Summer's over already!...

Hey.

We're going through a pretty rough transitional period at the moment. We've had time to do this article for Sketchfab however, so enjoy:

Sketchfab Art Spotlight: Frey Couch Scene Sound

This is related to the Fisheye Placebo fanart lipsync scene we've done. We show off some making of pics in the article, and describe our workflow.

There's also this little test we've cooked up, it's an Unreal 4 Blueprint AI system with very basic pathfinding and a few interactive objects.

The interactive objects work via a point of interest system. First, we created an offset for the head that follows the points of interest that the character is closest to (or that has more influence). After those, we've also added attractors and repellers as child blueprints to the PoI-s. The attractor has a chance to summon nearby characters to itself and make them clap, and the repeller can either explode and kill characters that were caught in the blast, and/or send the rest fleeing and cowering in fear. These are all pretty rough and basic, but functional nonetheless. We spent about a day working on them, they were made as a tech demo.

Oh yeah, and the assets are from the World of Warcraft.

Peace!

Conversation Blueprints!

Hi! It's Lussy.

We're busier than ever this month. While we couldn't significantly progress with our projects, I had a little time to practice UE4 Blueprint scripting, so I created a conversation system using the new String Tables in UE 4.16. It's still in progress, but here are some features:

• Each line of NPC dialogue can have up to four possible replies from the player. The conversation itself is saved into structs that feed off String Tables.

• There are stats. Player replies can add to or subtract from a stat, and replies can also be tied to a stat requirement; for example, if your knowledge is under 5, a reply will be grayed out. I went with one stat this time, and it's "Personal", which is code name for how many times the player talked with an NPC and wasn't a complete ass. More stats can be added as needed.

• I based the camera on Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - the camera can be rotated during conversation, and is locked to the middle point between the player character and the NPC. There's a smooth interpolation when a dialogue begins and ends.

• Greetings above the head - we gave each NPC a random personality out of 4 possible types: Normal, Wise, Upbeat and Lazy. Influenced by Animal Crossing.
  The personality type determines the greeting that appears above the NPC's head when walking close to them. We plan to include a system that lets NPCs insert random, personality-specific words into their sentences, or change adjectives to their own most preferred word. 

I still need to work on making this a more open system; for example, right now it's not possible to converse with more than one person at a time. I also need to figure out a way to tie the conversations to certain situations that come up in the game. Another feature I'd like to add is an optional animation for each line, for each character involved in the conversation.

If this becomes stable, we plan to use it in some of our projects, when it's appropriate to add such a system.

Features in Project Blind so far!

Hi! In this post, I'd like to show you some of the features we've added to the game this month. (Because we realized that the video showed nothing) So, let's go!

First, we have: automatic doors that open when you walk into their range.

The same doors can be closed/opened with access cards, here is one such card:

Using it, you can lock the doors. There are three security levels (three colored cards), each color adds a new level of security to the door. This helps keep the monster out.

We have an inventory system with 8 slots (controlled via the mouse wheel), with which you can pick up, use and drop items. You can even use items with other objects, like putting duct tape on something!

For the items, we have a fully functional vending machine. As you can see, all of the usable items are able to display their names and two info sections on the HUD.

We have two view modes in the game, one lets you see your near surroundings in black and white, the other lets you see electricity, other types of connections, and you can see much farther with it, although in significantly worse quality.

We have a power supply system, any item has the ability to run on electricity, there are power supplies that can be chained together, and switches to trigger each individual item, or multiple items at the same time. With these, we can build a full system, perfect for puzzles. Here you can see power cores that can be inserted into the sockets, which provide power for the circuits. There are other items that can be picked up and thrown as well.

The latest addition is the ability to climb into air vents. This has no animation or transition yet, so it looks weird, but it is also fully functional.

We'll try to update more frequently, as we're moving faster and faster in development. See you next time!