Containment Facility - a new Cleve Blakemore game

[communard]

I for one welcome our new autistic Neanderthal overlords.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

serious question

does batman have aspergers

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Well, you can download it there if you want to see Grimoire for yourself:
http://www.mediafire.com/?7d0sw1cjcjwk8a5

It won't work. I click on the shortcut, the screen goes black for a moment, and then nothing happens.

 

[Konjad]

Well, you can download it there if you want to see Grimoire for yourself:
http://www.mediafire.com/?7d0sw1cjcjwk8a5

It won't work. I click on the shortcut, the screen goes black for a moment, and then nothing happens.

Because you're popamole Windows user. Cleve predicted subhumans will want to run his game, so - in his wit - he made it run only under DOS. Use DOSbox.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Better here and closer to the way I envisioned it working.

Clipboard brings up a simple clipboard listing the task steps currently assigned to you : i.e. 1. Proceed to Level 387, 2. Enter Secure room in Quadrant 4, 3. Replace lightbulb etc. and each step checked off on the clipboard as you complete it.

Notes are any and all letters and documents you find during the execution of your duties. These are all over the facility.

Reference contains cheat sheets for all phenomenon in the Containment Facility pertinent to your work, similar to SCP sheets. Cautions and important details, known safeguards in place, explicit warnings, etc.

Note tooltip below when cursor is floating over item.

Each new task you go to the Stock window to pick up the items necessary to fulfill the task and you return them to the stock desk before you can get your next assignment. Artifacts found during your duties go in a glass cabinet in the briefing room. These are easter eggs on every level you can collect.

 

[kris]

5. Total domination of all scientific, mechanical, technical and artistic pursuits for thousands of years and anything involving problem solving ability

Except possibly game development and releases.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Turned on flashlight HUD. Bar shrinks as battery power dies.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

So you don't know any people you'd like to work with to develop a game so you could actually release one? Because by yourself you're not going to get this done either.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Because by yourself you're not going to get this done either.

if you've read the nonfiction bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by american author and relationship counselor John Gray, you'd know that men like to solve their problems on their own in their metaphorical private cave (or bunker, as it were), and since Cleve is all that is masculine he will be single-handedly soloing his game developing artistic visions for longer than our hominid minds can comprehend

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

So you don't know any people you'd like to work with to develop a game so you could actually release one? Because by yourself you're not going to get this done either.

I don't know any humans. I know many of your manboon kind who would no doubt fumble with their thick paws like General Ursa trying to find the "on" button for their PC Tower. I am supportive of efforts to allow your kind to live out their meaningless lives in peace but I think the evidence demonstrates you are generally useless for any kind of technical work on a team despite your having many Doctor Octavius types amongst you pretending to be able to reason, with mixed results. Nowadays your vocabulary consists of only a few words of surfer dude/ghetto rapper vernacular anyway, which would make it difficult to communicate even basic tasks like fetching me coffee and mopping floors.

This game is past beta and I've only been working on it a short while. Simultaneously working on Atomic War and Grimoire.

Containment Facility is about .04% the complexity of Grimoire. I have crammed nearly all the game interface, logic and behaviours into 6 different C# files, roughly a thousand lines of code. Grimoire was 220,000 lines before it even seemed feature complete. I have completion of tasks in CF described as a simple static array. The same functionality in Grimoire is so complicated and involves so many different editors even I don't understand it all sometimes. I am nearly finished with Containment Facility and have written no editors other than the ones built-in to Unity.

 

[Pablosdog]

I'm actually glad cleve is working on this sort of project. I happen to absolutely adore horror games, about as much as rpgs in fact.

 

[Mother Russia]

Cleve, why do you have so many editors for Grimoire then? Why not just one editor? Even the so called AAA+ titles like Morrowind had only one single editor.

Also, does Grimoire now use the same old spell effects that were used in the beta version (dos version) that's floating on the web? I played it, and found it enjoyable, but it did need improvement in many arenas, especially spell effects as they were quite ugly looking. Also, many spells used the same spell effect.

Has this been rectified somehow? Have you considered going for fewer spells, so that you can give them each better effects?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Cleve, why do you have so many editors for Grimoire then? Why not just one editor? Even the so called AAA+ titles like Morrowind had only one single editor.

Butthurt hindsight is great and if I could go back in time I'd do it differently than starting out with fifty text applications written in DOS for the editing system.

MY editing system has graduated from 640K RAM DOS environment to Win32 bit over the past fifteen years and it has not aged gratefully. It is a colossal cluster of tools used to edit the same global data for the game, followed by a resource packer to cram all these different streams of information, scripts, graphics and binaries into a single deliverable chunk. It's a nightmare. The appropriate thing to do would be to strap myself with explosives and go to the top of the tallest building in Australia, wait for the helicopter crews to show up and blow myself up on live television screaming maniacally while holding a floppy containing the original executable for Grimoire from 1994. Of course, then people like you would complain, "I don't understand why Cleve gave up when he was so close. The game was almost done." So I have to soldier on with this hideous editing snafu until the bitter end.

Compare with Unity. "Import new asset." I imported a little .CSV file which took me thirty seconds to edit for all the items used in Containment Facility and I read it with bog standard C#. It's enough to make me weep tears of pathetic madness like the Comedian just before Ozymandias throws him through the window.

(breaks into Tom Chick's bedroom at night)

"FOUR DIFFERENT BINARY FORMATS FOR TEXT INDEXING. (SOB) WHO DOES THAT? IT'S ALL JUST ... A BIG JOKE. I DID SOME BAD THINGS IN MY LIFE BUT NEVER ANYTHING LIKE THIS. HEADERS FOR GRAPHIC INFORMATION COMPILED INTO SEPARATE LOOKUP TABLES USING THE DOS /B COMMAND?!? WHAT WAS I THINKING?!? GOD FORGIVE ME. GOD FORGIVE US ALL. (SOB)"

Also, does Grimoire now use the same old spell effects that were used in the beta version (dos version) that's floating on the web? I played it, and found it enjoyable, but it did need improvement in many arenas, especially spell effects as they were quite ugly looking. Also, many spells used the same spell effect.

I have 42 new spell effects graphics to replace all of that old crap.

Has this been rectified somehow? Have you considered going for fewer spells, so that you can give them each better effects?

The new ones look great.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Will Grimoire and/or Containment Facility be on Steam? And if so, will there be achievements?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Got the notes/table of contents/browing working! Big part of game mechanics, of course. Similar to Penumbra notebook.

I don't have NPC conversations in this game. You can see and hear your handlers behind glass screens and up on pavilions but you speak to nobody face-to-face.

Clipboard/task sheet is also working but my matrix for rotating the entire GUI slightly to align with clipboard is still a little askew. As soon as I get this working I will post a screenshot of it.

 

[Gregz]

Great thread...or greatest thread?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I'm using a simple XML format to describe the tasks, each step of completion, the logical conditions needed to satisfy completion of the task and special actions associated with the task. This format was being used originally to determine what actions needed to take place in CORPSE CREW to move on to the next town. I made a cool looking "Containment Facility Dossier" that contains the taskings as a unit of work. You get one of these per task and you don't get another one until you complete the task. The next task you get will be semi-random in increasing difficulty and in more and more awe inspiring levels of the facility. The early tasks are somewhat modest and carried out on parts of the facility that the staff have not yet lost control of.

I am still debugging the clipboard of tasks in the GUI but I should have a screenshot of it working by tomorrow.

I have noticed in working with Unity that the capacity for reflection and reference-by-string of almost any component in the game space makes it incredibly powerful and easy to configure casually and with very fast iterations. To do the same thing in C++ involves a lot of referencing and indexing that is usually an exercise for the developer. In Unity, this stuff "IJWOOTB" (It Just Works Out Of The Box). I can code up stuff nearly as quickly as I can think of it. The only similar experience I have ever had was 20 years ago on the Commodore 64. It is putting the fun back into it for me.

 

[Peter]

Cleve, that UI looks horrid. Make the style more unified (ie between the different note icons), lose the head and work on the colour scheme. It looks extremely amateurish as is.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Cleve, that UI looks horrid. Make the style more unified (ie between the different note icons), lose the head and work on the colour scheme. It looks extremely amateurish as is.

(Mindless rage at well intentioned criticism)

Mayhaps accurate though. I will probably work on functionality for a while and then polish the UI. My wife was giving me similar feedback.

I think I will replace that head with a body cookie.



Oh and ...

This is what the task clipboard looks like ... except it should have checkboxes to the left to display whether or not you have completed the step yet.

This task clipboard is loaded by a dossier and you only get one at a time. I stuck this one in the starting cell just to test this part of the UI.

Lights don't work in Room G-12. There is just a sliver of illumination coming through a security port. The flash of your brownie camera will reveal this creature in the corner ...

 

[Tycn]

That guy at Frictional is light years intellectually ahead of anybody else in the game industry including me in seeing a really fresh new direction to take the adventure game to.

Cleve being humble, WTF?

Cleve using emoticons?

Who got to have his account this time?

Edit: just saw your posts in the Sir-tech thread. Just a momentary lapse it seems

 

[TripJack]

hey cleveypoo, you should add your amazing games to steam greenlight http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

you would surely get many upvotes from your devoted fans