2023!

We got through probably the hardest year of our lives so far.

Many things happened that made our lives difficult; we're moving soon and we're working on a different project now.

We're also dipping our toes into motion capture – full body, not just facial capture. So working on personal projects became somewhat hard, we rarely have time do it (again – or rather, still).

What Geril is messing around with nowadays is the iPhone app RealityScan, that creates photogrammetry in semi-real time. You basically have to take several photos of your target from all angles, and as you're taking the pictures, you can see the app building the 3D asset in AR. It can use up to 200 pictures – that you have to take inside the app –, and it uploads those to its cloud server. Making a preview can take some time, and you can only export the result into Sketchfab.

We used to upload some of our projects to Sketchfab, so we're familiar with the platform (for whatever reason, we have 4.7k followers). After the Sketchfab export, it's fairly easy to download the mesh and the two textures.

I shot a few (hundred) photos at our family Christmas, so I can share my grandmother's Christmas cookies with everybody. There's also a wooden hawk and a wall that is in a very bad shape.

We hope that we can show you something interesting this year, that we can be more active. Also, we hope that you all had happy holidays and will have a happy New Year!

New (non-personal) project!

Hi, Geril here.

This month we met a fellow artist who happened to be working on a FPS project.
He showed me their work, and although I liked the quality of the graphics, I thought the technology behind it was lacking. I made a deal with their team: we'll make an FPS project similar to theirs using their assets, but in Unreal; and if they like it, we'll be able to get on their team.
So this month we worked hard on making an FPS game from scratch. Of course because Unreal is excellent for shooter games, it was much easier than the other projects we have worked on, so we made rapid progress.

As of now, we have implemented:
– health and shield systems
– a basic enemy AI
– sprinting
– a weapon database with different weapon types (we made lasers, ballistic bullets, explosives and an energy beam for now)
– weapon sway and recoil for feedback purposes
– ammo logic
– weapon and ammo pickups
– a GUI directional hurt indicator
– different enemy types and a spawner
– a gore system (dismemberment and such)
– custom damage logic
– interruptible death sequences before ragdolling
– splitscreen local multiplayer
– switching to third person camera on player death

And some more, smaller stuff.

The team liked what we did in less than a month so they let us on the team!
As for now, we can't show you any images or videos, but we'll ask them if we could share some test footage here.

Contriving again!

Hi! Geril here. It was a quite mixed month.

Our friend Davy said something that made us think: we should concentrate on one single project until it's done.
Well, yeah, it sounds obvious, but because we make a living as developers working in outsourcing and such, it's hard to concentrate on just one thing, since we have to train ourselves in different parts of game development.
But he's right. If we want to be independent developers, not just regular developers, then we have to deliver a game. We've got a lot of Unreal projects just laying around, most of them are for paid commissions, but some of them are ours. So we started checking our projects, and their potentials:

– OLP is a bit too big in scale to be feasible with just two of us. It's an excellent project to practice animation, locomotion logic and such, but it's a game that we can't really finish by ourselves.

– Project Blind aka. Lemniscate. Oh Lemniscate, you grayscale mess, you... The main issue with this project is, we were inexperienced in Unreal, and what we made is very unstable. Last time I tried, it wasn't able to launch itself in the editor. So we'd have to remake the whole thing from scratch. And that game is so dark and uninspiring to begin with that we just don't have the spirit to work on it.
Maybe if we have something to shake up the visuals and gameplay, we'll take another look.

– Project BPM. We do have ideas as to where we could take this proof-of-concept project, but for now, it's just a Taiko clone. But that's fine, since it was only made to figure out if it was possible to develop an accurate rhythm game inside Unreal 4, and it was a success. We will work on it further once the concept becomes more solid.

– Project Contrivance aka Puzzle For Two. This project works surprisingly well. We checked it again, and wow, it still works fine and can be built on pretty easily. The design is basic, but it can be charming (the robots glow and make cute little noises when you pull the L or R triggers, we still like that part). The movement could be tighter and the camera needs a complete rework, but the game's logic is solid, and basic visual programming as a gameplay element is kinda fun.

So we started working on Contrivance again. In just a week, we made two playable maps (okay, we made one and touched up an older one) and added lots of features to them. We'll bake it this weekend and put it up for download later. We'll leave a link here too – if you have time and want to try something very unpolished and gimmicky, then you're free to download it. We are more than happy to hear your opinions and criticism on it. We have to improve ourselves somehow, after all.

Davy, if you guys are reading, our reply is coming soon! :)

EDIT: We have uploaded the project, here is a link.

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.

Puzzles!

Hi!

We’ve been progressing with the puzzle game project mentioned in the last post. We’re learning a lot about how to make stable things, how to manage a project and time, and how to optimize games for lower-end machines. We have a couple of game mechanics ready, so the bulk of the work will be to build levels using these mechanics.

This puzzle game has a simple goal: get to the end of each stage by solving puzzles and avoiding obstacles. For now, most of the problems are solved by pushing buttons with the character, or placing blocks onto them, with some light platforming mixed in. The whole idea is to mimic programming/digital circuits with the puzzles - think logic gates, nodes.

Here are some gifs so you can check out the mechanics with placeholder art:

A basic level's layout

 

Breakable glass

Playing with momentum

Picking up and carrying items

Opening secret passages

Utilizing moving platforms

Obtaining the bonus box - this box grants the player extra points if taken to the exit

 Many ways to die:

Finishing the level:

We will put the new skills we learned to good use in our bigger projects. Please look forward to more updates in the near future!

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)

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!

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.