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Graywalkers: Purgatory, supernatural post-apoc tactics & strategy game

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by AnomalusUndrdog, Aug 9, 2014.

  1. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    [I had been sharing my #screenshotsaturday posts in my older thread about Graywalkers (back in our Kickstarter campaign), but that was in the Showcase section so I now have the feeling that was the wrong place to post my updates. This will be where I will share updates now. I'll be slowly deleting the posts there and move them here.]

    Graywalkers: Purgatory



    A strategy & tactics game (think XCOM), set in a post-apocalyptic future, years after the cataclysmic war between heaven and hell.



    The game aims to feature a dynamic world map (think Civilization or Mount & Blade).

    Imagine borders between factions shifting because of expansion/wars/alliances, sieging a city by starving them out, trade/economy, etc.


    Concept Art
    (I'll be updating these when the new ones come out)




    Links
    Twitter: @GraywalkersGame
    Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Graywalkers
    Greenlight Page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=191653077
    Website: http://www.graywalkers.com
     
    Last edited: Aug 12, 2014
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  2. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Combat GUI

    I took it upon myself to prototype the GUI for the combat. This is all done in Photoshop using grungy textures as the base and lots of experimentation on blending modes and layer effects (e.g. bevel, inner glow, outer glow).









    I actually prefer this portrait mode, but the landscape version forces the user to see the extra information, and that may be useful for the demo, being that it's supposed to demo the player and be informative. I hope I made sense there.




     
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  3. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Logo Study

    This was the title logo used:


    Which I thought was a bit drab so I tried sprucing it up a bit:



    I used this tutorial to do the glowing hot effect on "PURGATORY".

    I ended up not adding flames because it reminded me too much of the explosion behind the MacGyver logo.

     
  4. AthosK

    AthosK

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    Cool looking game, I like the setting also, it's not every day you see a mix of a religious with a post-apocalyptic one, in fact i don't even think there is another one like that! Brilliant idea!
     
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  5. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Thanks! "End of the world" scenarios are quite prominent in most religions, so it made sense.

    The most similar game I can think off the top of my head would be Darksiders, but that game's taking the idea from a different direction.
     
  6. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Adding Polish to Level

    Since we were using demons as the placeholder enemies for this demo, I thought it was rather odd that there was lack of fire in the level.

    Before:




    So I added some. I was surprised at the amount of difference it makes to the look and feel of the whole thing.

    After:







    All those bushes and flowers don't make sense anymore though.

    While this was only meant for a demo and didn't have any backstory to speak of, I was thinking this would be appropriate as a mission where you need to stop these demons from summoning a hellgate in these ruins.

    Unfortunately having all those fire particles were literally overheating my laptop (I have a feeling the thermal paste needs replacing), and made it shutdown abruptly after a few minutes of playing.

    It's a Clevo W110ER, so a few weeks ago, I flashed it with a bios mod (Prema Mods) that made it undervolted, which makes it underpowered, but will emit less heat and lengthen battery life. A cool thing now is I can force the fans on full speed all the time. I'm hoping it can take it this time. At that point, I thought might as well reinstall and update it to Windows 8.1 (coming from 8).
     
  7. GeneBox

    GeneBox

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    Looking just great!
     
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  8. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Some Placeholder Skills for the Combat Demo


    Holy Blast (tentative name): Diviner ability. Unleash a burst of holy damage around yourself in all directions.

    (Holy damage means it only hurts supernatural creatures.)



    The animation looks cool so I recorded it in Vine: https://vine.co/v/MIEzWigXY1t

    I named that placeholder Diviner unit "Imhotep" btw, because I thought he looked like it from that mummy movie with Brendan Frasier:





    Arcane Shield (tentative name): Arcanist ability. A protective barrier to fortify your shackles to the mortal realm.

    (This ability's idea is taken from the standard D&D style shield spell)





    Cheap Shot (tentative name): Martialist ability. Hit 'em where it hurts. Bonus damage against men.

    (I don't know if we're gonna have Called Shots, so I put this in for now.)

     
  9. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Main Menu prototype

    I actually liked doing this. I did it in about 3 days, and even then I was busy with a different project at the same time. Given the amount of polish I was able to put here, it really goes to show how convenient it is to prototype in Unity.



    The idea was inspired from the squad loadout screen in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but since this is post-apoc, our characters do not go to a mission using aerial transport. Oftentimes they will just have to travel by foot. So I thought, might as well show them walking.



    Right now it's being used for the main menu, but I do want to use it for the actual squad loadout screen that we'll eventually have in the game. It will have to wait since I'm busy with other stuff (i.e. combat part of the demo) for now.

     
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  10. GeneBox

    GeneBox

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    I like the menu a lot!
     
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  11. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Large Units

    I added large units in the game, as in units that take up more than one square in the grid.

    This guy takes up 3x3 sqaures:





    That 3d model is from Dexsoft, and is meant as placeholder only. It's also available in the Asset Store btw: http://u3d.as/6Ka
     
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  12. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Victory/Defeat Screen

    Quick placeholder for victory/defeat screens I made for the demo:









    Since this is all just placeholder, I thought, might as well have a little fun with it.


    Also I was able to add firearm reloading. Each character has quick-item slots, and here I implemented reloading using spare magazines.

     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2014
  13. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Squad Loadout Screen

    I've been working on the Squad Loadout screen. It's where you inspect your squad members. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, the Main Menu screen (for now) will double as the Squad Loadout screen, as the squad members are walking along there.

    When you click on a character, the camera will zoom there, and the window (shown below) will appear.





    This is also where you can see the character's attributes and attack abilities.

    Since it's a combat demo only, you can't edit them yet:





    GUI design isn't really my role, so technically, that's programmer art :p

    Also, I looove lore writing so the placeholder text on the class/race descriptions there are mine.
     
  14. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Squad Loadout Screen (part 2)

    Currently bringing over the GUI design (from previous post) to NGUI.

    I also updated to the latest NGUI version (to 3.7.0 from 3.5.8!) I have a habit of not updating unless I encounter a bug that's reportedly fixed in the latest versions.




    The recent Unite keynote speech was pretty nice btw. Haven't had time to play around with the 4.6 beta though.







    NGUI Shenanigans

    I finally realize what NGUI users mean when they say NGUI is like MacGyver of GUIs. You have lots of low-level widgets that you can connect together to make more complex things.

    NGUI doesn't have a tab system. As shown here with the "INFO", "ATTRIBUTES, and "LOADOUT", I needed one. The example projects show one way of doing it, but I needed something slightly different. It was a matter of turning on and off the contents relevant to each tab, when it's clicked on.

    However I found that setting the GameObject's active state as the means to hide NGUI widgets resulted in noticeable delays. Setting the enabled property of sprites was the same.

    So I ended up making code to "hide" widgets by setting their alpha really really low (0.001).






    NGUI Scrollbars

    I also noticed that NGUI's scrollbars always have that mobile touchscreen feel: there's dampening and slowing down when scrolling and I needed to get rid of that.

    Setting "Drag Effect" to "None" didn't seem to fix that. I don't know, maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose of those settings, or there's some bug in NGUI.

    Well, it is called Drag Effect after all, not Mouse Wheel Effect.

    There didn't seem to be an easy way to stop the scroll view from responding to dragging also (I wanted it to respond to mouse wheel input only).

    So I ended up editing NGUI to do that.



    I made my own little respository to keep track of my modifications, so it's easier to re-apply them when I get a newer version of NGUI.
     
    Last edited: Aug 23, 2014
  15. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Squad Loadout Screen (part 3)

    Not much done this week. I took a little break before diving back in to this. That is to say, I finished Assassin's Creed 1 :p

    So I just rushed the work-in-progress design of the Squad Screen on Friday night. Clicking on a squad member in this screen will bring you to that loadout screen I showed last week.



    Clicking on "Proceed" will start the combat, and "Abort" will bring you back to the main menu. There's supposed to be a mission select screen prior to this, but since the demo has only one map for now, you'll immediately get to this screen when you press "Start" from the main menu.

    You'll be able to rename your squads in the actual game, and for the demo, this squad is named "Hell Divers" by default.

    I was also working on the screen manager in code. It works like a web browser's history, so it knows which screen to go back to when you press the back button. It also handles playing the proper animations when hiding/showing a screen. NGUI has no such concept, so it's up to you to add such functionality.
     
  16. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Squad Loadout Screen (part 4)

    Did mostly coding this week, so you can't appreciate the changes unless you see it in motion. That's why I'm showing a video:


    I'm just going through the screens briefly. If you want to read the text, put the video on full-screen and pause the video at the appropriate moment :p

    This is finally where it all comes together: the Main Menu, the Mission Briefing Screen, and the Squad Loadout Window.

    Take note that since this is only a demo, you can't change the characters' inventory/equipment.

    I also ended up editing NGUI so its UITween can make use of iTween's easing curves. It's the one I use for moving the camera to and fro when you click on a squad member (in the video).

    For some reason NGUI's easing curves don't look so good. I've used iTween a lot before and I was satisfied with it, so I implanted iTween's code into NGUI like some hideous Frankenstein's monster. I never feel good editing some 3rd-party plugin cause that means when I get an update to it, I need to reconcile my changes with the official update. That usually can get messy. I mitigate that by making my own git repo for NGUI in my hard drive and having an "official" branch and my "modified" branch.

    Options Window

    Meanwhile I've been setting up an Options window. It's not functional yet.

    I'm having fun making GUI art, like the slider there. But the programming part of the GUI? Not so much :p

    They're shaped like the sliders in Photoshop. I guess I've been staring at them for too long.

     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2014
  17. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Options Window (part 2)

    Nothing much to show this week. It was only now that I decided I've made enough material (and enough procrastinating) to experiment with making a consistent skin for the GUI as I needed to code in an options/settings window.



    I remember I used to dabble with web design back in college, but I got bored with it rather quickly.


    Playtest Feedback

    Meanwhile, we've been sharing the work-in-progress versions of our combat demo to some select friends and we've gathered some useful feedback.

    The Action Units bar for example, I had a hunch people will not initially understand it. There was indeed one comment that they weren't able to figure it out at first. It was more of a "actually I'm not an XCOM fan so I don't know what action units are". Good thing they were patient enough to figure it out themselves, but it's a problem nonetheless, which means I could do a better job of making the thing self-explanatory.


    The Action Units bar is the large yellow segmented bar at the lower left there.

    Each segment in the bar is one Action Unit. (Action Units being an idea taken from the game XCOM: UFO Defense, it's a sort-of resource that indicates the time taken to do an action, be it walk, normal attack, cast spell, etc. It naturally replenishes to full every turn. Games like Fallout and Jagged Alliance has the same idea with Action Points.)



    I made every 5th Action Unit in the bar longer, the reasoning being so that it would be easy to count by 5's how many Action Units you had left. In the end, I think it would be easier to just represent it primarily by number (I suppose there's a reason why the Hindu-Arabic number system got widespread use and hardly changed over the centuries), accompanied by a more standard bar, just like the Hit Points bar and Energy Points bar that we have (shown in the screenshot there just below the Action Units bar).



    Additionally I realized the display for an attack's Action Unit cost (found in the green screen at the right part of the screen, labeled "AU COST") is too far away from the Action Unit bar, and we found ourselves darting our eyes back-and-forth just to check if we had enough Action Units to do this attack or that. It's a lot worse on 1080 HD screens where those parts of the GUI are really far apart.

    Checking AU cost is something the player will be doing a lot, so I thought it needs to be fixed. Something for the backlog of tasks to do I guess.

    I'm fully aware that the controls need to be, at the very least, not cryptic or get in the way of the player. Because even if you have a fun game, if it's marred with terrible controls, players will likely drop the game before they could even notice there was fun underneath it after all. I'm pretty sure I experienced that myself, having played lots of games.

    Some comments are more cliche like "maybe make the barrels red and we could shoot at them and they'd explode!" and some I hadn't considered: "the characters are too 'white', add more racial diversity" which is rather surprising considering I'm Asian targeting a western market.

    All in all, they liked how it is so far. Nice to know all the little touches like the accordion tabs, or those icons that indicate prerequisites for attacks, or the unusual Main Menu look elicited some positive comments.

    It's also worth noting I get a lot of feedback about issues and problems I was already aware of. If we kept doing things as is, I'd keep on getting more and more of those redundant feedback. I immediately told Russ we need a way to notify testers of issues that were already known. We could just slap a static html page somewhere, maybe make a public Trello board, or this UserVoice kind of system that I found called GameLoop. The nice thing with GameLoop is users could vote on which suggestion/problem they want addressed (just like Unity's feedback site).
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2014
  18. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    World Map

    Here's a mockup of the world map. I decided to add the explanation on the images themselves. View the images on full screen to see.








    Graveyard Level

    Plus some work on a new level for the combat demo, a graveyard where you are fighting against some cultists (you may notice I'm making use of a lot of Asset Store stuff, these are placeholders for the demo).








     
    Last edited: Sep 20, 2014
  19. AnomalusUndrdog

    AnomalusUndrdog

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    Woops! I've forgotten to post an update last week since we were busy: our Kickstarter finally relaunched!



    I am now taking part in the campaign unlike last time.




    I've also gone ahead and set up our Gameloop page (It's like UserVoice, but specifically for games). It works as both a suggestion voting system (like Unity's feedback site), and a bug reporting system.




    We've also released a playable demo. To anyone who wants to post feedback, please use our Gameloop page!

    More details on the demo and Gameloop is on our Kickstarter update here.