Dinosaursssssss

[Dev Log] SHADOW of SOMETHING

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This Wizard Jam, I'd like to try a little experiment; something I've been thinking about for a while, but never got around to trying.

 

Do you remember the Digital Homicide? They're the studio that said they were gonna sue Jim Sterling over his comments about their terrible shooters, for example: "Sterling had criticized the game for using generic art assets purchased online" (Source: Angered Game Developer Sues Critic Jim Sterling For $10 Million)

 

Or maybe you caught this more recent story, "Fed Up With Janky Steam Games, Guy Clones One In 12 Minutes," which is about Glitch Simulator ("from the esteemed creators of hits like ISIS Simulator and Suicide Simulator") a game that is apparently "just a bunch of stock assets from a game creation tool called Game Guru."

 

I think we've all read one of these stories, looked at the generic military characters and thought them artless cash ins. But I can't help but wonder: could I do better?

 

So, please, join me on a journey of self discovery, as we find out if I can make (and release on Steam) a S.T.A.L.K.E.R clone in 2 weeks that isn't a complete piece of shit.

 

For this experiment, I bought about 100 bucks worth of assets on the Unity store, and I'll use a smattering of other things I've bought or built over the years. And in the scientific spirit, I'll try and keep a list here, post regular updates, and probably stream some development.

 

qZ17ptB.png?1

 

Asset List:

UFPS (First person shooter template)

Gaia (Terrain system) + a couple addons

Apocalyptic City (Models)

Tactical Shooter AI (UFPS compatible AI system)

Modern Weapons Pack

 

Note: I bought a bunch of these during the asset store Black Friday sale, normally this'd be close to two or three hundred dollars.

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Oh man, Dino, I didn't realise you're planning to go all the way onto steam with it! Best of luck all the same tho, gonna be rad!

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Yeah, this is the best. All the best with it, can't wait to make some bad gamephysics gifs in the end result :D

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7 hours ago, Mythalore said:

Oh man, Dino, I didn't realise you're planning to go all the way onto steam with it! Best of luck all the same tho, gonna be rad!

 

If it's really, truly terrible I may register a shell corporation or something to put it up, but going through with publishing it feels like an important part of this to me? Though of course it'll also be free on itch for ya'll.

 

Anyway first progress update! I made a git repo then spent about an hour importing asset store packages...sorta a lotta errors but I'm sure it's fine!?

 

 

import.png

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Update 2

 

Didn't have a ton of time, but I read a bunch of the UFPS and Tactical Shooter AI (TSAI from now on) documentation and fucked around with the demo scenes; both seem really comprehensive and well documented. AI animation/blend trees and behaviors were what I anticipated to be the most complex system I'd need, and TSAI seems like it'll be a great solution for standing that stuff up. From the docs, it seems like a good template that I can use with characters rigged via Mixamo (or other store bought stuff, if I need it).

 

I started thinking about narrative, and what my stand-in for Pripyat will be too. I think the rough idea will be a Resident Evilish setup: a megacorp has their headquarters in a city, over time they expand and own the entire city. A mysterious catastrophic event causes them to abandon the city, and leaves it uninhabitable, but looters (I really need a good name as a Stalker equivalent, so I can have an NPC say "get out of here, <whatever>") break the quarantine to steal equipment from the now-abandoned city and labs. Enemies will be a mix of megacorp private security, and other looters. And of course anomalies/radiation that you can scan for. 

 

I'd like to have one large map; a walled off city, and a small encampment that's the quest hub/store/etc. That may end up being technically infeasible (sure hope these assets I bought have LODs) and need to split into smaller maps? We'll see; I didn't buy anything to handle world streaming and that's probably too big a technical challenge for 2 weeks. You can either enter the city and explore, or take generated quests to find specific items in the city for NPCs. 

 

The super basic loop I'd like to achieve is: get mission, enter city, fight, acquire loot, return, repeat. Throw in some anomalies, weather, day/night cycle, and that'll be a pretty dang complete thing. Ambitious but doable.

 

Also something is still throwing this error constantly, I should probably figure out what that is.

Assertion failed: Assertion failed on expression: 'scriptParameterClass != NULL'

 

 

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10 hours ago, Dinosaursssssss said:

looters (I really need a good name as a Stalker equivalent, so I can have an NPC say "get out of here, <whatever>")

 

Raiders?

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sos.thumb.png.a6403a07dd009cae52889c6b1683d38c.png

 

I started cramming all these assets together and it's mostly working! Randomly generated terrain with Gaia, a bunch of buildings from one of those asset packs, and two squads of AI mans tactically shooting each other. Here's Sgt Bill Computerman marching into the ruins with his squad.

 

Gaia seems like a really fantastic tool, definitely something I'll use again in the future. I'm finding the workflow a little clunky (maybe because I just started with it) but for making a big ass piece of a land with some trees and terrain features very quickly it's very capable.

 

UFPS is one of the most professional asset store purchases I've ever used; the docs are thorough, and it was extremely easy to get started. So far my only disappointment with it is that it only supports shooting via raycasts (rather than firing a projectile with physics); I'm not good at dealing with bullet drop and leading targets, but it'd be more true to the source material. Maybe I can hack something together.

 

Edit: here's some video, there's weather and you can shoot a guy

 

 

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I made a very quick city; I promise this looks better with post effects and stuff on. Mostly need something rough to get started with so I can build the game. Something I didn't really consider is it'd be really nice to have some kind of setpiece assets to mark quest areas so they don't blend in with this grey and brown sludge.

image.thumb.png.e20d831501985bab05e40bc7736a5155.png

 

I started digging deeper into UFPS; I'd like to add a hit indicator, leaning, and tracers. I kind of got tracers in, but guns in the plugin fire from screen center rather than the gun barrel so there's some work to do there. No idea how to add leaning, the plugin is using procedural animations and IK so it may be pretty time consuming to do at all well.

 

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Slick! Be sure to mark a lot of the geometry as static and bake occlusion culling (it's in one of Unity's menus somewhere). That will help a lot with the performance of the city already, and it should stop the entire city from rendering when you're way out in a camp somewhere. Maybe add a hill in between so the city is definitely occluded ;) I have a script lying around somewhere that visualizes occlusion culling in the scene view if you want it.

 

For the name, maybe some synonym of stalking and looting? Creepers, Crawlers, Grabbers, Sniffers, Snatchers etc.

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Haven't baked occlusion yet, but everything is marked as static. I've been thinking about vis blockers but it hasn't really been a problem yet; probably because these assets are all relatively low poly and generally only have albedo/normals. It would probably be good to put some walls or something in just to keep the areas of the city navigable. 

 

For names I've been looking at synonyms and nothing is really grabbing me; I think going with an animal that embodies the idea might work better. Vultures or something.

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This is so good.

 

I've actually never played a Stalker so this'll be my official intro to the series!

 

Weren't The Vultures a gang in Full Throttle? If yes, I like it as a name.

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I'm currently blocked at work (installing the Unity 2017.3 update has made it so no version of Unity launches!) so here's some more tidbits about problems I've been having with my asset store purchases.

 

The post apocalyptic city pack is OK, a little too low poly, and as mentioned above, it doesn't have metallic maps so it's a little flat looking. Not ideal, but I can live with it for $20. My current big issue is the package has no prefabs, the pivots are all consistently off-center, and in the sample scene they included, almost all the meshes are at the same level in the hierarchy.

 

For non-Unity users, what this means is that if I click a building and start moving it, any deco pieces on it (moss, fire escapes, signage, etc) are left behind. The list is also out of order, making it an arduous task to move things around. This also means I can't easily script a system to place buildings on the ground: because the pivots are inconsistent (and because they all use mesh colliders with extents that also aren't centered)  the buildings get placed at weird heights above the ground.

 

What I'm currently debating is whether I should just use the crummy city I have now, or go to the trouble of building prefabs with good pivots and generating a large city. On any other project I'd take the time to solve this, but for this game I think my current solution (I copy pasted and rotated the sample scenes to make more city, then did a little clean up and cut out some streets) is probably shippable.

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What if you downloaded a bunch of free environments, and around every environment there were huge walls, and going through the walls would bring you to a new environment. Who built the walls? Mystery?

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Matt-Hazard-but-Asset-Store is a pretty compelling game idea too. Just grab a bunch of sample games and drop a first person shooter controller and some enemies in there?

 

Actually, less of a joke idea, it'd be amazing if a bunch of people packaged up assets and a single scene from one of their old Wizard Jam games, and then one person stitched them together into a shooter. Fight across the island in Transmission: Lost, hop into a portal that drops you into a fight in Eyes of Cheating Hitman, teleport out and get chased down the street by the Dot Gobbler in  Mid Jam Power Move.

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1 hour ago, Dinosaursssssss said:

... teleport out and get chased down the street by the Dot Gobbler in  Mid Jam Power Move.

 

Shadow of Something: Call of Otaku City

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