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft and Blade Runner. The goal was to create a project small enough to deliver within a reasonable amount of free time, with a (mostly) one-man team, on ~$0 budget and with a good amount of polish.

It was driven by frustration about the game industry, especially in our country -- a place that used to offer interesting projects, such as Chasm: The Rift, Cossacks, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro and Cryostasis, but now mostly focused on mobile and social gaming with only a few worthy exceptions. Since gamedev-related employment wasn't offering anything of interest, it was decided to start clawing our own way into the industry.

What Went Right

1. Sticking to the Vision

We intentionally avoided following the established conventions just to stay on the safe side. Certain features like full map weren't implemented due to focus on exploration and certain traps that wouldn't work if you could always check if your position or facing direction has changed at any time.

While we eventually added a tutorial and more details to the game, working with limited information and experimenting to find the best way to get past obstacles has always been an important part of our design, and while it may have narrowed the audience, there are no regrets about it.

At the same time, a lot of effort went into analyzing and filtering the player feedback to make the game better without compromising our vision or fixing what wasn't broken in the first place.

2. Unique, Simple and Interconnected Mechanics

Exploration and interactivity were tightly interconnected with each other from day one. Each weapon, action and interactive object had to have a purpose and as many use cases as possible to keep the simple mechanics interesting enough to carry the whole game, and have enough minor quirks and nuances to them to remain interesting on their own.

Even combat was always considered as part of interaction rather than a mode separate from other mechanics and as many player tools as possible had to work in combat and outside of it.

The moment the character managed to evade the enemy's bullet and still get damaged in the back because it hit a landmine behind the them is the moment we realized we have something special in our hands.

3. Ideas Kept Pouring In

Even though Das Geisterschiff had a tight focus due to a very limited budget and time constraints, there was always room for extra spice. Crippling, stat modifiers based on terrain, carnage feature that connected missed shots with the rest of the environment were added during the testing stages when we felt there should be more to it than what's already there.

There was no shortage of ideas and every minor and major addition shaped the game into a better, deeper and nuanced product.

4. Tight Schedule

After a few false starts, the final iteration of the game was released after exactly 12 months in development. Building (or rebuilding) a game from scratch in a short amount of time is something that even bigger teams struggle with, and with our tiny team this problem was multiplied.

On the bright side, this left no time to waste on fluff. Things that didn't add much to the game were cut at the design stage, which saved us time to focus on important aspects.

5. Well-Documented Engine

Unity, despite some notoriety amond developers and gamers alike, proved to be an ideal solution for this project, and some prior experience with it helped. Despite being a modern engine, the base editor is pretty lightweight and C# ended up being a pretty easy language to start with.

Since the game was designed on and for low-end hardware, choosing a different engine could cause more issues down the road than it would be possible to handle.

What Went Wrong

1. Poor Level Design Process

Due to the way the graphics style is implemented, the level design process took a lot of time and felt like designing two similar levels at once. Eventually, due to limitations of development hardware (a cheap laptop from 2010), the levels had to be cut down into smaller pieces, which eventually worked to our advantage, as it allowed designing multi-layered dungeons from tiny segments.

Even with that in mind, it wasn't as quick and enjoyable as putting together a Doom or even a Quake level, and that's something that we must address in our next game.

2. Shifts in Design and Content

The game used to shift a lot during the development due to various roadblocks along the way as it became apparent that some content and features required more time or resources than we could allocate. The project had to be refocused too many times to fit into the design and resource limits, and because of that the story had to be simplified until it became just a background and glue for the gameplay and levels, which, on the bright side, forced us to make them work better on their own.

3. Part-Time Work on the Project

Most of the time DG was a part-time project, and working on it full-time would give more time to develop better solutions instead of relying on 'fastest' in terms of development time, which worked, but hurt our workflow in one way or another.

4. Marketing

Due to its unique nature, DG proved to be harder to market than we expected. The majority of similar games were too old to be referenced and too obscure to catch even the 'old school' players. How many of you have heard of Carmine, the spiritual predecessor of DG? Yeah, right.

There were other hurdles, as we could not decide the right date for the Steam release due to lack of familiarity with its inner workings. In the end, DG launched on November 24 on Steam -- even though we expected it to launch there about a month later.

Happy Accidents

1. Lack of NPCs

Due to low amount of artwork the amount of NPCs and chatter had to be cut down to the barest minimum. While this decision may have turned away story-oriented players, in the end, it added to the barren, lifeless atmosphere that we wanted to create.

2. Graphics Style

What started as a shortcut to mask the lack of art budget eventually created an eye-catching style that was easy to use and stylish enough to look good (and, incidentally, more 'retro' than the majority of 'retro' games out there). It's a polarizing style, but it gave DG its own identity and made it instantly recognizable among others.

So, What Now?

Das Geisterschiff is available on Steam, it received rather positive reception and it's (probably) the first dungeon crawler where terrain matters in combat. It sells pretty slowly, but it already found a small audience, and the sales are going well enough to keep us in business and start working on another game.

Overall, it ended up being a good game that we are proud of, but there's still a lot of room for improvement and additions to develop this idea further.

Currently, we are cooking up a content update for Das Geisterschiff to expand the game a little bit. We are also working on a small non-RPG project, a commercial remake of Phantom 3D, our small jam game that ended up coming along so naturally and so well, we could not resist the temptation. We are aiming to release the commercial HD version sometime this Summer.

At the same time we're slowly working on the new codebase for the next DG. It will be a spin-off, rather than continuation of the main story, as there are several ways to develop the original concept and we would like to try each one of them before coming back to continue the story.

If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to comment or ping me on Twitter.

--RS

 

[Wunderbar]

Hm, i know someone from Ukraine whose initials are RS...

 

[Bad Sector]

driven by frustration about the game industry, especially in our country -- a place that used to offer interesting projects, such as Chasm: The Rift, Cossacks, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro and Cryostasis

Which makes me wonder what happened to Action Forms. I always had respect for them, they made their own tech and tools (even had their own 3d modelling and animation editor) and their games were often unique (if a bit buggy) and then suddenly they disappeared.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

driven by frustration about the game industry, especially in our country -- a place that used to offer interesting projects, such as Chasm: The Rift, Cossacks, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro and Cryostasis

Which makes me wonder what happened to Action Forms. I always had respect for them, they made their own tech and tools (even had their own 3d modelling and animation editor) and their games were often unique (if a bit buggy) and then suddenly they disappeared.

They closed up shop after releasing Cryostasis (poor sales and lack of investments) and jumped ship to make mobile stuff as Tatem Games.

Spoiler

 

[lightbane]

That's fine and all of that, but where's my content update?

This is the closest thing that we'll ever get to a Zaku simulator (for PC and translated to English).

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

That's fine and all of that, but where's my content update?

Biggest maps are complete. I still need to finish 2 smaller areas and scripting of a few addon quests and events in the base game.

Then I need to test the game from start to finish with both endings a few times to make sure they work as intended and balance tweaks aren't turning the game into inpenetrable murderchaos.

Maps are the biggest drag in this case -- in hindsight, I should've figured out how to cram in extra quests rather than adding whooping 8 maps (almost 1/3 of the base campaign).

Just for the record, average map takes about 7 days to create (+ a few more to polish and add details), while a sidequest can take a few hours tops.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Current changelog for the update that will come together with the addon.

• Fixed incorrect adjustment of the hit chance for explosive weapons.
  
• Fixed minor graphics issues.
  
• Users' systems should no longer go crazy @ Unity logo.
  
• Priority of control keys has been adjusted to make controls smoother.
  
• Removed 'ENEMY TURN' message and reduced the delay before 'YOUR TURN' message disappears to reduce downtime in combat.
  
• Slight optimization of line rendering.
  
• Slight tweaks to the player starting stats to make character growth more apparent.
  
• Slight balance tweaks to enemy stats and weapons.
  
• Encounter rate has been adjusted to deliver more steady results while remaining low.
• Added a slight accuracy penalty to attacks made with ATTACK ram response.
  
• Enemies now warn nearby units about your presence, increasing the encounter chance within a small radius.
  
• Added support for 5:4 aspect ratio.
  
• Engine upgraded to v5.6.7.
  
• Additional minor bugfixes, changes to text & tweaks.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Good news everyone: the addon is complete. I'm starting tests and polishing today to make sure it works. Expected testing time is about a week or so. Also fixed a nasty menu bug that crawled into 1.0.5a and somehow nobody reported it.

Bad news: original ending won't get additional levels, as a multi-layered puzzle planned for it just didn't work the way I wanted and there's no time left to rework it into something that doesn't feel like a pile of hacks, so it was cut. I'll make up for that with additional notes to give a better idea of what happened there.

 

[lightbane]

Eagerly awaiting to play this... In a few weeks or so once everything is patched properly and I have time to play.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

DG is 33% off on Steam until May 6.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/975230/

 

[Silentstorm]

Wow, how have i not heard of this before!?

The game has quite the interesting art style and i do like me some dungeon crawlers so i am going to buy this right now!

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Finished testing the latest update + addon. I think the addon is pretty good in terms of difficulty -- I've skipped half of the upgrades, got caught with my pants down a few times but managed to endure through my understanding of the game (and regular trips to the workshop). Pretty sure it will be a quick and short breeze for upgrade hoarders, but considering how many times I've played these maps, I'm pretty sure even they will have to sweat a bit.

I'll probably release the updated version on Thursday. Will prepare builds today and compile the patch notes.

Also, warning: you will need to restart whatever chapter you're currently on in order to access new content, except for the introduction, which hasn't changed.

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope you'll enjoy the game even more after this update.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Aaand upon further inspection there's no need to prolong this.

Full changelog:

Fixes:
* Fixed inability to move the cursor in the target list menu.
* Fixed incorrect printing of remaining save points on death screen.
* Fixed incorrect adjustment of the hit chance for explosive weapons.
* Fixed rare z-fighting issues on certain configurations.
* Fixed several incorrectly tagged objects @ Cargo Bay.

Tweaks:
* Users' systems should no longer go crazy @ Unity logo.
* Priority of control keys has been adjusted to make controls smoother.
* Removed 'ENEMY TURN' message and reduced the delay before 'YOUR TURN' message disappears to reduce downtime in combat.
* Slight optimization of line rendering.
* Slightly expanded tutorial text.
* Slight tweaks to the player starting stats to make character growth more apparent.
* Slight balance tweaks to enemy stats and weapons.
* Encounter rate has been adjusted to deliver more steady results while remaining low.
* Doubled door opening/closing animation speed to reduce downtime.
* Removed aiming animation when desired target is not in the field of view.
* Additional tweaks to enemy AI.

Additions:
* Added a new side quest to the Gangland chapter.
* Added a new encounter to the Ghost Ship chapter.
* Added an alternative ending with a small, combat-heavy dungeon.
* Added a slight accuracy penalty to attacks made with ATTACK ram response.
* Enemies now warn nearby units about your presence, increasing the encounter chance within a small radius.
* Added notifications about saves before points of no return in the Ghost Ship chapter.
* Added support for 5:4 aspect ratio.

Other:
* Engine upgraded to v5.6.7f1.
* Replaced old splash screen with studio logo.
* Additional minor bugfixes, changes to text & tweaks.

 

[lightbane]

That was faster than expected. Now then, it's time to... Wait a few days until I have time and/or a patch is released as well, just to be sure.


Does the alternate final dungeon lead to the same endgame scenario with that annoying teleporting puzzle, or is there something completely new? Didn't you saw you weren't able to make additional endings?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Does the alternate final dungeon lead to the same endgame scenario with that annoying teleporting puzzle, or is there something completely new? Didn't you saw you weren't able to make additional endings?

Alternative dungeon leads to a different ending without a teleporter puzzle. There are no new mechanics -- just 6 new maps (4 big, 2 small by DG standards), new boss battle, a few enemy types that were rare in the original, some new music and some hints on DG2.

I cut plans of alternative endings in the original release due to narrow scope, but once I started thinking of ways to add new content, adding an alternative ending was the only reasonable way to deliver it without changing too much in the base game.

 

[lightbane]

Alright, I gave this a quick spin. You start wtih slightly better stats than before (so you're no longer Zaku tier but instead Zaku-II at least) and the enemies are more aggressive, even the tutorial ones. It also has a new starting logo.

Good shit.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Forgot to mention something important for those who are replaying the game.

Spoiler

If you want to access the alternative ending, go to the Docking Bay after activating the self-destruct sequence and go to the spot you started the chapter from. In the original version the ship would close the hatch, in this one, it will trigger the alternative ending dungeon. Make sure to apply whatever armor upgrades you have before doing this, because it's not gonna be easy.

 

[lightbane]

got to mention something important for those who are replaying the game...

Thought so. I'll remember to keep a separate save once I reach the third area. Speaking of:

Spoiler

Is the new sidequest of Chapter 2 related to that unti-now minor event where you could pretend to be a gang leader, or is it something else? IIRC you had to complete the main mission to activate the quest.

Also, does it change anything if you end the chapter 2 by going back to the starting area or using the alternate exit you can find looking around?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

got to mention something important for those who are replaying the game...

Thought so. I'll remember to keep a separate save once I reach the third area. Speaking of:

Spoiler

Is the new sidequest of Chapter 2 related to that unti-now minor event where you could pretend to be a gang leader, or is it something else? IIRC you had to complete the main mission to activate the quest.

Also, does it change anything if you end the chapter 2 by going back to the starting area or using the alternate exit you can find looking around?

Spoiler

The informant sidequest is a new, separate event, and it gives a few hints on the Tunnels map for first-time players. You're still treated like a gang leader once you kill Krutz.

And no, there are no changes to the events after the boss battle.

 

[lightbane]

Alright, played a little more, arrived to the tunnels in record time. Some thoughts:

Spoiler

I'm not sure if that was a thing before, but the Doghouse guy notices quite fast if you did something you weren't meant to do and refuses to speak anymore due your foolishness. C&C! Although I believe that didn't happen before, I'm not sure, I remembered that you could go here at the end of the mission for extra loot so I decided to go early to save time. However, there's a minor bug: The game still tells you to go back to the Doghouse to get your reward after you activate that console hidden somewhere in the streets section even though the bartender refuses to say anything.
Also, some of the German signs are not translated (specifically, these found in the upper level that start with 'A', I can't recall the details right now).
Also also, it's funny that while the Crow Junior members are meant to be suicide-bombers, they still get scared at the sight of the almighty Zaku Bazooka.
Changing the topic: I don't remember the boss in the jail section being so rude: Just when I reduced him to low health thanks to precise Bazooka strikes, he began insulting me, in the face of death. That's determination.

Lastly, now I understand why the tunnels are so annoying: FUCKING TELEPORTERS! What in-game excuse is there to accomplish that? Sensor fuckery? I didn't notice the change the first time, or if I did, I did not register that subtle detail, but thankfully tactical headbutting still works. Is it possible to find the body of the punk that writes these notes in the tunnel though? I don't remember if he was meant to be a mini-boss, or if you were supposed to find his body hidden somewhere.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Spoiler

Dayum, I thoroughly checked the scripts and tested the whole shebang to make sure it doesn't trigger if you pissed him off. Gonna fix it. And thanks for finding that oversight, gonna sit down and do some double-checking.

Also, Tunnels don't have any teleporters inside -- there are a few spinners that can be bypassed by paying attention to your current facing direction. They are a security measure to make intruders eventually wander to the exit area and get rekt by security robots.

The notes are written by Arnold, the guy who begs you to let you join the Crows after you kill Jurgen.