Project Blind story details!

Hi! It's Geril.

We're on Steam Concepts! (And soon Greenlight) Check it out!

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We haven't really talked about the story of Project Blind, because obviously, we don't want to ruin anything. But I'll try my best to give you an overview.

The game is set on a transport spaceship that carries supplies from and to a city-sized science base. In the game, there are also four people being transported on it, one of them being the player, an ex-engineer who had a severe accident and lost his vision, and therefore his job. He is in a coma after the surgery that replaced his eyes with a machine.

The other three people are a newly retired doctor, a scammer lawyer and an insane designer. All three of them leave messages in their portable devices, which the player can check to find out more about them.

The spaceship has a crew of five people who keep the ship in check, while the ship carries them through space on a predefined path.

Among the cargo, there is a military experiment hidden, the result of an ongoing gene-modifying project. This creature wakes up from cryogenic sleep for unknown reasons, and breaks free.

The player wakes up after this happens. Most of his fellow passengers are dead, and he can only find out what happened by discovering clues and reading writings on the wall. The only other survivor has locked himself in the surveillance room, watching the player through the cameras, and he is the one leaving the messages.

The loose monster isn't the only thing standing in the way of exploring and fixing the ship. About eight minutes after the player wakes up, the ship enters an anomaly that resets time and the player wakes up again. Time goes back by about one and a half days, but the player always wakes up in the last minutes. By that time, the other survivor has changed what he could in the ship based on his own experience and the player's actions, to help the player progress, and locked himself in. For example, if the player rearranges a room to get to a valve to turn off the heating in the room, then the next day, the other survivor will have already exposed the valve for him. Of course, he won't repeat everything the player does, but he tries his best to help. This is why he writes the notes on the wall, although those can be misleading sometimes.

Ultimately, it is up to the player how many times the day repeats, and what the ship's fate will be.

Update 2016

Happy New Year!
(it's a little late, but it's still 2016, so.. we're still in time?..)

We've been silent for more than a month, and it's not because we abandoned the project or this blog. We're in a situation that.. wouldn't allow us for continuous and uninterrupted development on Project OLP. The fact is, we're not making any money with OLP, and with learning more about the whole development process better, we've realized that it's not going to be completed any time soon, especially not with only two of us working. ...This sounds like we're not continuing, but it is not the case. OLP is still in development.

In the meantime, we've come up with a game idea that doesn't require years to develop. We've gained a lot of experience in the past years with our hobby (developing), and we'd like to see if we could do this for a living. So, for the last month, we've been working all day, all night, continuously, developing that game idea, and we took it really far (of course, compared to the time, experience level and... we're still just two people). We'll reveal some of the info about it now.

As you can see, it is a first-person game, still using Unreal 4. The genre could be described as.. first-person horror adventure (the point-and-click kind)..? (Still not good at defining things)
You are someone who's lost his eyesight and now sees through an implanted machine. You wake up in a spaceship, trapped inside. You have to figure out how to solve the problems that come up along your way. But here's the catch:
When you die, you go back to the beginning of the day (think Groundhog day), but you're not alone. You'll remember the puzzles you need to solve, but things change, some events play out differently. You'll have to find the right chain of events to get to the end of the game.

This game is also part of the OL universe, although is a lot more early in the timeline than the other two.

A little more about the development process itself: I (Lussy) am making all the blueprints for the project (it is made with UE4 Blueprints only), and the technology itself is coming along nicely, but as Geril is working on all the assets almost alone (I help occasionally), the art part of the game is a lot less developed than everything else. This is why the game looks barren right now.

Movement test!

Hello!

Here's a video for you:


Just a quick update on how we're doing. As you can see, we're experimenting with different controls: a fixed, side-scrolling camera with 3D movement. It works out pretty well. The only awkward thing about it is how sometimes you can't determine where you are in the 3rd dimension. We're planning to fix this with a small circle of shadow below the player, and a more dynamic camera.

P.S.: Subwoofer required for full experience

Story time!

Hi! We're going to share some information about the game's world. It's going to be a bit technical so bear with us. The next story post will be focused on the actual story and the characters.
So... here we go.

The story takes place on Koronite, a world made up of irons. Along with this iron based world there are other kinds of matters on the surface which make life possible. Water is rare to find, clean water even more so as the seas contain lots of iron mixed in with mercury.

Magnetism is what makes the continents, mountains, air and water move. The planet has such a high voltage that it could shatter on its own, but the energy is contained by resistors (gigantic natural poles).

The atmosphere is slowly eating away the hills and mountains by oxidising them. Millions of undiscovered minerals lie hidden deep inside the planet’s inner layers among with organic living irons.

The reason why life is possible in this world is because of the plants as many of them are able to extract iron from the air as well as other sources and incorporate them. They then give off the materials they don’t need -  the ones that are needed for humans to live.

The life forms here are either based on iron or have evolved to survive in this environment. The people living on Koronite essentially adapted to the planet, their bodies able to process some of the iron. As such, they are heavier and sturdier but they regenerate less and more slowly. Their fur is strong but prone to rust if it’s not taken care of regularly. Breaking one of their bones may take tonnes of force but once broken, it stays that way. They can also have parasite-like irons consuming their bodies, or living with them in symbiosis. 

The planet tries to get rid of outsiders on a daily basis, these are the more recent inhabitants who haven't evolved to process iron, yet they are determined in surviving at any cost.

The surface is varied. In some places the ground is hot and sandy, elsewhere it is cold with crumbled metal. There are endless oceans that look like large mirrors and also seemingly never-ending are the chasms, floating mountains made of dust and slowly moving damp cubes of metal.

While life is everywhere in its own stubborn form, the inhabitants are fighting an endless war against nature using steam and sparks. After centuries they can finally say the surface is theirs. The problem is, the surface is not the only layer the world has.

Before conquering the surface life only existed deep below it. The creatures were primitive and less able to adapt to changes. Their large bodies remained as caves between the layers of the planet. As it moved and changed, the surface became more stable than the other layers. Water carved long caverns that became the home of simple and more complex creatures alike. So while the surface keeps changing, under it, chaos is the only natural order.

The average inhabitant stays far away from the deeper levels - they have enough trouble on the surface already - yet there are people who use the caves to remain hidden, to do things under everyone’s feet. They have to fight other creatures or nature itself for these places, so it isn’t very common.

About one and a half centuries ago, it became forbidden in most regions to work, develop and transport under the surface. Only mining could be continued and even that was kept under close supervision. Recently there have been revolts across the world. Leaders came and went, laws faded and became rewritten. Nations changed names and conquered new lands.

These new, neutral areas of land - or as their inhabitants called them, “free terrains” - were captured by hired mercenaries. Without a flag or a name the conquered lands could become inhabited to form a new nation of their own.

In this unstable world, to survive, beggars can't be choosers.

Our protagonists’ lives start out from the village in the valley of Maron.
They separate for a while after but their past and goals ultimately causes their paths to collide soon enough.

names not final

Some plans

Hi!

A lot of you (..the few people who sometimes read this blog) don't understand what the game is going to be like. So we'd like to make this clear: we're making a sidescrolling cooperative game in which you explore huge dungeons in groups of 4 or less, fight monsters and enemies and do quests. We'll leave the rest for later. For now, here are some of our most recent plans and ideas:

(don't tell anyone! ;) )

About the game

Hello,

I am Lussy, a member of a video game developer team. We're working on a project codenamed O.L. The game is in its very early stage. We're constantly brainstorming and still figuring out which gameplay elements to implement.

Our story revolves around an anthropomorphic fox, currently only referred to as 'Fox'. Fox lives on a planet which is mainly made of iron. The inhabitants (also anthropomorphic) live mostly in small colonies, or small cities at best. Technology is vastly different from what we know due to the many elements with unique characteristics.



The game will be powered by the Unreal Engine 3, featuring a third person perspective and will focus on adventure game elements, problem solving and combat (mostly melee). We'd also like to emphasize animal instincts and senses. For example, smells would be kind of visible for the player, and would help in pathfinding. We want to make it a unique game that players will enjoy, so feedback is greatly appreciated. After developing the core of the game and finalizing our concept, we aim to launch a Kickstarter campaign to see if our idea is interesting enough for it to be brought to reality. We're experimenting with different graphical styles, so far we like the cel-shaded and watercolor-like look the most.

Currently, we're working on the control of the main character, but we already have simple maps to test in, so looking at the pictures I upload, you can get the basic feel of the game. I'll be posting about the progress of the project on this blog regularly. In the next couple of posts I'll write about the protagonist, the world, the story, the gameplay and technological information.

Until next time, then.