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DarkDale: Betrayal -- new indie RT blobber

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
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http://www.darkdale.net/2015/06/back-on-track/



Back on track!
on Jun 26, 2015 | 3 comments

Hello everybody! It’s been a long time, as I haven’t posted in about 8 months, but don’t worry, DarkDale is not dead, quite the opposite. The winter months have been really busy for me and I couldn’t unfortunately dedicate much serious time to game development between January and April. With May came the end of the school year and I could finally get back working on the project, which has been steadily advancing in the last two months.

This break led me however to think some more about the projected timeline and how I was planning to get the game done.

First of all, I’m realizing that despite all good will, I won’t be able to do it all alone, or at least not in a decent amount of time. As I don’t want to release the game 3-4 years from now, I will most certainly need some help in the asset creation department, essentially for models (environments or items), creature animations and character portraits. This means some expenses, which naturally leads to the idea of crowdfunding, something I was planning for anyway : but instead of simply trying to cover some of my own expenses, the campaign will try to raise enough to purchase assets and hire some freelancers. Before committing to a Kickstarter campaign and the ensuing challenges and deadlines, I want however to advance further in the development of the game, as to be able to assess precisely my needs, what I can do myself and what needs to be contracted.

So, what’s the new plan then?

  • First, I’ll finish the game engine in its basic state over the next 3-4 months, which essentially means to have a completely playable experience, even if it’s only 1 level. Most of the major elements are already in place, and meeting this target shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, as development goes on, I’ll keep adding more components and functionalities, but these will be easy to implement on top of the existing framework.
  • Then, over the course of the school year, I’ll work on writing, quest and level design prototypes, so as to have a good general skeleton of the game by the spring.
  • Run a Kickstarter campaign somewhere in April/May 2016.
  • Following which (if successful), hiring some help to get remaining things done over the summer, to enter alpha/beta testing in the autumn.
  • So this leads towards a release in the earliest at Christmas 2016, and more probably during the first quarter of 2017.
Will we get there? I’m ready for it, and provided I have your support, most certainly. Now let’s see how things are going!

Welcome to Unity 5

Multi-level structure in the sewers.

Oh yeah, we finally got the new version of the game engine after months and months of waiting and it is great! What does it mean for DarkDale?

  • The full engine capacities are now included in the free version! I was developing using Unity 4.x free, and planned to purchase a Pro license eventually coming closer to release: that’s not necessary anymore, something which frees 1 500$ that can be invested in assets instead. Plus of course, a better development environment.
  • The new Unity UI system has gotten out of beta stages and is quite impressive. Refactoring all my code to work with the new UI has been a tedious and rather boring process, which I’d say is around 85% done, but it’s been worth it. UI is now sharp, fast, more intuitive and most importantly, flexible so that I can make quick adjustments easily as I play with it and feel what works and what needs tweaking. But just redoing things which were already done didn’t make for much interesting material to show, and it’s one reason the I haven’t updated the blog more regularly, even if I worked a lot.
  • Physically-based rendering. Yes, Unity 5 provides a full PBR pipeline which means a greater visual quality in textures, lighting and shadows. I’m in the process of recalibrating the existing textures for the new shaders and so far, the difference is subtle but it looks really good.
  • Very welcome updates to their Animation API, which will allow me to control animations from script much more easily, something that’s necessary due to DarkDale being 1) built up at runtime using Lua scripts and 2) grid-based, which means that creature/character animations have to fit exactly in 3 meters / 90 degrees intervals. I had to resort to all kinds of hacks to make the Unity 4.x animation system behave like I wanted it to, something that’s now happily behind me.
Going underwater

Looking up at a torch above the surface from underwater.

In the first iterations of the game engine, I had thought water to be simply a decorative surface. It raised much problems about how to deal with items that could fall into the water however, and prevented using it as means to enhance level design. As a result, I’ve changed the entire water system so that now water tiles are tiles like the others: you can see beneath the surface, and take a plunge! While implementing this, I had to also implement the code that takes care of detecting different elevations and animating the party falling down. Note that falling is physically accurate, as falling longer will mean an acceleration, and falling into water slows you down. I’ve made some tests where the party makes a huge leap from 4 levels above the water and plunges down 3 levels below the water surface… The effect is spectacular and you should expect to see it in game at some point!

Going down meant also going up, so I’ve added ladders and all the code required to support them. By the way, making levels tri-dimensional by using the height element has always been one of my priorities in DarkDale as it opens up so many new possibilities in terms of level design. This is one place where Legend of Grimrock 2 made a step in the right direction, but not enough: its concept of “elevation” on the same level is rather limiting at times and really not intuitive to work with in the level editor if you wish to make complex layouts. In my engine, each difference in elevation is a separate level on which you have full control and work on separately, and you can decide which levels will be rendered together using a levelGroup variable. This also allows to mix-up different water elevations in the same environment and construct waterfalls or water slides.

Get connected
It was more than time to get some game logic into the engine, and after trying a few implementations, I’ve set up for the final events/connectors model which will allow game entities to communicate together, for example when you pull a lever and it tells the door next to it to open. Along the way, I’ve also modeled, textured and animated a door and a lever, created their sounds plus coded the door and switch components which make them work.

Marco Mastropaolo has continued developing his MoonSharp Lua/.NET bridge, and it is now blazing fast and has so much useful features that I don’t even know where to start for implementing them. In any case, it allows very easy integration of Lua scripting in a Unity environment. The script components are ready as well, and they communicate with the external world quite easily, sending or receiving events. For example, this is a script entity in the beginning of the level (which you can see in action in the video below), which adds some party dialogue between two random members.

function onPartyEnter()
console:addDescription{
en = "The stench of the stagnant and murky water makes your noses twitch as you step into the dark sewers.",
fr = "La puanteur des eaux stagnantes et troubles vous fait retrousser le nez alors que vous avancez dans les sombres égouts."
}
local champion1 = party.champions:getRandomChampion()
console:addDialogue(champion1, {
en = "I hope we can find the bandits' hideout quickly and get out of here!",
fr = "J'espère que nous trouverons le repaire des bandits rapidement pour nous tirer d'ici!"
})
local champion2 = party.champions:getRandomChampion(| c | c ~= champion1)
console:addDialogue(champion2, {
en = "Yes, let's move on.",
fr = "Oui, allons-y."
})
end
As DarkDale has the ambition to be more a role-playing game than a puzzle-based crawler, it will rely heavily on such elements to convey mood and story, essentially inspired by the example set by the Baldur’s Gate series. If programmers out there are wondering about the syntax of the second getRandomChampion() call, it accepts a condition function (like a C# delegate) which tells it to select a random champion between the champions which are not “champion1″; the syntax is borrowed from MetaLua which MoonSharp supports, greatly streamlining the code. So:

party.champions:getRandomChampion(| c | c ~= champion1)
is equivalent to:

party.champions:getRandomChampion(function(c) return c ~= champion1 end)


Looking around
Legend of Grimrock 2 introduced a wonderful look feature which moves the camera forward when looking over a ledge, to give a better view of what’s below. It is so natural, that I played the entire game without even noticing it, until one of the friends from the community pointed it out to me. Needless to say, I am borrowing that wonderful idea, shamelessly, but at least publicly recognizing where it’s from. I’ve also taken the concept further and implemented a peak around corners feature, which you can see in action in the video. It really helps convey a feeling of tension of looking around a corner to see if there is a monster, and it has obvious puzzle implications.

The Editor redux

The DarkDale editor, as of June 2015.

The DarkDale Editor has been entirely rebuilt from the ground up with the new Unity UI, a task which took quite a while, but which now allows me to prototype levels and new additions to the engine much faster. I had stopped development on the editor more than a year ago, because I knew I would need to rewrite it properly at some point, and I was meanwhile working directly from scripts for my level design, something I don’t have to do anymore! I’ve also added a full file browser for loading/saving scenes. While the editor is obviously not fully ready yet, it’s already quite advanced and I’ll keep adding features along as I need them.

So, here’s a video that takes you on a tour that showcases some of the new features in the sewers of Mountain Shadow, which is the starting level of the game. Meanwhile, I’m back on working on the game, and I promise some news earlier than in 8 months time! Also, a quick reminder: if you’re on facebook and are interested in the project, why not “like” DarkDale’s page? -> https://www.facebook.com/darkdalerpg.
 

resilient sphere

Educated
Joined
Nov 27, 2014
Messages
73
you guys seem to bag on real-time crawlers because of all the stuff that's left up to the player, but Grimrock 2 has one of the best set of dungeons in recent gaming memory, no idiotic voice acting, a party you create yourself and actual GOOD PUZZLES. If Dark Dale takes after that game then so much the better. Until Dark Heart of Uukrul starts getting sequels the real-time blobber deservedly rules the category.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
I have a suggestion regarding the RT Combat (if the dev is still reading this thread):

As the main gripe of some people with rt blobbers is the hectic clicking in combat even for standard attacks, which reduces the timeframe to think of actual tactical approach, how about you implent some kind of tactics system as present in dragon age? For me, this feature was the one that redeemed the game a bit, as it was a smart addition to the rtwp combat and reduced micromanaging. In a actual rt combat system without pause it would even have a bigger impact, as the need of reducing micromanagement is even bigger.

Just set the tank to auto parry, the melee to autohit, set the priest to heal if someone falls under 20% and then you have all the time to think about using the enviroment to your advantage or what spells you use with your mage. You could also go for a bit deeper and varied magic/combat system, which would be another refreshment to the genre because what we have seen until now were rather simplistic systems to fit the fast paced combat.
 
Joined
May 28, 2013
Messages
11
I have a suggestion regarding the RT Combat (if the dev is still reading this thread):

As the main gripe of some people with rt blobbers is the hectic clicking in combat even for standard attacks, which reduces the timeframe to think of actual tactical approach, how about you implent some kind of tactics system as present in dragon age? For me, this feature was the one that redeemed the game a bit, as it was a smart addition to the rtwp combat and reduced micromanaging. In a actual rt combat system without pause it would even have a bigger impact, as the need of reducing micromanagement is even bigger.

Just set the tank to auto parry, the melee to autohit, set the priest to heal if someone falls under 20% and then you have all the time to think about using the enviroment to your advantage or what spells you use with your mage. You could also go for a bit deeper and varied magic/combat system, which would be another refreshment to the genre because what we have seen until now were rather simplistic systems to fit the fast paced combat.

Hi there! I hadn't watched the thread for a while, but thanks to Infinitron for raising it back :).

I was in generally going for slower combat pace, Grimrock 2 tried to "fix" the two-step problem by making enemies jump around you much faster, which was nice, but gave a much-more action-oriented pace to the game, something I'm not heading for. I'll rather balance equipment such as armor to actually work more effectively, and have better protection spells, to give finding equipment/preparing spells more meaning, and allow you to stand toe-to-toe with monsters and have a viable fight. A big problem in LoG is that as long as enemies cannot touch you because you're jumping around, finding better armor is useless...

Two-step fighting will have consequences in much faster stamina drain, resulting in inability to use higher-level skill attacks and cast spells, and also in a much lower to-hit accuracy if you and/or the enemy is moving. So it would be a choice between running around and using only basic swing attacks which miss most of the time, or actually purchasing some good armor, getting health potions/spells ready, leveling up your weapon skill and facing the enemy in a fairer straight-up fight.

As for tactics, hmmm it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it would take too much interactivity off the player if it's well implemented and effective, or a useless option if manually clicking yields better/faster results...
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,885
I have a suggestion regarding the RT Combat (if the dev is still reading this thread):

As the main gripe of some people with rt blobbers is the hectic clicking in combat even for standard attacks, which reduces the timeframe to think of actual tactical approach, how about you implent some kind of tactics system as present in dragon age? For me, this feature was the one that redeemed the game a bit, as it was a smart addition to the rtwp combat and reduced micromanaging. In a actual rt combat system without pause it would even have a bigger impact, as the need of reducing micromanagement is even bigger.

Just set the tank to auto parry, the melee to autohit, set the priest to heal if someone falls under 20% and then you have all the time to think about using the enviroment to your advantage or what spells you use with your mage. You could also go for a bit deeper and varied magic/combat system, which would be another refreshment to the genre because what we have seen until now were rather simplistic systems to fit the fast paced combat.

Hi there! I hadn't watched the thread for a while, but thanks to Infinitron for raising it back :).

I was in generally going for slower combat pace, Grimrock 2 tried to "fix" the two-step problem by making enemies jump around you much faster, which was nice, but gave a much-more action-oriented pace to the game, something I'm not heading for. I'll rather balance equipment such as armor to actually work more effectively, and have better protection spells, to give finding equipment/preparing spells more meaning, and allow you to stand toe-to-toe with monsters and have a viable fight. A big problem in LoG is that as long as enemies cannot touch you because you're jumping around, finding better armor is useless...

Two-step fighting will have consequences in much faster stamina drain, resulting in inability to use higher-level skill attacks and cast spells, and also in a much lower to-hit accuracy if you and/or the enemy is moving. So it would be a choice between running around and using only basic swing attacks which miss most of the time, or actually purchasing some good armor, getting health potions/spells ready, leveling up your weapon skill and facing the enemy in a fairer straight-up fight.

As for tactics, hmmm it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it would take too much interactivity off the player if it's well implemented and effective, or a useless option if manually clicking yields better/faster results...
This actually sounds good. I am happy to read this.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
I have a suggestion regarding the RT Combat (if the dev is still reading this thread):

As the main gripe of some people with rt blobbers is the hectic clicking in combat even for standard attacks, which reduces the timeframe to think of actual tactical approach, how about you implent some kind of tactics system as present in dragon age? For me, this feature was the one that redeemed the game a bit, as it was a smart addition to the rtwp combat and reduced micromanaging. In a actual rt combat system without pause it would even have a bigger impact, as the need of reducing micromanagement is even bigger.

Just set the tank to auto parry, the melee to autohit, set the priest to heal if someone falls under 20% and then you have all the time to think about using the enviroment to your advantage or what spells you use with your mage. You could also go for a bit deeper and varied magic/combat system, which would be another refreshment to the genre because what we have seen until now were rather simplistic systems to fit the fast paced combat.

Hi there! I hadn't watched the thread for a while, but thanks to Infinitron for raising it back :).

I was in generally going for slower combat pace, Grimrock 2 tried to "fix" the two-step problem by making enemies jump around you much faster, which was nice, but gave a much-more action-oriented pace to the game, something I'm not heading for. I'll rather balance equipment such as armor to actually work more effectively, and have better protection spells, to give finding equipment/preparing spells more meaning, and allow you to stand toe-to-toe with monsters and have a viable fight. A big problem in LoG is that as long as enemies cannot touch you because you're jumping around, finding better armor is useless...

Two-step fighting will have consequences in much faster stamina drain, resulting in inability to use higher-level skill attacks and cast spells, and also in a much lower to-hit accuracy if you and/or the enemy is moving. So it would be a choice between running around and using only basic swing attacks which miss most of the time, or actually purchasing some good armor, getting health potions/spells ready, leveling up your weapon skill and facing the enemy in a fairer straight-up fight.

As for tactics, hmmm it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it would take too much interactivity off the player if it's well implemented and effective, or a useless option if manually clicking yields better/faster results...

Those ideas sound good! About the tactics system, you could restrict it, or just implent autoattack for the start. Those autoattacks in grimrock were never an actual form of tactical decisionmaking but more like a quicktime event, so letting autoattack perform those and maybe implenting some sort of melee abilities could help with that. And you still have to consider that using your enviroment would still be a thing, so the player would not sit around idly exactly.

Another idea would be some sort of combo system. You have 4 extra buttons for 4 sets of combos you can program for your group, so you press one button and your group performs a preset sequence of actions.

So combo 1 would be Warrior - attack; Rogue - stun; Cleric - smite; Wizard - Fireball
and combo 2 could be Warrior - attack; Rogue - stab; Cleric - shield; Wizard - Freeze

In combo 1 you have the rogue stun and 3 types of damage attacks, but if you meet an enemy that is immune to melee stuns you could switch to combo 2 so the enemy gets frozen by the wizard.

or you could setup completely defensive combos for hard hitting enemies, or complete damage combos for enemies that have low hp and have to die fast

so each encounter requires the player to think about his combo setups and reassign them to be prepared for the incoming encounters, and because you would only have to press one button it would not be as much of a clusterfuck if you implented a more varied spell/ability system.
 
Last edited:
Joined
May 28, 2013
Messages
11
Your name sound Bulgarian.
Back to Wizardry 7

Indeed it is! But I've grown up and lived in Montreal for almost 30 years now, so my home's here now (right accross the street from Ubisoft HQ... ;) ).

Doktor Best, interesting ideas, I'll think about it. I'll start by getting the basic enginge ready and maybe try such things later in testing when it's time for balancing gameplay. As for taking the environment into consideration, of course! I don't mean for the party to be fighting always static, just encourage a mixture of standing and moving fighting tactics, instead of a always-run-around-the-monster-by-default. If someone throws a fireball or an arrow at you, you're obviously expected to move out of the way... :lol:
 

Why.jpeg

Learned
Joined
Nov 14, 2013
Messages
109
Oh boy this has my interest. Dont let this baby be a stillborn.
 

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