Lemniscate's gameplay structure!

It's about time we wrote a post about Lemniscate again.

Looking back, we wrote surprisingly little about the game's... "game" aspect. Yes, we are afraid of potentially spoiling the game, but we realized we can't expect anyone to look forward to a game they know very little about. So, here goes.

One integral part of Lemniscate is using items. For example: the player needs a crowbar to get into the air vents, and a screwdriver to open a fuse box.

Another usable item will be related to surveillance cameras. There are several surveillance cameras on the ship in every room. From the story's viewpoint, this is because the transport company that owns the ship requires the overseer of the ship to keep the ship's crew under constant surveillance. The overseer has a portable device for this purpose - a gadget that is connected to every camera on the ship. In-game, this is a very valuable item for the player, because it lets him look into any room he wants, anywhere he is. He can time his actions according to what happens in different parts of the ship. Obviously this item will be hard to get, and its location will vary depending on how things went during previous days.

In addition to these, we're working on various events for Lemniscate. These events will happen when certain actions are executed by the player - for example, if he changes the destination's coordinates on the ship, it will go off course and steer into meteoroids that destroy a part of it. If the player survives, he'll hear the sirens and see the alerts on every screen while the whole ship freezes and he slowly dies.

Because of this structure of gameplay, we're not basing advancement on experience points, like in RPGs. Lemniscate will be like an adventure, there will be no good or bad answers to a question, only different roads to an ending. Destroying the ship may mean revealing crucial information about the story or characters - it's not "game over".

The disadvantage is that once the player finishes the game, replaying it won't be as much of a challenge. Because of this, we're planning to include multiple endings depending on playtime and choices.

We are trying to create a story with believable characters that is one of a kind. The player will decide if he wants to listen to the story, find out more, or just play the game and ignore the hidden details. (Lemniscate's universe is the same as OLP's!)
The ship's crew will drive the story forward - not through dialogue or encounters but through the recorded notes in their PADs (Personal Assistant Device). They all had their PADs with them when the time anomaly began, so the entries will change along with the player's actions.

We're writing a lot of text, developing the visuals and thinking about the story in-depth for Lemniscate to be relatable and atmospheric. We have a lot of assets to create before we achieve the look we're aiming for - a home for a whole crew of people that have been living there for more than a decade. We hope we hit the mark and players will find the experience enjoyable.

Feature Update!

Hi!

It's time for another update on how the development is going. We've, since the last update, added:

Objects that can be picked up and thrown, and if they are thrown with enough force, they break/explode. These are not using UE4's built in fracture mesh. They spawn gibs and particle meshes on impact, destroy themselves and of course, make noise, too. 

We can't show you yet, but the monster can now react to noises. It's possible to distract him with throwing an object somewhere far, and if the monster is close enough to hear it (or it is loud enough), he will inspect the sound's location.

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The doors also got an upgrade. The door system itself changed, now every door uses a certain color, and the corresponding colored card opens the door. They also got this flashy sign on the buttons that shows if they are locked or not.

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We've added a note system to the game. Every in-game character has a Personal Assistant Device (P.A.D) that they use to take notes with. The P.A.D assigns these notes to the locations they were recorded at inside the ship. If you find someone's P.A.D, their notes will become visible and readable. 

Like this poor fella's.

And this is how the note looks if you activate/deactivate the found P.A.D.

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We've added visible points to the spine of the monster, so he can be seen from farther away.

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One of the biggest features we've added is the fire detection system in the ship. If there is a fire, the sprinklers will activate (if the water system is active, of course), and put it out over time. The fire can also kill the player if he stays in it for long enough. Also, if the player stands under the sprinkler, he gets wet and the camera also gets an effect that makes it hard to see. It fades over time, but while he's wet, electric devices will be dangerous to him.

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The last thing is the way the day ends. After a set amount of time, time resets, and we've added an effect that sweeps through the ship, representing the time loop starting everything over.

Also, related to this, we've made a clock that shows the current time. This will be the clock that wakes the player every day, and he can also use it to determine how much time he has left of that day.

We're still working on the interface, there are a lot of placeholders and debug stuff there, please excuse the messiness.

In other news, we're preparing for our Steam Greenlight campaign, and trying to find legal ways to release the game (we're in Hungary... it's not easy)

This is all for today, see you next time!

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!

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.