ABSENT LOG Dev Update 1/15/2024

The holidays are finally past us, and the new year has begun! We are excited for a productive and positive year, and we hope you all had a great time with your family and friends.

Now that we are starting to get more situated with the project, we’ve hit a much better flow of work and progress, and we are able to start getting an idea on how to tackle high priority items. Alot of combat and game play systems are hitting a temporary refinement stage, and the main focus is definitely going to be on building assets for game use. This month's update brings a modest chunk of concept work for some enemy and weapon redesigns, lore elements, and further progress on some in game assets.

Another big update is that we have brought “Alt” APrjcts on board the project to assist us with sound design and music composition! His body of work exudes key tones and themes from early 2000’s sci-fi media, such as break-beats, Jungle, synth ambient sounds and spacey/dreamy sweeps and flows, which embodies much of the feeling and vibe the project harkens back to. Our first big step in developing our musical style is establishing a key set of

Melodies, specific sounds and recurring audio signatures.

ALOG, at its core, is a ghost story. A haunted ship floating adrift in a vast sea. Many aspects of the sound design should reflect isolation, somberness, and give a sense of depth or distance.

Ambient themes would be dreamy, spacey, with a lot of texture and weight, to reflect the feeling of wandering through a lifeless, empty ship, littered with whispers, anomalies, and faint echoes of those who once were.

Combat/action themes will be minimalist, with subdued rhythms and melodies, looping breaks, and crunchy, glitchy filters to reflect the feeling of fighting against an autonomous security apparatus attempting to fulfill its directive despite it having no more crew to protect.

Boss themes are where we want to really push high melodic themes with more complex rhythms, and a much heavier boisterous sound, reflecting the unique nature of each boss.

Once we have established a baseline for these sounds, we plan on developing key themes such as a main theme and leitmotifs for certain characters. This will be quite a long and tedious process, and quite a bit of back and forth will happen before we get some usable music assets, but now that we have someone on board who actually knows how to do these things we will finally be able to make some headway in further fleshing out ALOG’s identity.

Included change list for 1/15/2024:

- Fixed issues preventing players from using the keypad with specific weapons equipped.

- Fixed issue where enemies would not enter recently unlocked doors.

- Implemented a player stun status with cooldown to prevent stun locking.

- Reduced the hearing threshold for enemies so they don't pile up waiting at doors.

- Added new inventory icons for the Automag and the Patta Carbine.

- Fixed scaling issues related to text kerning in the pause and main menu.

- Gave the pause menu background a facelift.

- Added new “select” animation for pause menu items, this will be replicated to the main menu.

- Tweaked the threshold for how thick a wall or obstacle should be in order to be traversable.  This was done to help reduce the chances of TW trying to vault over a small ledge on a wall, making her clip out of the level.

- Changed the float value for the health and energy display to be non decimal, so no more “56.778291 health”, it should just read as “57 health.”

- Made mandrones a little bit quicker when moving to engage the player. Also tweaked their animations so they don’t “skate” when running, however I’m still trying to find a fix to make them feel less floaty in general.

- Fixed an attenuation sound bug for weapon firing. This is most noticeable for enemy fire, when closer it will be much louder when they fire, this effect has been applied to bullet impacts as well. It was previously inconsistent and sometimes the sound attenuation effect wouldn't activate at all.

- Slightly increased the pick up detection for weapons and items so it's a bit easier to grab them.

- Tweaked the blend out for TW's death animations for a more natural death transition.

- Automatic weapons now have a procedural recoil animation, sustained fire will have the weapon animate to kick up more

- All automatic weapons now operate on a procedural F-curve for recoil patterns, as opposed to a float value.

- Extensive work on TW and Huey’s ship interior, texturing and blocking out center hallway and Lounge area. Detailed up cabin rooms with more props and details. (PLEASE NOTE: this level is not at a presentable state to be playtested yet, and is not included in the current playtest demo.)

- Complete overhaul from the ground up of TW’s rigging system, better skin weights and cleaner body deformations for animation. All of her assets have been rematched to her new updated rig.

- New face rig for TW, including a library of facial animations and key poses for use in game.

- Implemented a “Pain React” system, a short animation of TW being in pain will play when taking damage. This has been extensively tested and will not affect gameplay in any way, it is purely a visual element.

- Implemented “Pain React” Facial animations for TW.

- Added new improved “Idle” facial animations for TW, (blinking, looking around, etc…)

- Reworked lighting in Testing map to be less blinding and have better readability for UI Items.

- Added unique “Magazine” model objects for the Automag and Estoc.

- Implemented a “bloodied” effect on TW’s face that fades in and out depending on how low player health is.

ART ASSETS:

Here is a small showcase of some current items in the works.

TW & Huey’s ship (Model Asset):

Art by Tekka Croe.

“The model for TW and Huey's ship is well under way!  All of the main forms are present and I'm currently in the process of adding geometry detail to parts of the ship which were fully approved in the 2d stage.  The back middle of the hull has remained very primitive, while I work out the right arrangement of shapes for the rear airlock assembly.  Getting some interesting shapes into that area is especially important, as it will be one of the most visible sections of the ship's exterior when TW is walking around in the dock concourse.

A number of external details like the rear airlock hatch haven't been blocked in on the exterior model yet, because an exact scale for the ship hasn't been finalized.  Loom and I will be working to keep fairly high parity between the interior and exterior of the ship, so once we've got a finalized interior layout, that will inform the exact size and placement of certain details on the exterior.

The bridge module is part of the ship that's remained hazy in the 2D artwork, purposefully.  We decided early on where we wanted to pull some inspiration for the shape of the bridge, and we also determined that it would likely be easiest to just solve the shape in 3D first, rather than the usual 2D-to-3D pipeline.  Pulling very directly from one of our visual inspirations, the bridge is a nod to the Great Fox as it appeared in Star Fox: Assault, with this big wedge-shaped wraparound canopy.  It's a design element that really jumped out at me back when I first played the game, and I've been waiting for an opportunity to work it into a design for ages.  This seemed like a good occasion.”

(sketchup render showing the modular breakdown)

“While the ship's interior is being designed with a bit of a cozy, homey atmosphere in mind, we also want to get across that this is a pretty basic and function-oriented little ship.  We decided to do this by designing it to appear modular in nature, with big open bays for slotting engines into the back, and large mounting rails along the sides for equipment (in this case a large sensor system on one side, and a pair of apartment modules on the other serving as private quarters.  This was mentioned last time, but I thought it would be neat to have a visual aid.”

- Tekka

Overland Garde/Pursuer:

Art by Looming

“A lot of assets in the game were made almost a year ago, during a time where we were learning the process of how to properly create workable, optimized meshes and textures. Since then, our process has gotten a lot more streamlined which leads to a lot of these assets looking very...rough.

It's important to not fall into the trap of constantly redesigning something, but occasionally, when you have to rebuild an asset from scratch, an opportunity to rework the original comes up.

The original Pursuer design was decent enough, it hit some right notes but overall did not feel like a noticeable enough "tier" above other mandrones. Our original idea was that the pursuer was specifically modeled after combat data gathered from Peris studying TW. They were meant to be your equal in terms of combat prowess, acting a bit sharper and more aggressive than the average mandrone. I think we were too literal in this aspect of the original design, so I opted to refine the body a little more to keep that feminine figure, but not have the exact one to one proportions as TW, I also wanted to visually showcase them as not only very advanced, but also very ceremonial, almost elegant, contrasting flowing brightly colored fabrics with the ivory and brass body chassis. The Imperial Sahmar has deep relationships with the ritualistic and spiritual nature of things, and some elements of that reflect itself even within their tech and infrastructure.”

Sparkjack Redesigns

Art by Looming

"Originally the idea for the Spark jack was to be a sort of "last resort" kind of weapon, a sort of stun-machete you'd typically find on mercenaries or privateers. However, as TW became more fleshed out, I realized that having such a lethal sword like weapon gives a sort of connotation for a type of character that TW really isn't. She is meant to be scrappy, resourceful, rugged, and clever, not really vicious, lethal, or hyper aggressive.

A weapon like this would be sort of her own personal device, and we were thinking of ways to have it not only be a weapon, but even a tool used for certain puzzles or level progression. An idea that fits both a techy little corporate thief, and could functionally be used as a tool, was to make it be some form of advanced stun baton multi-tool, that when in its stowed position, could be plugged into dead machinery to kickstart it, power on devices, or used as a control mechanism in certain situations.

This idea actually worked exceptionally well as we could have it animated to telescope down to the handle, making it compactly holster on the body with minimal clipping and added noise to her silhouette."

Exploring Prosthetics Implementation in ALOG

Art by Looming

"A personal pet peeve of mine is the dismissive nature of how many sci-fi stories present cybernetics, augmentations, and deep invasive enhancements. They are often presented as a sort of "snap fit" aesthetic solution for a lot of problems a character might face. I imagine, in a setting like ALOG, you typically wouldn't get them unless you either really needed them, or were required to for a very specific and dangerous kind of job or task.

They are expensive to obtain, expensive to maintain, and very difficult to remove.

I wanted to briefly explore a little bit with TW, on just how invasive and tedious a procedure like this could be. Before implantation of cybernetics is even considered there is a lengthy body prep period, consisting of a strict diet and day schedule, lasting for 3 months. After the body is prepped, cybernetics are installed piecemeal, often with months of heal time between surgeries depending on just how invasive some of those are, such as a full skeletal replacement. Afterwards, a strict regime of physical therapy, drugs, supplements are established to ease the patient into their new body, and regular maintenance and check ups are almost always indefinite.

Despite some of the major benefits and enhancements these cybernetics can provide the human body, the mental and physical side effects can be quite serious, such as a complete disruption to hormonal balance and normal body functions, causing infertility and sterilization, mental fatigue, and many digestive issues."

AUDIO SAMPLES:

Attached to the post is a small showcase of some early WIP audio sample tracks done by APrjcts.

Please note, this is very early explorations and may not reflect our final sound.

PLAYTEST BUILD:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a3UMc9jBZlsmLTLkBl6oYXAwkvMXLLMy/view?usp=sharing