Kagemusha, Stealth / Strategy Game

Hello fellow developers!
I've been working for the past 6-7 months on a stealth/team based games in the vein of the Commandos/Desperados series. It is set in medieval Japan, my main influences are the works of Kazuo Koike, from Lone Wolf and Cub to Path of the Assassin, manga like Shigurui Death Frenzy and of course my favorite director of all time Akira Kurosawa, i'm also a big fan of TV series like Kage No Gundan and Yagyu Clan Conspiracy (Shinichi Chiba is a f****** GOD).

What all this had to with the game? Well I wanted to take a more down to earth approach on the Ninja genre, leaving the supernatural elements aside and relying heavily on technique so citing my influences on the Ninja/Samurai genre would help to make my point. I was also raised on games like Commandos and was really sad this type of games have died throu the years, i knew i had to make a game like them with Ninjas and Samurais!!

At the current stage the game is only at a pre-Alpha but i think it is shaped up enough to saw the world my vision of it!

although it is a stealth game primarily i wanted the combat to be fun and pretty engaging and not to punish the player if spotted and difficulty to be more based on realistic elements like if you fight against multiple opponents, well the odds of course won't be in your favor . But of course being a game about ninja's mean that the player always has some aces up their sleeves.

At the moment I finished the first character in your team (Every character has tons of animations and everything is done by me so progress is slow but steady) and working on enemies AI. I wanted to eliminate elements most games have that players can exploit, like the most common technique "If something works, spam it", i try to tackle this with adaptive AI, if you use something on an opponent and others are seeing it they learn it, so if you try it on them you gonna have a different outcome. AI out of combat is not that simple either, i'm trying to recreate realistic behaviour for a more immersive and lifelike experience, for example: if enemies see a fire, they will try and put it out, of course they can't just put it out with their hands, they need buckets and buckets don't grow on trees so they need to go and find one and then fill it with water and when they throw the water in the fire they need to fill it again and so on and on... (something i've already implemented in the game but needs some debugging so it's not in the video, sorry).

Well okay enough with my ramblings, i can talk for hours and hours about it

You can find the Vlog here

or to my blog for some pics and other stuff
http://devwithoutacrew.blogspot.gr/

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Quick Update:

Finally i made offmeshlinks to work properly with animations, i used a curve to control the agents speed for more realistic velocity of the jumps. The result? A more open approach to gameplay in the final version, you could climb up walls/houses set up barricades and quickly jump up and watch the enemy strangle to get across, you name it.

As an extra tease i added some pickable objects at the end... (yes that is a chopped off arm you throw at the end)

My blog:
Devwithoutacrew.blogspot.gr

Here's the video

 

Looks real good. The gameplay looks interesting. Is there going to be more action on the screen? I like the RTS view, but without an army, there's a lot of empty space with that camera height.

 

From what i have in mind in the final version you will have up to 5 main characters (if they die you can't progress the story) but on some levels you could have a lot more expendable characters so you can set up ambushes and such, the enemies would also be a lot more in numbers with varied weapons from spears to bows and firearms. The level right now is highly unpopulated with items because for every each one i try to put at least a little bit of interaction, from a description to be able to move/burn/destroy or use it for other things.
Thanks for checking it out!

 

:O incredibly cool. I liked very much the video and the combat system! It looked very neat. Could you explain a bit how the controls work? Do we move and evade the ninja with keyboard input or is it solely with the mouse? How does work the counter attack?

Very impressive, l'll keep an eye on your project

 

I'm not sure why you've titled it 'Kagemusha' when the term loosely means 'body double'. I also know for a fact that no human being would enjoy watching a sword fight from a bird's eye POV.

Other than that, this could be fun.

 

It can be played solely with the mouse but with keyboard is much faster, you aim with the mouse when you are in combat and when you want to move/dodge you hold shift (since you also move the camera with WASD) and move with WASD or click where you want the player to dodge, abilities that are unique to every character are laid with 1,2,3,4,5,6, and those that are common they have their own hotkeys or the GUI buttons. Now the counter attacks are not actually counter attacks, i'm still working on having counter attacks but what you saw is infact either the abilities of the player or the executions that happen when the enemy is at low health, they are not counterattacks the way they are in AC or the Batman games per say.

I checked your project also, looks really cool! reminds me of the tenchu series! I liked it a lot!

 

The literally meaning of Kagemusha is shadow warrior, from Kage which means dark/shadow and musha which means warrior, see Onimusha for example means Demon Warrior. the term yes was used as a body double , as seen in the Kurosawa movie, but here it has the shadow warrior meaning but it's also a hint for the story with it's body double meaning...

It's not primarily a sword fight game but a stealth game so the camera serves the purpose of knowing what is around you and you will control more than one player at a time so it's kinda of necessary, but it serves the purposes that my models are not the best in the world and animations are somewhat rough since i do all of them by hand and not with motion capture.

In my younger years i played Robin Hood Legend of Sherwood where it was kinda of the same with this , i recommend playing it but it hasn't made all that good of a transition to newer OS so check some youtube videos if you want to , although their combat was much more restricted the game was hell of a fun!

 

Sounds good! Looking forward how it will evolve. One thing what bugged me in the old commandos/desperados games was that the characters were pretty defenseless when the enemy engaged them and the player didn't controled them. How will you handle it? Do you plan to give the allies an AI so they help you in combat or can at least defend themself?

Thanks for checking out my game, glad you liked it

 

yes exactly like that, if you remember in Commandos 2 and 3 they implemented to your characters (and some other allies you occasionally had on some missions) something like a guard mode where they would stand and shoot when enemies got in their line of vision. The same it's going to be here, since i'm already doing an AI battle system to fight the player it's just a simple copy/paste and renaming a few tags. I'm also experimenting with a system where the player could choose what AI should his character have, like retreating to a safer position or using ranged weapons etc but it's still very early on and i haven't wrapped my head completely around it

 

Hi nasoukikos,

Love your game. This is an amazing effort, especially for one-man project! Can't wait to get a playable demo. I wish we could zoom closer to the action, especially the "kill" sequences would benefit from a closer camera view.

I see you have already a lot of motions included (the Mecanim Layer image on your blog looks impressive, not to say intimidating ), and I expect you’ll continue adding more for the other characters.

I was wondering if I can lend you a hand. We run a startup motion capture studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, Mocapi Animation.

Drop me a PM or contact me on our website and we can talk. I’m aware that this is an indie project – the fun is an award in itself.

Best,
Vla

 

Thanks for commenting and for offering help! That was the basic mecanim layer, in the end every player character would have his own with mostly unique animations. Unfortunately my budget is almost nonexistent, with bills to pay every month and no job currently and Unity's pro monthly fees, as you can imagine i'm on tight spot right now , but i'll keep it in mind for the future!

Currently you can zoom in and zoom out it's just my preference for it, for enemy awareness nearby etc.

Thanks again for checking my project!

 

i've updated the main thread, more info there!

 

After a long meeting with the head of the studio, which is me talking to myself, I came to the conclusion that i want to expand the game even further. Instead of having just simple levels loading one after another I wanted to give the player the ability to choose what would be his next move and to have more weight on his options, instead of boring dialogues and choices. I wanted the consequences to derive from what he is actually doing and not by what he just selects on a dialog. And instead of just a typical map to just move around, now this is going to play a major part in the game, strategic positioning of characters would play a significant role to how levels progress and how difficult the levels themselves are. On what the player would give priorities would also effect the progress of the story with unforgiving results, you could even lose main characters to defection according to your choices. That's all i'm saying for now, big things are coming in the future, stay tuned!

for high res pics plz go to my blog: Devwithoutacrew.blogspot.gr

Here is an overview of the demo level WIP



Here is an overview of a level that is going to be in the final game, the brown buildings near the top are the same models in both pictures, for scale references.




The player's scale in contrast with the buildings.




The campaign Map still WIP

 

This is something I would love to play! Great effort, will keep an eye or two or three on this one. Keep it up!

 

Haha! thank you very much!!

 

This looks potentially really fun game! I also played Robin Hood Legend of Sherwood as a child and loved it. Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks! I was blown away with Legend of Sherwood back in the day, I was basically a sucker for Commandos clones and that game took the formula to another level! So I consider it my responsibility to take it even further
Thanks again!

 

There's no such thing as a perfect combat system, you will always want to add more. At least that's my opinion...
So I've added the ability to pick up any weapon from the ground and the player will change his style accordingly.

Here's some eye candy, but pls watch the high res linked in my blog or IndieDB for the full awesomeness

here are the forum appropriate sizes (not that somebody is forcing it but it's just my opinion that i don't want to clutter the page with huge photos for ease of access)


I think this is a genre trope nobody can have enough of


Another trope that is a must, seriously how badass it is to have a duel in tall grass?


Nothing like a little shade in a hot day, if only it wasn't that dangerous though

 

Been busy the last couple of weeks, creating the campaign map, creating a database for all the levels and their stats/states and finally coding the enemy AI (around 3000 lines of code and still growing). So as a break from all this I decided to add even more flair to the game with mounts! Still a work in progress but it turns out pretty good!! Check the videos below

This is an intro scene for the game.
Take it also as an announcement for mounts to the game!

Here you can see them on action, keep in mind they are still WIP

I haven't found out yet how to do the mounted combat, except from ranged combat that is, but I'm working on it. As for the ranged combat on horseback, be prepared to face some tough and mean sobs, unfortunately you won't see them in this update though, they still need some nitpicking...

Other Features added:
1.You can pick up any weapon from the ground and the character would change his style
2.Breakable Items and Weapons
3.Enemy makes morale checks and acts accordingly (currently 5 states of actions for them)
4.Enemy communication and Character responses (Everyone has a response according to their personality)
5.Day/Night time cycle in the campaign map and on certain levels.

I'll be adding and some wallpapers to download on IndieDB so you'll be able to spread the love around!

If all goes well we might be talking about an alpha pretty soon(a couple of months perhaps) I'm working furiously to bring a playable demo that's not bug ridden and it's a good taste of the whole pie till the end of the year.

Cheers!

 

I'm running some tests for horseback archers AI with pretty good results. Instead of just sitting around like in most games, they surround their target based on his position and they scatter when he is closed. I also made vector dependent the IK for them to aim more realistically and to give the player a way to escape them.

 

So you saw MGS 5?

Very cool your progress, the horse archer are looking pretty good and clever. Maybe you could change that the horses doesn't stop immediately after a sprint.

I saw your mecanim state setup, how are you dealing with increasing project complexity?

 

Hi there!
Thanks for your comments! Well project complexity is a think but I have it under control for the moment, I heavily modified that picture and now I have a layer within this layer, so for every weapon style I use a sub layer, the same for the horses. The funny think is that they don't have an easy way of simply adding a new sub layer, so I have to create a new one, copy him and paste him on the layer I want and it creates a blue state (but If you right click and copy that Unity always crashes), it might be a whole other layer but Unity treats it like they all are in the same layer so that's nice. Now for each state tree I have a boolean that decides from where to go, the only problem is that the mecanim parameters are a lot and I have to search a lot if I want to modify a transition . Codewise other than mecanim I'm using a lot switches with enums for every little thing both for the AI and the player. The horse there is at a very early stage, I'm trying to nitpick the AI to use them properly and then the player and then I'll polish the agent, but I don't have much to work with to make it more realistic, this is just a free asset from the asset store and has only 3 animations, if it had root motion it would look even better and with no sliding all over the place. It's a good thing for once I work by myself in this project because I don't have to explain anything on what I do to someone sometimes even I don't understand what I did there and now I'm always trying to comment code something I heavily ignored in the past and has turned to kick me in the ass a lot!

MGSV and MGS in particular has always been one of my favourite franchises and Kojima is my Idol because he uses a cinematic approach to his games, I've also finished film school so I can easily relate to him. But I'm taking the horse dung a step further and Implementing them as a game mechanic, for example when you are in a random encounter you don't know what enemies you'll face, so if you see some horse dung, you better hide because this ones are very tough to beat. Other than that you can throw them at opponents or at their food and they will get sick when they eat it.

Cheers!

 

Experimenting with some cutscenes, I like the manga-esq appeal with this one and the use of sequential panels means I won't have to waste hours animating full cutscenes rather than focus on Key Animations and poses.

 

Here is a quick scene I did to test the artstyle, what do you think?

 

... and I've still have lot's of animations to add for every weapon type

 

We all have played a game which utilizes a counter attack mechanic, the idea is always the same, it's basically a QTE, well how boring that turns out to be? And usually everyone turns out to spam it all the time breaking the immersion of the game.

For games that are primarily stealth (you know which ones I mean) they turn out to be just a power fantasy in the end with no reason to change your tactics, so...

What's my approach to this? Instead of just hitting a button on the keyboard, you have to click the GUI button which spawns randomly around the enemy. Now the size of it depends upon the enemy's skill and familiarity with your moves, but even if you do manage to counter attack that doesn't mean you will get instant kills, the weapon you have and the skill of the enemy play a major role in the outcome of the counter attack but at least you will be sure that you have broken the attack of the opponent. I believe this adds a lot more to our previous talk about "Observation before action" so knowing the level of the enemy will give a significant weight on your decision of your course of action. Although the Counter Attack mechanic is very powerful, you'll have to know when to use it!

But I have to admit, when you are making a stealth game you can be so unapologetic with the combat difficulty

It tends to get a little bloody sometimes...



A close up from a counter attack



I've also created a FB page if you are into that sort of thing.I plan to update it with stuff from the game or not that relevant to it, but a lot about the samurai/ninja lore, links below

Till next week! Sayonara!

 

Hey it is me again

First thank you of your lengthy post how you handle animations, it is always good to see how someone else manages it! I'm pretty overwhelmed by the complexity of your mecanim state tree and well done that you animated everything by yourself, I like those animations. And yep I can fully relate towards MGS with you!

Cutscene: Looks cool! Did you try a more stylistic apparance for the cutscenes? Maybe more contrast like in Sin City. It would be easily doable with the grayscale image effect. Well but I don't know if it would fit into the flair, but I thought of it since your main menu screen was also very stylistic.

Counter System: Interesting concept, I like the approuch that the combat system will not let you automatically do everything for you. The counter button is currently a bit jumpy and hard to see due to the gui skin, but I think you will change that later.

Horse: I assume you have no access to the animation data of the horse with e.g. Blender? Else it would be fairly easy to add root motion.

Well I'm looking forward to play your Game!

 

Thanks for the feedback!

The cutscenes they were just a test but I kinda like the results, I didn't put any effects on the camera (i forgot it ) basically I was testing a shader I bought from the Asset Store. I want it to be heavily story bases so cutscenes are a must for this. Sin City is always on my mind Robert Rodriguez was the reason I went to film school when I was young .

The problem is that my models are low poly so I can't have good cutscenes with them without being stylistic about it. I had in mind doing it like PeaceWalker does it with the cutscenes but given that I can't draw for sh*ts I try with the tools I'm good at . If I do it right I think it's gonna work, it reminds me a lot of Kurosawa movies with big and imposing panels, very stylistic even in a black and white screen.

The button is a little jumpy yes and sometimes frustrating I'm going to change it when I'm more keen on how the GUI works etc. for now it would have to do for testing purposes, keep in mind it's still in pre-alpha.

The horse is a free model from the Asset Store, through hell and high water I managed to convert it from .fbx to .blend so I can animate it but it doesn't keep the rig and animations, so I have to do it again by hand and texture it all over again and weight the rig etc. I've looked into buying one with a lot more animations but they were horrible to say the least, this dude has amazing animation on his free model!

I had no plans to do it this big actually, I started using it just for testing and putting more and more things to it and before I knew it I had a locomotion system, a basic combat set, a range set, a fire arms set and a whole lot of interactions sets. So I wasn't going to redo them again for every character , but doing it this way actually opened up a lot more possibilities, I'm currently thinking of putting and different sword styles in it like in the Kengo games or Way of the Samurai, the only catch is, the animation I have to make will increase by the boatload.

I started doing the animations my self because I had no money actually, I didn't know how to animate but I had some experience with martial arts and a lot in acting because of film school so mimicing the actions of the human body comes really natural to me. It's really nice that I can make them looking good because I can add everything I want and don't have to pay anything extra if I want a cool execution per say.

How's your game coming along?

Thanks for listening to my ramblings!

 

This is superbly fascinating, and I love your references. Also, you should think of using a gamepad for controls instead of a mouse: it could be the Dark Souls of top down RPGs

 

Thanks! It's not an RPG actually, it has some elements but don't consider it as one. I'm thinking of ways to implement a gamepad for possible console ports but those are for the long future, my main focus is PC right now.

 

I've added a new weapon into the game, the dreadful Naginata.
A Naginata consists of a wooden shaft with a curved blade on the end, think of it as the European halberd that is as sharp as a Katana. In the right hands this weapon can be deadly, perfect against cavalry it can dismount a rider without much effort, there are even legends of a monk that reflected a hundred arrows by moving the Naginata in a helicopter fashion above his head and cutting them in half. Later during the Edo period as there were not that many battles the Naginata became a symbol of social status for women. As son's would inherit a family sword, daughters often would be granted a Naginata as a wedding gift. The most common images associated with the Naginata are those of Onna-bugeisha (Female warriors) or those of the Hojo monks but it was widely used.

I'm also thinking of changing the name of the game, I'm constantly having videos flagged by youtube's automated system because apparently it thinks that a Japanese word can be copyrighted....

Somehow the basic system of combat mechanics which I've create it, made it so easy for me to add a new weapon, it literally took me half an hour to have it set it up and running both for the player and the enemy. You know what that means right? Tons of weapons! Another cool thing I've added to the Naginata is that when it breaks instead of dropping just broken parts, the blade part of the Naginata can be used as a regular sword, which is actually a legit technique! If you look at videos of Naginatajutsu the participants would regularly grab the Naginata higher up and just under the blade and use it as you would use a Katana. I will showcase this in a later video because there's not really much to it right now.

I've also started thinking adding more the ability to change your sword style in game, after playing with the Naginata and how easy it was to add it would be pretty simple to do it. The only problem with this is that the amount of animations I need just keeps multiplies more, that's not a bad thing but it's a big weight upon our timeline.

Here's a video of the Naginata in action and it's aftermath!

some pics

 

The business end of the Naginata

 

That animation is supercool!!!!

 

Hi all!
In this installment of the Devlog I talk a bit about the Campaign Map and new Combat Mechanics.
Most of the stuff on the Campaign Map I have mention them before so I'll go straight to the Combat.

The Combat now is skill based, meaning that even if you hit an opponent, he has a percentage to block your hit. That percentage is actually dictated by his level of skill and how familiar he is with the style you are using and your weapon.

If your tactics are to spam the attack button you'll have a hard time dealing with enemies, for example, let's say you are facing three opponents of the most basic level, they have a level of familiarity with your style of 1, if you are using a sword they have a 15% chance of blocking your hits, BUT! Attack them with this style 3-4 times (the exact number is different for everyone, it's dictated by the stats of the enemy) and not only will the enemy you are attacking will level up his familiarity but everyone who is currently seeing you fight! So more skillful opponents would be priority targets, you don't want them to learn even more about you.

"If you know the enemy better than you know yourself,
the outcome of the battle has already been decided"
-Sun Tzu​

Another thing I usually don't like in other games nowadays is the constant info on your enemy, you are always treated like an infant getting to know the world but sometimes it's just right out offensive. I'm seeing a gigantic monster wielding a cleaver coming out of a furnace, duh I don't need you to tell me that he is of a higher level and has fire resistance (Any resemblance to any Butcher is coincidental). So no magic floating numbers betraying the level of the enemy.

Now you are going to ask:
"How would you know then how familiar is an enemy with each style? Or his level? "
And I'll answer:
"By observing and using lore!"

Lore you say? What is that? Well enough with toddler behaviours, let's take a deep look into the Samurai culture.

As you may know or not, Samurai once upon a time were the military nobility of Japan. A Samurai literally means "to serve". Contrary to the popular belief of that every Samurai is instantly an expert with the sword, Samurai's abilities varied. For someone to become a Samurai, under the strict Confucianism cast system, he would actually have to be born in a Samurai family and carry on the tradition or prove himself through battle. Though there were always exception to the rules of course and the constant warfare helped in the survival of fittest as you can imagine. Another thing that is highly misinterpreted is that all Samurai were some kind of a high moral human beings or whatever and that every Samurai was actually following Bushido. It wasn't like that at all prior to the 12th century. Bushido is actually a modern term. Before the unification of Japan there were as good as any other veteran soldier of that era. The "peaceful" times of the Tokugawa era show the rise of the sword fencing schools and that is where the whole moral code for the Samurai started to give birth. Now of course they had a very good base to begin with, their military laws prohibited for a warrior to lose his sword in a battle, they took no prisoners and everyone had to take the head of the person who kill to instantly prove that it was him that killed him. Warlords never send assassins to kill another Warlord. It was regarded highly disrespectful if you took the life of your adversary outside of a battle, the only time it was allowed it was if he was forced to commit Seppuku, literally means "The cutting of the belly". Oh and one other thing, Seppuku is a ritual, not a suicide, if you did it alone in your room with no witnesses and no one to take your head off it's called something else, I don't remember right now and I'm not going to search 50+ books I have on the Japanese culture to find it out. So all this and the actions of Miyamoto Musashi show rise to the Bushi class of the Samurai, it wasn't long enough from there that every Samurai had to become a Bushi to be a true Samurai. The capital punishment of the goverment on those who didn't follow at least the basic lines of the "Bushido" code help the widespread of this way of living.

Now that we have all this clear.
Knowing the lore of the game (or the Samurai lore in general) would actually give you a tremendous advantage over the game. It was nice reading books in Baldur's Gate and learning everything about the world but it didn't have much to add to the game, you could take hint of were something or someone could be but that was all.

With Kagemusha now everything you see it would have a meaning. For example, it is no secret that Samurai always carried two swords, so what you will think the next time that you'll see an enemy that only has one? That he is not a Samurai, that screams low skill! But of course whatever shines is not gold, so you'll have to look for other clues, take hint in where the level you are playing is based on the Campaign map. Is it close to the city? Is it close to a village or a forest? Does he have a reason to be here? Every region it usually had it's own style, for example the Satsuma Sword Style was focused a lot on the first strike, so they had small tsubas on their Katanas (Don't get me started on the term Katana), the sword guard. The way someone is dressed, his behaviour on the level and the location of the level betrays a lot for him, you will just have to spend the time and invest on the game and it will give back

And no. enemies won't be standard, they would be semi-randomized at the start of each level but on unique levels that are story based they would be always the same.

As you can see in the video, all this things are implemented, some things of course they would be more clear with time and when they are more polished.

Keep in mind that I'm not a Historian. All my knowledge comes from personal research and years studying martial arts and common logic, so if something is not that accurate, well I don't really care.

Here's the video

 

1. This game is already really awesome! I never seen someone putting such a level of detail in combat and being so true to the historic / cultural aspects.
2. Your accent and commentaries made the video even more entertaining )

 

Haha! Thanks for your words, I tried to make the best of any situation

 

Spend the whole week optimizing and restructuring most of my code. Prior to that I had problems with many enemies on the screen, 5-6 enemies on screen where actually enough to make the fps-es take a nose dive but now it can stand up to 80, of course there is a frame drop but not all of it is because of the pathfinding.

Video showcasing this

Atop of that the combat and movement of the player is way more dynamic now and it's actually interactive with the enviroment so no more floating characters (this is not shown in the video though!) and it opened the way to even more interesting stuff. I've also decided to give another try on mocap to speed up development time a little bit and I had some good results but more on that later. That's it for this week, although not so much stuff to show, the game undergoes big changes and it's getting even better.

 

23 Samurai battle it out against 23 Ninjas. Although it's still in a raw version it's shaping up pretty good even with some animations missing. Wait till I add blood effects, different weapons, dismemberment and enemies with horses. It's gonna get so awesome. Every character is a unique entity with his own stats/skills and style familiarities. For this video everyone starts with the same stats as to be balanced so the outcome is always random. Everything you see is AI I don't do anything.

Although it is a stealth game there would be times where the above would be necessary, of course on a level you would have to take care and think where this battles would take place. Kinda like in Total War games but instead of wide open areas you will have small areas and in cities/villages and other landmarks. So let me give you an example, you have your ninja been spotted by 5 samurai, as you already know without having first observe your enemies the battles would be very difficult so what will you do then? Run inside a house where you have strategically placed some of your own characters and let the slaughter begin!!!

I had a friend come over and we placed bets everytime on who is going to win, it was so freaking awesome, kinda like multiplayer without actually playing . I'm going to make this a mode in the final game and you would unlock characters by playing the main story.

Enjoy!

 

Decided to refurbished my 3d modelling skills and work up some stuff for something I have in mind

48

 

I'm so god damn glad I took the time to refurbish my modeling skills.

just a quick render on a WIP unrelated to Kagemusha but still everything I learn from it will go into it.