Archives 2017

Since last time I wrote an article here, I’ve been quite occupied with moving. Me and my spouse built a house that was finished in the end of November so we’ve had our hands full so to speak.

Never the less, I’ve still managed to do some progress on LBKR’s development- although, I’ve not quite managed to document the progress very well so this article might end up a little unspecific compared to the usual updates.
Game Introduction

I’ve come to realise that LBKR didn’t really provide the user with a very involving introduction scene, the player was basicly lead in a straight line toward the first chapter, with very little interactions (and introduction for that matter…) so the intro-map has received a complete overhaul.

I’ve ensured that a minimum of 1 armor piece and 1 weapon are dropped before the first monster(s) appear so that the player won’t stand helpless at that moment, more tutorials/hints have been implemented, and all hints have been given more detailed info.
Also average play-time has been extended, mainly due to the map beeing more spread out and the first mission has been changed slightly to make sure the player have to walk around the first map and try out different controls and game mechanics before progressing to the first chapter of the main story.

-UI improvements
As mentioned in the previous article I wrote, the game’s UI was updated, all in-game hint pop ups have changed slightly, covering everything from mission updates to data device collections and contract completions.

The message board now render every second message with a darker background to allow the player to more easily separate them from each other, also some bugs related to ‘message stay time’, and content-pooling have been resolved.

-New Post Processing Framework
A new post processing framework came available in the latter batches of the Unity Engine 5.x series, I’ve been meaning to upgrade to the new framework for a while now but it’s been delayed alot as I’ve prioritized other things instead. I finally got to it though and apart from improving already in-use post processing effects in LBKR it also added a few new ones, and also have less impact on the frame-rate.

New effects that are available to toggle on (by checking the Options menu) include
-Vignette Mask
-Color Correction
-Depth of Field
-Ambient Occlusion

-Gameplay – Portal Device
As some maps in the game do not allow the player to use his/hers portal device I’ve now added a UI message that appear in the message board, explaining that the device is offline or malfunctioning. Also, to give some visual feedback to when the player character is using the portal device a particle system now emit particles from the player’s hands and the character has received an animation in which he/she fiddles with the particles emitted.

–AI & Traps
Alot of monsters have been balanced, more info regarding this will be available in the release log by the release of v2.28
In game versions prior to 2.28 alot of traps in the earlier chapters of the game appear to have been set to either none or an invalid damage type. This issue has been fixed so all traps now inflict the correct damage type of their specific trap type.

Furthermore a new trap has been added: Gas Leak, it’s a red fog that flow out from pipes, if the trap receive fire damage the gas ignites, creating a flamethrower out of the pipe.

I’ve also optimized world colliders in all instances of chapter 6(Wildlands) and chapter 7(Caverns) as I still experienced some performance-related issues when playing those maps.

The more I get done on v2.28 the more I realise that it’ll be a really large update, and more things that require my attention keep poping up! The development of v2.28 has now entered it’s third month and since a few weeks’ve passed since my last update on the progress, I’ll try to fill you in!

– AI –

A new skill has been introduced to all AI character’s called “Pain Threshold”, the pain threshold is sort of their physical damage resistance, also greater pain threshold will make monsters less likely to enter “execution”-mode, this has now enabled me to manage which monsters that should be easier to execute and which ones that are supposed to be more toughened as the “Execute”-mode implementation in v2.27 and earlier was set up sort of like “if the monster’s health is less than 25%, chance of execution = x%”. Needless to say it was kind of random.

Before v2.28 is released I’ll have implemented a new item stats aswell called “Impact”, that will help the player to bypass the monsters pain threshold.

I’m also done replacing the old ‘Forsaken’-monster models with new ones, seen in the attached pictures are the new Conjurer and Guardian models. There’s also a new unique monster that will be possible to encounter in chapter 5 (The Bridge), he seem to be stuck in some weird space-roots at this time though.

I’m also introducing AI weak-spots. I added some weak points for the final boss, primarily as an experiment, and I felt that it turned out quite good- so I’ve already gone ahead and added weak points for a few common monsters aswell.

To dig deeper on the subject of weak-spots in LBKR: monsters that have weak spots will from time to time reveal them for various reasons, and attacking them with a weapon that the monster have poor resistance to will result in massive damage bonuses when the weak-spot is destroyed. So to give an example lets take the ‘Hypoxia’ monster, they’ve received a pair of cannisters that are attached to their backs and are filled with plasma. The cannisters will start venting if they get too hot, which can be identified by the cannister’s shell slightly opening and letting out blue steam.
If the player destroy the cannister with plasma-projectiles it will explode and not only inflict bonus damage on the carrier of the cannister, but to any unlucky monsters that are nearby aswell.

– UI –

The panel that display current buff/debuff-effects have been improved with a new style/layout in order to give the player a better overview of any relevant stuff, and also the inventory has been updated again, while the layout remains pretty much the same as introduced in v2.27, the left-most scroll-window has been sorted into a more grid-like layout, as I found it irritating to have to scroll up and down all the time to find items while testing some new features in the game.

– Game World –

There are currently 41 new world chunks waiting to be explored as soon as v2.28 is released (and with that there’s now a total of 571 unique world chunks.), most of them belonging to the new and final chapter of the game- and all story-missions have been created aswell, although not yet game-tested so we’ll have to wait a while and see if they work as they’re supposed to… it’s not too uncommon that these things need some fine adjustments, or so I’ve come to notice.

Just last week I began updating the introduction-map aswell, it’ll get a major face-lifting procedure and will offer much more inviting gameplay than the current intro-map that pretty much just have you move from point A to point B (and sometimes don’t spawn any items for you to equip your character with… which makes your character quite useless as you enter the first chapter of the game…)

– Items –

As I mentioned earlier, weapons will now have different Impact-ratings that affect how well your attack may stagger an enemy and make it possible to quickly execute it, to add to this there will also be some changes on how plasma fuel is managed for ranged weapons. Currently the plasma fuel required to fire any ranged weapon is predetermined and depends on which (ranged)weapon type the item is ranked as. (Eg. Shotgun, Assault Rifle, Handgun. etc.)

I’ll have the plasma fuel implemented in the procedural item generation now though, while the base stats are still determined by weapon type the plasma fuel requirement will now atleast vary between each weapon that is dropped even if they are of the same type. And I’ll make sure to add the plasma fuel-useage to the item tooltip so you can see at once how much plasma is required per shot fired!

I’ve also spent some time setting up a visual studio project page to help maintain bug issues, tasks I need to do and a wiki of the game in it’s whole, so I’ve obviously wasted some valuable development time but it was starting to become quite necessary as I had a hard time keeping up with all papers I had scribbled things on and to-do-lists scattered everywhere.

Just out of curiosity I had a quick look at the file count in my project directories, so to share some information of completely no use whatsoever- the project now consist of
-1437 textures/2D art files
-387 3d models
-1392 code files
-2859 audio files (Although, rough estimate of mine is that atleast 800 of those files will be removed within soon, alot of sfx has lingered since very early versions of the game and are no longer used in-game).
– 198 misc. files (Related to the game, but used to manage things outside the game engine, eg. the LBKR website, build releases, documentation, the LBKR in-game news feed etc.)

Progress is going on as strong as usual with LBKR, although I haven’t felt that there’s been much to show up until now, as alot of time has been spent on bug fixes, coding the final boss behaviour and creating world chunks for the final chapter, which has already been shown in previous posts!

For the moment nearly all mission-related world chunks have been prepared for the final chapter, aswell as ~35 regular chunks- including new secret areas and randomized world events. All maps already implemented in the game have been set up with the new decal system (replacing the previously used, physics/mesh gen-decal system I had created.) and as far as I’ve been able to see this far it’s had a positive effect on game performance and memory consumption.

While still speaking about maps, one of the void-rift maps currently implemented, namely the “SX0 Exterior” will be unavailable as of v2.28, the map’s been out of date for quite some time and I feel that in order to have it work properly with some new missions I’ve added I want to recreate it from scratch.

Some changes made to existing stuff include the character stats. A skill used to calculate the likelihood of evading an attack in earlier versions of the game, “Dodge Rating”, has been removed. As of 2.27 this skill was rendered useless as all attacks were modified to use collision detection for hits and a new input was added called “Dodge”, allowing the player to perform a dodge roll ( or a warp if playing with the ‘Cryptic’ player class. )
A new skill has been added to the game called “Ranged Damage”, and will as the name implies, affect the character’s damage while using ranged attacks/weapons. As more player classes are beeing added to the game I’m noticing that alot of the player’s attributes feel unclear and that it might be difficult to know which ones to focus on for a certain character so I’m trying to plan for an improved attribute list, and the ranged damage skill is a first step.

Some issues reported in earlier versions will be fixed for the next release, some of these are as follows.

‘The Cryptic’s ‘Chain Strike’ ability no longer randomly target destructible environment, but will instead only target enemy characters as intended’
‘Minions no longer attack, nor get stuck while attacking, destructible enrivonment’
‘Fixed issue with corrupt mesh data in some of the maps of Highland Chapter’
‘Cryptic’s Shuriken ability no longer heal the player if the attack destroy a destructible object instead of hitting an enemy’
‘Tech’s Junkaton ability no longer heal the player if a destructible object is destroyed instead of hitting and enemy’

I’m also making some adjustments to the background, story and lore of LBKR- this will most likely not be fully finished until the next release as alot of content has to be updated, the changes are intended for the alien “Forsaken” creatures, that in the current version of the story inhabit the planet and seem to live unaffected by the parasite that is infected almost all humans on the IGCC station.

I’ve never been quite satisfied with the appearance of the Forsaken though, and I feel like they’re quite…. random? Anyways, they will still appear in-game and while their background story will remain more or less the same, they will now show signs of infection aswell. My idea is to make them appear more evolved than the infected humans, since the Forsaken inhabited the planet alot earlier than any humans did (although, hidden in caves deep beneath the surface.) and were infected earlier aswell.

I’ve begun remodeling the characters and this far I’m more pleased with them, they feel more like LBKR-monsters to me than the previous versions of them. Unfortunately this will take some extra time to remodel, animate, rig and re-implement each monster of the Forsaken faction but I believe that it’ll be worth it!

Work on LBKR continues as usual, been putting together alot of world chunks for the final chapter, currently there are 25 chunks game-ready but alot more to be done!

I’ve created the primary minion that the new player class “Puppeteer” will be able to summon, it’s a puppet (… who could’ve guessed? 😉 ) The ability used to summon the minion has three modes, the first mode will summon a puppet that deal only physical damage, second mode may summon up to three puppets that inflict random elemental damage and the third mode summons a single large monster puppet.

Hastily moving on to visuals, in previous versions of LBKR I’ve generated flat meshes at runtime for blood stains and splatter however, I recently noticed that this method was to a relatively expensive cost once entering the Wildlands (Chapter 6), as the system I wrote to handle this relied heavily on extra world colliders. The old system worked fine for the first five chapters as all world colliders are fairly simple and originally, LBKR was only supposed to have 5 chapters, it wasn’t until last year that I decided to add another 5 of ’em and that alot of the new chapters would take place outdoors or in caves with more detailed ground etc. therefore involving more complex colliders.

Anyways, I’m now using projections instead to simply bolt blood stains onto any surface that I allow to receive projected decals. As all extra colliders necessary for my old decal system are now unnecessary I’ve decided to clean up all old world chunks from them, and I’m currently half way through, more or less. ( Which I find to be quite good… considering the current unique world chunks count is about 600 or so chunks. )