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.

Progress, hard work!

Hey!

We are properly progressing in the development of Project OLP, FINALLY. This week we got lots of things done, like equipping and picking up weapons, and playing proper animations on slopes (and slowing down and speeding up according to the slope's angle). Also we're working on a new map.

Here are some pics and gifs:

The map

Slope blendspace:

Weapons

See you next time!

March update

Hi! I'm Lussy.

...It's been a while..
I got home from Korea a little while ago, so I'm still jetlagged and grumpy. But being there helped my mental health a lot, so now I'm ready to dive into work again. ...I mean, I would be but I have a few months of school left, so until I graduate, I don't think I'll have much time for anything... Finals. Sigh.

So while I was away and wasn't paying attention, Geril found a REAL programmer for our project. An actual programmer who can actually program AND actually DOES program. Not procrastinate. So yeah! As I still have very little grasp on what's going on, I'll just let our new programmer tell you how the project's doing. If everything works out though, I'll be able to switch back to the role of a designer and texture(/3dmodel/background/everything else related) artist soon. And I'm really looking forward to that.

***

Hi! I'm Alex,

I'm the new programmer for this project. I can also help out with German and Italian translations if we decide to include them in the game.

I hope you'll like the videos we make about the game, its features and maybe some of its funny glitches. I joined this project because I liked the story behind it and I want to be a part of this 'game-dev-gamers' team.

What I'm working on right now is some basic movement, and functions for blueprints. I'm still trying to get used to Unreal's hierarchy.

Hopefully with me on the team the rest of us don't have to get involved in the blueprint madness too much, so we can speed up the project a little bit.

What I aim to work on soon, but still don't know how exactly, are some grab functions and fluid character movement to make the gameplay look awesome.
I hope you will enjoy my videos and updates on the project.

***

PS: March's comic may be a little late, but it's already in process,
PPS: It looks like we'll be migrating to Unreal 4.

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

Tutorial: Introduction to Unrealscript

Hi! This is Lussy.

It's been a while since we posted a tutorial. It's time for another one.

I’ll try my best to help you get started with Unrealscript. Don’t worry if you know nothing about scripting: I don’t know anything about other programming languages either! High five!

As a first step, I recommend downloading Notepad++ (here). It’s a simple, easy-to-use software with lots of functions. You’re going to use this to write your scripts. I also suggest you download UnCodeX (here). It will help you immensely. With it, you can browse all the classes in your script folders (a class is a file of script. Classes can be found here: UDK/Development/Src). You need to configure it first, though.

These two software are all I use for scripting (besides the Internet). Oh, and of course, the UDK, but I assume you already downloaded and installed that. Let’s get started then.

If you plan on making a completely custom game, you need to start with a new gametype. I’ll show you how you can create one.

First, you need to decide what kind of game you want. If you want a shooter very similar to Unreal Tournament 3, you can base your scripts off of the UTGame gametype. If you want something entirely different, I suggest you start from scratch: SimpleGame. If you want something in-between: UDKGame. It has some useful functions, but it isn’t as advanced as UTGame.

It is important that you don’t base your game on something you’ll never use: you’ll only make it harder for yourself. The biggest challenge for me is not writing scripts, but understanding all the scripts that already exist. Of course this might not be the case for you. If you’re not sure, just experiment, try out the gametypes on a sample map and decide which is the closest to the game you want to create. You should only choose one, if you try to mix and match, it will lead to disaster (not the good kind. What I mean is that it will not work.). Once you’re done:

Create a new folder for your scripts. Name it something you’ll recognize. Recommended: Make up a short ‘identifier’ for your classes. In my case, this is OLP. All the files you create should have these letters in the front, so you can find them and refer to them easier. I’ll use TG for this tutorial (TutorialGame). Create another folder inside the one you just created and name it "Classes". Create the following empty files inside your "Classes" folder (you can simply open a new file in Notepad++ and save them inside your folder by the name „TG … .uc”, it will take care of the extension):

-TGGame.uc

-TGPlayerPawn.uc

-TGPlayerController.uc

These are the only ones you need for now. The Game class kind of holds your whole gametype together and defines the rules. The PlayerPawn class defines functionality of your pawn: your player(character). The PlayerController class contains (mostly) the rules by which you can move your player character.

Next, you’ll need to have them extend from the gametype you chose. You can do this by editing the previously created files, like so:

TGGame:

class TGGame extends SimpleGame;

TGPlayerPawn:

class TGPlayerPawn extends Pawn;

TGPlayerController:

class TGPlayerController extends PlayerController;

This makes them extend SimpleGame. It's important to note that the class name inside the file must match the file's name.

For UDKGame:

TGGame:

class TGGame extends UDKGame;

TGPlayerPawn:

class TGPlayerPawn extends UDKPawn;

TGPlayerController:

class TGPlayerController extends UDKPlayerController;

For UTGame:

TGGame:

class TGGame extends UTGame;

TGPlayerPawn:

class TGPlayerPawn extends UTPawn;

TGPlayerController:

class TGPlayerController extends UTPlayerController;

   

Now that you’re done, you need to tell the engine to read your scripts when compiling (Compiling = the compiler reads your scripts and converts them into „machine code”). You need to insert a line into the „DefaultEngine” ini file. You can find it here: UDK/UDKGame/Config/DefaultEngine.ini

Find this line: "[UnrealEd.EditorEngine]". This is the part that shows the compiler which scripts to compile. Insert the line "+EditPackages=TutorialGame" after the other ones. Save and quit. 

You’re almost done: Open Unreal Frontend. ( UDK/Binaries/UnrealFrontend.exe ). 

You will find the compile and full recompile buttons there. I recommend you do a full recompile this time, just in case. You won’t need to do this every time, the compiler detects if a script folder has modified files and it will only compile that folder. (If you get random errors or UDK decides to crash randomly or not even start up, do a full recompile. This will inevitably happen sooner or later.)

So, hit full recompile. It will take a few seconds to finish. After it is finished, you can check the log to make sure your files were found and compiled. 

This was an easy step. It will get harder though. The compiler log is the place where all the errors will be displayed. Like this:

If you get an error, the compiler won’t compile further until you fix the error. Warnings won’t stop the process, but you should still fix those, too.

So now your gametype is ready. You can try it out, but at the moment, it won’t differ from the gametype you extended from. This is the tricky part of Unrealscript: the classes are all part of a tree. They all start from Object.uc. This structure, the extending, lets you use all the functionalities of the classes before yours, without having to define them again and making a huge mess. This also means that you’re going to have to know the content of the classes before yours to use them effectively. I suggest you take a tour in UnCodeX. You’ll get an idea of where everything is.

I should mention that scripting is a very tedious process (personal experience), and you will feel like giving up, especially if you never did anything like this before. You need a lot of patience and practice to do well. I stayed up so many nights, fixing errors and glitches and they all made me furious. You just have to remember your goal (like in my case - if I don't do it, nobody will).

I hope this was helpful to you. I plan on making other tutorials as well that will help you actually modify your gametype. Until next time!

If you want to see our other news, check our Facebook and DeviantArt!

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! ;) )

Fennec fox

Hello, it's Lussy.

In this post, I'll introduce one of our more important characters, the fennec fox. Designing and creating her is mostly my job.

The fennec fox is a merchant who has a shop. She's about 30-40 years old, concentrates mostly on business and money, and the thing she's most fond of is her gun. She will occasionally hire fox, and in some parts of the game, she'll act as fox's sidekick, occasionally helping him out, but mostly just doing her own thing.



Her technical specifications will be the same as fox's: a regular and a cinematic model.


Thanks for reading, have a nice day!

It is still undecided, but she might be controllable in the game at some point.

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.