SECRET KEEP - Dev Video 11 - "Crossbow Guards - Voices & Bolts"

Did some work on the Crossbow Guards:

• Got their crossbow bolts behaving quite well.
• Got their voices low-pass-filtered if they are on a different floor of the tower.

SECRET KEEP - An immersive story of intrigue and choices

Announcement!

Work has begun on my new game... 

SECRET KEEP

Secret Keep is an immersive interactive experience inspired by the immersive, simulation-rich world of Thief: The Dark Project, combined with the living story line of games like King's Quest 3: To Heir is Human.

Awaken...  It is another morning at the castle.

The people stir and the sounds of a keep begin to clatter and rumble.

You wake, and go about your chores.

The wedding banquet approaches, three days hence!

And you must play your part...

Play out your public role as a servant among the castle folk.

But also... your secret part, as a spy, an agent, within the walls, watching, eavesdropping, manipulating events to alter the outcome, and ultimately changing the course of the story.

How will your story unfold?

Stay tuned for more news as it comes to hand!

To follow along with the development and get the latest news, I have set up a website for the game Secret Keep here...

https://www.secretkeep.net/

ROMACK: Dev Log 003 - Ragdolls, Doors, NavMesh Obstacles

I had fun this past weekend adding some new features to my Thiefy / Quakey prototype.



I added doors which open away from you (depending which way you approach them from).

The doors are also Navmesh Obstacles, which carve into the Navmesh when closed, thus blocking the AIs from going through.

Ultimately, I plan to make it so the AIs can open and close the doors where logical.

I'm thinking of swapping out the Quakey stuff and focussing on Thiefy stuff as I keep going on the AI.  I might use the Thief guard voices as my placeholder sounds, so I can check off the AI states as I get them into my implementation...  things like...

• "Dum da dum..." -> Idle / Patrol between patrol points.
• "Hey, did I see something?" -> Suspicion.
• "You there!  You're dead meat!" -> Chase and attack.
• "Hey, where did they go?" -> Lost sight of you.
• "I'll find you!" -> Suspicious, searching for you (cooling down).
• "Hmmm, gone now, I guess..." -> Given up, lost track of you.

ROMACK: DevLog 002 - A Quake-meets-Thief style AI system

I took these Christmas holidays to work on various fun projects.

I've been working on a Quake-meets-Thief inspired project these past few days.

Some basic AI & gameplay is taking shape!

I'm really happy to be learning new things about in C# and Unity in general. :D



I've been working on some enemies that launch grenades at the player.  They detect you by sight, taking field-of-view, line of sight, and the lightness of the player's position into account.  

I also added basic ragdolls for when they die, and they carry around torches to see with.

Here's several minutes of me just running around playing with the AI's.


Note: I'm using some sounds from Quake, but the grenade and launcher are my own models and textures.

ROMACK: Dev Log 001 - Beginnings of a Quake-like

I started playing with some Quake-like elements in my prototype level.




I made a Grenade Launcher and Grenade in Maya and Substance Painter, and made my homage to the Quake Grenade Launcher.  What a beauty!

This demo also has the lighting of torches, spreading light around the building.  But I removed that soon to allow for "hiding in the dark!"...

Doug Church: Object Systems, Immersive Sims

Here's a presentation by Doug Church (Looking Glass, Valve) from about 2003, about designing Object Systems for games.  

I've reformatted it a bit to make it easier to read, and included it here because I love the Thief games, and thought others might be interested in it too.

It is written (I assume) with an eye towards immersive sims, and other games where you want rich interactions and emergent gameplay possibilities.

Here's the Google Slides, and here's a PDF.

I wish I had an audio recording of the presentation, but I don't think any such thing exists.

Enjoy!


PS: Here's a little preview of a few of the slides from the presentation...

Steam VR - HTC Vive - Prototype Development - Video #002

Some clumsy wizard left all his guns out, for anyone to tinker with.
But none of them work!  I'd better see if I can get them into action.  :)

Steam VR - HTC Vive - Prototype Development - Video #001

This weekend I started my first solo Steam VR project with the HTC Vive!
Lots of fun. Sparking off lots of ideas.
This video is the results of the first two days... a mysterious, thiefy sort of thing!