Happy Halloween!

You can view our Halloween 3D comic here:

No Rest for the Wicked by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Can you find all the hidden secrets?

We spent a huge amount of time working on this comic alone (more than half of October). It's not our best comic, and has as much to do with Halloween as a rotting pumpkin in the morning sunlight. Anyways, we tried.

Because no one is going to find the hidden things in the comic (and our previous comics...), I'll just tell you outright: There are hidden things. There are invisible things. Use the view settings to find them.

Working with a deadline (because of the contest) meant that we frequently missed sleep and any other opportunities that came up - no free time, no social life. We planned way too big for such a short time. I can't really say it was worth it, because the comic is rushed. More time could have led to a better quality comic, and better overall mental and health condition for the two of us. Needless to say, we didn't win anything. (if we did, maybe I wouldn't feel like I wasted half a month of my life)

We remade all four of our characters for this, as you could see in the previous post. Eslie really needs to be redone, the mesh has been through a lot of engines and changes, and at this point, it's more of a mess than a mesh. So we're going to redo her as soon as possible.

Blender has been especially cruel to us, causing random errors, not saving morph targets and such. Exporting and uploading to Sketchfab took us maybe 6 hours in total. (midnight - 6AM)

Sorry about the tone, lack of sleep doesn't exactly make me a happy person.

This is our last comic for a while, because the large amount of time we spent on this could have been better used on actually developing the game. We will continue making comics in the future, but for now, we're working on a playable demo.


Cheers, spooks, ghosts, whatever goes today-

And 'Happy' Day of the Dead for those of us not celebrating Halloween (Visiting graves and mourning instead of trick or treating? ...niiiice)

3D comics!

Hi!

We spent a lot of time doing a new type of comic on Sketchfab. You have to click through the annotations to read it properly. Like this, in the lower-right corner:

We recommend full screen to see it better.

On non-widescreen (4:3) monitors, you may not be able to see all of the text, because we optimized the comic for widescreen monitors. You can move the camera with the right mouse button to see all the bubbles.

Enjoy!

Stargazing by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Unreal 4!

Hi!

This month is a little crowded.

We are happy to say that we managed to get hold of Unreal Engine 4 for a while (thank you, GitHub!!). So these days we are trying out the engine, discovering the differences, etc. There are lots of built-in stuff in UE4 that we would have needed in the UDK. So we're looking at the pros and cons, and considering migrating our project. We're not sure yet though. I have yet to check out the blueprint system in-depth. (By the way, scripting is so much quicker with the graphical interface and in-engine compiler. No more restarting while adjusting a variable. Yay!)

Here are some pictures for comparison! Every texture and mesh is the same as they were used in the UDK. Only minor changes at most.

Left side - UDK, right side - UE4

---

Super detailed bump maps! Yay!

Geril created this "building" in about 15 minutes.

Real-time reflections make everyone look like T-1000s in liquid metal form

If we do decide to migrate the project, we'll make some tutorials.

I'm sorry to say that there may not be a comic this month at all. Geril is hard at work at his full-time job, and in UE4 too, and I (Lussy) am traveling in South Korea at the moment. I hope you can understand.

Comic No. 2!

Hi!

Here's the second comic:

We know it's late, sorry.. Geril got a full-time job, we had a lot to do, and little time. But don't worry, we'll keep up the monthly comics. We really hope we'll be able to finish the next one in time.

Introducing: Comics!

Hi!

We've prepared a little surprise for you all. Here you go:

We're going to continue this comic series throughout the next year. As you can see, this is our first time making a comic, so you can expect us to get better with time. I think it will be interesting to see the progress we make with each strip.
The comic is mostly Geril's work, while I (Lussy) helped out a little with the background and lighting, and I proofread and translated the original text as well.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Post-Halloween post!

Happy Halloween!

Here's a video that we just made (still warm). Prepare for spookiness!

You can see a brand new map and lots of new foliage and effects. We realised we focused solely on gameplay mechanics, so the environments.. kinda sucked. So we were working on creating foliage. And we're showing them off right now. Enjoy!

Here are some bonus pics of the map in daylight. You can see the foliage better this way.

P.S.:

It took us about 8 hours to export the frames from UDK, then convert them into a video, then convert that video, then edit it, and then export the edited video (the first edited export took 3 hours. Turned out it was 4:3, small and disfigured. The second export took about half an hour. It was also edited twice.) And THEN it turns out that the quality is faaar worse than the original exported images. Comparison:

So if we ever have the patience to try video editing again, maybe we'll fix it. But right now, we just want to take a break from this weeklong, nonstop video preparing and editing.

P.P.S.: At least the vid is 60FPS though.

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! ;) )

Shapekey Test

We've been planning to post info about the gameplay for a long time now, but we'd rather not discuss it just yet. Instead, we're going to show some interesting stuff.

One of the playable characters in the game is going to be Eslie. I'm going to write about her technical properties today but her story and personality will be covered in another post.

Her lip-syncing is kind of difficult to create and adjust with her being part wolf. Morph targets - or shape keys - deform her base mesh into a given position (for example, her mouth making different sounds). It can be adjusted, how much (a gaping mouth-morph target can be adjusted to become a slightly-open-mouth morph target by changing the values) and when (they are made into keyframes) the mesh deforms. With some effort, these morph targets can be adjusted so Eslie can (almost) perfectly lipsync any given speech.

A demonstration of this:



I (Geril) used a free software called Papagayo that creates lip-sync using sound and text. It's not very accurate, and it doesn't adjust the jaw movement unfortunately, so there's still a lot of adjustments to make after it finishes. It's better than creating it all from scratch, though.

The importing didn't go very well, but I managed to put it all together in Blender ver. 2.63. I also added some very basic facial mimicry to see how it would look.

And the character can now sing. Not in perfect sync, of course, and without any animation on her body... in T-pose. But it's working. (Makes a great imitation of the decapitated robot in the first Alien movie.)