Incline SHELTER update thread

[shihonage]

Sort of like improved Backgrounds/Reputations in Fallout 2? Childkiller, Berzerker, Made Man etc

Sort of, but not exactly like them. Our philosophy regarding their use is a bit more on a personal level, they're intended to have a more profound effect on the game, and each has level tiers with unique subnames. These tiers can be jumped by iteration or by a special type of XP requirements for each, depending on type of character achievement in question.

 

[shihonage]

Shelter update 01/13/2010

Replayability IS mandatory in a game like this. The player has to wonder what would happen if they used a different character or approached situations in different order, or picked different sides.

Reconciling a linear story arc AND "choice&consequence" is difficult. It is a learning experience in a category of its own. A number of issues have to be overcome, including these:

1) Controlling the player's progression, but loosely, without "hovering over the shoulder" or creating invisible walls in the way other games do.
2) Not having the main arc overshadow the secondary quests and make them seem small in comparison.
3) Not making secondary quests be immediately recognized as secondary quests.
4) Linking secondary quests into the main plot arc without destroying the arc.
5) Allowing for a more-than-superficial breathing room within just the main arc itself.
6) Not making the game easily breakable/unfinisheable due to player doing unforeseen things.
7) Not making the game in a way where player simply avoids certain situations the next time they start over. This makes "major twist endings" a difficult affair, but perhaps your key party NPC's shocking but inevitable betrayal the kind of thing better left for another medium, such as film.

I'm happy to report that the issues in the above list have been, for the most part, resolved. Shelter's design is inching forward with steadiness of a Soviet bulldozer and cleverness of a Soviet bulldozer.

Wait-..

 

[ecliptic]

7) Not making the game in a way where player simply avoids certain situations the next time they start over. This makes "major twist endings" a difficult affair, but perhaps your key party NPC's shocking but inevitable betrayal the kind of thing better left for another medium, such as film.

Well, I think it would be pretty interesting to make a party NPC's shocking betrayal conditional, such that it may only happen if the player behaves in a specific fashion. This also could play into the replayability.

 

[shihonage]

This is more of the feature where "if you mess enough with NPC's core faction/town and he's in your party, he will disband and attack you".

It's more procedural, naturally explainable, and can be applied to all party NPCs.

Having the game decide that a character "turns out to have been evil all along" based on player's actions, however... is more time-consuming to do, and it's just, kind of a weird connection to make. If the dialogue content for that character is not doubled to account for the "evil case", the betrayal switch will be out of place, much like the season finale of 24 season 1.

Has there been a successful precedent of this that I could learn from ?

 

[shihonage]

Asides from slowly adding to the quest database, the only things that stand out this week are my attempts to fix and enhance Shelter's renderer. They both failed.

The first was an attempt to fix the game not restoring itself properly after ALT-TAB. Managed textures, reinitializing Direct3D, nothing worked. Conclusion: I will cheat and make Shelter run in a full-screen window. This way you can never completely ALT-TAB out of it, and the game doesn't have to restore itself.

The second was an attempt to integrate pixel shaders into the engine, for a grittier look, a la Left 4 Dead post-processing. The attempt failed miserably, despite me doing everything by the book. Wasted hours looking for a solution, found nothing. Oh, it ran, but the end result mangled the image in unholy ways.

For instance, this is the result of applying a cookie cutter shader that was supposed to post-process the image into black&white:

So close, yet so far. Gorramit

In other news, we're limiting Shelter ambition and scope, saving a number of features for the sequel, should there ever be one. Driveable vehicles is one such feature. Dynamic (reactive) quests may be another casualty.

Mind you, by the very nature of our quest design, the quests only activate when context appropriate. They don't activate based on "status of other quests", but based on the state which the other quests impacted onto the world.

For instance, when someone needs an item, they need it not because the quest is marked "incomplete", but its the other way around... the quest is marked incomplete because they don't have the item, and will remain so until they have it.

But, I also planned to have reversible quests, and framework for that has been both in and out. Quests where say, you put someone in prison, but then you freed them by doing another quest, which fails the first quest (it becomes red), but then if you put them in prison again, it will all get reversed again, etc.

THESE types of quests may be too far to shoot for right now. The scope of the game has to be maintained, as we're trying to make its release in a feasible future, sometime before a bright light and a series of low concussions render our world obsolete. We're sticking to Fallout scope for Shelter.

Now, in the sequel, "Shelter II: The Awakening: Origins - Resurrection: Redemption - Wrath Of The Transformed", we'll have driveable vehicles, more weather effects, more ambitious quest system, and more, well, emergent gameplay.

 

[entertainer]

2/10

 

[Big Nose George]

Shelter II: The Awakening: Origins - Resurrection: Redemption - Wrath Of The Transformed

You forgot "War" but I guess everybody can rearrange Wrath to fit his needs.

What are you doing for a living?

 

[zenbitz]

War of the Wrath of the Transformed Wraiths

 

[shihonage]

What are you doing for a living?

I work at a software company.

 

[shihonage]

The quest file grows slowly, as I constantly have to reconcile the more ambitious designs with current (and projected) capabilities of the engine, and take into account economy of resources - for instance, we cannot afford to create an entire map filled with NPCs just for one quest where you nuke it.

Keeping track of the quests (how they interlink) is something I hoped to relegate to Zorlag, the automated quest compiler, but it cannot do so for human-language written quests document. So, tracking quest chains past the "what brain recalls at once" threshold is rather nightmarishly confusing at the moment, but I'll find a solution somehow.

Also, our sprite system will have to become layered, like Diablo2. Otherwise, even by the most conservative estimates, the amount of graphics that we'll have to generate will be unsustainable.

Speaking of graphics, this is a concept art image of the Player that the talented Mr. Bough created last year.

 

[entertainer]

-remove rpg elements
-add realtime combat with no pause
-remove text, its pain for the eyes
-remove all stats affecting char
-one word dialogues

if you do this you might have a good chance of this being as awesome and enjoyable as me2

 

[shihonage]

Change of plan! Shelter will take place in the cromagnon era, w/grunt-based dialogue system. The grunts will be voiced by Richard Anderson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Megan Fox, Jet Li, Ricky Gervais, Kiefer Sutherland, Owen Wilson, and Bill Roper.

 

[Jaesun]

Awesome.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

I have no idea what this game is about but this looks neither cool nor practical

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I don't know why, but I like it in a perverse way.

 

[Luzur]

Change of plan! Shelter will take place in the cromagnon era, w/grunt-based dialogue system. The grunts will be voiced by Richard Anderson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Megan Fox, Jet Li, Ricky Gervais, Kiefer Sutherland, Owen Wilson, and Bill Roper.

 

[Hory]

Looks good to me, too bad it will end up as a small unintelligible sprite.

 

[bhlaab]

There's definitely some neck/head relationship issues going on with that concept art

 

[shihonage]

Looks good to me, too bad it will end up as a small unintelligible sprite.

With 28% increase on both X and Y axis, we'll have 63% more pixels per sprite than Fallout Tactics. Still, the blessing of sprites is that we will NOT have to render them in exquisite detail, because the player won't be able to zoom in on them.

There's definitely some neck/head relationship issues going on with that concept art

Either that, or we're so used to having every protagonist be built like Schwarzenegger that people with more commonly encountered, scrawnier physique start to look odd.

 

[bhlaab]

There's definitely some neck/head relationship issues going on with that concept art

Either that, or we're so used to having every protagonist be built like Schwarzenegger that people with more commonly encountered, scrawnier physique start to look odd.

Well no, it's more like his neck and his face are in two different directions

 

[Quilty]

That does look pretty silly.

 

[mondblut]

We'll have to play as a man in tights?

 

[shihonage]

In response to criticism, I made adjustments to the player concept art.

 

[Hory]

Too much sun bloom.

 

[shihonage]

I'm now back to Shelter engine. I was adding quests to the main document, but the code got cold, and I stopped comprehending it. That was a mistake. I'm now working on "dropping items on the ground" and proper implementation of doors.

Ground items are quite a pain in the ass, because I have to determine when you're supposed to be able to click on them, i.e. when the objects in front of it are transparent so you can see it... among other things.

Then I'll be putting in the first area (Hillside Penitentiary) and quests directly into the game. Also, the quest document will be merged with Zorlag-quest-editor, because plain-language quest descriptions inevitably differ from their implementation, and I don't have the time to keep them in sync.

It was initially planned to not have intelligence-influenced dialogue, and now I'm back to that idea. Nobody REALLY wants to play dumb ass characters, but people still want to have unique dialogue options each time they play.

This is why instead of INT checks, a lot of dialogue will be dictated by Player's in-game accomplishments (and failures).

I'll see both of you next week.