[Game] [WIP] Apostate (The Long Journey To Making My First Game)
polycounter lvl 11
Hello Everyone, its been a very long time since I posted here to Polycount. Everyone's work is amazing and all of you guys have been really raising the bar!
About two years ago now I embarked on my largest project to date! Inspired by games like Hellblade and just generally deciding to scratch this itch that I have had for the longest time. I decided now was the time to create my first game.
Its called Apostate! Its a third person action game that will focus on narrative and character development. It tells the fantasy story of an Inquisitor called Alora and her quest to fulfill her fallen sisters final wish.
What I wanted to do with this project however is share it all the way through. From inception through to completion. I want to share all my thoughts, my insight, ideas, ways of doing things everything. I want to share all my victories and defeats, the happy times when something in the project works, and the sad times when something needs to go. All the progression and everything that comes with it. Its going to be a long journey, but ive made some nice progress since I started. I hope you will enjoy this thread and maybe for some even inspire who knows!
I plan on this thread being a parallel thread to some other platforms im using to show off my game too. The link to the projects tumblr is below so you can follow it there. I plan on having an Artstation blog soon too, and I will make a thread on the Unreal Engine Forums as well. So you will have some options on how you wish to follow the project!
Here is the tumblr link.
https://apostategamedev.tumblr.com/
About two years ago now I embarked on my largest project to date! Inspired by games like Hellblade and just generally deciding to scratch this itch that I have had for the longest time. I decided now was the time to create my first game.
Its called Apostate! Its a third person action game that will focus on narrative and character development. It tells the fantasy story of an Inquisitor called Alora and her quest to fulfill her fallen sisters final wish.
What I wanted to do with this project however is share it all the way through. From inception through to completion. I want to share all my thoughts, my insight, ideas, ways of doing things everything. I want to share all my victories and defeats, the happy times when something in the project works, and the sad times when something needs to go. All the progression and everything that comes with it. Its going to be a long journey, but ive made some nice progress since I started. I hope you will enjoy this thread and maybe for some even inspire who knows!
I plan on this thread being a parallel thread to some other platforms im using to show off my game too. The link to the projects tumblr is below so you can follow it there. I plan on having an Artstation blog soon too, and I will make a thread on the Unreal Engine Forums as well. So you will have some options on how you wish to follow the project!
Here is the tumblr link.
https://apostategamedev.tumblr.com/
Replies
Some early design sketches ultimately went with number 6!
Alora's final concept (the design ended up changing a little bit from this but mostly I stayed true to the original idea)
Some basic color study and material ideas. As well as some design breakdown to see how certain pieces of equipment my be assembled.
Face details was achieved with Texturing XYZ maps. The general modeling was achieved mainly in Zbrush with some 3DS Max as well.
Hope you guys like her final render!
Luckily I had my friend and game dev buddy Estevan to help me out. I learned a lot from him and gradually got comfortable in blueprints to being experimenting and making some custom blueprints actors and such.
Here is one of my earliest test in the engine with my character. I decided to use Unreal 4 as its one of the most (if no the most) popular game engines to use and I already had some experience in the engine from past projects. This video is just showing the character playing a continuous animation as the proper blueprints setup was not completed yet.
https://apostategamedev.tumblr.com/
The main menu is of course really basic and it essentially doesn't have much in the way of functionality. But you can quit out of the menu that closes the play game editor. The options button takes you to an options "menu" and you can return to the main menu. And when you press the play game button it will load up the main world level where all the mechanics testing takes place right now.
The next one is the inspection system, this was purchased from the market place after much trial and error on my own. I was really lucky stumbling on to this as it was a pretty simple basic plug and play system for the game. I will need to do some work to it (primarily to get it to work with a gamepad and keyboard right now it only works with a keyboard) but its a great solution as it works on a simple naming convention that as long as your object you want to be inspectable is a movable object in the editor and has the correct naming convention the plugin will work out of the box.
The last one is the letter and book inspection system. This was a system that I created after watching some tutorials and adding some of my own ideas to it. Hope you guys like the systems.
I guess this is the first you have shown of the character here. One of the great advantages of Polycount is it is a super feedback resource. With so much character work on these forums you can use the wip farea as a test bed. No comments means hum, needs more work or a different approach. The work here is really good but I feel the main character is core.
Nice progress.
So I made a quick update video of the melee traces. I know its not super exciting but it is pretty important! Before when the line traces would hit the enemy target they would register each hit independently, problem was I was also using the apply damage node and for every registered hit that the line trace would do it would apply the damage (10 damage to start with) for each independent hit. So instead of just doing 10 damage it would do a cumulative say 60 damage because the line trace registered six different hits.
The original video to show what im talking about.
So after some tinkering and reverse engineering I got it where the hit no matter how many line traces register a hit, it will only count that as one hit and apply the damage accordingly. I rendered a quick video of this hope you guys like it!
The updated trace video.
Game and level flow
Hello everyone! So something that came up recently in the development of the game that I had kinda neglected was the idea of the game and level flow. By this I mean how the player would move throughout the world mechanics wise. I suppose you could call this the level pacing. The problem was that now that im getting to the point where I have all the base mechanics implemented into the game I needed to figure out, well, exactly what type of game I was making and how I wanted the player to experience this. So I began to do some research into some of my favorite games and how their general level flow seemed to work. I referred to these different gameplay flows as “models”
The Zelda Model - The first one I thought about was how the Zelda series handled its general level flow. Most games follow a kind of “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle when it comes to its games and Zelda of course is no different. From my personal experience with the games this is how I noticed most Zelda games handled their overall level flow.
Player embarks to a new section of the world map, usually this is the general area where the next dungeon is located.
Once players are in that new section of the world map, they will embark on a mini quest in that region (and sometimes spanning other previous regions) to be able to gain access to the dungeon. This usually takes place in the form of helping the locals with some type of problem that they are having
Once the dungeon is open the player then has two essential objectives.
First find the needed “magic item” that resides in all these dungeons
Second find the “boss key” to access the boss of the dungeon
Third defeat the boss of the dungeon, collect whatever magic quest item the player needs to advance the story
Once the dungeon is completed and the player collects the needed quest item to continue the story they will embark to the next region of the game world.
At first I thought about adopting a kind of similar approach for own game but overall I thought that my game was bit too incompatible for this type of level flow. There may be some elements that I could incorporate into the game (like level dungeons for example) but overall I wanted this game to be pretty contained. (as im the only dev working on it)
So I thought of some other games, one game that I thought about was Hellblade, my game does take a lot of inspiration from Hellblade, so I began to look at Hellblade as a possible solution to my level flow problem. Hellblade however is a pretty linear experience, and although the mechanics that I have so far implemented would work in an environment like that. It would at the end of the day defeat the purpose of one of my games most important mechanics. Making the player think for themselves and solving problems on their own. With the linearity of a game like Hellblade the player bassically has a point A to point B experience that ultimately defeats the purpose looking at clues and using simple problem solving to figure out where the player needs to explore next. The inspection system and journal and note system that I had developed for the game would essentially be relegated to a more cosmetic mechanic that really wouldn't serve the gameplay very well anymore.
Then it began to dawn on me with one very simple game. Shadow of the Colossus. One of the things I always wanted for my game was to have a large and breathtaking world that the player could feel like they could get lost in. But still have it direct and concise enough that the player does not get distracted from their main objective in the game. I came to realize that Shadow did this already. In Shadow, even though the world is large and open really offering the player the freedom to ride off in any direction they so choose, and as breathtaking as it is on its own that there really is no reason to explore the world other than for the grand sense of exploration in and of itself.
The other part that makes Shadow so concise in its design in my opinion is that the player is pointed in the direction of the next colossus immediately after defeating the last one. This gives the player their next objective and keeps them focused on the task at hand. There is no mini quests to complete, there are no prerequisites that need to be met first before fighting the next boss, its a simple point and go objective. I began to realize that this model of level flow would work with my game more and more. So I began to prototype (at least on paper) this type of level flow for my own game.
The solution I came up with has the player starting in centralized location (like the temple in Shadow) from there the player will receive an initial clue or be given the initial direction that they need to go in. This would take them to a new region of the map just like in Shadow. From there the player would find necessary clues, and directions that continuously point them in the direction of the regions (level) boss. This repurposes the mechanic of using clues and reading notes and journals from their initial design purpose of being largely vague elements in the world that the player needs to piece together to know where to go next or what their next objective is to being used more as an objective marker system of sorts that point the player in right direction they need to go to get the level boss. I think this repurpose is better overall as it makes the player still need to think and roughly figure out where they may need to go in that specific level to advance without the clues becoming overly vague and confusing as well as not being too obvious as to become a kind of de facto “yellow dotted line” for the player to mindlessly follow.
From there once the player follows these clues to the levels end, they can either be confronted with the boss of the level, or even a Zelda like dungeon that takes them to the boss of that region (level). From there it would then be a situation of “wash, rinse, repeat”.
Awesome! I was a massive fan of Hellblade and I love the style you're going for. I can't wait to see more of this and you are super inspiring me to try do something like this one day!
@LeahM Thank you so much! those words mean so much to me!
So I made a pretty big decision with regards to my combat system. I recently picked up For Honor from Steam during the summer sale and I immediately fell in love with the way they handled the combat system. The use of stance switching for attacking the opponent as well as blocking felt really good to me. The system itself really felt simple to use which is nice but I could also tell would have a lot of stuff that would be difficult to master. This made sense of course as the game is mainly meant for multiplayer. But I began to think of how I could adapt such a system to a more single player based experience.
My first attempts to get such a system working were only half successful. I intended to make the system pretty close to that found in For Honor. Where the right stick or mouse determined your attack/defensive stance. The issue with this was the targeting plugin I am using in my project didnt allow for very accurate stance switching. This was due to the engine recognizing not just my left stick input but would read my movement from right to left on the left thumbstick and apply that to my right thumbsticks input. The issue that this created was that if I moved my character too much to the left or right the stance would automatically switch. This would not do of course and eventually I scrapped this method of combat stance switching. That was when I decided to try the stance switching with button presses instead.
The general method is pretty simple.
Just using an Xbox controller as an example. The player would enter combat mode by pressing and holding down the left trigger. From there the games UI would change to show a combat UI where the player can change their stances. X would put the player in a left stance, Y the Upper stance and B the right stance. The player would attack with the right button and block with the right trigger. The player can also switch targets with the right stick. By flicking the right stick in the direction of the next opponent the player will focus on that new enemy. This felt like a pretty nice set up and worked well when I was just testing to see how such a button layout would feel on my controller.
After some trial and error I got the system working! Here is the vid for it. if you guys would like me to go into greater depth about it I would be happy to do so. Hope you gust like it. Im really happy how its come out so far. Now I will need to do some more studying of the "For Honor" combat system and get the attacking to work with the different stances (I have this working in code already I just need animations now).