Indigenous

[Zooch]

I’ve made some major edits to this post to reflect updated game mechanics.

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The Indigenous team has spent quite a bit of time planning and reflecting on how our game could be fun and enjoyable to play. We’ve gone through a few test phases and numerous planning revisions and are confident we’ve finally found our sweet spot. Now all we need to do is execute on our plans! That’s the easy part, right? …right guys?

Okay maybe that’s not an accurate assumption ;). But that’s why we need you! We’re expanding our team’s ranks dramatically - recruiting in almost every department - to help push our vision through into demo, alpha and release stages.

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[CENTER]What is Indigenous?

Indigenous is a third-person survival game set in a tropical island environment. Unlike many typical survival games, players are surrounded by life. They control a tribal leader who is responsible for the prosperity of his or her tribe. The tribe does as the leader commands, whether that’s exploring, defending, attacking, trading, building, learning, gathering, or many other actions, and may live or die by their leader’s choices. While many survival games force the feeling of isolation, Indigenous is centered around community and growth, which players will experience as they command their tribe.

However, our islands are not without their perils. Surviving on a tropical island is not easy. In addition to the naturally harsh atmosphere of hot, muggy days and hurricane storms, the islands are filled with many natural predators big and small, as well as other leaders from foreign tribes. Yes, that means other players and their tribes. You may choose to get along with the other tribes and trade, make alliances and conquer the island elements together, or you may choose the path of war and strife.

As tribes grow and learn, they expand their population and their borders, and exploring other islands becomes commonplace. Islands will be streamed and will auto-populate based on the number of active players. There will be twelve to fifteen player-driven tribes on any given island, along with a handful of NPC-driven, completely autonomous tribes.

We are recruiting! Check out our recruitment thread to find the latest. We definitely need artists!
://.com/=jtOTcTP5q9g

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[voltaire585]

Hi I would be really interested in licensing this for a project. When are you looking at releasing a version to the marketplace?

[Guneriboi]

Interested

[=voltaire585;53356]
Hi I would be really interested in licensing this for a project. When are you looking at releasing a version to the marketplace?
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Love to be involved - I don’t have the sort of skills you need but I am interested in what you are trying to achieve. I like to write.

[Zooch]

@voltaire585: We still aren’t sure on a release date. There’s two stages to being “complete” in terms of releasing content to the public. The first stage is getting it functionally complete and working how we want it internally. The second stage involves reworking quite a bit of the blueprint setup to ensure it’s completely modular, clean, flexible and easy to understand for those who aren’t as fluent with blueprints. Catering a blueprint setup for one specific game is much easier than abstracting it to work with 1000 different types of RPG! We’re tossing a couple ideas around in regards to how we’d distribute this system, and right now we’re bouncing between a release when the entire system is done vs. release each module as it reaches the 2nd stage of complete.

@Guneriboi: Thanks for your interest! We’re stretched pretty thin in terms of ability to manage non-critical staff at the moment, but we would be open to talking with a writer if he had some formal training in linguistics and had a desire to create uniquely primitive written and spoken languages and dialects.

[Guneriboi]

Contribution

[=;53739]
@voltaire585: We still aren’t sure on a release date. There’s two stages to being “complete” in terms of releasing content to the public. The first stage is getting it functionally complete and working how we want it internally. The second stage involves reworking quite a bit of the blueprint setup to ensure it’s completely modular, clean, flexible and easy to understand for those who aren’t as fluent with blueprints. Catering a blueprint setup for one specific game is much easier than abstracting it to work with 1000 different types of RPG! We’re tossing a couple ideas around in regards to how we’d distribute this system, and right now we’re bouncing between a release when the entire system is done vs. release each module as it reaches the 2nd stage of complete.

@Guneriboi: Thanks for your interest! We’re stretched pretty thin in terms of ability to manage non-critical staff at the moment, but we would be open to talking with a writer if he had some formal training in linguistics and had a desire to create uniquely primitive written and spoken languages and dialects.
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Thanks for the reply. I believe I have a little knowledge and understanding about the trials and tribulations regarding unique ways of creating such projects.

A little about me…I’m been around a while doing what your team is striving to achieve - the difference with me is that I am an Indigenous Australia with strong links in Knowledge Management - as aspect of this is language as well as cultural heritage management and maintenance. I play with Oculus Rift, have developed with Torque and its various update, converted to Unity3D and have delivered a few iterations based upon the similar premise to what your team are trying to achieve.

With respect to linguistics, I have used the Linguist’s Toolbox to undertake a comparative analysis of twelve endangered languages from Western Queensland in Australia, I manage the National Indigenous Radio Service here in Australia which links over 120 communities through satellite broadcasting and my pet project is the development of an application for HbbTV which essentially will be a platform for translating dreamtime stories, myths and legends into a series of interactive quests that any user can play to explore traditional country.

I think this is enough for now. My Masters is in Indigenous Knowledge Management and I could send you a link regarding this and my effort to ignite an international community for Virtual Heritage. I am also exploring Unreal Engine 4 and your work on RPG capabilities for this engine is of great interest to me. I dabble in programming too.

[Bee_M]

hey can you share the material setup for the character, it looks pretty !

[anonymous_user_634c75741 (anonymous_user_634c7574)]

Good work with that landscape,it looks really pretty.I’m working with C++ and have worked with CryEngine also,do you recruit C++ programmers as stated in your site? I’d like to involve.Message me if you’re interested.

[Zooch]

Big changes in philosophy came down the pipeline after tons of unit testing and vertical slices (6 months worth), which changed the nature of what I wrote in this post. Just cleaning up old information, so some posts in this thread might not make too much sense.

[Zooch]

It’s been a full week since my last post so I figured an update was slightly overdue. The holiday weekend slowed us down a bit, but we were also trying to tackle both replication and persistent data. Little did we know that in order to truly understand replication, we had to overhaul basically every system we created. Even still, we don’t have a complete grasp over replication, and would welcome thoughts or feedback on our approach.

With that said, I’d like to show you how we came about replicating some animations in Indigenous:
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The base locomotion animations (walking and jumping) are hard coded to replicate and should do so automatically, but since we’re making a generic RPG Framework, it will obviously have many more animations than just walking. We were able to implement crouching/crouch walking, sprinting, a fighting stance (upper body blend), and punching (also upper body blend) over the network.

Prior to attempting replication, we had two big mental hurdles:

1. We had controls existing entirely in the PlayerController blueprint, and we thought the red colored event nodes that handled Input were considered controls. We later realized that these are just execution chains for events, and aren’t directly driven by the player’s input themselves. Realizing this blew our minds and everything started making sense afterwards.
2. We thought Animation Blueprints existed to control all the animation settings, including logic for animations. This is technically okay, but we were taking it to the extreme and adjusting things like the player’s move speed in the animation blueprint.

So after coming to terms with both of those points, we moved everything out of the PlayerController blueprint and put it into PlayerCharacter, then we dramatically simplified the animation blueprint and also put that into PlayerCharacter. There actually isn’t anything of value in our PlayerController blueprint anymore (but there will be eventually), and our Animation Blueprint only calls variables from the PlayerCharacter and sets them to local variables that the state machine can use. We don’t adjust any of the variables in the Animation Blueprint - it only asks for the final number.

Here’s an overview of our replicated animations in Indigenous - this is about 25% of our current PlayerCharacter blueprint nodes:

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Gamepad input, Mouse input and the jump controls are pretty standard - we’ve just added an AllowInput boolean for the sake of our inventory removing focus from the world and allowing mouse events:

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Movement input has been slightly changed from the standard because we use 2D blend spaces and want to have side-stepping and back-pedal animations:

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Crouching, replicated:

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Sprinting, Fighting Stance, and Charged Attack (all replicated) are identical to crouching except that they handle different character actions - their setup is the exact same. I’ve posted images in the album but won’t link them here due to image overload.

Here’s the logic that accounts for movement direction and movement speed (the move speed is a macro that’s shown below):

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Fighting stance logic + throwing the punch:

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This is the punch server event that you see at the very right of the previous image. It’s probably important to mention our flow here. The punch server event gets called from the top right of the punch logic image and sets collision to enabled (ignore that part as its not working currently). But in the previous punching logic image you’ll notice the punching variable gets set to true. The animation is handled in the animation blueprint, and it plays when punching is set to true. There’s currently an issue with the setup that allows players to spam the punch button and interrupt the punch animation with another punch animation. This should be a very simple fix for us but we kinda burnt out on this setup and needed a break before looking at it again.

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This is our macro that sets the player’s movement speed. Animations (blend spaces) are based on the movement speed variables, so this also drives animation. We currently hate how it hard switches between arbitrary values - in the future we want to ease into each switch over time and also have many more variables affect the move speed (like ground surface/angle, armor type, if the player is hurt, etc.).

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This is our animation blueprint. You can see it’s pretty simple right now. We need to figure out a better way for these variables I think.

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And lastly, this is what our Animation Graph looks like in the Anim Blueprint. It blends an upper body slot with the full body animation so you can run, crouch walk or normally walk with your fists up or down, and can throw a punch at any time.

Here’s the full album: http://imgur.com/a/rvV75#0

[Joviex]

Wow. This is a really detailed breakdown. Some excellent material, and your early peeks look like this project is going in a great direction.

Really appreciate the information share, it is really cool to see an actual in motion project.

Cheers.

[sandboxgod]

Word! That is a lot of blueprints! Very cool to see

[anonymous_user_b9532c9a]

I am thoroughly impressed with what I’ve seen so far! I can’t wait to see more of what you come up with for Indigenous!

[Zooch]

Big changes in philosophy came down the pipeline after tons of unit testing and vertical slices (6 months worth), which changed the nature of what I wrote in this post. Just cleaning up old information, so some posts in this thread might not make too much sense.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

You must be using placeholders for testing the AI, you could show that.

[Zooch]

We ***could ***show every one of those features listed in some way, but as a team it’s not beneficial for us to showcase work that’s placeholder, broken or buggy, even on the unreal developer forums.

[sangloo]

hhhhhhhh ^^ nice philosophy of life always show to people the best you can make and hide your default as much as you can

[SE_JonF]

That’s just game design in general. Some developers on here show a lot of the WIP, while some like to keep things under wraps until it’s in a very polished state since people can be very judgmental of placeholder content. I can second his statement about the frustration of not being able to show too much, I’ve been going through that for the past year and it is difficult. Glad to see this project is still moving along though, it seems to be a very interesting game. =)

[anonymous_user_d829b65b]

Any news here?

[Zooch]

https://.com/=jtOTcTP5q9g

We’re now able to show off our building system for Indigenous! It’s not a complete system yet but there’s certainly enough features to get feedback on and run tests to determine if the core functionality feels good.

We are recruiting tons of artists! Please check the top page (I just updated) to see the latest. We definitely need help making these buildings look sexy!