New DEV DIARY video about the status on Secret Keep!
Still cranking away! Still as slow as ever! But... progress is being made, friendos!
I've built a solid foundation for the visuals of the world now, having improved the ambient lighting, the terrain shaping and texturing, and the reflection probe system.
I've brought all the NPC types up to the same level of interactivity and ragdolls.
I've made an NPC Attachment System, where I can put weapons (and other objects) onto characters, in their hands, or other places. These can get dropped when they are killed.
Testing and preparing for SteamDeck compatibility.
Doing more Blender Modeling, figuring out how to tackle modular architecture, and thickness of walls, etc.
Animals align with the slopes of the terrain they're moving over.
The rest of the game should just fall into place, probably within a matter of days, if not hours. Easy! It'll basically finish itself. No problem!
I've implemented the foundations of the interaction system, for examining objects, and picking thing up. Very excited to be at this stage after so much tech & architecture work!
Disclaimer for all these early videos:
Lots of sounds from "Thief: The Dark Project" are used for prototyping purposes! :)
It's been a while! I took time off work, and built a home office / studio to work in!
Now I'm back, and excited to be working on Secret Keep again. I've gotten back into the Tower Generation algorithms, filing the interior up with more logical rooms and stairways to reach the top.
This provides a good foundation for putting some actual playable missions into the game! :D
Murray Lorden takes a retrospective look at the development of his third game B-Grade Renegade, and discusses how it represents part of a longer journey towards becoming a fully operational death sta... um, game developer, making the games of his dreams. This blog entry tells my story of making B-Grade Renegade: Race to the Rocket, a top-down action roguelike for iOS, Android and Mac.
B-Grade Renegade - Game Trailer
The game features a lot of procedurally generated elements, with strategic choices to make on the meta-game map, and then proc-gen maps and objectives whenever you go into a mission.
The game takes inspiration from classics like Interstate '76 (for it's tone and flavor), FTL (for it's race against time in a procedurally generated set of obstacles and opportunities), and a touch of the original Grand Theft Auto (such as being able to jump in and out of different cars, and the top-down viewpoint of the game).
But the experience of making the game is really about much more than just trying to sell people on how cool this game is. For me, it's a much longer journey about learning to make games on my own terms, and building stepping stones that take me towards being able to make the games I truly and ultimately want to make!
So let's go back to the start...
Although I started working in the Australian games industry in the year 2000, only now am I finally starting to feel confident with building my own dream games for the world to play.
It's been a super long path for me getting to this point. I started in Quality Assurance at Bluetongue Software in Melbourne, Australia, working on "Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy", super keen to be a game designer, but joyfully accepting a job in "QA" when it was offered (not really knowing what QA was at the time!).
I'd done some map making for Quake and Quake 2, and later I made a small Thief 2 level that I was really proud of ("Lady Lomat's Flute")... and I'd also been teaching myself 3D Studio Max 2, and then 3, using books I'd buy in the city.
But one of the tough things about the Australian games industry, is that there's never been that many studios that focus on level design, even though Level Design is a fairly meat-and-potatoes job at many bigger studios around the world.
So I spent 6 years at Bluetongue Entertainment, where I did quickly graduated to being a Game Designer and Assistant Producer on Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis for Xbox, PS2 and PC. I then went to Firemint (now Firemonkeys EA) for 5 years, where I applied my Game Design, Producing and Video Editing skills to their massive successes with early mobile hits Flight Control,Real Racing 1 and 2, as well as being lead designer on the cute stealth game SPY Mouse and some other GBA and Nintendo DS titles. Then I left in 2011 to start making my own games!
I'd discovered an engine called Game Salad which allowed me to make my own games with a sort of "visual scripting", and I hoped to cash in on the promise of the mobile games cornucopia!
Well, after making Rad Skater Apocalypse in 2012, and following that up with Pulp Diction (2012), I'd learned a lot about designing and implementing games, and had earned about $300. Gulp.
It may have been wise at this point to discard all of my half-finished Game Salad prototypes and projects and launch into a much better engine like Unity... after all it was fully 3D games that really had my heart - games like Quake, Half Life, and especially Thief, and now more recent immersive sim games.
But instead, I wanted to get one more of my unfinished Game Salad projects finished off! A project that had been there since the start.
Originally entitled simply "Foxy Driver" when I started it in 2011, I finally finished it off as "B-Grade Renegade: Race to the Rocket" in 2018, after many life changes and game development challenges, and a full time job teaching Game Design & Production at a tertiary level games school (during which time I'd also been learning Unity, and coding in C#, and having to keep beating this Game Salad project over the head for years was a real pain).
The game was actually the first project I began making in Game Salad, and it ended up being the last that I would finish in that engine before switching my focus entirely to Unity (PHEW!).
In the final days of using Game Salad, I decided to make some development retrospectives of my B-Grade Renegade project, to look over how the project works, discussing the design of the game, how the actors work, and also discussing how the design changed over the years.
There are two videos covering these topics. The first video focuses on looking at the Game Salad project, looking over the actors, explaining how the game is structured, how the AI works, the vehicles, the weapons, etc.
B-Grade Renegade: Game Dev Retrospective - Pt 1: Inspecting the Project
And in the second video I open up a whole bunch of the project files dating back from 2011 right through to 2018, looking at how the project changed, and discussing all the design changes as development went along.
B-Grade Renegade: Game Dev Retrospective - Pt 2: Jumping thru versions (2011-2018)
I wanted to share the story of developing B-Grade Renegade to tell just one story of a developer's completely-inglorious and non-astounding journey through learning to make a complete game. Coming to the end of this project, I'm really glad I finished it off.
Although it has formed a triptych of games that have all basically launched to absolutely no fanfare or sales of any kind, I consider these to be really successful stepping-stone projects in their own way, and I'm excited about launching into my next project in Unity, currently just code-named "Romero", a fast paced challenging FPS game with some immersive sim aspirations (more news on that as it comes to hand!).
Murray Lorden
MUZBOZ Games
You can get B-Grade Renegade for Mac for free on itch.io
The player can see through the portal into the other location, and they can also jump through themself. I am still developing the actual ideas of what to do with my portals in the game. Yet to be finalised! But these are just test ones for now!
Some GUARDS with basic detection AI. (They detect you based on whether you're standing in the light.)
Some ANIMALS with basic ecology AI (they get hungry and thirsty, and go to eat and drink as needed. They flee from you if they detect you).
Added CLOTH BANNERS that blow in the wind.
A basic DAY/NIGHT CYCLE.
I wrote my own cross-platform CUSTOM PLAYER CONTROLLER. I'm using InControl so I can support Windows, Xbox One, PS4, etc. It has support for keyboard/mouse, or gamepad.
This is a prototype I'm building, which might become my next released game. It's working project title is "Lofi Epic", because I want it to feel epic and meaningful, to have a resonant story with a good start, middle and end, but to be able top produce it as a lone developer, it has to be lofi!
Here I've blocked out the map for the game in very rough terms.
This is a glimpse of the first steps of putting together my Lofi Epic prototype. I started by blocking out the map based on an old piece I did in high school in 1995!
I always intended this map to be fuel for a game, or a book (or even a movie or TV show). So here goes! My concept for this game is for it to be an "immersive adventure game", taking a lot from the immersive sim genre, but also from adventure games such as King's Quest 3! Follow along to see the progress.
Here's a video where I talk through the nitty gritty of how my soon-to-be-finished roguelike game "B-Grade Renegade: Race to the Rocket" plays out! I talk through the thinking behind my game design, and show the game in action.
B-Grade Renegade is a game I've been working on for many years now, on and off. You play as Foxy Scavenger, making her way across the country to reach the last rocket before it blasts off, leaving behind the destroyed Earth. It's main platform is iPad, and it works great on an iPad Mini, or a full size iPad. It also plays well on an iPhone 6 or 7 +. I'm also going to put it out for Mac game on Steam and the App Store. I'd love to hear any feedback, comments and suggestions! Q: Are people into this sort of game? Q: Would you play it on iPad, iPhone, Mac or PC? Q: What would make it better? Q: What don't you like about it? Enjoy!
Here's a look at my current game I'm working on... I've been working on the Weapons and Vehicles.
I'm trying a lot of new things in this game, using Tables in a much more extensive way than in previous games. I'm expanding on things that I tried in a basic way in Pulp Diction, and taking them much further. Specifically, I have all the weapons in a table, defining a full set of attributes such as ReloadTime, ClipCapacity, BulletRange, DamagePerBullet, etc. That way, the actual Weapon Actor is a single actor, but can take on the form of any number of different weapons. Likewise, my Vehicle Actor can take the form of any number of vehicles, taking their Acceleration, Top Speed, SteerRate, etc from a table. I'm also using a HudSpawner actor, which spawns all the different elements of the HUD, and they resize and position themselves around the screen as appropriate (depending on which device they're running on). Next I'll be moving on to actually dealing with the missions themselves. Please excuse some amount of silliness and bad language. If you leave me alone too long, I become foolish. :)
This video shows me and my fantastic voice acting buddy Brendan Barnett having a lot of fun while recording the detective voice over for Pulp Diction. We always have a great time doing voice over recording. He cracks me up.
This video shows me and my twin brother Evan making the music for the game! Evan played a few different retro instruments on my Nord Electro 3 keyboard, which I have loaded up with mostly vintage sounds from the Mellotron. I love the Mellotron!
Evan also played guitar, which added a nice live feel to it.
I then played a variety of virtual instruments using the Roland GR20. It picks up the guitar strings and lets you control a plethora of instruments with it. I recorded double bass, clarinet, pizzicato strings, timpani and the lead instrument, the saxophone!
This video explores my frustration with the mood of the game, and the ideas I came up with to create mood and atmosphere with art and music.
So much of the actual effectiveness of games happens on a psychological level, so you really need to work on a metaphor that brings everything together in the mind of the player.
