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Author Topic: Outer Colony  (Read 64481 times)

Viken

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #195 on: February 03, 2018, 07:31:29 am »

It may just be that most players aren't sure of what options are available for them.  Most games these days are in pure 3D, with a fully movable camera angle that can get into everything.  Having pre-selected options in Outer Colony without explanations or the habit to look for them can cause others to just simply miss 'em all together.

I'd suggest a UI box/icon/whatever solely dedicated to camera movements.  Up and Down on the Z-Levels, different type of view focuses, half-wall or whatever to be added.  Maybe paired with pause and time speed indicators.  You guys should know what i'm talking about.  Lol.
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VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #196 on: April 22, 2018, 08:07:05 pm »

Hi, guys, this is just a very quick post to keep everyone informed about development progress.

Solifuge and I have been chugging away on weekends and evenings, and the isometric overhaul is well underway. The initial implementation of the new isometric renderer is in place, and a first round of performance improvements was just completed to get everything comfortably up to the FPS cap on my hardware. Dynamic asset scaling to support zoom levels, day-night shading, and a variable color sprite framework are in place to customize characters, items, terrain locations, and other assets.

I can go into more detail on these points if anyone is curious, but our philosophy here is to go as far as we possibly can to produce the best aesthetic possible. We're trying a lot of experimental stuff to get this sort of game to look and function smoothly with isometric rendering, and I think progress is good so far. I'm going to hold off on posting screenshots and videos for now, because I think it'll be more impactful if I wait until we have more production assets in place.

Development is a bit slow from our end, given our lack of free time to work on Outer Colony, but we're focused much more on the quality of our output than speed. The nice thing about being self funded is that there are no time constraints beyond what we impose ourselves. We still have well over a year until this isometric overhaul is completed, but my hope is that we'll have something that's pretty neat and engaging by that point.

Thanks to everyone here for your patience, and we'll keep working on our end. I hope we'll have some slick screenshots and videos to share in the coming months!
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se5a

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #197 on: April 23, 2018, 06:36:50 am »

keen to see it, I struggled a little bit with the pure top down view.
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( Tchey )

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #198 on: April 23, 2018, 02:41:51 pm »

Thanks for the update.

Too bad about the "no screenshot" because i personaly don't care about "the impact", i'm only curious and always happy to see and read dev logs on games i'm following, even more in pre-proto-alpha-stage.
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Blood_Librarian

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #199 on: April 23, 2018, 07:56:12 pm »

Ooh. man am I hopeful about this. It's already shaping up to looking like something pretty get damned awesome.
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VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #200 on: April 29, 2018, 12:04:49 pm »

keen to see it, I struggled a little bit with the pure top down view.

This was certainly the case for a lot of people. The top-down and surface views probably created more confusion than convenience, and despite their complexity to implement, they were probably a net usability loss when compared to a DF-style "Z-level only" view scheme. It's red ocean / blue ocean stuff. Sometimes, you try something new, and it doesn't work. Hopefully, the new scheme is more intuitive.

And sorry for holding off on screenshots, Tchey, but I'll aim to email you some images and videos shortly. I just want to wait on posting things publicly until the visuals are more polished. We're using grey box terrain assets now demonstrate the system, and I'm personally very excited about where we are! I was so pumped when I first got things working that I had to show it off to my girlfriend, and her response was, "Um...looks like some ground. I don't get it." In her defense, this is a pretty normal reaction, and it'd probably look like a bunch of nothing to the casual observer.

Thanks for the kind words, too, Blood_Librarian - I hope you and everybody else can get a solid kick out of the game when the next release is ready!
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( Tchey )

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #201 on: July 01, 2018, 03:40:36 am »

Hi !

Everything's good for you and your surrounding ?
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Torvus

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #202 on: July 03, 2018, 09:44:54 pm »

Sam is doing well, just keeping busy with the programming  . He gets caught up in the coding and can forget to check in. He's been hard at work getting everything ready for when the new art assets are ready such as procedurally generated character sprites.

I am Torvus from the OC forums by the way. I've been connected with the project since back when it was called The Far Reaches
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The Scout

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #203 on: July 04, 2018, 04:16:59 am »

Can't wait for it to be released, ready to back into bug testing it.
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VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #204 on: July 04, 2018, 03:04:52 pm »

Hey guys, huge thanks for the posts. I appreciate your checking in, as well as the continued excitement!

Torvus has been with me on this project since its earliest stages back in late 2011, and he's been a great friend for much longer that. When my time is really crunched, as it has been lately, he steps up and fills in for me on all sorts of tasks. He posts a ton on our forums and answers a lot of questions for players, and I'm really glad to have him on this thread with me.

Development progress has been steady on my end. As Torvus mentioned, one of the biggest things I've coded over the last 2 months has been procedural character sprite generation, and I've finally got a working demo of it! Now, when a human puts on a green jacket, it'll show him wearing a green jacket. When he puts on a kevlar helment, it'll show him wearing a kevlar helmet. There's much better visual feedback on these sorts of things, and it makes the game "feel" better, I think.

I'm going to have to share the early demo with Torvus in the next few days, but I'll probably hold off on posting screenshots here until we've got real pixel art to work with, instead of my hacked-together-in-MS-Paint-assets.

We've been working on getting things rolling on the production of production pixel art assets for the isometric overhaul, too. As most of you guys know, forum member Solifuge (who did much of the pixel art for Stonesense) is handling all of this, and as soon as Solifuge has finished the terrain work that's currently underway, I'll aim to post some screen shots.

Thanks again to everyone for your patience, and I'm looking forward to sharing more updates soon!
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EuchreJack

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #205 on: July 15, 2018, 09:50:28 pm »

Awesome, I always appreciate my pixel dudes and dudettes visually having the equipment they're suppose to have.

Blood_Librarian

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #206 on: July 15, 2018, 11:07:28 pm »

And it makes my mishmash of random shit I find all the more obvious.
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Knave

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #207 on: July 16, 2018, 08:02:41 am »

Keep it up, everything sounds super promising! :)
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VoyagerGames

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #208 on: September 03, 2018, 08:03:23 pm »

Hey guys, I just wanted to post a quick update on Outer Colony development before I get some sleep.

Coding for the isometric rendering overhaul is approaching completion, and we're currently rendering nearly all the sorts of things that we want to render. We're actually moving on to nice-to-have features of renderer development, like translucent water and real-time, point-sourced lighting effects.

Currently, though, I'm having a great deal of difficulty in finding an isometric pixel artist to produce all the production assets we need. It's a strange sort of problem to have - I've saved up plenty of money and there's a mountain of work to be done, but I just can't seem to find anyone with the requisite skill set to do it.

We keep having conversations with artists, paying out on initial contracts, and then having people flake out on us. If any of you guys know a pixel artist that's looking for long term work on a fun, interesting, and laid-back sort of project, please feel free to pass their names on to me. Ideally, we're looking for candidates with a deep understanding of color theory and orthogonal projection, but I'd be delighted to talk to anyone who's got both talent and motivation.

But the code for the engine overhaul is mostly written, we just need the thousands of sprites re-made, and we'll be ready to resume feature development and testing with isometric graphics. I really hope we can find an artist soon, and I appreciate everyone's patience, as always!
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Asgarus

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Re: Outer Colony
« Reply #209 on: September 03, 2018, 11:54:45 pm »

Great to hear about your progress! :)

I would think that there are more pixel artists out there though, but I guess that skill is becoming rarer and rarer.

I really hope you'll find someone fitting and able to handle that pile of work to be done!
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