KickStarter Peripeteia - Deus Ex-inspired FPS/RPG set in anime cyberpunk Poland

[Bad Sector]

That is the first time that i see someone using Hammer to make Unity maps. Shodanon how come you are not using any brush tools for Unity like Probuilder or RealtimeCSG (or whatever it was called)?

 

[Roguey]

Impressive simminess but how can a person even see the line you can shoot?

 

[Roguey]

*unsheathes katana*


They're expecting to release another update of the demo at the end of this month with an additional area.

 

[Testownia]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

 

[Testownia]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

It's not edgy. Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

It's not edgy. Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

Ghost in the Shell.

 

[AdolfSatan]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

It's not edgy. Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

Well, there's Serial Experiment Lain, which the devs mentioned as an influence. Or Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third book Gibson wrote on the Sprawl trilogy.

What's the deal, tho, you feeling emasculated? Whole ordeal makes you come across as insecure tbh. Perhaps you're lacking in testosterone, might wanna get that checked.

 

[Testownia]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

It's not edgy. Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

Ghost in the Shell.

I said a real story, not an anime ripoff.

 

[jebsmoker]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

why would that bother you. did you really dislike ghost in the shell or something because the main protag was a female

 

[Testownia]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

It's not edgy. Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

Well, there's Serial Experiment Lain, which the devs mentioned as an influence. Or Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third book Gibson wrote on the Sprawl trilogy.

What's the deal, tho, you feeling emasculated? Whole ordeal makes you come across as insecure tbh. Perhaps you're lacking in testosterone, might wanna get that checked.

Two sentences is a "whole ordeal"? Your over-dramatisation is the thing that's womanly.

 

[Testownia]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

why would that bother you. did you really dislike ghost in the shell or something because the main protag was a female

No, I dislike it because it's a piece of plagiarism.

 

[Fargus]

When i saw "Deus Ex inspired" i got intrigued. When i checked the thread i saw a pile of shit from a polish dev and the main character who is a woman. Not to mention protag looks like minecraft 2b with a feminist touch. No thanks.

I'm always on the lookout for immersive sims. But i'd rather wait for Core Decay, Gloomwood, Monomyth, Fallen Aces etc. All of them look more interesting than this trash.

 

[Gargaune]

Not digging the art direction, unfortunately, it's got that faux-retro stylisation that puts me off big time. Sure, the "90sGraphics" handle is there for a reason, but they could shoot for 2000 and Deus Ex itself. I realise it's hard for indie studios to budget modern visuals, but perhaps the cel-shading route might've been a better approach.

*unsheathes katana*


They're expecting to release another update of the demo at the end of this month with an additional area.

Speed-running Immersive Sims is like serving Chateau du Tariquet at a college kegger. And all LAM-climbers should be forced to train Swimming to Master as punishment.

 

[siliconlife]

The main character is female? Any interest just died.

The prostitutes you will have to hire to get out of this rut, sir, are going to be quite rugged.

Anyway, this game looks beautiful to me! Love the music too, keep up the good work, devs.

 

[Shodanon]

Sorry for taking so long to reply again, saw some more live in the thread, I guess it's time to take the bullying again. Still can't brofist but I'll try to reply to most of your posts. This is gonna be a long one.

Yuuuuup, I had the elevator leave without me twice so I haven't finished the demo yet. Gunplay definitely needs work too -- it's already been widely noted that aiming down sights is worthless compared to just hipfiring since the base accuracy is already so high and it's easier to manage recoil. There's time to work that stuff out, at least; I think it was Warren Spector who said these games are never fun to play until the final 10% of development?

Sometime after this post we rolled out the update fixing the elevator, sorry about that. It's one of those lovely Unity "works in editor, shits itself in build" things, and it drove me up the wall. The accuracy will end up being stat-based, but don't expect it to appear in the next demo, so still expect ultra high first shot accuracy. And we do hope for the game to be fun before that final 10%.

It's a different paradigm from Thief/SS2/DX/Half-Life. It seems completely unique as far as I know. The thing to realize is that ladders are not modal in this game, even less so than in those other games. Rather, it's a straightforward extension of the ledge grabbing mechanic. Once you get used to tapping jump and crouch to ascend/descend, it's easier to quickly enter/exit the ladder interaction and get where you need to go.

Not gonna lie, the original reason for the ladders working as they do was me lacking time to implement anything modal, the map designer placed them anyway and it "just worked". Your lobbying made us adamant to keep it, with Snaketicus bringing it to somewhat ridiculous lengths, or heights rather. The "APS-projectiles-as-handrails" thing was also inspired by this.

I haven't experimented much, but does the presence of individual magazines to manage in the inventory imply that there will be a simulated distinction between tactical and dry reloading?

Yeah, that was supposed to go in the game, but we lacked time to implement. I'll try to have it added this week. Basically, mash the reload button for a faster reload but drop your mag to the ground.

Yes, that is what i did - i unloaded both weapons which ended up with ammo in my inventory. But then pressing the reload key with one of the weapons i previously emptied equipped wasn't doing anything (the weapon had 0 ammo). I assumed i need to manually drag-drop the ammo on the weapon but that didn't work either.

You're not reloading from an ammo pool, each magazine needs to be loaded separately. Pick up the ammo box and click when hovering over a mag that's not full. The tester-Youtuber PHI struggled with it, but he got the gist of it. I guess it's our 90s adventure game puzzle.



Hope that you got to try the demo again and that it came to you. And to preemptively answer anyone's question: this isn't going to be streamlined but it will be explained.

I fucking did it, I killed him!

Good job! Hope the music was a pleasant reward.

Here's a quick walkthrough on how to speedrun the demo:

The strats have evolved. Are you a bad enough dude to beat the 1:26 world record?

You did well there, the demo level is fucking baller, you keep being able to look into other areas and get a better sense on where you are and have been in the gameworld, like the sewer grates outside the metro and all sorts of things like that.

Thanks man, seeing you finding the extra hidden stuff in the following screenshots was motivating. There are hidden guns like the VSSK, G3, APS and VSS hidden around the level. In future maps and the updated version of the current one, we'll will also include places that would be entirely unreachable without using the aforementioned APS-projectile climbing (at least that's the intention- the fun thing about the whole making-an-imsim thing is that players will always outsmart the designer, and it's our ambition to encourage that).

I noticed something only when I got a scope, it's like the crosshair snaps to a grid or something.

Now I know what you mean. Mouse sensitivity when using ADS is wonky. It will be fixed.

It also happened on loading a save, the pistol you get at the start became a ghost pistol.

Yeah, we found the reason for that and fixed it for the updated version released halfway through December. It was caused by issues with the save system. Next demo the saves are going to be completely revamped, so

Spoiler

expect new and exciting bugs caused by them.

It kicks ass now that I know how it works. I don't know if I missed something but Shodanon is underselling how awesome the traversal is in this game, it's even an upgrade over Thief with the things you can do, hanging off a ledge and shooting someone and shit. I can't believe games got away with these scripted sticky ladders that you have to mount and dismount after playing this, this is way better.

Since December we've started tweeting a lot more and showing off the mechanics, so hopefully it will serve both a "tutorial" purpose and as a way to capitalize on something we do thing makes us stand out. Some of the mechanics that I put in aren't obvious and need to be... advertised. Some players didn't even discover the ledge grabs, shooting out lights or implants. So thanks for being one of the early ledge grab appreciators!

 

[Shodanon]

I wish lifting things worked more like in Thief or Deus Ex rather than this more Oblivion or Skyrim-like dragging. Maybe if you had both hands free you could use both of them to lift heavy objects up properly? I don't know what would be a good fix, but it took longer than it should to get that box there.

We approached this in somewhat of a hamfisted way BUT with the strength implant installed, dragging will work like it did in Deus Ex, without draining your energy- unless you pick up something heavy like a barrel. But the upside of this is that now you will be able to knock enemies unconscious with it.

Is there some way to disable the fan above those thugs by the burning barrel before the commies? .

In the current build, with bullet time, you can drop down from there. Wasn't the case in early December.

Also just realized that you can use the mouse wheel to change to third person camera. Then I tried to get the name out of that weirdo in the hallway and I wish you had a gun at that part, got so close only for that fucker to call me a weirdo again and I wanted to go blam blam blam.

If there's any part of the game I am not at least somewhat proud of, it's the TP camera. That's getting a complete rewrite. And yeah, finding weirdo's name seems to be one of the holy grails of the demo, few have achieved it. This is her dialog tree.

Spoiler

and back when saves were really fucked, you could load into the apartment with guns upon starting a new game

one more thing, is the music uploaded anywhere? I thought it was great and want to listen to it some more.

Music by Snaketicus: https://soundcloud.com/shopkeeperleonard

and Bogie: https://soundcloud.com/user-683545842

Nice Gondola placement there!

Good job on finding the elusive creature!

I am quite impressed with the ability to climb/mantle all over the place, but the game definitely needs an ability to break/open windows and climb through them, which would allow for some Life of the Party tier gameplay. As it is it seems that there is no way to for example enter those sky bridges from the outside even though you can get to them.

The windows in the penthouse in the current demo don't have collision so you can both just shoot (see:twatt below) and... jump through them. That will change next build.

Hacking is kinda lame, and I am saying that as someone who liked hacking in Alpha Protocol. But I guess I will be able to live with it...

The trick is to stare at the keys on screen and look for yellow ones -they indicate there is the right key near them. We just like its "Beartato hacks the database" comicality as is, even if tweaks will be needed, like the unintentional augs turning on and character moving, which should be fixed in the current build.

When I hack the terminal on the second floor of the main building there is no mouse cursor or anything

Omission, sorry. Just press tab in the current build. And we'll still add one more hacking minigame later on, not everything has keyboards to mash after all.

The vertical mobility is phenomenal, I was able to go on the lower sky bridge and then climb all the way down to the street level, literally some Thief level shit! The game obvisouly needs a lot of work, but there is huge potential there!

Thank you, that's very motivating!

What's the Polish word for adventure? Cause in Greek it's Peripeteia (Περιπέτεια).

Adventure is "przygoda".

"Perypetia" (usually as plural "perypetie") commonly means life hardships / difficult situations / troubles, though I haven't seen it used by younger generations in colloquial context. But I assume Shodanon went with the literary (sudden change) meaning.

Yep, while the modern greek and polish equivalents still apply, all things considered, the reasoning behind choosing the name is because of its relation to latin term a certain immersive sim was named after.

Played it too. Was funni.

Only real problem I noticed was the inventory not being persisted (meaning, when I reloaded an old save state, I'd keep the inventory from before loading)

Also, sometimes augmentations would keep draining energy after I deactivated them.

Other than that, good job!

A thousand thanks! I seriously hope the inventory/saves will be flawless at some point, because the issues do cause us pain and a lot of bugreports. The "augs keep draining energy" thing could be a misinterpretation of the small battery mechanic. These things give you only a temporary energy boost and have to be used up or topped off with a fuse.

Even with it set to the lowest possible settings, I was getting 14-24 fps max. Unity.

Not just Unity, but HDRP, which does add a lot of pretty, while causing framedrops when volumetric lighting is on, as well as other issues that cause us grief, including linux builds just NOT WORKING. As you'd expect, this is a work in progress, so we hope to iron out the performance problems. Hell, might actually scrap HDRP altogether. Care to share your specs?

Don't like the fade-in on dialogue text and how it gets uncomfortably small when there's multiple lines. Edit: Also consider allowing one to select dialogue lines with the number keys.

Good suggestion, I'll try adding that soon. The scrolling text thing happened because the guys putting it in didn't consider the fact that you can and should split it into separate parts to make it easier on the eyes. So consider it a bug/omission.

I was stumbling around blindly and was frustrated quite a bit figuring out just where I was supposed to go, but I worked it out. I like the music that plays when you kill your target. Another edit: I replayed with a stealthier approach and endured all the jumping to get to the top of the building. Jumping down, hanging on that window, and popping that guy with a stealth pistol to get the music to play while jumping back up out of sight is a fantastic feeling. Something to showcase in a trailer.

Wew. Thanks, glad you gave it another go and I'm really happy you enjoyed it the second way around.

August 2021 is fabulously optimistic. Strong potential here, but there's a lot of work to be done.

Guess I can admit it now. A released date by the end of Aug 2021 was a requirement for games to participate in the Steam festival that's going on right now. Not that other games actually put that date on the steam pages, of course. So sorry about the overly optimistic release date, I changed it to something more appropriate now. Since we missed the release window for the Steam festival demo, we'll be releasing the steam demo later this month, the features and stuff shown on twitter is all freshly added and will be available next build.

Oh yeah, I had no idea how to set it to third person camera and apparently it's mouse scroll? My scroll wheel doesn't work, so consider adding a key for it.

You're not missing much but we'll try to make the rebind menu less user hostile.

Yet another additional item: I noticed how enemies can shoot you through walls, not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, it's true to life and you can do it to them back; on the other, it does feel kind of cheap that they can target you with pinpoint accuracy if they hear you make a noise since the AI isn't really seeing or hearing anything.

I think the walls you mention are actually the few sliding doors we have in the game. It's entirely not intentional. And as long as you use the fact that the enemies actually attack your last known location and use shadows, flanking tactics and/or bullet time, their accuracy (which we have actually substantially nerfed since our early days) should be managable.

lol

The dev streams are journeys into the mind of Snaketicus, who's a jack of all trades and proud to be a bit schizo, which comes through in the art, music and level design. We usually hide these streams instantly, this one was up a bit longer, so I hope you had fun listening to his ramblings.

That is the first time that i see someone using Hammer to make Unity maps. Shodanon how come you are not using any brush tools for Unity like Probuilder or RealtimeCSG (or whatever it was called)?

I'm not the map designer BUT I'll relay the answer: the current demo was made in Probuilder and its tendency to create a trillion separate meshes that can't be merged easily seems to be one of the reasons for our performance issues. It's NOT a brush tool either, there is no carve tool which makes it way, way worse than Hammer. And since both you and Dillon Rogers suggested RTCSG, Snake tried it and judged that while it's good, his current pipeline with Hammer is faster. He just has experience with it from his HL2 modding days.

Impressive simminess but how can a person even see the line you can shoot?

By not having to suffer twitter's dogshit compression, of course.

*unsheathes katana*

 

[Shodanon]

*

They're expecting to release another update of the demo at the end of this month with an additional area.

Hope you enjoy it. The current demo map is progressing as well.

Can you name one significant cyberpunk story where the protagonist is female?

Well, there's Serial Experiment Lain, which the devs mentioned as an influence. Or Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third book Gibson wrote on the Sprawl trilogy.

Ghost in the Shell.

I know this is bait but I guess I can repeat myself and say that both SEL and GitS are inspirations for us. Also, to add to the list of significant female cyberpunk protagonists, I am fond of Lenie Clarke myself.

When i saw "Deus Ex inspired" i got intrigued. When i checked the thread i saw a pile of shit from a polish dev and the main character who is a woman.

No issue, dude. To each his own, it's not like there's a free public demo for you to try and make up your mind, right? Though I guess one of the most obvious Deus Ex references to date will only appear in the next demo.

Not to mention protag looks like minecraft 2b with a feminist touch. No thanks

I'm always on the lookout for immersive sims. But i'd rather wait for Core Decay, Gloomwood, Monomyth, Fallen Aces etc. All of them look more interesting than this trash.

I too await the release of the games you mention and if you ever cared for it, I have a whole list of other imsims that are in the making right now for you to rather wait for. Also, fun fact: at this point we've been called feminist character design AND sexist dialog.

Not digging the art direction, unfortunately, it's got that faux-retro stylisation that puts me off big time. Sure, the "90sGraphics" handle is there for a reason, but they could shoot for 2000 and Deus Ex itself.

Well, that is the ambition of the artists as well at this point, all the models will be updated for something more early 2000s-like. We'll keep the twitter handle and domain because it's cool. The updated model of our protagonist appeared publicly once.

Speed-running Immersive Sims is like serving Chateau du Tariquet at a college kegger. And all LAM-climbers should be forced to train Swimming to Master as punishment.

That is a genuinely funny torture idea. But since some did enjoy speedrunning our demo and since it is supposed to be an imsim, by definition giving players freedom to do as they please, we won't be stopping them.

 

[Testownia]

So you're inspired by poorly made and plagiarized children's cartoons. Thumbs up, day one purchase.

EDIT: Stop stalking me, Infinitron.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Was the cyber sabre folded over 1000 times?

 

[lukaszek]

where did he buy sabre though?

 

[Bad Sector]

It's NOT a brush tool either, there is no carve tool which makes it way, way worse than Hammer.

If it creates individual meshes then that is probably for the best, considering carving creates at least a new brush for every surface of the solid you are subtracted (so, e.g. if you subtract a cube fully immersed in another cube you end up with six cubes) :-P.

 

[Gargaune]

Well, that is the ambition of the artists as well at this point, all the models will be updated for something more early 2000s-like. We'll keep the twitter handle and domain because it's cool. The updated model of our protagonist appeared publicly once.

Fixed Augmented. I'll expect my cheque in the mail, yes?

That is a genuinely funny torture idea. But since some did enjoy speedrunning our demo and since it is supposed to be an imsim, by definition giving players freedom to do as they please, we won't be stopping them.

Sorry, I just can't resist taking a stab at people who treat DX's LAM-climbing as an adequate instance of emergent gameplay, rather than what it actually was - an exploit. This isn't applicable to your project, you guys are actually implementing those features in an express, consistent manner.

 

[Testownia]

Well, that is the ambition of the artists as well at this point, all the models will be updated for something more early 2000s-like. We'll keep the twitter handle and domain because it's cool. The updated model of our protagonist appeared publicly once.

Fixed Augmented. I'll expect my cheque in the mail, yes?

That is a genuinely funny torture idea. But since some did enjoy speedrunning our demo and since it is supposed to be an imsim, by definition giving players freedom to do as they please, we won't be stopping them.

Sorry, I just can't resist taking a stab at people who treat DX's LAM-climbing as an adequate instance of emergent gameplay, rather than what it actually was - an exploit. This isn't applicable to your project, you guys are actually implementing those features in an express, consistent manner.

She even looks like an anime waifu. Jesus Christ.

 

[Roguey]

Sorry, I just can't resist taking a stab at people who treat DX's LAM-climbing as an adequate instance of emergent gameplay, rather than what it actually was - an exploit.

The design philosophy behind im-sims is to not do anything to discourage exploits. The genre was birthed through a playtester bypassing an area through an exploit

on Ultima VI, which is kind of where I realized that all this improvisational stuff could really be magical. It was unplanned, kind of a bug. There was one puzzle where the Avatar and his party came up on one side of a portcullis and there was a lever on the other side of the portcullis that you had to flip to raise the portcullis and keep on making progress. I watched one of our testers, a guy named Mark Schaefgen, playing in that area. And he didn’t have the telekinesis spell, which was the way to get past that portcullis. I was sitting there rubbing my hands together going ‘oh ho ho, he’s screwed, he can’t do it.’ He had a character in his party named Sherry the Mouse. You can probably see where this is going. The portcullis was ‘simulated,’ and here the air quotes are around simulated, simulated enough that there was a gap at the bottom that was too small for a human to get through, but not too small for Sherry. He sent Sherry the Mouse under the portcullis, over to the lever, she flipped the lever, and then the rest of the party went through. And I fell on the floor. At that moment I just said to myself, ‘this is what games should do. We should start planning this, not having it happen as a bug.’

 

[Gargaune]

Sorry, I just can't resist taking a stab at people who treat DX's LAM-climbing as an adequate instance of emergent gameplay, rather than what it actually was - an exploit.

The design philosophy behind im-sims is to not do anything to discourage exploits. The genre was birthed through a playtester bypassing an area through an exploit

on Ultima VI, which is kind of where I realized that all this improvisational stuff could really be magical. It was unplanned, kind of a bug. There was one puzzle where the Avatar and his party came up on one side of a portcullis and there was a lever on the other side of the portcullis that you had to flip to raise the portcullis and keep on making progress. I watched one of our testers, a guy named Mark Schaefgen, playing in that area. And he didn’t have the telekinesis spell, which was the way to get past that portcullis. I was sitting there rubbing my hands together going ‘oh ho ho, he’s screwed, he can’t do it.’ He had a character in his party named Sherry the Mouse. You can probably see where this is going. The portcullis was ‘simulated,’ and here the air quotes are around simulated, simulated enough that there was a gap at the bottom that was too small for a human to get through, but not too small for Sherry. He sent Sherry the Mouse under the portcullis, over to the lever, she flipped the lever, and then the rest of the party went through. And I fell on the floor. At that moment I just said to myself, ‘this is what games should do. We should start planning this, not having it happen as a bug.’

The difference is that what you're describing isn't exploiting an insufficient model to the detriment of suspension of disbelief, but the opposite, leveraging an unexpected affordance of a sophisticated collision system in a way that furthers the fictional engagement.

When it comes to LAM climbing, though, that wasn't a feature of the DX's physics system, it was a limitation of it. Considering things in their proper fictional context, the ability to stack crates and furniture to reach high places advanced DX's diegetic consistency, whereas rock-climbing on sticky bombs lessened it, and it was only possible because the physics system did not implement relevant mass or adhesion factors.

The long-running problem here is that Spector went whole-hog on emphasising the emergent gameplay aspects of DX and ended up skewing the public perception to treat it as an end rather than a means to an end. Ironically, the notion of "Embodiment", as used in relation to Ultima Underworld, much better captures the chief aspirations of the Immersive Sim as a subgenre, with emergent gameplay constituting a critical, but subsidiary component. The "sim" part is subservient to the "immersive" one in that it is required to allow the player-character to interact with the fiction in a rational, verisimilar fashion and thus achieve comprehensive "embodiment."

The Digital Antiquarian - Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld

They kept coming back to the theme of embodiment, what Neurath called “a feeling of presence beyond what other games give you.”

To give you a more plastic comparison, in as much as Immersive Sim emergent gameplay enables creative problem solving like in tabletop, LAM climbing is actually this:

DM of the Rings LXXXVIII - An Unexpected Maneuver