The Forgotten City
I had been hearing good words about this game from various podcasts for the past six months. Thanks to the Epic Store coupon, I finally pulled the trigger on that one. Considering I beat the whole thing in a weekend, I'd say it was worth it.
Despite hearing a lot about the game, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had heard about the basic premise, but that was pretty much it. The gameplay is pretty simple at first: walk around this Roman city, talk to the folks, and solve the mystery. There is more than that. Eventually. But I won't go over it as to avoid spoilers. This is one game where you don't want to be spoiled. The various stories are quite interesting, and the overall plot, while fairly predicable at a certain point, was entertaining enough to keep me going and going, and there were plenty of surprises along the way.
I had a great time exploring the city, uncovering and solving its mysteries, talking to its inhabitants! The city itself is very well done.
On the technical side, I encountered some weird issues:
From an in-home streaming point of view, I tried playing this through Moonlight with my Raspberry Pi, and again encountered some annoyances:
I gave up on streaming the game and played it on my older Alienware Alpha instead.
Categories: reviews
Gris and Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League
Yesterday, I bought two games: Gris and Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League. The former had been in my Steam wishlist for ages. I became aware of the latter during Summer, and it had piqued my interest even if, after watching the trailer, it didn't look like a particularly good game. Playing both to completion in parallel, in less than 24 hours, has been an interesting experience.
Gris is a puzzle platformer. The animations are detailed and very well realized. Its graphical style is extremely polished. The music is fantastic. It has some clever puzzles that are actually not that hard to complete. There is an underlying theme of grief and overcoming depression. It takes itself fairly seriously.
On the other hand, Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League feels like a game that was thrown together in a weekend by two friends after getting drunk on a Friday night. The gameplay is rough, the graphics are primitive, there are plenty of bugs, the text has typos and grammatical errors (that even someone for whom English is not their first language notices). The volleyball is not very fun to play and the matches go on for too long. Yet, it also has its charm, and I thought the ending wrapped the whole thing pretty beautifully.
Of the two, Gris was definitely a better experience, but I had fun with both nonetheless.
Quick note regarding in-home streaming using Moonlight: Gris worked flawlessly. Volleyball League requires a mouse in some areas (navigating the settings and exiting the game).
Categories: reviews
Dialog system is mostly complete
After weeks of little to no activity on the gamedev front, I finally sat down on Sunday and Monday to work on the dialog system. After several attempts at tree traversal algorithms, I googled 'tree traversal', and voilà! I found a simple C program that I was able to use as reference.
My dialog system now supports:
Here's a very simple example, with one line of dialog and then an question to the player:
This is what it will look like in-game:
There are plenty of issues, of course:
I will spend some time today to fix the font and window order issues. The UI inconsistencies will wait. I also need to test the conditional blocks feature to make sure it actually works. And with that, the dialog system will be mostly complete!
Categories: gamedev
Some soccer, sort-of...
It took some time, but I got something that vaguely looks like a soccer game showing up:
I spent way more time than I should have on the 3D model. This screenshot also has an issue with global illumination (all the blue sections should actually be white). The final game should have five players per team. I will be adding the goals and ball soon, and then the actual prototyping will start.
Categories: gamedev
Pre-match scene
Before every match in the game, the player can walk around the changing room and talk to the other players. This is a simple one that I threw together with some sprites I generated from a generic tool and simple models I created in Blender:
I am still undecided regarding the dialog system: Do I create my own, or do I use a plugin called Dialogic? At the moment, I'm using my own. It can display dialog and character portraits. I have plans for user choices, and dialog trees.
Although I thought the dialog display elements were in a good state before I started working on this scene, I soon realized that there were major issues with how input was processed, and ran into all sorts of trouble: infinite loops, unable to get out of a dialog, the dialog box would close but the player couldn't move... Things are in better shape now.
The next step is to switch scene when the player moves close to the green rectangle in the background (which is a door, even though it doesn't really look like one). Once that is complete, I will get started on the actual meat of the game: the beach!
Categories: gamedev