Inbetween!

We are in-between jobs for now, so we've finally had a little time to spend on developing Lemniscate.

One of the biggest problems we're facing (especially me, Geril, as I'm a graphic artist) is the dark, grey-scale aesthetic of the game. If you've seen posts from us from before we've announced Lemniscate, you might have noticed that we like vivid colors and flexible characters. We can't really do that in Lemniscate, it'd go against the game's theme. The graphics are so literally grey that I only use a single texture file for BaseColor, AO, Roughness and Metallic (on different channels).

The other problem we've run into is with the adventure aspect. As with point-and-click games, things that are obvious for the developers aren't necessary so plain to see for the players. We might think that it's logical to wash off the stench of waste water by standing in the shower while the water is running, but this might feel illogical in a video game environment where you open air vents with crowbars.

We are trying to solve both of these problems with the Inbetween. The Inbetween is, as the name describes, a dimension in between dimensions. Here, the player can find clues on how to progress in the game. In this dimension, we're also letting all our closeted frustration with the dark spaceship out: lots of weird shapes, unnecessary colors, tons of particle effects.
We're trying to make the place seem otherworldly. The player character sees these forms and colors because his brain can't decode what he's seeing. He's only able to move inside a bubble there, a bubble that is unaffected by time.

The clues are going to be cryptic and visual, without any text. For example, if you have to blow a fuse to get to the content of a closet, you're going to see a red poof in the distance, and a red shape a bit farther, that represents the contents of the closet. When you walk closer, you'll begin to see the surroundings of the closet. The important objects are going to appear in vivid colors, while the others are going to be darker, and only there to help the player recognize the part of the ship.
So, yeah, the cryptic game gets another cryptic layer. But at least this one's colorful.

You can get to the Inbetween in the final minutes before time resets. The 'reset' itself is a wave that goes through the ship, but a few minutes before that happens, there is a smaller wave coming to warn the player of the approaching reset. After the small wave, rifts appear in the dimension  in certain parts of the ship. These rifts can only be seen from up close. From afar, you only see barely visible blue sparks. The locations of the portals are worth memorizing, they won't always be at the same place, but they don't appear at random, either.

We'll continue to work on the game and will post more updates in the coming weeks.

IT'S HAPPENING!

Hey, it's Geril.

Okay, so a lot of stuff happened in the previous weeks, but we'll write about those in a later post. There is some paid work in our future.

Lussy finished her finals and got the best grade possible. For her  exam, she presented some of OLP's assets which were quite unique compared to the average works presented there.

This is about it, see you next time!

...

Oh man, it almost slipped my mind..

LEMNISCATE HAS BEEN GREENLIT!

The funniest thing is, we were looking at the Greenlight page last night and talking about how it might take some months for us to get greenlit (we were at 35%). Then this morning, an e-mail came that it happened. It was unusually easy to get out of bed afterwards.

The only question remaining is how to release the game legally while still making a profit. Regardless, we're happy that we made it even with our abysmal marketing skills.

A big thank you to everyone who helped us achieve this!

(we're working on the tutorial for the dynamic normal maps, but we're doing lots of other things, too, so please, be patient)

NeoFur!

Hi! It's Geril.

Because Lussy is 120% preparing for her finals, Lemniscate's development is going slower than usual. But in the meantime, I've had time to try out a new technology that I've wanted to try for a long time. It's called NeoFur by Neoglyphic. Because all of OLP's player characters have fur and fluff, this plugin is perfect for us.

For now, only Cole the bobcat has a presentable coat of fur applied. It would be a lot better with a fur pattern map, but Lussy is busy so it'll have to wait.

As you can see on the comparison screenshots, the fluff and the beard improves the character's appearance greatly. We can control the fur's length, density, and how much gravity, wind and force fields affect it. It's fun to tinker with and makes things really interesting visually. For example, we can even make Cole's beard grow during the game.

so majestic

According to our experience with NeoFur, it really is the best when used as a fur effect (because, of course, we've tried to use it on other things, too, like hair). However, it also looks decent for things like fluffy carpets or grass.

The fur effect is very costly graphically, especially when using more shells (70<), but using proper LODs helps solve this problem.

We couldn't make animations work with NeoFur yet, but we're working on it. We can watch the animated meshes with fur in the editor frame by frame though. We're looking forward to solving this issue, because the preview looks promising.

We can only recommend the NeoFur plugin for anyone making fur-coated beings in Unreal 4. It's really worth it (it's only $20!).

Apart from this, there are lots of things going on, for example, we may begin to publish posts on other sites, too. Nothing is decided yet, but it feels like our work up to this point is finally going to pay off.

After Lussy's finals, we'll get back to working on Lemniscate again!

Dynamic facial normal maps!

Hiya!

We've been working on ideas for Lemniscate, and we were reminded of something we've wanted to try doing for a long time: dynamic facial normal maps tied to morph targets. You know: when a character pulls up an eyebrow and wrinkles appear on his forehead, and the like. It took us about a single workday to implement this using UE4 Blueprints (maybe eight hours including creating the normal maps).

We don't want to spoil anything of Lemniscate, so we've applied this technology to one of our characters from OLP, Beat. She hasn't had a singing video yet, so with this, all of the characters have lip-sync videos where they make fools of themselves.

This animation isn't final or fully detailed, the body animation is still in progress so this version is made of recycled, already existing animations. Oh, by the way, we've also made the texture based eyes work.

The quality of this gif isn't great, but you can hopefully see how the normal maps change. We should really make some older characters, this would look perfect on them.

If you're interested, we can probably make a quick tutorial on how to make dynamic normal maps (EDIT: here it is) and texture based eye movement work in UE4 Blueprints.

Just to make it clear, we're progressing with the development of Lemniscate. This is one of the rooms (the staff quarters):

See Lemniscate's ship in 3D!

Hi!

We've uploaded a new model to Sketchfab: now you can see the game's ship in 3D!

OuterLine: Lemniscate - The Ship by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

You can click on the annotations to take a simple tour, but you can also explore it yourself. We recommend using the first person control mode for this, and adjust the walk speed with the mouse wheel, or else you'll fly right through the ship.

This model isn't exactly like the in-game map -  we had to leave most of the props so we could upload it to Sketchfab. We've halved texture sizes, left some out, but it might still be tough for SF's engine to display it in a browser. It's still amazing what this engine can do in a browser window.
The rooms' shapes and sizes were exported directly from UE4 BSPs, so until we release the game, this is the closest you can get to exploring the ship.

In other news, our Greenlight campaign is progressing fairly well, considering we suck at marketing. Seriously. We've visited forums and wrote posts to get more votes, but I guess we're not pushy enough to be successful marketers. Also, there are a lot of people who want to talk to us and who we need to talk to, and it's wearing us both out. We're not very good at social situations either, so instead of feeling tired because of 14-hour days, we feel tired because we had to talk to three people in a single day instead of just one. Oh, the struggle.

Keep the votes flowing!

OuterLine: Lemniscate

Good news!



We've finally launched our Greenlight campaign. You can vote for us here

So the final name of Project Blind is OL: Lemniscate.
To be honest, we wanted to do a flashier reveal of the OL abbreviation's true meaning, but... it's not flashy. It stands for OuterLine. It's basically the universe which we have created that houses all of our game ideas (for now). So, due to financial constraints and to our limited experience with game development, it so happened that Lemniscate will be our first released game - after it got through Greenlight (so, please!).

We've also changed our team name to ExceptionGate, and changed the blog title accordingly. And created a new Facebook page. And now we're hoping our likers will slowly trickle over to it. wink wink

The last few weeks were a mess of trying to properly record footage from Unreal 4 and video editing. In the final days we chose to record footage with the built-in matinee recorder, but that makes gameplay really hard so there are some lower quality clips in the trailer from earlier screen recordings. Also, we're not good at trailers. (actually we've figured it out: it's magic, and we're muggles) We've managed to leave out most of the gameplay we've implemented from the video. We still hope it catches some people's eyes and makes them read the description and take a look at our gifs. Seriously, we're better at making gif posts. Just look at the gif posts. Don't judge from the trailer.

Anyways... we're considering crowdfunding. We're short on money, and currently this project doesn't generate any profit. Using free software means we don't have to pay for licenses, but even with minimal expenses.. we have to eat something. The downside of crowdfunding is that taxes are ridiculous.

And now it's the middle of the night, so we're going to sleep. In the next few days, I'll sit back, relax and watch the votes flow in. Hopefully. oh crap, I have finals And Geril's going to work on a Sketchfab model for the Greenlight campaign. Because he's a workaholic.

The new model for Lemniscate, of course, will fit right in with our previous works in our Sketchfab gallery. Such colorful and bouncy.... spaceship. Yeah.

G'night!