DOGEcrash - A dystopian cyberpunk procedural death labyrinth rocket jumper

[SFtheWolf]

Thanks again for the kind comments! I assume their positive energy is what’s keeping me active since I sure don’t have regular energy.

I was going to keep the endgame a complete surprise but it’s a bit too big a feature to stay silent on for so long, so at least have the music for the escape sequence:

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Music for the escape sequence! (work in progress)
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I’d appreciate any feedback you have! I’m a little iffy on the wandering “shh shh shh” sounds in the far left and right.

[anonymous_user_b666e59e]

I really like the shattered glass look you have. I am a bit concerned that it may become repetitive to show the same shattered glass every time. Maybe you could have the shattered glass material randomly flip horizontally and/or vertically whenever it is displayed so that it is not as readily apparent that the same material is being used.

[SFtheWolf]

That’s a good idea! Hopefully between that and the fact it’s only going to be visible on screen for less than a second when you die should make it less obvious of a pattern. I also had an idea for a simple way to animate the propagation of the cracks:

I’m torn on the “ripple” in the refraction as it might overpower the cracks in motion, but it might also give a cool sense of being a futuristic liquid display of some kind (these are your eyeballs after all). Will test and tweak as appropriate.

[anonymous_user_b666e59e]

It may look better in motion, but from the still images the “swirling” transition effect doesn’t do much for me. If you are looking for some kind of transition for when the shattered glass material appears, it may be sufficient to give the camera a “shake” just as the material becomes visible (I would be expecting some kind of hard impact to get that kind of shattered glass effect, and you mentioned this would appear when one of the flying cars hits the player). Perhaps throw in a momentary burst of static or visual distortion as well.

Please keep in mind that I come from a programming background, so my sense of what “looks good” should be taken with a fairly large grain of salt (about the size of a classic VW Beetle might do the trick).

[SFtheWolf]

Thank you very much for that criticism as it resulted in me getting a much nicer effect! I now blend several of the layers in using an expanding starburst texture as an opacity map. Cracks look like they’re actually propagating across the glass now, which is really cool! It’s not perfect but it’s a bazillion times cheaper and easier than writing a procedural glass cracker would be, and you’re only going to see it for a moment while heavily distracted anyway.

I also added the random rotation you suggested, a blue/green static effect to the broken edges (meant to look like your AR failing to display), and some emissive whiteness on the sharp bits so that they remain visible in any lighting condition:

After some experimentation with adding noise in post, I found that it drew my attention away from the broken glass rather than adding to it. It made me aware of the monitor I was seeing the game through, and lessened some of the intended 4th wallishness of the material. I solved this by adding some noise to the material itself, which was cheaper and easier to stylize:

Here’s a video of it in motion! Played at 10% speed so that you can see the cracks spreading, and because player death will probably involve some amount of time dilation.

https://.com/watch?v=PDMUifXIETA

This is just a demo of the material itself. The death sequence will probably also involve the player being launched, a particle burst of sparks and glass, and some red coming in from the edges before it fades to something like a television tuned to a dead channel.

[anonymous_user_b666e59e]

That effect looks really good. You continue to amaze me with the visual effects you are putting together.

[SFtheWolf]

Thank you so much! I still get chills when people from Epic notice, let alone compliment my work.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup since there’s a demo-oriented indie meetup on Tuesday that I want to have something playable for. I cut about a gig of unused content from the project folder today (due to my kitchen-sink importing of sample content before the aesthetic was nailed down), and did a lot of reorganization that should help other people navigate once I release the .uproject.

I’m experimenting with a different project structure from the one Epic uses, namely one where the assets are grouped by their in-game function rather than their asset type; For example there is a folder for the drones which contains their base material and mesh, and sub folders for type-specific assets, such as the jammers’ lightning. I figure that organizing by asset type is redundant since filters can already do that for me, and my strategy means that dependencies are far more likely to be clustered together. The disadvantage is that I’m going to have to compromise on assets which are referenced in multiple places, such as handy mask textures.

I further improved the glass effect in ways that might not come across in screenshots but I’ll post some anyway:

The refraction is properly creeping in along the cracks as I intended now. I also switched to a lower res but more dramatic mask texture and made the chroma noise fade in on an exponential curve so that it doesn’t appear until closer to 1 on the intensity scale. The start and end points look the same but the transition is far cleaner and more animated, plus it looks consistent and good for every random value now (before it would sometimes just barf everything out at once).

I’ve also finally gotten around to adding some of the propaganda for the jammer drones! Witness the unfathomable psychomanipulation that future advertising holds for us…

[SFtheWolf]

Tonight is the first time that anyone other than my business partner who is also my girlfriend partner gets to play DOGEcrash! On the off that anyone reading this is in the Vancouver area, please drop by the Full Indie meetup tonight and watch it melt my lappy.

[anonymous_user_b666e59e]

I’m curious to know how things went last night…

[SFtheWolf]

Fantastically!! It could hardly have gone better. People were forming small crowds around my laptop in response to me merely plunking it down on a random table and playing for a couple minutes. I ended up demoing to a constant stream of people for 3 and a half hours. Basically wanted to play it themselves and had glowingly positive things to say, like “This is what indie games is about.” and “You really have something here.” and “It’s nice to finally see a woman into rocket jumping.” (???)

In particular people focused on how impressed they were by the aesthetics, which I found very encouraging considering I don’t think they even got a very good taste of them; The game was running at 20 FPS and not-max settings in a bordered editor window with the sound completely drowned out by adjacent displays.

A lot of people were asking about Unreal Engine 4 as well, which I had some glowingly positive things to say about in turn. I think I sold some copies ;3 Running in the editor proved handy here because some attendees were eager to see under the hood, and I was able to walk them through my Blueprints. It pays to have clean graphs for an unexpected moment such as this! Like wearing sexy underwear in case you’re hit by a bus or however that saying goes.

By the way I’ve nearly finalized the traffic death effect. Here’s a taste:

I was happy that I managed to achieve that “whiplash” slow motion effect that some action films use where things briefly go at faster then normal speed, followed by quickly interpolating to very slow motion as the debris floats and the viewer can soak in the details (if anyone knows the industry name of this trope please tell!)

This is also my first foray into event-driven lighting. I tried doing the red tint in post, but found that creating a dull, unrealistic flood light had several advantages; Its performance scaled better with resolution, it was less “overprocessed” looking, it allowed me to cast dramatic shadows from the blood and glass, and it varied more based on the environment.

The glass effect uses a similar strategy to the dust particles in ShooterGame; Panning caustic textures mask an interesting pattern (in this case, a copy of the broken screen texture) in order to give the illusion of many small particles spinning in and out of visibility. It’s very striking and very slow-motion friendly, particularly with all the little facets catching a gleaming light every now and then.

[SFtheWolf]

I had a flash of inspiration after-hours yesterday and took a second look at the smog layer beneath the traffic. It was barely visible and not contributing much visually, but after seeing the frequency with which people were dying at the live demo I realized that the city’s underbelly needed to be more attractive and look less like you were seeing the edge of a finite virtual world. I whipped together a material that conveys a sense of pollution so thick and caustic it’s almost liquid:

The refraction and weird surface normals blend very nicely into the smog particles, making it harder to tell where they begin and end:

Here’s what it looks like should you get close enough during gameplay:

After that I realized that even though the buildings are ridiculously tall, you could still see something that resembled their bases down below when you die. In order to maintain the illusion, I added a gigantic distant plane which emits an off-white colour and depth-blends into the runtime generated buildings. It’s meant to look like a volumetric brightness emanating from a city bathed in permanent light:

This also recaptures some of the glaring angles I liked from earlier builds which proved unsuitable for general gameplay.

During a run, this is probably the most you’ll see of the lower city:

[SFtheWolf]

During the demo I noticed that new players spent a large amount of time with their face smeared against the building walls, particularly at lower elevations where they have reason to spend time getting into a less dangerous position. The buildings don’t hold up well to that kind of close scrutiny due to the parallax effects on the metal bars, plus untextured glass just isn’t that interesting at point blank. I decided they needed some kind of detail texture to draw the players’ eyes to the surface of the wall.

First I tried a few different masks on the solar panels, and settled with the concrete grime I was already using, albeit at higher frequency. This made the roofs look much better at close range:

However I was disappointed with how much more repetitive and dingy the same effect looked when applied to the glass walls. Eventually though I came up with the solution to scale its intensity with world height. This added quite a bit to the immersion, since it looks like the pollution is coating the glass, without needing to sacrifice their unsettling sleekness when you’re up higher:

I also disabled the depth of field effects entirely. This saved me quite a bit of processing power, and actually improved the visuals! The chunky aliasing occurring on my bloom was due to the gaussian blur, and bokeh was far too expensive. The game turned out to be dreamy and surreal enough that I couldn’t otherwise tell the difference:

I’ve also cleaned up the sound system and added some atmospheric ducking to the explosions and such. I’m going to see if I can add some cool dynamic filtering effects on Monday:

I spent a little time implementing more of the pause menu and trying to decide on some silly post effects to turn the game into a decent background for it:

And here’s another screenshot of the player dying because I like the effect so much:

[anonymous_user_b666e59e]

That’s awesome news about how well the meetup went. It looks like you got some really good feedback, which you are using to make your game even more awesome.

I agree that the death visual effects are looking really good. Whenever you release the game and I am able to get a to play it, I will probably spend some time just falling off of buildings.

[SFtheWolf]

Very glad to hear that! I figured that in a death labyrinth where game overs are going to happen extremely frequently, it’s important for death itself to feel like a satisfying punctuation mark on a good run rather than a disciplinary measure.

So first off I further improved the rocket trails. They look more voluminous and taper their colours more nicely now, yet use half the particles compared to before!

I added muzzle flashes to the runner’s rocket launcher. I put this off until late in development because it seemed like an extraneous feature, but I was surprised how much it affected control “responsiveness”. Don’t underestimate the amount of feedback that visual effects can give your players!

I added some barely noticeable heat ripples to the explosions and heat/smoke to the gun, because why not it’s not like I have major gameplay elements still missing

I took a second look at the traffic particles and made them both more efficient and more consistent with my visual style. The fresnel highlights do a good job of making them look lit when they’re not, and the sickly palette + lack of windows makes them way more intimidating.

I remembered that the skyscraper material was written back when I was just learning the editor and was a complete mess. I’ve totally refactored it and added some new features at the same time. For starters, the solar panels now use iterative parallax mapping:

They’re also set up to add scalable detail to the large hexes through a parameter:

A requirement of adding the parallax mapping was to not let the artifacts get in the way of the aesthetics, especially since roofs will be viewed up close and at oblique angles quite frequently. The answer here was to integrate the artifacts into the aesthetic, and try to make the “pancaking” inherent to the method look like a deliberate visual feature:

The completely non-tessellated grooves look surprisingly deep for a method with no self-shadowing or occlusion.

The walls were much trickier. Here’s a bunch of failed attempts that made for appealing screenshots, but were ugly/distracting during real gameplay:

I stumbled on a couple gems though. For one I found that a really sleek, reflective window pattern looked decent in motion:

That’s just a mockup but it’s given me a bunch of ideas for future texture randomization.

I also had this weird fractal-esque parallax artifact happen once when the height offset values were set way too high:

Those grids in the back would twist and shift from certain viewing angles, then line up with mathematical precision from others. This gave me the light bulb moment that I needed for the menu designs, and I hope to show you the fruits of that soon.

The look I settled on allows for quick silhouette acquisition during fast gameplay, dramatic light gleaming at oblique angles, and avoidance of texture swimming artifacts by means of a scratch layer that lerps in at close ranges. The scratches remain somewhat present at a distance as well, further implying a sense of surface to the glass and depth to the metal underneath.

It’s hard to tell in static shots but the bars subtly parallax beneath the glass in 2 layers. Also seen in that last shot: The lowest level of hex detailing for the solar panels.

Next on the todo list is giving the shooter drones their particle effects, adding the propaganda randomizer, and working on the menus.

[SFtheWolf]

Added a new building type for the aesthetic randomizer: Steel arcologies.

Here’s a bunch of screenshots of them taking shape:

It kind of blows my mind that I did all of this in a day.

[AlwysAnrchy]

Fantastic job SF! I remember first seeing this thread about DOGEcrash about 3 months ago and I thought to myself that this game looks pretty cool. Since then, this project has gone from pretty cool to awesome to Amazing! Keep up the fantastic work and thank you for keeping updated! Who doesn’t like to look at pretty screenshots every now again?!

[rb2610]

This looks amazing, I love the art style!

It’s so vibrant, but also has a Cyberpunk grittiness to it, not quite sure how to describe it, but it looks awesome.

[SFtheWolf]

Thank you both so much!

[=rb2610;113265]
It’s so vibrant, but also has a Cyberpunk grittiness to it, not quite sure how to describe it, but it looks awesome.
[/]

I’m really glad the art’s been working out in that regard. I wasn’t sure if the loose mental image I started with would pan out at all, but I knew I wanted to do something that conveyed “grit” without being as lifeless and brown as most games (FPSes especially) that attempt it. I think some really successful examples of dark-yet-colourful include Hotline Miami, Max Payne 3, and DmC, which are three of my favourite games come to think of it. My next game, the other dystopian one about privatized fire fighters, is going to have a very different aesthetic, but will attempt to follow a similar principle.

So big news: The project is (probably) getting a new name! The new name is Sky Scraper and I’ll update the wiki etc. when I get around to it.

Doge is a stupid meme and what was supposed to be an incidental joke kept threatening to eclipse the actual content, and basically no one reacted positively to hearing it. It wasn’t even supposed to be about the meme but not enough people knew about dogecoin to get the difference, and even then a weak pun on Snowcrash wasn’t really worth it. The coins are staying as an easter egg. If anyone agrees/disagrees with this strongly please let me know.

So I forget why I took these screenshots but they’re nice looking:

As for updates, I refactored the particle system controlling the traffic. It’s no longer 4 distinct systems facing in different directions (I assume just 1 with lots of emitters is easier for the engine to optimize) and it’s now several layers deep. I don’t have a screenshot that shows it decently but it does a better job of conveying a flickering buzz of hostile movement that you don’t want to touch, and also makes it look like there’s more down below you’ll never see.

Speaking of below, I’ve improved the lighting from the undercity. Here’s what it looks like in the editor with only the skyscrapers enabled:

In fact I’ve improved the lighting in general. Apparently a level full of big-*** occluders and only a few light sources means you can get away with more dynamic shadowing than I thought! This has really improved atmosphere, colour variation, and depth perception. It’s also solved issues of building visibility in the dark areas, which I no longer need to handle manually in their materials:

And then I learned about volumetric translucent shadowing with spherical particle normals and immediately knew that I needed to reinvent the rocket effects:

The coloured lighting on the smoke does a really good job of letting the player know which vertical slices of space are directly above the lethal zone.

And while I was at it I gave the miner drones more efficient effects that also have some lighting:

This flurry of graphical work is happening since the next live demo is rapidly approaching and it seems more sensible to focus on than UI when 4.4 stable + UMG is just around the corner.

I’m also improving the surreal vista silhouettes, but here’s what they looked like when I accidentally broke them twice:

[SRombauts]

I like what you’ve done so far!
I would really like to try this…

Do you have a recent video of it? Perhaps should you update the first post with links to last updates. Or maintain a small website to show a video and a few screenshot, as well as information like ETA for release date?

Keep up the good work!

[SE_JonF]

Anything new with this game? Been a while, hope things are still moving along. =)