ABSENT LOG Dev Update 2/15/2025

Last month we talked a little bit about our puzzle and level structure and what we want to accomplish with that, and hopefully you’ve had a chance to try out a small taste with the playtest build. Since the last update, our focus was two fold, get a playtest demo out the door, and immediately jump onto major bug fixes and refinements of the most egregious issues that came from that. As a result, there wasn’t much work done in terms of new raw content for the game so this update should be fairly brief and straightforward. The feedback we have gotten has been tremendously helpful in identifying issues that we often miss in development, and seeing in real time people finally playing what we have has been kind of surreal, and immensely rewarding.

However now that the playtest build is public, our focus is switching back into the campaign.

The core functions of most of our systems are working at a state where they can start to be implemented into the level design proper for testing and refinement. A lot of these systems still require more time and attention to ensure everything is cohesive, so there is some benefit to developing them in conjunction with level creation. The most important items we are paying close attention to are things that need to stay consistent between traversing different levels. Like properly saving and loading player equipment, stats, enemy spawn pools, level progression and layout changes (such as unlocked doors, picked up items, world persistence essentially).

The challenge with maintaining a world persistence system is that it requires everything within a level to be broken down into a set of trackable variables. All that information when a save game happens, gets pushed into a “structure”. When loading the level, it grabs all the data from that structure, and reads each variable to determine how it needs to rebuild the level to be exactly how it was when it was saved.

Ideally, a snapshot system would be the most intuitive but this seems to be beyond our technical capabilities at the moment, or at least we’ve not yet found how to make UE handle save data in that way. Regardless, we are confident that we can have a functioning system up and running soon.  Already the save function works for core things like player stats, locations, spawns, etc, but not the finer elements of world persistence such as level progression and objectives. 

In order to fully test this system, we need to complete the first level, TW and Huey’s Ship. In terms of a completion rate, it's moving into its final asset building phase this month to knock out the last couple of rooms, alongside its various interaction elements. Once complete we can build out the rest of our intro cinematics and move along to the next level, Dock Concourse.

We are excited to finally start getting more substantial work done with our campaign, and looking forward to sharing more with you all soon!

MAIN PROJECT UPDATES:

• Implementation of Halberd assets 

• Addition of save game interaction animations 

• Implementation of save functionality to save stations (this is still an ongoing WIP, currently saving is working but loading is still under construction)

• Additions of cinematic assets to Secret Parade level (TW & Huey’s ship)

• New interaction items added to Secret Parade level

• Quick optimization pass on light builds for Secret Parade level.

• Refinements to post processing volumes for Secret Parade level.

PLAYTEST BUILD CHANGE LIST:

• Resolved an issue where accessing a terminal while aiming or moving would cause a soft lock from said terminal.

• Resolved an issue where the player could still move while accessing a terminal.

• Fixed a bug where weapons would still be visible while accessing a terminal.

• Resolved a bug where pausing and unpausing while aiming would lock the player in an “aim” state until “aiming” again.

• Resolved an issue where TW would play a breath sound every time the sprint button was pressed. This now works on a cooldown, and the player must be sprinting for at least / seconds in order for it to play.

• Resolved an issue where the player would be locked to a terminal while taking damage (this was related to moving while accessing a terminal).

• Fixed an animation bug where TWs facial animations would not play after taking damage.

• Completely rebuilt TWs rig, fixing numerous animation issues related to her facial rig.

• Resolved an issue where bullets will phase through walls occasionally.

• Tweaked interpolation to have a slightly more snappier transition from walk to sprint for TW.

• Fixed an issue where the cursor was still appearing on screen despite not accessing any UI element.

• Fixed an issue where a terminal was inaccessible after unpausing while having it active.

• Fixed an audio looping bug in the shotgun trap room of the demo map.

• General optimization pass on a few map assets .

• Fixed an overlap issue where exiting out of the “files” tab on terminals would still leave the interaction component present, despite the UI no longer being visible.

• Fixed an issue where holstered weapons will occasionally display the laser sight.

(The playtest demo link has been updated, and the new build can be accessed from the link below.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BmrmUb79Ay8MAdxc7jZcghwhusAfVz0Y/view?usp=sharing

ART ASSETS:

HALBERD Volley Gun

"One of my recent tasks has been reworking one of our oldest weapon designs, the Halberd. It was originally designed as a ballistic shotgun, but ALOG's art direction has solidified a lot since then. The general styling of guns has developed in a distinctly more "real" direction than what we had sketched out at the beginning, and this is reflected in Loom's recently completed Tabar shotgun.

We still liked the shape of the Halberd though, so we decided to rework it as an energy weapon. I felt that the large flat plane in the front was a good canvas for some kind of repeated or arrayed projectors (still channeling a little bit of its origin as a shotgun). Putting the new model alongside the old really drives home for me how far ALOG has come in developing its visual identity.

Getting the Halberd working mechanically likely won't happen for a while.  It's intended as a later-game weapon and as such it's currently a low priority.  I can share a bit about our current concept though.  The Halberd is a "smart" weapon, firing volleys of beams that curve, with a little erratic spread, toward a locked target (maybe it micro-staggers the firing order, and this causes the magnetic envelopes around the beams to pull in a specific direction?).  Unlike other guns the Halberd lacks a reticle pointer, and while it can be fired without a lock, doing so would be ineffective beyond point-blank range.

While it's intended for late-game and is more exotic that most of our stable of guns, the Halberd isn't really a power weapon. In fact, it likely will deal slightly less damage than a full spread from the Tabar (though it still packs a punch). Its main role is as an option for dealing with fast or flighty enemies introduced in the later parts of the game. The idea is that it presents a choice- it can ease encounters with challenging foes, but its ammo is scarce and you'll need to rely on your sidearm for dealing with threats that don't warrant expending the Halberd's batteries."

-Tekka

Crewman Portraits




“ A key method of telling the game's story is going to be through the use of audio and text logs. If you’ve ever played games like System Shock, it’s a decent reference point for how we want to do this. An attractive aspect about handling the story this way is that it not only provides a totally diegetic and sensible in-world method of telling the story, but it also allows us to do so with minimal, more stylized assets, cutting down on cinematic bloat, and 3d asset creation. With careful writing and voice work in conjunction with these portraits we hope that we can achieve the same level of “impact” of these side characters as if they were realized animated characters in game.



When I was working on this, I wanted to make sure that I kept both in-game characters and these crewman portraits as stylistically cohesive as possible. Realism was never the goal for our visuals, and ALOG has always sort of lent itself to a more toony, dynamic visual presentation. However, there is a natural disconnect that happens when you are comparing a 2d image to a 3d object that takes up depth and space. So picking up on key elements to bridge the two such as emphasized upper eyelashes, more angular faces, sharper eyes, and slightly exaggerated facial features helps to soften a little bit of that contrast between the two mediums.

There are still about a dozen more of these to be made, and not all of them will include VA lines, but when we start implementing them, we hope it will make the game world feel more lived in.”

- Looming