Hi Death, glad to see BioXide getting a hand with this project. Ginormous demand for First Person Animations. Keep up the great team work guys!
Went silent but I’ve made massive progress. I’ll keep it short since it’s extremely late and I’m drooling on the keyboard, 's a TL;DR
- AI patrols randomly on his own, searches for the player, chases the player, attacks the player and continues the loop without breaking up
- AI can now bleed from player attacks and receive damage, till eventually they die and turn into ragdolls
- Reworked the weapon system to provide better flow between anim BPs and C++ functions (Shooting, reloading, etc) everything is done in the anim BPs using anim notifies, receiving the event from functions on the player CPP which turns on bools, so the anim BP can do all it’s magic
- Now weapons have ammo and can be reloaded, it will use a magazine system instead of a global ammo count like most shooters
- Most of the core gameplay stuff is done, which means I just gotta tweak the AI and some player functions before diving into the level design, the game reeks of programmer art
- Once a basic demo scene is built, I will proceed with the Kickstarter campaign
- New developer blog will be uploaded during the weekend
Now, enjoy the pictures!
In these last two pics I decided to have some fun pushing the limits on how much AIs I can have, I spawned over 100-200 and my FPS took a hit but surprisingly, it was playable with over 30-40fps, the beauty of optimized code compared to my noobie days in Unity using almost every AI function in Update() :3.
Thanks Techlord! I’m glad BioXide allowed me aboard, it’s been a fun process.
The 1911 is looking really nice in game, I’m really liking how it turned out. Can’t wait to get to work on other weapons in the sandbox!
WOW. Totally impressed with the frequency of updates and momentum of progress on this Project.
As much as I love FPS Games, I don’t have time to play them. I’m not familiar with global ammo count, what is that exactly?
Is dual-wielding planned?
The global ammo count thingi is the ammo system used in most shooters made now a days, let’s say you have an M4 with 30 bullets in the clip and 90 in total, so 30/90. Let’s say you shoot 2 bullets and reload, you will end up with 30/88, shoot 5 more bullets and reload, 30/83. Where do all those magazines come from? So if you shoot once and reload till you’re out of ammo, you’ve probably used over one hundred magazines. That’s fine I guess for arcade shooters, but for my game I want to implement a magazine system where if you have 3 magazines, it cycles between them when you reload, so if you shoot 3 bullets out of a magazine that holds 15, when you reload, it will store that magazine in your inventory and look for a new one to reload, that one could be 15/15 or possibly 1/15. This is used in realistic shooters such as ARMA, Insurgency and even Battlefield 2 used this, but it doesn’t stop there!
I plan on making it more dynamic, by making it an interactive system, instead of drag/dropping bullets on the magazines in the inventory screen, you will equip the magazines and load the bullets yourself, 's the process explained a bit better:
- You pick up ammo (Different ammo types such as 9MM, .45, 2.23mm, 5.56mm, 7.62mm, etc)
- You pick up empty/full magazines using the ammo types as identification
- Magazines are treated like weapons, except you only equip them through the inventory only and once swapping weapons you won’t be able to access the magazine unless you equip it again from the inventory, preventing a massive weapon pool of utility “Weapons” (items)
- You equip the magazine, now, every time you “shoot”, you play an animation which has an anim notify exactly when the bullet is adding to the magazine, which calls the function AddAmmo(), which basically takes a bullet from that caliber type ammo pool in the inventory (Let’s say you have 45 individual bullets of 9mm and you’re loading a 15 capacity clip) and adds it to the magazine.
- Once you’re done, add the magazine to your inventory and fill another one, this is the same process with all guns except shotguns, which don’t use magazines (no usas or saigas lol)
Now you’re all probably asking, why make this a tedious process? Well for me personally I’ve never seen it in a video game and since I’m going for an old school hardcore survival approach, this will make you appreciate each shot more and make regearing sessions a bit more fun, nothing better than scavenging a massive building and gathering tons of bullets, just to spend the night back at the safehouse with your buddy storing the loot and packing up the magazines while it’s pitch black outside with strange noises heard in the distance. Adds more roleplaying to the game and makes it a bit tedious, which is good for this.
“What if I run out of bullets while scavenging/exploring?”
You shouldn’t be shooting in the first place lol, shots can be heard from afar and will attract every living/dead creature close to that location, guns are for extreme cases and for exploring high frequency areas, but the whole process of equipping the magazine and loading bullets is pretty quick, you can hide in a corner and pack up the bullets you picked up while scavenging.
I can go more indepth with actual pseudocode or real implementations if requested ^.^
And dual wielding I don’t think so :P, maybe wielding a flashlight/lighter/frequency meter and a 1handed melee weapon could be acceptable :P, but a horror game with dual wielding weapons is a big no no, especially for the vibe that I’m pushing for :P.
Checked out the unity video and the latest screenshots, huge improvement!
Because of the early textures this looks like a remastered DOOM screenshot, I think it looks awesome.
Hope you have a long and prosperous development, hope to see more.
Heya, 's the first ever combat footage of Project Frequency. The changes are insane and I’m so proud that the game is shaping up :D, some feedback would be appreciated. (Lots of visuals are still lacking but they’ll come soon once I start polishing the game a bit.
Checked out the most recent vid and I can feel the vibe, especially with the grading. Rapid iteration is paying off and you’re getting the game mechanics in there fast. The description of the Mag system sounds like it could offer greater tactical complexity, but, I would weight implementation based on whether or not it adds fear-factor, fun, etc.
Thanks! That’s what I’m trying to do at the moment, get all mechanics set in place and iterate through them fast to squash the remaining bugs. After I have the core of the game (survival elements, inventory management, combat) then I can start branching out and building the world. The hardest part was the coding and getting the gameplay stuff in, after that’s been done, then I can focus completely on building a level that can use the mechanics to provide high replayability, which is the most important thing I’m aiming for at the moment. I care more if the game gives you a reason to keep playing it, instead of the horror and other aspects, which are important also, but how much times have you replayed a horror game like Outlast/Amnesia?
For the mag system, obviously I gotta test it and see how it works in the actual implementation, so then I can adjust as feedback drops in. I can agree it can be a bit tedious when you have insane amounts of ammunition. But since ammo is extremely scarce and most you’re getting from a drop is around 1-3 usually, 5 is probably the highest amount of bullets you can get. The process will be rather fast, you just equip the magazine, load the bullets (which could probably take 1-1.5 secs at most). In less than a minute you’ll have a magazine loaded with the capacity of 15-30.
With ammo being scarce, I could definitely see a form of ammo crafting, being relevant and additionally drive the need scavenge for materials to craft cool ammo.
Re-Playability is huge on my list, which is why I tend to design my games with Arcade Style mechanics: Fighters, Shooters, Sports/Racers. Arcade games were designed to be short and replayed often (taking lots of quarters). In many Arcade Games the goal was to beat the top score. Although simple it in implementation, it catered to our nature to compete, beating the score set by other human player, in turn, defeating the player behind the score. In modern games, we have achievements and leader-boards.
In my opinion a game mechanic attaches some form of scoring to the mechanic in the game. Its optional for the scoring to be visible to a player. There is at least one repeatable mechanic that operates as such: Auto-Depleting Health Meter and Food Health Meter recharge. If the Health Meter reaches zero the permadeath to the Character. The primary goal for the Player should be keeping their Character alive, but, there has to be a driver to Live, wither its beating the high score, achieving character advancement or completing the game.
I fully agree with what you said, excellent choice of words my friend.
Well after the last video, most of the core mechanics are in place. I decided to take this week somewhat “off” and clean up the code, squash some bugs and tidy up my project files and blueprints. I managed to fix some annoying bugs I had regarding the animation blueprints. During the video, if I spammed my shoot button extremely fast it would lock the weapon completely, not allowing it to function properly. It was because I’m using a combination of C++ logic and animation blueprints, the ABs do all the work using the C++ code. The problem was that I was setting the shooting as a state on the locomotion, activated by a bool, if I spammed the fire button, it would set the bool to true and not play the animation, thus getting locked completely. That was obviously a bad practice and implementation, so I researched a bit on how to generate an event from my C++ logic and call it when the player presses the Fire input.
I made a delegate macro and set it up inside my fire function on the player, when the player fires, it initiates that event, which then activates the animations on the ABs (Setting some conditions first to prevent errors). Now I can spam the fire button and not break the weapon, I also tweaked the melee a bit, it now cycles between 2 attack animations smoothly. I’ll keep cleaning up the code this week and hopefully start building a demo scene which I’ll be using for the Kickstarter :D. Now some pics!
Cleaning up the ABs a bit and making them more clearer to read
I love how clean and tidy my code looks now :D, that’s the function I was talking about, the .Broadcast() calls the event on the animation blueprints
I built a small prototype scene to test stuff out, had some fun wacking the ghouls, it was great knowing that I just had to drop my AI respawner and my monsters would work without any problems, they randomly roamed around the map without having to set waypoints or do anything besides setting up the navmesh. A massive improvement over the AI I had in Unity, which I had to set up the waypoints manually and manage them, eww.
The animator is working on the AK’s animations right now, so pretty soon we will have this beast in the game, ready to pop some heads with it’s massive power, but be wary, the recoil is insane.
That’s all for today, I’ll have a new update video by the weekend :D!
Having fun stress testing my AI system, there’s over 100-200 of them on the map thanks to my respawner with 0.5 delay. I added avoidance and tweaked the animation blueprints to work with my behavior tree. So far they’re behaving like decent gentlemen, not bumping into each other and having a casual party at the house. I decided to barge my way in, knifing some aggressive ones outside the house, once I was in, they all just kept staring at me, attacking me if I got close to them, they’re being rude. The reason why they don’ get close is that there’s just an insane amount of AIs constantly spawning, I can have around 80-100 before my FPS starts taking a small dip on a medium range GPU, efficient coding ftw 
I’ll probably start doing the main menu for the game and setting up some demo scenes to use for the KS campaign 
Heya, I wanted to share these videos with you guys, there’s a #throwbackthursday on a game dev community I’m in and I got a bit nostalgic seeing these.
This is the first video ever posted of Project Frequency, back in 2013, when I was a complete noob at game development, I barely knew java, C# seemed like some ancient extinct language for me, C++ sounded like something from another world haha. I think there’s even an earlier build than this, gotta find that in my laptop.
This was probably when the game was taking some shape and started to look good.
Watching all those vids remind me of the long path I’ve been through with Project Frequency and the immense dedication I have for this game, it also reminds me of the progress I’ve made regarding my skills, back then I couldn’t program even the most basic stuff in Java, now I can think of an idea and quickly write some pseudocode and implement it on C++ without any problems, I can rig, animate, model, texture and probably do most of the development pipeline by myself. It’s impressive what dedication and discipline over the years lets you achieve, but this is just the start :P.
I’ve been working on the environment these past days, trying to keep the atmosphere from the original game. I didn’t realize that the materials/landscape were gonna be such a nightmare, I found it extremely confusing, and I’m a programmer haha. But after hours of intense researching, I managed to make it work. The demo scene map is starting to take shape, once I’m done with the entire landscape, I’ll fill the map with buildings and hopefully by springbreak I’ll have the demo ready for the Kickstarter :D.
That last screenshot looks pretty Creepy and ideal for a Desktop Backdrop:
https://arcadekomodo.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Desktop_ProjFreq-150x150.png
[FONT=Courier New]Project Frequency
1600x900 Backdrop](https://arcadekomodo.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Backdrop_ProjFreq.png)
:O! Awesome, I put it as my desktop background even tho it’s too cluttered to admire the picture haha, I like it!
Busy weekend, my kid just turned 1, so I barely had time for PF, but I’ve managed to model and texture my main menu scene. Not that bad for a programmer who can’t UV map (3ds Max material IDs ftw!) I still need to tweak the lighting a bit and add the overall main menu loop. But still, a massive improvement over the Unity one.
I’ll be doing level design while making some assets also to populate the world, I’m lacking an artist at the moment so I have to split all of the work between me, myself and I. The game is playable already since most of the mechanics have been coded already, all I need is a nice big level to polish them. Also I have some great news, I will launch a public pre-alpha demo, similar to what I did with the Unity version. Once the Kickstarter launches, I’ll upload the demo, it will be available for free, anyone can download and play it :).
It will include “Horde Mode” (Basically cod zombies for the people who want to shoot stuff up) and “Survive Mode” which is the real game, but it’s gonna be a small portion of the game, since it’s a demo :P. I’ll be posting more progress during the week :D!
Progress is looking awesome, my pistol looks great in game.
That demo will be fun 
Oops, the standalone Image is the link below the pic: [FONT=Courier New]Project Frequency 1600x900 Backdrop](https://arcadekomodo.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Backdrop_ProjFreq.png). Just realized that’s not so obvious. Content is always the challenge for us Code-centric game devs. I’m teaching myself Blender and eager to setup my Animation Studio. In the interim, I intend to re-purpose/re-skin all the free content I can get my hands on ie: Engine Feature Samples, etc.
You move quick. The menu is looking real nice man and fits the atmosphere of the game. Just realized the first initial in each label of the menu spells out: SHOE. Don’t know if there is some relevance to that.
I agree, one thing I’ve noticed a lot is that artists usually get a bigger praise for their work than programmers, it’s mostly due to human nature of being attracted to pretty visuals. I’ve seen plenty of kickstarters with only concept art and they managed to get everyone crazy about their game, even if it contains little to no gameplay mechanics, on the other hand, a programmer makes a campaign with just block art but amazing and fun mechanics and it doesn’t reach the amount of praise the artists get.
And yea I’ve been told that by some people already haha, it took me around 2 years to get the Unity version how it is now. I started the remake on January and it already includes most of the mechanics present in the Unity version, but implemented smarter, less buggier and with a heavy focus on optimization.
New gameplay! Showing off the newly added weapon, bugs present in the video but it’s getting real close to a stable build :D. Monster death sounds are quite annoying for now, but I’ll be tweaking them pretty soon 
