15 years ago while I was in college, I’ve tried out silent hill 3 for the first time, without prior experience of the silent hill series, the game scared the hell out of me and I almost couldn’t finish it. During the intense combat and psychological pressure, there is one small section in the game that gave me a tiny sense of comfort - an abandoned building where the protagonist arrived after escaping the sewer area. While the building is eerily silent, there is no enemy, no jump scare and I couldn’t help but lingering for a while even though I know I could easily progress further by pushing the mattress down the floor.
The game created a sharp contrast between intense pressure and a moment of comfort and safety - however brief it is - leave a profound impression in my mind, from which I could recall the rough layout of the building years after I finished the game.
The ocean courtyard serves a similar purpose in terms of providing that sharp contrast. After players go through a series of challenging levels (especially the water dungeon area), the pacing of the game slows down, the width and height of the courtyard gave players plenty of space to maneuver, the low staircase and arched ceilings is a gesture of peace and harmony. I hope that as players enter the ocean courtyard, they could enjoy the soothing environment I created and maybe lingering for a while just like I did 15 years ago.
I hope you enjoy this week’s update, feel free to leave your thoughts on this subject, and have a wonderful weekend. =)
(This beautiful ocean creature is a humpback whale. According to wikipedia, males are able to sing a complex song lasting 10~20 minutes)
Hello everyone!
In this week’s update, I wrote an article describing the challenges I encountered and the solutions I came up with while making this beautiful ocean creature. I hope you enjoy reading it!
This bridge has been worn out by time and events happened years ago. From the sheer size and scale of its construction, one might suspect it was once the main traffic of its era.
Now barely standing on its foot, and somehow still manage to provide the only way for the protagonist to reach to her destination, serving its last purpose in its remaining years.
I hope you enjoy this week’s update, have a relaxing weekend! :3
I’m glad you liked the latest update of my project, thank you very much for stopping by! =)
The video clip you showed demonstrate some stylish and slick animation especially in slow motion, I’m interested to see how the control feels like during gameplay!
In the previous post, you’ve talked about how you wanted to develop a ninja game with sword and gun with acrobatics, I’ve happened to noticed two games that may provide a more direct inspiration than mine.
If you are looking for a third-person ninja game experience, I think you might like to follow the devlog of Ronin 2072
It’s a two mans’ project using UE4, currently still in development, however, from what I can tell in their monthly devlog, they made some tremendous progress over the past few months. Their latest devlog (uploaded 2 weeks ago) already demonstrate a solid gameplay loop with awesome level design - in terms of both aesthetic and gameplay.
If you are looking for first-person experience, Ghostrunner is also made with UE4 and recently adopted ray-tracing features. Although it might be difficult for a one-man-team to achieve the same quality as this game, it already released a playable demo and I think it’s worth checking out to get a feel of its controls and camera design - which are both easy to incorporate its features into your own game.
I hope this information could help you with your game development, have a great day! =)
Thanks for the references. Ronin and Ghostrunner both look incredibly fun. I have a long ways to go in regards to control in game and there is more to it than the animation. Manual and autonomous control of Head (Cam), Arms (Weapon/ Reticle ), and Body (Navigation/Movement) are core elements of Gameplay as im aiming to achieve a VR experience without the VR Equipment. Camera control has a major role in my game as it will play both third and first person.
One of my favorite project on the forum so far. Your parkour keyposes and the teleport/dash effect are so stylish ! I loved the whale and the relaxing tone contrasting with the action, maybe useful also for the replay value. The Gameplay in Traversal and Combat looks really responsive and fluid, i totally agree with similar comments, and moreover it got this Aeon Flux vibe i cannot resist to. Really some amazing job you’ve achieved with this project. I’m a huge fan of P.N.O3 by Shinji Mikami, the DMC serie, Vanquish (can’t stop playing at Sekiro right now), i fell you have updated the flavor of this kind of game with some really new interesting ingredients. I love the way actions chain in your game, looks like madness ! Perfect for speedrunning you’re right. I wish you courage and motivation for all of your projects and the future of this one !
Yes, the plan is to release a demo before the official release. If everything goes well, it is very likely that a demo will be released this year on Itchi.IOand IndieDB. =)
Feel free to stop by and view the weekly content anytime!
The way I’ve worked with HISM is to write a construction script depicting how the mesh grows along its 3 axis and its corresponding offsets then feed in the parameters via editor exposed variables - it is a fast and simple trick to get a piece of building block with minimal effort. Over 90% of the levels are built using these small pieces of “lego” and saved me a lot of iteration time while test play each section of the level.
HISM Spline
While this approach is suitable for man-made constructions which are usually confined with simple geometry shape and a certain degree of repetitiveness, it is ill-suited for creating natural landscape or foliage. After some contemplation, I’ve decided to write a construction script based on spline instead of axis. The idea is to utilize the spline component’s editing features without actually rendering a spline - instead of calling AddSplineMeshComponent, I call AddInstanceWorldSpace at each spline point - thus enabling me to create buildings blocks that are more organic and natural to the level.
I hope you enjoy this week’s update and a BIG THANK YOU for all the comments and thoughts shared during this past week, an active community helps me realized I’m not alone on my journey.
I wish you all the best with your own game development journey and have a relaxing and healthy weekend! (／>///<)／
To spice up the wall running experience in the later stage of the game, I decided to add physic walls - a special wall-runnable actor where its rotation is driven by physic force - making it a bit difficult for players to align their camera with the ever-rotating wall-run plane.
https://media.indiedb.com/cache/images/games/1/70/69632/thumb_620x2000/Physic_Wall_03_f173_400x204.gif
(it might be difficult to notice in the GIF, however, these physic walls are driven by torque force per tick)
As long as players aim their camera correctly, these physic walls could help players traverse through the level just like a normal wall would, meaning it is possible to perform vertical and horizontal wall-run and even wall-slide on these physic actors.
Additionally, since these walls are physically driven, players are able to shoot these walls and change the rotation of these walls - a that veteran players could take advantage of.
I hope you enjoy this week’s update, feel free to leave a comment if you are interested in my physic wall !
The Physics Wall concept sounds really powerful. Why not apply it to all Wall Running? I’m too lazy to figure out how to implement such a physics system, LOL, thus I’m using False Gravity plugin and hacking the IK of this ledge animation set.
Physic walls is a concept I’ve just recently come up with, I’m afraid it’s probably too late to implement the same features to all the other wall run plane. Q_Q
Thanks for sharing the link to the awesome plugins and animation assets!
At the time I was prototyping my game (which is about 3 years ago), there aren’t as many products to choose from on the UE4 marketplace as these days. Not an artist myself, that limitation largely restricted the type of game I could make and the way the game presents itself to players. Lots of design decisions were compromised because I couldn’t find an appropriate art asset to facilitate my idea.
I always wonder what my game will be like if I have access to those wonderful artworks from the very beginning; how much cool ideas will be made possible and allow players to enjoy it in the final product.
As a solo indie dev, I consider myself very lucky to live in a world where the online marketplace help brings all the talented artists together and help me realize my dream project - for a reasonable price of course. XD
I agree whole hardheartedly. I’m in the same position. I’m a solo code-centric game “systems” developer. I cannot call myself a game developer, because I have yet to develop one, but, I’ve developed plenty of game subsystems. Over the 4 years I’ve worked with UE4, My focus has been learning and developing networked procedural generation / player construction subsystems. Because I believe in-game Player Creations that can be shared and collaborately built is the future of social gaming. I also believe that High Density Modularity is the future of constructing Game Content. Only recently have I actually started working with combat game mechanic, which is at the core of a lot of action games.
Indeed ^^ All those nice assets and kits on marketplace help a lot, and things got solid the past 3 years. Taking advantage of Sketchfab, Megascans, Turbosquid, and Epic’s marketplace helped me to speed up my game dev. I only modeled hero models and main characters. The rest of the models, they’re all purchased or commercial-free with some tweaking.
To provide sufficient space for players to maneuver around, I usually scale the props in my level 2x or 5x bigger than its normal proportion; additionally, in order to give players that magnificent, astonishing moment toward the end of the game, I tend to make later levels even bigger in scale and size than its predecessors. These attempts add up and cause subsequent levels to feel much more monumental and yet somewhat empty at the same time.
(click the image for higher resolution)
To compensate for this issue, I figured it could be a good idea to add an enemy where its proportion is comparable to the size of the level, hence, fill-in the void of the empty space without compromising the space players could maneuver and the visual composition I am going after.
In terms of scale, this mech is gigantic - literally 900uu high and 600uu width - even bigger than some buildings in the game.
I hope you enjoy this week’s update, have a wonderful weekend! ヽ(´∀｀)ﾉ
I’m glad you elected to add Giants in the game as I’m a huge Kaiju and Mecha Fan. How many Titan ‘Bosses’ do you plan to have. One at the end of each Level?
Kaiju and Mecha is what I mean by Monsters in SPAGHETTI (see sig). Although Monsters will be of various proportions using the Transformorph Subsystem, there’s just something awesome about Giant Monsters in a game (ie: Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, etc ). I also think it will be Fun for Players to literally ‘Slice’ Monstrous Yokai the size of buildings using the Splinter Subsystem.
If you’ve followed my last week’s update, you might be familiar with this big fella - a gigantic mech I’ve designed to fill in the void of my level and spice up the overall gameplay experience.
Although the mech’s AI and various supplemental functions weren’t particularly hard to implement, it took me quite some time to make it into its current form. During the development process, more than half of the time was spent on balancing each of its attacks to give players a reasonable challenge.
(*if I delay my second dodge, I should be able to avoid the third laser attack /_*)
There are many factors in-play when people consider a game mechanic is a reasonable challenge, one of them I found most critical is the possibility to avoid all damage provided the player is skillful enough with the game, which is to say, all the attacks need to provide a signal and a reasonable delay after the signal for players to react. I’ve spent almost a week to tweak the attack behavior of this mech and didn’t achieve this goal I was after; since players have different speed on walls versus on ground, depending on players’ movement speed, the same attack can either come too quick and felt like the AI is cheating or too late and pose no threat to players.
I’ve yet to come up with a solution regarding this problem - feel free to share your thoughts on this matter! Hopefully, I could get rid of this problem next week. Q_Q
It’s always great to see your progress, it’s inspiring.
