edited April 2017 in Showcase
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17th apr progress update vid



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Hello all!

I'd like to share with you something I've been working on recently. It's very early development, but I was thinking of using this thread to help me keep tabs on my progress. Any thoughts on what I'm doing are most welcome!

About me
First let me introduce myself. I'm Stuart, and I live in London. By day I'm an engineer working on robotics, mostly hardware stuff. About a year ago I figured it would be useful for me to learn a bit more about the software side of things, and so I decided that making games would be an interesting way of me doing that!

I initially set out by creating WebGL-based games, giving myself about a month for each. They were pretty terrible! But I think I learnt quite a lot from doing it, and I'm now a lot more confident in using Unity and also the scripting side. A few months ago I got a hankering to get my teeth into something more substantial, and so I came up with the idea for my current project. It doesn't have a name, but I'm calling it 'Warlock's Hand' for the time being because it's descriptive of some of the key game concepts.

About the game
Warlock's Hand is a fantasy RPG. You take on the role of a warlock who has just discovered their power. You roam the lands learning runic symbols for your spells. Spell casting is gesture-based; you have to draw the runic symbols to cast!

During your travels you come across magic-wielding monsters. You must defeat them with your warlock skills in turn-based combat, but success is not simply about who can summon the most powerful spell. All spells can be counter-acted by others, and so you must use your intellect to choose the wisest move.

The platform I'm provisionally targeting is iPad, as this seems like a good fit for a touchscreen interface. I'm using ORK for all the back-end RPG framework, however because I'm doing a lot of gesture control stuff all the front end is separate.

Influences
I would say a number of things have influenced the direction I have taken with this project. Here are some of the key ones:

- Pokemon. I loved this game as a kid! I loved the idea of travelling to different places to find unusual and rare Pokemon, and also how each Pokemon no matter how strong could be countered somehow.

- Black & White. Anyone remember this game? It wasn't the best, but one thing I still remember to this day was it's gesture-based spell casting mechanism. It made me feel like I actually had magic powers, not just pressing buttons on a computer

- Harry Potter. I'm not really into this tbh (I never read the books!), but I loved the visual portrayal of a duel between 2 wizards. They don't simply throw out their favourite fireball spell ad-nauseam, but there was more of a battle of intellect, with each opponent choosing their next move carefully to try and gain the upper hand.

- Low poly art. I saw some pictures from an artist called Timothy Reynolds of scenic vistas done in a low poly style. It looked gorgeous and I wanted to capture the feeling of walking around these places.

I hope that gave you a bit of a flavour of what I'm doing. I'll follow up with some screenshots :)

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  • edited October 2016
    starting island

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  • edited October 2016
    Entrance to the starting village

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  • battling some enemies...

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  • Very nice start!
    j0hnbane
    youtube.com/j0hnbane
  • i like the low poly look except that the lowpoly look isnt constant. there seems the pine trees are not low poly? cant seem them up close so i could be wrong. and some of the back ground landscape seems to also not be low poly? i could be wrong since i cant see it up close but all in all i love the look
    new website can be found here http://www.fore-loregames.com

    Follow the game Development on Twitter https://twitter.com/Fore_Lore_Games

    or check out the face book page here https://www.facebook.com/ForeLoreGames
  • edited October 2016
    @j0hnbane thanks! You're working on a VR game right? I'm intrigued to know more, particularly the design of your control system and its interaction with ORK.

    @wtyson thanks for your feedback, glad you like it. The terrain is a tricky one, as the low poly 'chunks' ideally need to scale nicely with distance from camera. Too small and distant terrain looks too 'real', whereas too big and it looks very abstract and jarring with the foreground. It probably needs some fine-tuning but right now I'm trying to get some core mechanics in place
    Post edited by stuart on
  • @stuart i see what ur saying. yeah that would be an issue. just an idea but i think smoothing out the terrain so it dosent have the erosion on it would fix ur problem since low poly really should not have all that erosion. also the shader i made in unreal for my game does just that it scales based on distance. the father away it is the smaller the textures get which allow it to be so small they dont give any detail which allows for really good performance. Not to good at unity shaders but i think its plausible to do the same with a c# and custom shader. it avoids distance tiling and also allows for nice details up close. just not to sure how well unitys system can handle a legit custom terrain shader. if anything u could export the terrain and import it as a model instead with a custom shader. anyways good luck!
    new website can be found here http://www.fore-loregames.com

    Follow the game Development on Twitter https://twitter.com/Fore_Lore_Games

    or check out the face book page here https://www.facebook.com/ForeLoreGames
  • progress update

    for the past couple of weeks I've been working to get the basics of the gesture spellcasting mechanism working. I see this as quite fundamental to how the game plays, so I wanted to get some foundations working well early.

    It seems to be working pretty well now, I can 'cast' my spells through simple gestures rather than pressing buttons.
    image

    Next up I'm going to add some simple UI stuff surrounding combat; some info about the enemy on start, health bars, and a more fancy spellcast announcement
  • I've tried to do a video to illustrate the combat flow also. It seems like I've messed up something though because the picture is really choppy. I'll replace it later



  • pretty cool!
  • @ stuart last guy look like he was shooting ice from his pecker :P but like the fact that u have all custom stuff :) thats what im working on right now all custom models for my game.
    new website can be found here http://www.fore-loregames.com

    Follow the game Development on Twitter https://twitter.com/Fore_Lore_Games

    or check out the face book page here https://www.facebook.com/ForeLoreGames
  • Thanks for the positive feedback everyone.


    @wtyson LOL, oops yeah I might wanna change that a little. Yeah I'm enjoying crafting something that carries my own style, it's a great learning process also.
  • I just saw your response to my comment, stuart, my apologies.

    Its coming along very well. I've gone from being a visual scripter to C# and that has helped immensely. The damage zones would not work for me. I'm amusing its from the SteamVR prefabs, but I haven't tried it with OVR directly.

    I did reach a point where I got the Vive's controls to talk to ORK (with some help). But I'm mainly using those for interface actions. Just finished the first listing of the interactable objects to be used.. weapons, shields, herbs, ore, etc.. I've already worked out the combat mechanics and getting collider and trigger events to talk to ORK. That was a great breakthrough coming in as someone that didn't know any coding.

    Already have the logo work back and am getting the steam and oculus page ready (along with a website)>

    All in all, I've got 11 days off here soon, and they will be 11 days to get the core game put together and start adding content.

    I'm sure there will be haters on the assets used, but I had to choose a corner to cut at the beginning, and that was it. I'll be using Probuilder and redoing the UV's later to custom them up a bit.

    Looks like you've got some solid progress coming along with your game. Looking forward to more updates. =)
    j0hnbane
    youtube.com/j0hnbane
  • Also, if you need help setting up your video capture, let me know. I use OBS extensively on my channel.
    j0hnbane
    youtube.com/j0hnbane
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