Septaroad Voyager - party-based JRPG where you program your party members' AI

Legacy UDK Projects
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Check it out! Official announcement trailer for my next game. The title and the trailer give you a pretty good idea about the gameplay.

Following the Spiderweb Software school of game development, I’m trying to reuse as much of Himeko Sutori as possible. But this being a completely new game, all of the menus, ActionScript, and UnrealScript are different. So are the levels. And I made all new textures and meshes for kitbashes to make my buildings with consistent texel densities and a reduced-palette pixelated look. But I was able to use the same sprites and music, and the textures from the particle effects, so at least I didn’t have to redo those I guess.

Also, this game makes frequent use of dynamic lights, so I force the game to run in DX11 for improved performance. And DX9 support is disappearing for good. New hardware will only run it via emulation. So I had to rewrite some things to work with DX11. Whenever @Coldscooter starts working on UE3’s C++ I’ll have some pointers on how to run borderless windowed with DX11.

What else do we have here? Steamworks integration. Controller support via Steam Input. On-screen keyboard too if you run in Big Picture mode or whatever UI is replacing it. Cloud saves.

I’m making character portraits and promotional art with help from Stable Diffusion. It’s churning out stuff MUCH faster and cheaper than doing it myself or hiring an artist. It does have a tendency to produce details (or sometimes entire compositions) that make no sense and I have to rework those with Photoshop or inpainting or photobashing, but I still think the results are a much better option for someone with my budget.

I think it’s coming along pretty well. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

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Looks great @Nathaniel3W :slight_smile:

If you have fully switched to DX11, doesn’t that mean that all your speculars are broken on your materials though? As per this thread: DX9 vs DX11 (Forward vs Deferred Rendering) - #2 by Coldscooter

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I’m not noticing any major change with the speculars. But my meshes all have pixelated textures and I don’t even use a specular texture. It’s working OK for me and I think the deferred shading is doing its job of making the rendering fast.

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Good job. :clap: :clap: :clap:

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Nice buddy I cannot wait to give it a try!
Looks more open worldish than your other game
Is it built on 64 bit ?
Is it open world?
Does have campaign?
Getting ready to play it basically…

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Hey @Neongho ! Yes, it’s open world. Its campaign right now is largely procedurally generated, but I’d like to add more custom content. It is 64 bit. And DX11. I’ve been making a lot of progress lately and I’m going to post some of what I’ve been working on.

First off, I’ve been trying to change the look of the game to match what the big studios are doing with HD-2D ™ games. Octopath Traveler and Wandering Sword for example seem to have very high contrast, color grading for each location, and a vignette post process effect. So I’m working on something similar.


As for the procedural generation, a lot of the game involves finding and exploring dungeons. You start off with a legend, which comes with a map…

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You fill in the map using clues, which you learn from artifacts you pick up during your adventures.

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Each clue can be used on a specific space on the map, and each one modifies the legend’s difficulty and treasure scores.

When you have enough clues to complete the legend, you start a new quest and unlock a new dungeon somewhere on the world map. Here is a portal leading to a dungeon. It’s in the middle of the path because that makes it easier to test, but in the release version the portals are going to be more remote.

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And that portal does indeed use a scene capture actor.

Inside the dungeon, you’ll find a maze with enemies. In order to maximize variety and minimize work, I’m adding streaming levels to template levels to give the dungeon a kind of theme.


I’ve also been making a lot of tweaks and changes between adding new content. Like what we see here for example…


The interesting thing here is that only one enemy used its immobilizing web attack. That’s because the enemies are now coordinating their attacks. If one of them is using a status effect that doesn’t stack, the others will choose a different attack.

There’s still a lot more that I need to add, but the game is definitely starting to take shape now.

If you have any suggestions or feedback for me, I’d love to hear it!

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Septaroad Voyager has been released!

Septaroad Voyager. It’s like a Warcraft raid for people with no friends.

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If you buy one videogame today, buy Diablo IV. If you buy two videogames today, buy Septaroad Voyager.
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The game is in Early Access now, and certainly full of bugs. I plan on adding content for about the next year and we’ll see where we go from there.

Certainly after this I’m picking up UE5.

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