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Immortal Redneck, a FPS roguelite set in Egypt - Devlog
polycounter lvl 4
Hello, Polycount! I'm one of devs of CremaGames a Spanish indie game studio and I'm working on a game called Immortal Redneck. I don't know if you have heard about it it's very early in development, so let me talk a little about it.
Immortal Redneck is an arcade FPS set in Epygt with roguelite elements like permadeath, randomly generated rooms, skills and guns you can improve with gold and a very particular twist: the money you earn playing can only be spent after you die and before a new run, so you can't save it. Oh, and the main character is a very wacky folk that somehow has ended up being a immortal mummy that fights demons and fantasy creatures inside three colossal pyramids. A very normal situation, if you ask me.
Inspiration
Our main references are Ziggurat and Rogue Legacy, but there are bits of other roguelites here and there as well as some old school shooters. There is also some Serious Sam in Inmortal Redneck because, you know, Egypt. Each class has their own skills, stats and weapons, and there is also a literal skill tree outside the pyramids, so you could say there is some RPG elements too. We have nine different classes in mind right now.
Artworks and concepts
Here you have some stages concepts. We want every room in Immortal Redneck to be kind of a challenge. There is a lot of jumping, differente heights in each room and all of them will be procedurally generated.
This is a mockup about how we want Immortal Redneck to look. We are a far from here right now, and obviously the 3D graphics will change a little bit how it looks. Anyway, this is how we imagine a random room: packed with enemies, different heights and a weird gun in you hands.
This is a concept of one of the enemies, the archer. This strange mix of Anubis head and hunk attack from a distance and will flee if you try to reach them.
Here you have two screenshots from a pre-alpha build. We are working really hard in the game atmosphere. We want the room around you to be very present in your head while you move and shoot, so we want a very specific light. So here is more or less how we want the game to look once we have all the final assets and stuff in it. It would be really great if you give us your opinion about it. Right now, the game looks very different, a lot more colorful, but this is what I can show you at the moment, haha.
Goals
We want players to have fun and to make split second decisions while running, shooting, jumping and dodging enemies, but they also have to plan a little before each new run. Thats the idea: to improve their character and to fight the unknown inside the pyramids. Since every room is randomly generated, there is no way to anticipate everything.
Its the studio first game outside a mobile environment, so even though we have lot of challenges in front of us, we are aiming for something great and, above all, fun. Immortal Redneck will ship with a Story Mode, a Daily Challange and a Speedrun Mode. There is no multiplayer planned, but never say never. The plan is to have a demo ready around March 2016 and to launch it in September for PC. Hopefully, we can also publish it in PS4 and/or Xbox One, but that is still a long way from here
So I'll keep you updated about the stuff we make and I'll change this first post one I have more to show. I know this first post doesn't show much, but I think you'll like the next one. Hope you like it. Im eager to read what you think about it.
Immortal Redneck is an arcade FPS set in Epygt with roguelite elements like permadeath, randomly generated rooms, skills and guns you can improve with gold and a very particular twist: the money you earn playing can only be spent after you die and before a new run, so you can't save it. Oh, and the main character is a very wacky folk that somehow has ended up being a immortal mummy that fights demons and fantasy creatures inside three colossal pyramids. A very normal situation, if you ask me.
Inspiration
Our main references are Ziggurat and Rogue Legacy, but there are bits of other roguelites here and there as well as some old school shooters. There is also some Serious Sam in Inmortal Redneck because, you know, Egypt. Each class has their own skills, stats and weapons, and there is also a literal skill tree outside the pyramids, so you could say there is some RPG elements too. We have nine different classes in mind right now.
Artworks and concepts
Here you have some stages concepts. We want every room in Immortal Redneck to be kind of a challenge. There is a lot of jumping, differente heights in each room and all of them will be procedurally generated.
This is a mockup about how we want Immortal Redneck to look. We are a far from here right now, and obviously the 3D graphics will change a little bit how it looks. Anyway, this is how we imagine a random room: packed with enemies, different heights and a weird gun in you hands.
This is a concept of one of the enemies, the archer. This strange mix of Anubis head and hunk attack from a distance and will flee if you try to reach them.
Here you have two screenshots from a pre-alpha build. We are working really hard in the game atmosphere. We want the room around you to be very present in your head while you move and shoot, so we want a very specific light. So here is more or less how we want the game to look once we have all the final assets and stuff in it. It would be really great if you give us your opinion about it. Right now, the game looks very different, a lot more colorful, but this is what I can show you at the moment, haha.
Goals
We want players to have fun and to make split second decisions while running, shooting, jumping and dodging enemies, but they also have to plan a little before each new run. Thats the idea: to improve their character and to fight the unknown inside the pyramids. Since every room is randomly generated, there is no way to anticipate everything.
Its the studio first game outside a mobile environment, so even though we have lot of challenges in front of us, we are aiming for something great and, above all, fun. Immortal Redneck will ship with a Story Mode, a Daily Challange and a Speedrun Mode. There is no multiplayer planned, but never say never. The plan is to have a demo ready around March 2016 and to launch it in September for PC. Hopefully, we can also publish it in PS4 and/or Xbox One, but that is still a long way from here
So I'll keep you updated about the stuff we make and I'll change this first post one I have more to show. I know this first post doesn't show much, but I think you'll like the next one. Hope you like it. Im eager to read what you think about it.
Replies
What we wanted
While designing the rooms of Immortal Redneck, we wanted to create sand piles based on the terrain. It was an easy task, but we wanted them to be meshes we could bring into each particular scene easily.
A example of our first attempts.
We didn't like how the mesh and the terrain mixed together, as you can imagine. It seemed outdated and didn't look like sand at all once the texture was on a mesh, so we created a specific shader that could make very detailed and soft transitions between the sand piles and the floor.
About the shader
I really wanted to have the ability to 'paint' some surfaces with sand, and to achieve this, we developed a shader that uses the vertex colors to show the correct amount of floor and/or sand. I disliked the idea of having the typical blend, so the shader is configured to show the sand texture according to the floor heightmap. Also, the texture has a planar projection to ignore the UV mapping so it can tile correctly.
Here's how the shader looks in shader forge. Thought you might find it helpful.
And here's a little demo so you can see how it works. This is how we 'paint' sand...
And this is how we 'erase' it. I'm just playing with opposed values: black for painting, white por erasing.
We had a little problem with the shader, though. When the terrain mesh and the painted shader mixed, the transition was a little too obvious. Look:
The problem was caused by the vertex normals. The way it was working, the sand's and the terrain's normals were not aligned in the intersections: the first one pointed in whatever direction the geometry was pointing and the other one was just vertical. This was an issue since we needed both meshes working together, so the solution was to create a specific tool to match the normals. This way, they would be pointing vertically in the intersection.
About the tool
Carlos, our programmer, created the tool I needed, but he thought it was a good idea to write two modes in the tool: one that changed all the vertices and another that only affected the edges. The last one is the one we ended up using in the game.
We first tried to change all the normals' vertices, but even if the transition was smooth this time, the light was acting a little weird. Instead, we used the other mode that only affected the edges of the mesh.
It's easier just to see what we mean. In this image, you have the floor normals, all pointing vertically.
Here, the mesh normals, unaffected by our tool. See those lines in the edge of the mesh? That's what made the cut so abrupt.
Now, when I apply the tool to 'all vertices', the normals end up like this. See how the light is strange?
In the end, I used the tool only on the edges, so both the floor and the sand point in the same direction only when needed and the rest of the mesh acts normally, unaffected.
Here you can see better our problem with the light. Shadows were just wrong and didn't look natural at all.
"Sandpainting"
Now that I have explained all this technical stuff, I can just show you how the final sand looks.
A little video of the 'painting' process.
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And that's all for now, folks.
Immortal Redneck is growing so fast sometimes it's scary. If things go as expected, I think I can show you some of the first guns we have in the next devlog. Hope you have liked this one, and any suggestion you have about this post or the game, please tell me.
Thanks for reading!
The small dark grey bricks in the upper half of the alpha room look quite small - I can't help but think of the poor soul that had to put them all there, maybe reduce the tiling? From the concepts it looks like the rooms could get absolutely gigantic, so if that texture reappears then you'd get the impression that a lot of man-hours were spent by slaves placing those tiny bricks around haha, but still even in such a small room I wouldn't expect the architecture to be so detailed.
The red decal (scarab looking circle with wings?) looks too clean for me - if these levels are supposed to be ruins, then I'd expect it be heavily worn or even embossed/sculpted into the rock rather than any pigment left behind, but that depends on how old these ruins are and how realistic you want to be of course
I feel there's nothing wrong with colour especially in such a stylized game, but the room does seem to be lit a little too well. I feel like, in the concept with the purple skulls for example, lighting that doesn't illuminate every corner of the room gives a more 'creepy' and 'dangerous' feeling which I feel would add to the sense of danger you're going for with the permadeath, hazards and pitfalls. For candles and braziers, they sure seem to be bright, is all I'm getting at!
I guess overall, my opinion is that the game should stay colourful but be a little darker and look slightly more time-worn and decayed. I think the sand everywhere adds a lot to that feeling already and the shader looks really nice, great job.
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Thank you for your comment, rizzler.
We are opting for a 'cleaner' style indoors. The team thinks we can get more variety this way instead of placing ruins everywhere or working on very specific details. After all, it's a roguelite with randomly generated rooms, we had to make some cuts here and there. There will be some degradation in the scenario so it looks aged, but we can't concentrate yet in such details.
About the scarab, yeah, you are absolutely right. The one you see in that image was just a quick test of our decal system (I just grabbed the texture from one concept art). The same way, the lighting you see is just a first test. We have to work a lot more on it while improve the game and work on weapons and other stuff.
Anyway, thanks again for your suggestions. And thank you guys, we love you all!
Grandpa, the handgun
Grandpa started as a revolver, but it ended up another way. It has a strong recoil, but its a powerful weapon. We are not sure about the size of the magazine just yet, but there will probably be around 10 or 12 bullets.
Its design is rudimentary and almost impossible, but thats intentional. The way its hold, the way you reload it and its hammer are plain stupid, and we love that, but we wanted it to look like it works, like it's a real handgun. Even if our animations are simple, every frame is special to us and we need everything to work together. So yeah: silly gun, clever concept.
Oh, and about the name, let's just say that the redneck's grandpa woke up one morning a little angry with the world and decided to leave with a bang. A literal bang.
[SKETCHFAB]6ff6933d869e4ec8a646098287c71ea2[/SKETCHFAB]
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Mr. Tickles, the shotgun
The background story behind this one is my favourite so far: it involves the redneck's mom and dad and a cow called Betty. Basically, his dad thought it was a good idea to milk the cow in the kitchen, the cow panicked, knocked him out and her mom had to tickler the animal with Mr. Tickles. That's how she told the little redneck when he arrived at the kitchen and show such a spetacle.
As you can imagine, the shotgun is a beast that makes a lot of damage, has a great spread but its range is really short. we are afraid it ends up overpowered, that's why we made a slow reload and we are thinking over the amount of ammo you can carry.
[SKETCHFAB]c54b6b43bf104f07aef0c801f5d56dcf[/SKETCHFAB]
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Dina, the dynamite
And last, but not least, Dina, the dynamite. The name is the redneck sister's name. Se is a very problematic girl with a bad temper, so you can understand why he thought it was a good joke to name a explosive after her.
Theres not much to tell about the dynamite bundle: it explodes, it makes huge damage and blows up either on contact with an enemy or after a few seconds after you ignite the fuse we don't have that effect implemented yet, btw.
[SKETCHFAB]b46086ca4d764b4998a998fd7cee434e[/SKETCHFAB]
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And more coming soon
Those are our first three guns. Grandpa, Mr. Tickles and Dina are the most basic ones in Immortal Redneck because they are the starter class ones, but that doesnt mean they are not powerful or useful.
Each one of the classes in Immortal Redneck will have their own guns, but there will be others youll grab while playing, also. The stats of each class and gun will affect the way you play our game, so youll probably have favorites and youll use different strategies depending of which one you choose in each run
And just so you dont have to imagine what we are trying to do, look at this artwork.
Thanks a lot for reading and thanks a lot for your comments!
Thanks
The sarcophagus
And last, but not least: more concepts
So, we have a new shader to dissolve stuff in sand. Like this:
How does it work? Easy: the shader has two values: one that allow us to make transitions from any texture to sand and another one that makes the object dissappear from top to bottom while using the world position as a reference. Given this, we make an animation so it looks like you just have seen and then we add a sand particle so it 'splashes'.
Since we have other shader that paints sand according to the vertex colors in a plane, we wrote a script so once the animation is in motion and the sand particle splashes, the script starts painting the vertices below the given object.
This is how it all works together:
This sand shader and script can also be used to achieve other cool sand effects, like an enemy leaving a sand trail while moving. We’ll probably use it in a future creature because ir really looks nice:
So, to summarize, this effect is achieved with a few tricks:
– the new shader that uses a noise texture to make a non linear transition,
– a sand particule system from Unity,
– our other sand vertex shader,
– a script that paints those vertices
– and the animation putting it all together.
I hope you find it interesting, that you like it and that you tell me if you find something wrong or have some insight about our game! Thanks in advance, people!
Guns, ammo, health
Gold
Scrolls
So, what about the Warrior?
The Warrior is one of our first enemies and also one of the strongest: if he hits you with his giant mace, you’re gonna really feel the pain. It might seem like a small, fatty creature, but it’s actually more than two and a half meters (about 8,2 feet) tall. The redneck’s 1,8m (5,9 feet), so it’s huge in comparison to the player. Since I'm showing it alone and with almost nothing else to compare but our 'pharaonic' blank scene for testing, it doesn't look big at all, but believe me: it will look like that in the end.
It’s a very simple enemy. It’s that kind of monster that you can easily kill with some distance and patience, but that you need to keep an eye on. If you leave one or two warriors moving around freely, they’ll end up surrounding you in the worst possible time and hitting your sorry ass hard
Let's see him in action. I won't go into detail about the programming side of the creature, but if you are curious, you can read about it in our devlog.
First, this is the Warrior without textures nor the final animation, but look how it follows you:
Here, the creature when he needs to find you and it just moves around.
Now, with an almost final texture an attacking the player. Notice how he starts attacking before reaching you. We wanted him to attack that way so it looked more natural. He also attack still, of course.
This is the final movement of the Warrior, adapted so he has to attack you always face to face. There was a silly bug that made him attack in the wrong pattern if you just move around him, but we solved it.
And last but not least, various Warriors and two Skulls trying to kick the redneck's sorry ass.
Hope you like how we designed and animated the Warrior. Our idea was that the Warrior is not a hard enemy per se, even if it makes tons of damage; but when you have a lot more creatures in a single room, a few Warriors can be a real pain in the ass.
That sand effect is brilliant, don't think I've seen anything like it in other games. Definitely use it on an enemy, maybe a creepy mummy that drops a sand trail out of the cracks in its bandages as it comes towards you, as well as enemies that pop into sand when you kill them?
The currency I feel (personally) would be better if it was more visually distinctive, having them a similar shape but different colour reminds me of the rupees of Legend of Zelda which is alright, but I think for all of them to be successfully identified as 'gold', they'd have to be gold in colour.
In my opinion you'd get a stronger sense of 'tomb robbing' if you kept that Egyptian coin as a base 1 gold piece that appears a lot, then have higher value gold objects that look more elaborate and valuable - e.g. you could break into a secret area or kill a difficulty enemy and find treasure looking like this ?
The scrolls - love the idea, maybe make some scrolls low risk/low reward, some high risk/high reward so the player has more control over the amount of risk they want to take? e.g. the bullseye scroll's random negative effect could be similar to the positive, except it changes your weapon if you miss - the positive/negative effects could be in the same vein if that makes sense.
I think taking away the player's jump entirely as a negative effect wouldn't mesh well with the focus on platforming, maybe have it so that the player can only jump once every few seconds, so that they can still work around it?
The enemies - not sure if either enemy is final but is it possible to jump over the soldier's horizontal swing? It would be cool if you had options if they do get too close, and I think it would convey the strength of the attack better if it was a little slower as well. You could also add an overhead attack that the player would have to sidestep to avoid, so that if they meet a soldier in a cramped corridor they can get past as long as they react to either attack properly (jump the horizontal or sidestep the overhead, instead of just jumping every time against 1 attack) But of course it's up to you, maybe I've been playing too much dark souls and want more melee focused combat
With the skulls I think they charge too slow, they're really easy to see coming. Maybe if they could strafe and flap about in the air and be hard to hit, then telegraph a charge move (stop moving, eyes glow or mouth opens) and launch towards the player but take more damage during the charge? Then the player has the option of either spending ammunition trying to take them out at range or risk it and wait for them to charge for an easier kill (or most ideally for them to telegraph, when the skull is still)
But anyway I hope I'm being helpful and not just blabbing on again. Really liking the look of this game so far
I'm so glad you like the sand rendering. It's such a simple trick, yet so beautiful... I know I shouldn't be so proud, but man, I love everyone is loving it and telling us, haha. We are still thinking about what kind of enemy would be the best for the sand trail effect. We are using the shader in at least one of them, that's for sure.
Fancy you mention Zelda, because that's exactly where we were looking when making our currency, haha.
I know it might seem strange to use the same word with coins that are not golden, but it just is an easy way to remember your 'points' while playing.
About making various objects to represent different amounts of gold, that a great idea. The problem? Our time and resources. We chose to make coins and scrolls a bit less unique and making more enemies. I know this might sound as a bad excuse, sorry.
Yes! The idea behind the scrolls is to do precisely that. I think we are not making different types of scrolls in the future because we want players to take the risk. You have your guns and your abilities, the scrolls are a plus.
You can be sure we are testing each one of them and that we do not want any gamebreaking combo or such. Obviously, neglecting the player to jump is hardcore, but it would just be temporary.
The Warrior shown is almost final. We changed a his behavior and animations a little, but the fundaments are the same.
Jumping enemies is something you can do. There's even a double jump scroll! But I think it depends a lot of the enemy or the situation. Jumping over a Warrior would be a bad idea because the redneck's about 1,8 meters, the Warrior is more than 2,5 meters and his mace is really big and has good range. Also, enemies damage you on contact, so it's a risky thing to try.
About making a sidestep or an overhead attack... I don't think it would fit well with the game. You are really fast (100 meters in 8,5 seconds, that's faster than Usain Bolt xD) and each room will be enourmous, but also filled with lots of enemies. The better way to escape your enemies is to move, run, strafejump and shoot them while moving. Sidestepping and overhead attacks would work better in narrow spaces, but Immortal Redneck is all about big, pharaonic indoors spaces.
Oh, and it's impossible to play too much Dark Souls, hahaha.
Yes, the Skulls need a lot of work. Right now, they are a lot faster and work a lot better in group. We shouldn't have showed them just yet. One thing I can tell you is that they certainly won't teleport because we have that planned for other enemies, haha.
Anyway, the idea behind the skull is to chase you tirelessly, taking your attention while other enemies roam and try to corner you. They are weak, but a big distraction.
And I think that's all. Thanks A LOT for your comment and your insight. It's always great to have someone question your stuff and making you think about what you've done and if that's the best you could have done
We wanted this creature to attack from medium to long distances (it's the kind of far away enemy that you have to look for) and to flee in case you got near. So let's see how it looks, uh?
I don't know why I can't insert the sketchfab, but here's the link anyway: https://sketchfab.com/models/5e7ae3d5ec2e4983a76b150bba54beab
About how the creature behaves, you can read the entire devlog to understand every step in the process or you can red my TL;DR version here.
Basically, the Archer wanders until it sees you or you hit him. In that moment, it chases you if you are very far away, it tries to find you if he loses eye contact and/or it attacks you. It has special nodes to attack and to repeat each needed behavior, so it's not a really complex enemy, but it works as we needed.
I hope you like it and you have some suggestions. And before you say it, yes, how it predicts the redneck position need some work and his attack speed will be changed in case it ends up being too slow when more enemies are in place.
Speedpanting
Modeling
Z brush
Retopology
Texturing
Animation test (WIP)
I hope you forgive us for showing this animation. We need to tweak it a little bit, specially when it ignites it's blue lights.And that's it. We are still working in our still unnamed game for the LudumDare Jam. If you are curious about our work, we are streaming it on Twitch.
Then that animation sold it for me! Admittedly as you say it need some touch ups an polish but I just love the concept!
Nice job
These are the two creature: Skull and Flying Demon. Not final names at all, haha.
Two gifs about their concept art progress:
Now, their 3D models. I can't insert the sketchfab properly, so I just linked to this images that looks just like them.
And finally, them into the game:
Hope you like them. They are the first two aerial creatures of Immortal Redneck. If you want to read more about them, here's the studio devlog.