Wild Passage - Storytelling roguelite adventure!

Community Showcase Game Development
1

Hello fellow developers and friends!
I’m very excited to share our game Wild Passage with you.

Wild Passage is a game that is inspired by all the adventure games we played growing up as well as our love for fantasy and the outdoors. We hope to create a game that, while focusing on short playthroughs (~2h) inspires that sense of adventure we once felt as kids the first time we picked an aventure game!

Roughly a year ago, I ( Polymatheddy ) quit my tech industry job to dedicate full time to developing WP along with the folks at our little studio Polymath Lab.

Although we’re still early in development, we wanted to start a dev log here to share our process and journey.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!

[HR][/HR]
Wild Passage is a roguelike game with a focus on survival, exploration, and storytelling.
Players must survive the hazards of a procedural fantasy wilderness in order to uncover the mysteries of the Wild Lands and share their story with other players.

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Watch out for wild creatures, environmental hazards and the unexpected!
The lands are full of deadly flora and fauna which players can fight (read: die to) in classic top-down adventure combat.

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**Investigate the Lands in search for resources and magical artifacts! **
WP features a point-n-click inspired investigation system which allows players to take a closer look at many objects in the world in order to solve puzzles, gather resources and uncover bits of the world’s story

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**Use adventuring tools and unique items to aid in your survival! **
Of course the game features many items and tools both quirky and familiar. You already know the kinds of games that obviously inspire us :wink:

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Watch your story unfold as you journey through the Wild Lands
While we love core survival games, we want WP to really focus on the adventure itself!
Every instance of the world hides its own selective bits of content for players to experience and uncover with each playthrough

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[HR][/HR]
State of Development
As of right now, Wild Passage has been in development for roughly 8 months of dedicated time and on-and-off for about another 4 (gotta pay the bills).
Because WP Is a game that relies heavily on content, we believe building a strong foundational framework will allow us to add content fast in the future, so we’ve focused on exactly that.

  • We’ve built out all of our core frameworks for items, creature AI , day/night cycles, health, collision management and so on, all the little things that make the game run.
  • We’ve got ourselves the inventory, investigation systems, map travel systems, and some lightweight world generation
  • We’ve spent a significant effort on the visual style; models, shaders, custom lighting tweaks and such. We’re reeeeally passionate about pushing the stylized look in UE4 and are just beginning to see a style we feel happy to call our own :slight_smile:

What we have currently is our pre-alpha prototype, we’ve had the privilege of sharing this core gameplay with folks at Indiecade 2016 and in other playtest scenarios and have gathered a lot of wonderful feedback for us to impove upon.

[HR][/HR]
Goals and Future
Wild Passage is a passion project and so far remains totally self funded.
Unfortunately, this means sometimes our development slows down as we take on contract work to keep ourselves fed and going.

Regardless, we’re shifting gears now to:

  • Prototype the larger world gen systems
  • Add more creatures, items, and map types
  • Add proper support for mouse/keyboard

The fundamentals are built, the biggest technical questions are answered, so it boils down to hands-on time crafting some new content.
We are still in planning to seek funding probably via crowdfunding and Patreon, more time to put into the game and less time to worry about $$ :slight_smile:

So far the feedback has been immensely reassuring. We hope to post as weekly as possible, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
[HR][/HR]
@polymatheddy](https://twitter./polymatheddy) | @polymathlab](https://twitter./polymathlab) | Website

2

Very beautiful visual style. Great work.

So you are exposing a different fraction of the overall content to the player each time a new game is started and the player needs to stitch these experiences together to a bigger whole?
Sounds like an interesting way to get a lot of play time out of the limited amount of content an indie team can create. Sounds very cool.

3

Great style, i like a lot the graphics and the point and click puzzles gameplay.
Keep up the good work :smiley:

4

i freaking love the graphics !! did you made a sort of cel shaded post process? or just materials with this kind of cartoonish style?

6

Yes that’s exactly right! I’m glad you think thats a good idea, we definitelly came upon this thought after feeling limited, we rather smalller more unique playthroughs than some long neverending epic

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Sort of! It’s actually not cel shaded we’re using a combination of tweaked PBR with injecting a custom light vector into the diffuse so we can more directly affect the colors of materials, maybe it’s somethign we can do a write up about sometime!

8

Wow, this looks fantastic, Eddy! Congratulations! I, too, am very intrigued by the lighting. It’s very soft and natural. Beautiful!

9

Beautiful style! cant waite to see it in action :slight_smile:

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Day Night Cycles!

Hey All
Thanks again for the great feedback! I’m currently working hard on fixing up some of our Day/Night management systems.

The game already had this working but it’s now really nice and smooth and 100% dynamic lighting <3!

Peep this little timelapse of a 24H cycle in game :3. A day in Wild Passage is roughly 15m in real time

http://i.imgur./tbxY0F1.gif

11

Oh man! This is magnificent! It’s like a cross between Super Mario 64 (and its subsequent titles) and the isometric style of Diablo.

This is fabulous. I’m so excited!

12

oh Boy, that’s totally a description I hadn’t heard before. Thank you so much ^_^!

13

No problem! I’m amazed at its design. I really look forward to more!