Games Frameshift - Post Apocalyptic Sci-fi Survival

Frameshift is a multiplayer open world survival game set in a post apocalyptic sci-fi world. You'll survive the elements, battle genetically engineered mutants using weapons and technology, enhance yourself with cybernetics, build underground bunkers, and much much more. Inspired by games like DayZ and Ultima Online, Frameshift will be full of great content and innovative features, and be an awesome sandbox experience where you can be whoever you want to be.

Story

In the near future, a large company called Frameshift Technologies bioengineers a life form whose blood can be used as a power source. It is many times more efficient than any existing power source, and within five years ninety-nine percent of households run on Framefuel, the branded biofuel created by Frameshift. In-home power cells, branded Framecells, contain live genetically engineered life forms, their blood continuously harvested to provide power to the home.

Through a series of mistakes, the engineered Framecell organism is mutated to create powerful, genetically engineered mutant life forms that destroy ninety-nine percent of human life on earth, causing the end of mankind as we know it. The survivors, now at the bottom of the food chain, must band together to fight against this unstoppable new force.

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Features

Summary
Frameshift will have a strong core experience of survival against the elements, battle versus mutants, and cybernetic augmentation. We also strive to have a number of secondary features to give you the freedom to live how you want in the world.

Enemies
The mutant predators in the world are bred by an out of control artificial intelligence that dwells in the data centers of Frameshift Technologies headquarters. It connects wirelessly to in-home Framecells, directing them to incubate these aggressive life forms in every home, business, and industrial facility across the world.

Mutants are genetically engineered and cybernetically augmented to be powerful predators, specifically designed to kill or maim their human prey.

Combat
Inexperienced survivors will fight with makeshift melee weapons, but as they progress they will be able to upgrade to more powerful and durable ones. A deep primary/offhand weapon system allows for a large number of choices and cool combos. Discover and master the Framefuel you scavenge to create powerful weapons and traps.

The detailed damage system allows for various damage types to be applied to individual body parts, causing limb dismemberment and other equally gory outcomes.

Cybernetics
Scavenge and repair technology found in the world to create cybernetic augmentations for yourself and your friends. Perform amateur surgery on fellow survivors to install cybernetics. Enhance movement, strength, vision, hearing, and endurance.

Once you are augmented with an Ocular Implant, you have access to a vision overlay to provide more data about the world and your surroundings. Salvage data from systems you encounter when scavenging and from bodies of victims who were augmented pre-apocalypse. You’ll find GPS coordinates of valuable stashes, applications to further enhance yourself, schematics for technology, and more.

Open World
The world of frameshift is a gigantic 576km², with tons of variety. Stay off the grid and survive like a bearded wild man in the wilderness, creating meals from plants you gather to barter with other players or keep for yourself. Or venture into cities to battle mutants and scavenge for food, water, and technology to advance yourself and your weapons.

Progression
Your progression and specialization is determined by which loot you choose to carry. There is no level system or grinding in Frameshift. Your skills and power are entirely based on the loot you find in the world. Physical power and endurance enhancements come from cybernetic augmentations and implants. Find schematics and other literature to gain knowledge and enhance your ability to build and repair items.

Read more about features


Devblogs

Devblog 1 - State of Frameshift

Devblog 2 - Buildings Visual Upgrade

Devblog 3 - Terrain Intro

Devblog 4 - Progress Report March 2016

Devblog 5 - Progress Report June 2017



Concept Art











Team & Status

The core team for Frameshift is Nick Owens (@goonter), Mark Amiot, and Jeremy Severinsen.

We are currently in early Alpha, hoping to hit closed Beta in Summer 2016 and release in 2017.

Read more at www.frameshiftgame.com

Feedback

We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback about the game so far! Feel free to take a look at the website for more detailed information and additional screenshots. I'll continue to do regular devblogs and post updates here to keep you informed of our progress. Thanks for taking the time to check out our work!

 

Nice job on the art.....that is scary stuff. My first thought was of the characters from "The Descent"

 

You guys have really put a lot of time into the story and its quite unique and very interesting as a backstory for the game, thumbs up for that. An open world of 576^2km? My mind is blown, to even think of making such a huge world its just amazing . I have a few questions, Is the game going to be released on steam? if so how much would you expect for 1 copy of the game. Its still early so i dont mind these question not being answered. Anyways the game looks really awesome in all aspects and this might be the game all the people who love open world survival games have been waiting for .
Good luck to you all and thanks for sharing info about this game.

 

@Terminator75 Thank you for the kind words! The world is starting to turn out really cool, I'll try to put up a video of a fly-through in the next few months.

We're going to attempt the Steam Greenlight and Early Access route, but we don't want to put an unfinished game on Early Access, we just want to use it for finding bugs and polishing the game. The price will probably be comparable to other similar titles out now ($25-$35), but nothing is for sure so that might change.

I hope so! We're working really hard and I hope it will end up being something that players love.

 

Absolutely astonishing. This is a very inspired premise, and those art pieces are fantastic. The best of luck! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

 

The ingame art and Concept does not look like it was made from the same person is this correct ?

 

The concepts look really cool.
Keep on the good work!

 

@Wacky Moose Most of the in-game art you seen in screenshots now is placeholder, so the visual quality isn't quite where it needs to be yet. Also, you are correct, the concept art is created by a dedicated Concept Artist who does not create production art. We have a Production Artist and an Environmental Artist for the in-game stuff.

@DrakkarDev thanks for the encouragement!

 

I'm super excited about this new concept art for the Framecell. You can check out all the images here.

 

Some new concept art for one of the many devices that can be crafted from scrap parts and electronics. Since the enemy creatures are mutations of the original Frameshift organism, their blood remains Framefuel which can be extracted to provide power to vehicles, tools, and other equipment. It can also be refined and processed in different ways for various uses.

 

EPIC!!

 

When I went here, I did not expect to see such a ... it's Lawful WOW!
I worked for many years with realism in game development, you really go with this?
Reminiscent of Half-Life.

 

@DxStd_IgnatPribylov thanks, I think

 

So far we've mostly been focusing on getting features in the game, delaying super polished visuals until we were closer to launch. Our first draft houses were visually on-par with DayZ mod I'd say, maybe slightly worse.

However, recently we decided to revamp our residential house visuals as part of our push to get low level portions of the game into a really polished and fun state, both visually and mechanically. This includes gameplay in the wilderness and light residential areas (like farms and suburbs).

I wanted to share with you some of our process and the results we've achieved so far. Here is a screenshot of the living room of a version 1 house:


Our houses at this point were highly optimized, using only 2 draw calls and very low poly furniture. The rooms shared UV space to allow high enough texture resolution in a single 8k texture.

Here is the same living room, with version 2 revamp in-progress:


Here I've made a few changes:

• More, and more detailed decorations. We've added additional geometry while keeping performance under control with aggressive LODing. It could be further optimized with object pooling for all the small decorations.
• Individual 4k textures for each room in the house. This allows us to add a lot of small detail and varying grunge to each room, which adds a ton of realism. It raises texture memory and draw calls when inside the house, but the house is combined and atlased into a single object and a single texture at higher LODs, so overall performance isn't too much worse.
• Custom-made speedtree vine to add an overgrown feel.

In the previous screenshot, you can see that shelves and furniture still have that "floaty" feel. SSAO post-processing helps a little bit, but objects still don't feel grounded. In the shot below, I've added baked AO so the decorations now feel like they are really part of the house. I used the awesome tool Export2Maya by @Fishypants to bring the whole scene back into an FBX that could then be used to re-bake AO in Substance Designer.


Something still wasn't right with how objects were appearing in the scene, and after playing with Unity's ambient light settings, I realized that everything being lit by ambient light is completely flat looking, because ambient light has no direction. So I needed to find a solution to light interiors better. Unity 5 global illumination was not an option because we don't use the built in scene loading methods, and since our world is streamed as you travel across it, Unity's GI bakes tied to scenes really doesn't work at all for us.

Finished version 2 living room:


In the shot above, you can see that we found a solution. We're using the GI Proxy asset by @nasos_333 , which is a great asset and is really the only "Global Illumination" solution for projects where the world is loaded dynamically. It makes a HUGE difference, as you can see objects have a ton more depth now. Since various sides of objects are lit differently from each other, they no longer blend into one monotone blob.

Here are a few more before and after shots:


Bedroom before


Bedroom after

One general design goal we have is that locations in the game should tell a story about what happened during the Frameshift apocalypse. A player should be able to walk into a house or encounter a wreck on the road, and be able to imagine the brutal ending of lives that occurred there. It should make them a little upset

So, as you can see above, the implementation of that philosophy within the house revamp was to add a little more personality to the rooms so the player can imagine who lived there.


Bedroom 2, before.


Bedroom 2, after. Without GI Proxy.


Bedroom 2, after. With GI Proxy. You can see this makes a huge difference with metallic objects like the garbage can.

After I got the workflow for the revamped houses hammered out, our Environmental Artist, Jeremy, took it to the next level, adding tons of detail and personality to the next house he created:







We're really excited about the level of quality we've achieved with this update. Feel free to leave comments or feedback on the new visuals! You can read more about Frameshift on our website.

 

Congrats on the improvements, but that AO looks overdone. It looks less like AO and more like some sort of very clean and uniform mold.

 

@AcidArrow Yes, I agree. I think in this case it's okay because it's half AO and half grunge/mold/dust/leaks since these are meant to be aged quite a bit. But we are still adjusting the levels of grunge vs AO so thanks for the feedback!

 

Looks good!

 

I have finished the house, and am moving on to upgrade another.
I made a fly through video of what I just finished.

Here is a quick gallery I put together of where I'm at with the next upgrade.

Old version:
It has no interior other than the garage. The entire house is just one 2k texture. So it looks pretty bad up close. I am pretty much starting from scratch with it, and making it look as good as the house above. Also taking advice from above post about too much AO. I agree and I will try to tone it down on this one.



New version:
It's getting a full interior. The front door is right in front of the stairs.


Downstairs layout:


Upstairs layout:

 

Wow. This game is looking great.
The concept work is absolutely stunning and the repolished homes are looking great as well.

Keep up the great work, can't wait to see more

 

I am a programmer for Frameshift. I have a lot of fun creating this game and love making things in Unity.
I'm really excited to show off our terrain. Frameshift is set in an open world with a total area of 528km². The player can't get everywhere so the total walkable area is 409km² . Everything is based on real satellite imagery and height data. This data is then customized by hand to add intricate details and blending. Satellite images don't have the best resolution when viewed close up, so at close distances those images fade into high resolution terrain textures.

There are multiple biomes with different sets of vegetation and textures, including the Coast, "Low Fields", Mountains, Sierras, and Desert. There is too much area to show in a single post so this introduction will only be about the Low Fields.

Low Fields biome is the most complete so far. Its green farmlands, rolling foothills, oak trees, small bushes, and plentiful edible plants. Trees and bushes are generated based on real data too. Very neat.


Spring time in the Low Fields


Scenic view from the Twin Gates area


High resolution terrain textures blended into the distant satellite images

Things to improve: atmospheric & weather effects, grass density, and add more vegetation assets for each biome.
The Frameshift world is a major part of the game experience so look forward to more updates!
Make sure to leave replies if you like what you see


-Mark

 

Here's a first look at the mutant dubbed the "Chest Stabber".

I'm working on how this guy will navigate. The goal is to make him quite the nuisance. He will chase players and leap at their face whenever he gets the chance.
Hats off to our artist Oliver on making this look so good. Check out more of his work! twitter.com/olvr_pbln
"Chest Stabber" is a placeholder name for right now . Maybe someone has suggestions?

 

Some new concept art:

The Frameshift Combat Exoskeleton was created by Frameshift Technologies for military use. Post-apocalypse, survivors hack together salvaged pieces to augment themselves. Amateur surgeons perform risky procedures in unsanitary conditions to install these powerful cybernetics.



Segmented armor provides protection against attacks.



Attachment points on the forearms allow blades and other integrated weaponry to be installed.



Capsules on the back and limbs contain injectable stimulants for muscle enhancement.

 

the creature concepts are amazing so is the character.
i think you guys posting these stuff to have feedback, so here is mine:

i think you guys might need to rethink of the whole style of the terrain/world style you are showing here. scrap it if you can!
the style of sci-fic survival is very appealing to me, that appealing is destroyed by the terrain looks!
the style of terrain is similar to hundred games out there.. out of the box the world style it self does not invoke any curiosity to the player.. its like another survival game with only enemy models switched.
the terrain shown in video don't have any "link" to sci-fic.. just a regular terrain with nice trees + houses+ flowers.. (where is the sci-fic in the world?)

i suggest more mysterious world, with more like a waste land with remaining of abandoned sci-fic stations.
you guys can search for inspiration from google, sci fic waste land..

 

Thats is very good models.
Still i really don't like the last one , i am more fond of Crysis nanosuit design instead of such cybernetic suit with holes weak points everywhere.

What is bringing the game in gameplay that could be very different from Follout 4 ?

Keep the good work.

 

@mangax Thanks for the feedback! We're currently working on adding the sci fi elements to the world, but it will be a mix of present day and sci fi.

@zenGarden Our suit is a bit different. Since you can scavenge or craft different pieces of the suit, it needs to be modular. So you can have just the arms, just the legs, or just the brain interface. At the most basic level, Fallout 4 is a quest driven single-player game, we are a cooperation-focused multiplayer game, but there are lots of features of Frameshift that I hope will be exciting and different from most games out there. Thanks for the encouragement!

 

Hey !
What's new about Frameshift ?

 

Thanks for asking! We've finished concept art on a large gorilla-like creature. This one will be more of an epic boss type enemy, guarding valuable Frameshift facilities and needing multiple players to take down. It has extendable arm blades that are used to dismember players during combat.

We've also been making a lot of progress on the dev side. I'll post an update about that soon.

 

The ennemies you design are really scary compared to Follout 4 or Doom. If you give them some crazy beasts like behaviour and animations this could become impressive. Good work.

 

Awesome stuff. I'd like to work on this if you're willing to take me on - PM me if interested and I can provide you with more information about me.

 

@zenGarden thanks for the encouragement! Yeah, we don't really have the budget to create lots of different creatures, so we really want to invest in the behaviors of these guys. So hopefully it will end up as you say - some really scary and interesting creatures.

@Jawneer we're not looking to expand the team currently, but I'll keep you in mind for the future. It's awesome that you're interested in the project!

 

I've been working on "City Tools" for Frameshift, an editor tool created for laying down roads and neighborhoods. It dynamically generates road meshes, intersections, extruded side objects (like sidewalks or ditches), and can scatter prefabs along the road (like wrecked cars or trash) or align them with the sides (like signs or power lines). It also allows individual lot placement along roads (for individual houses or stores), or zone placement for entire neighborhoods. It has a preset system for defining lots, roads, scatter layers, and zones. Lots themselves can also have randomized elements to provide variety. Needs more polish and features but the basics are there.

This is an internal tool that will hopefully make it possible for our small team to more quickly populate the giant world of Frameshift Here are some videos of the basic features:

 

A few more City Tools videos:

 

Good tools. But i find the result somewhat repetitive (perhaps because the houses are too similar with same height).
Perhaps you'll need a street tool to make streets and add houses around streets.I would make a tool for placing random houses randomly inside a volume when i draw a square on the terrain, this way the houses could be placed anywhere not only on road borders. About the wrecked cars they could be anywhere , not only on the road ?
Do you use some plugin from Asset Store for the roads ?

Keep the good work.

 

Just a little curious to find out more about the game.
I looked over the features section on the website and can't find answers to everything.

How many people will be playing on a server, on average ? (50, 200, 5000 )

There isn't much information on the persistency and progression aspect. Will there be permanent death ? You mentioned there are no levels or stats but you can learn schematics/recipes. Do you lose all of these on death and start over on a new character ? If there is perma-death, what do you expect the average life span of a player to be ? Similar to day-z (less than one hour) or more? Is all progression limited to the loot ? Are there literally no other stats ?

Sandbox elements... As far as I can tell, there is the some kind of housing system. Do these persist forever ? What happens when there are too many "bunkers" around ? What other sandbox elements exist ?

The "family" idea seems a bit weird to me. What's the point of this feature?

The game looks great so far. Keep it up guys!

 

@zenGarden maybe it looks repetitive because it is using the same two houses repeatedly. The way the tool works, you can define a zone, and it will randomly choose from lots you've categorized for that zone. Right now, there are only two houses to choose from, but in the future it could choose from different house and lot sizes, gas stations, parks, stores, etc. to have more variety. I suppose the cars could be anywhere, but there are other assets that do that fine (like quickbrush and mega scatter).

I created the all the tools myself, we couldn't find a road tool on the asset store that worked the way we wanted.

@xceed Thanks for your interest!

• The server capacity is TBD right now, we need to do some testing to find out the best number where the server feels populated but not overcrowded.
• For death, we have two ideas that we want to try out and see what feels best. In the game, characters are created and fill a character slot, like an mmo. So, one method would be that you lose the loot that you are carrying when you die, but you retain your knowledge (from schematics, etc) as well as any cybernetic augmentations you've made. This is the straightforward option. Another more experimental method I'd like to try is "permadeath" in that you can not just press a respawn button, but your character can be revived/recreated in various ways. These would involve help from other players or transferring your consciousness to a Framecell that has been reprogrammed (by a player) to construct human bodies, where you can be reconstructed. So your character would remain in the slot as "dead" until you somehow become alive again or choose to delete the character.
• Loot is at the root of all progression, you don't gain stats through actions or xp from killing stuff. But the player does have a bunch of internal stats that can change based on how you've progressed. The main driver here is the cybernetic augmentations. So you might have augmented legs and run faster, arms to hit harder, or your heart for increased stamina. All augmentations are player-made, nothing drops directly as loot, only the ingredients.
• Bunkers are the only freeform building sandbox element, but the entire game is pretty open-ended in that you can survive and play in multiple ways, not just the typical kill monsters, get gear, level up progression. In that way, it is probably more similar to a sandbox mmo than a sandbox building game like Rust or Minecraft.
• Bunkers will have a refresh system where you have to visit it every so often to keep it. If you don't, it will partially collapse, allowing looting, then fully collapse. Also, a single character will only be allowed to have one (or maybe 2, undecided) bunkers. We'll also only allow them to be placed outside of a certain radius of other bunkers, so there will be a maximum number per server.
• The family system probably will be weird, but hopefully interesting too The goal is to jump-start player cooperation because the game is very cooperation heavy. So players who create characters around the same time will spawn in the same general area and be in the same family. They will spawn with complimentary items that can be used together to start cooperating immediately, creating an instant mini-"clan". Also you might be less likely to kill someone who is supposedly your sister. That's the idea anyway, it might totally fail.

 

I am working on new houses and house props. We also needed some mobile homes for rural areas, so that is what I'm working on at the moment. I finished the first and am working on a second. I just added another house to the world, and also have 2 more houses partially built.

The finished mobile home:




Another finished house:

 

This looks awesome.
Why don't you make closed houses where you can't enter like Follout 4 ? These don't need furniture and it will save lot of GPU using some closed houses.

 

That is the plan for several buildings in the future. We do need a lot of interiors for testing AI pathing and making sure things like that work. It is also part of game balance. Trying to judge item spawn rates. If too many items are spawning in an area we can swap out a full house for a house shell. If an area seems like it's a little too complex we can simplify it with a shell building. It's just all part of testing and juggling all these different events. You might have also noticed there are no doors on any house yet. I'm holding off on doors for a bit until we are ready to test AI interacting with doors. There are some AI bugs that need fixing before we pile on more bugs from them colliding with doors.

Also making buildings with less complex interiors is important too. I'm planing no interiors, simple interiors, and complex interiors. This is the second mobile home I'm working on right now and it has a simple interior.

Ignore the colors, they are for making selections by color later on.


Update:

 

Really great texturing skills you got there!

 

It is Unity standard shader ? I see no metal effect or metal scratches.

 

Yes we are using the standard shader. The GI has been turned off, but we had it on for our play test yesterday. Here are a few shots of the metal and roughness on the mobile home in the moon light.

 

Maybe slightly too shiny (could also just be because it's a still image) - overall excellent looking assets. Great textures!

 

I just posted a new devlog entry, giving some development updates since it has been a while:

Frameshift Progress Report March 2016

 

The house interior is beautifull , i found wood floor too much reflective or specular compared to the indoor overall house, if it is abandonned it hsould be no refelctive and covered by lot of dirt and dust everywhere.
Another issue is the ground terrain and grass, but i suppose it is alpha work and no shadowing ?
I see a simple Agent controller, we see them walking one over the other when they cross, perhaps some raycast and simple avoidance could help ?
Keep up the good work.

 

Thanks zenGarden for your interest in the game. It means a lot to us .
Yup, in the future I will implement local avoidance so the creatures don't prefer to step over each other. Right now it looks funny because they 'hop' over.
I was just thinking that maybe a good stepping animation would help too. Just in case they cannot find a path around each other and are forced to step over.

 

In real i am not sure creatures would walk on top of others ? It could be considered as a bug or a new gameplay features having creatures walking on top of others.
I would use some raycast checks spread around two or five frames, collect the result and decide where the creature can walk. If there would be no path i would just make it wait with some advanced checks, for example if there is a danger around (fire or the player shooting at it) the creature could walk on top of other as emergency move or flee away (path points spread in the main road for example) instead of trying to reach te player.
This could bring interesting gameplay.
It's early work but i give you some ideas, it is your game do as it pleases you

 

We've finished the model and animations for a new creature called the Guardian. It will be larger in size than a typical pickup truck, so very scary and hard to kill! Let us know what you think.




(the size of the creature has increased about 30% since this comparison image was done)

"More than twice the size of an average man, this mutant is incredibly strong and extremely deadly. In combat, its razor sharp extendable arm blades are used to quickly dismember and disembowel large swaths of enemies. Ten and Twenty-man groups have been observed falling by the hands (and blades) of this creature. Guardians watch over high-value Frameshift facilities, such as Frameshift HQ and various outposts. Survivors have yet to devise a tactic to take them down, but have been observed using stealth to avoid them."

 

Very cool looking creature.
Just looking at that second picture it looks like those legs aren't strong enough to support the body weight.
Because of that and where the center of gravity is(somewhere close to the arms it looks like) it would always need to keep at least one of the arms grounded otherwise those legs wouldn't hold. Because of this the creature would also need to rotate around its arms(kind of how a forklifttruck steers).

If I were to play the game and run into this creature, based on its looks that is what I would be expecting.(I would probably have ran away scared before having the chance to analyse its looks though)

 

Good catch @nickyoso1 - I looked at the creature for a while examining it - seeing something slightly off but couldn't put my finger on it. You did.
I was thinking before your post - the back end (butt area) of the creature looked like it was missing a section, like the back abdomen of an ant.

Also - wondering what the back side looks (if the player will ever see that side of the creature) because it is straight on eye level with the player character.

Overall - really cool looking creature work!

 

These creature designs are superb! Honestly, it looks like something out of the movie Prometheus with the pale skin and all. Or something like inter-dimensional beings.

Keep up the great work!