ABSENT LOG Dev Update 7/15/2024

This month we continue our focus on fleshing out the starting area of our campaign, with a key emphasis on establishing the tone and mood for this area. The starting area, temporarily dubbed “TW & Huey’s ship”, not only acts as the starting point of the game, but also serves as a “safe zone”, a form of hub where the player can retreat to if needed to store items, tune or modify equipment, plan areas of the world ship they would want to approach, and review logs or other data they have retrieved. When discussing the purpose of the ship in game play terms, it was important that not only it acted as a functional area for player utility, but also as a place of respite. We wanted to differentiate this area from the rest of the world ship to have a more gentle, cozier feel with a more warmer lighting and color palette, and a lived in, somewhat scrappy feel. In order to really push this ambiance, careful attention is being placed into not just lighting and styling of the area, but even world props and environmental storytelling. Careful placement of items in a world tells a story, and as we continue to create and refine assets, it's become an almost therapeutic exercise to brainstorm where to place a item and think about why it's there, things like:

“This carpet here looks very baroque, hand made even, maybe it was from a family member of TW’s? A Lot of items in this one area are very erratically scattered and messy, perhaps she has a lot on her mind,? Or just not a very organized person?”

These small things are a simple but incredibly effective way to make a space feel much more realized.

One key item that we are looking forward to jumping into as soon as we get this level of assets back in game, is developing interactive world items. Simple things like taking a shower, turning on a room light, or opening a wall panel are great examples of the level of intractability we want to achieve.  A Lot of our maps are not planned to be large per se, but rather have a lot of verticality, winding hallways, connecting rooms, alternative routes, and this gives us a lot of freedom to merge environmental storytelling with interactive world design to create a believable space.

Another item that has been in the works is establishing a basis for our Post Process filter. Typically, Post process filters act as a visual adjustment or styling filter, that adds a certain feel or look on top of a base rendered scene. This is usually used to create lighting effects, color balance, or establish a certain artistic flavoring to accompany the base art style. The main goal for our own filter, is to carefully balance and tune a visual styling to match more or less, how we draw our own art. Key components include creating a faint outline to objects, character and level assets to give a faint “line art” look, adding a sharpening filter to reduce some of the blurring and desaturation that occurs with UE’s natural rendering style.

(Images of Post Process WIP)

ART ASSETS:

Med-Aide Stim/Hypo concepts:

“A noticeable trend in how we approach a lot of tech, weapons and general items is an emphasis on compact design sensibilities and portability. Weapons tend to be small and tightly designed, and generally items tend to be small hand held gadgets or devices as opposed to larger items and stationary equipment. This is a direction we have really enjoyed and feel that it flows nicely with the style of world exploration and design sense that we are going for. For the medkits, we wanted to redesign what we had before to be a sort of small handheld device, akin to a recognizable “hypo stim”, and to make adjustments to gameplay to reflect the updated design. Instead of standard pickups, we want to create a stacking inventory item system, with an accompanying hotkey for consuming a medkit when one is available in the inventory. This would be complete with an animation that would play when consuming a hypostim, how this affects gameplay is something we are still in discussions about. With the design of the hypo stim, we wanted to have a mass produced plastic hard covered device, with some kind of pressurized healing agent that could be swapped out from the plastic casing when used. High visibility white and reds are not only iconic to “medicinal” items, but also lends itself to being immediately identifiable within the game world, especially for an item that isn't terribly large.”

-Looming

Housekeeping

“I’ve been making some small set-dressing contributions, as well as revisiting and wrapping up a couple of older assets.  For TW’s cabin I built a set of tableware- a plate, bowl, and cup, all with lids (you never know when the gravity might go out!), as well as a desk chair.  The chair was a fun exercise, since I was building it specifically to match up with the desk Loom built.  For simple background stuff like this, I try to keep the texture resolution pretty low while allowing for a little extra geometry since (as Loom is fond of reminding me) geometry is cheap to render.

Next up was the frag grenade.  This was actually the first asset I built for the game, way back.  I did a terrible job on the textures, and I felt like quickly redoing it with my now-greater experience.  Since most of the grenade is covered in repeated detail, I was able to get away with teensy 256p textures while keeping everything clear and readable.

I also finally wrapped up an asset that I had started last year: the large machine gun like weapon wielded by the MD Heavy miniboss enemies.  The retractable radiators for cooling down after sustained fire are a highlight, and I can’t wait to see that detail implemented in-engine.

Foam Gun

Something Loom and I have discussed pretty frequently is our desire to emphasize that TW is a techie first and foremost, not a soldier or mercenary.  To play into that, we want to make sure that her arsenal includes tools as much as weapons.  We recently brainstormed up an idea for a foam gun, for sealing hull breaches, as an item that could have utility in both combat encounters and in solving puzzles.  The current idea is that it can launch blobs of foam that expand and harden on impact, which could be used to slow or restrain enemy drones.  In a pinch, the whole ammo canister can be launched.  This could be used to temporarily block doors, or even to generate a temporary pillar of cover if TW’s caught in the open.

This is a tentative inclusion for now, and we don’t know exactly how it will shape up as we experiment with the concept and mechanics.”

-Tekka

AUDIO ASSETS

https://soundcloud.com/machine-ghost-165231349/alog-ship-s3/s-0sAR5J1g7Ru?si=408e3e76a0224d74b7aa1eca6f8f5bbb&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

"A major focus for us with this project is properly setting tone and mood. We have a great appreciation for "feeling" and the "cinematic" of things. When approaching the backing tack for the starting area, we wanted to really enshrine the entire idea of this area, "home". Sweeping pads, dream like layered sounds, harmonizing elements, and scattered contrasting gongs create an atmosphere reflective of our two protagonist and their home. Scrappy, hobbled together, mismatched, but honest, bare, and direct. We wanted this track to almost lay a ground work to be further developed into a leitmotif for TW and Huey, that represents the start, midpoint and conclusion of their journey, how they strive, survive and suffer together to carve out their own piece, and without spoiling too much, the tolls it takes on themselves, and how they see each-other. "

"So if you like GITS style ambient sounds, you'll like this,"

"if you don't like GITS style ambient sounds, you'll like this"

-Machine Ghost