Hac (pilgrimage) - First-Person Adventure w/ Focus on Interaction

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Hi Unity Forums,

I'd like to share with you some media for a game I've been working on the last few weeks.

I'm an ex-AAA racing game developer who is now in the early stages of working on Hac - A first-person game about driving 1990's Europe, with a focus on meaningful interactions and a "true" driving experience. The closest comparison I'd imagine is Euro Truck Simulator with a narrative.

I'm currently cooking up a build to share sometime this week (latest Friday) but thought I'd grab peoples' initial thoughts on the visual design so far.

Inside of the car and the interactive elements.​

Example of one of the interactions, the car radio.​

Hope I'm not breaking the rules without a build ready just yet, let me know your initial thoughts on the visuals, is it readable enough? The style comes form a need for a rapid content pipeline.

If you'd like to follow development of this game, check out my dev log over at www.minskworks.tumblr.com

Thanks,
Greg

 

I like the idea! kind of reminds me of

 

Yes! Loved my time with Enviro Bear.

I'm hoping to achieve that level of interaction but a little more forgiving .

One of my favourite take aways from that game is if you try to feed the bear but keep missing his mouth he eventually has a little freak out. Hoping when I introduce the car passenger, he'll be commenting on your in-car interactions in a similar manner.

 

First dev build now available!



[Edit]this version now retired

So it's just a test environment at the moment, there's some bugs I've discovered such as windows not opening because I've not assigned any audio to them, but the core concept is on show - walk around, look at stuff, have a fiddle.

Let me know what you think, all criticism are valid at this point.

Thanks,
Greg

 

Hey all, latest build now available.

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So not much work done to the car this week. Instead time has been spent on blocking out the Berlin environment.

As this environment allows you to pick the starting items you'll take with you on your journey, it's going to be a fairy dense and populated environment. The ambition with the Berlin environment is to attempt to achieving what Warren Spectre describes in his "one city block" idea (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/31/will-we-ever-get-to-play-one-city-block/). Though how close I can get to that depends on time.

As it is now though, it's just a place that exists physically, and an ugly place at that. There is not detail, there is no lighting passes, no decals. It's a definite first pass.

Let me know any and all criticisms, and please do let me know about bugs, even at this early stage.

Latest Build (18/11/14):

PC : https://www.dropbox.com/s/rp5ocztez204rre/Build_011.rar?dl=0
Mac : coming soon...

Thanks again,
Greg

 

Thought I'd drop in to dump some of the latest media.

Below is an example of the procedurally generated route system during a day and night cycles.





For latest updates on the game please follow me on twitter : https://twitter.com/MinskWorks

Thanks,
Greg

 

You don't seem to be getting alot of replies so I had to leave a comment. This looks absolutely great, I can't wait to try it out.

 

Great job.

 

This looks amazing! I'd just suggest you to work around the flares of post lamps a bit more as they look too much in darkness Other than that, this looks absolutely amazing!

 

Looks fantastic - I like the art style and the concept seems very interesting

 

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Yes, the flares are a bit of a mess, I might remove them entirely if I can't get them looking right.

I answered some questions over at TigSource and I thought they were pretty informing (I hope at least), so I thought I'd post them here too:

I enjoy the Virtua Racing-esque graphics.
Is the game going to conain more cars? I'd love to use a Volvo 240 or Fiat 126P.

Thanks, it's a style that's coming together more as I work with it, especially with the environments. I'm drawing a lot of style from more recent games too, such as Killer 7, which uses gradient colouring to break up the white space present in such a low poly aesthetic. ​

As for being able to drive a Volve 240 or Fiat 126P, or any other vehicle in the game, as of right now it's just not in the scope for me to create another vehicle. While you'll likely see these models - or rather close, fictional, representations of these vehicles - in-game, setting them up to be drivable is a time consuming process. It's not just a matter of building the model and adjusting some of the handling parameters. The Trabant is a complex beast of reacting elements. Windows role up and down, you can fiddle with the sun guards, change wheels, swap out the battery, upgrade components - all these would need to be rebuilt around the style of the newly introduced car in order for them to be represented authentically.

Not only that, but the 3D inventory which is the boot (or trunk) of the car would need to contain the same real world space for each car, which could be done, just at a cost of how believable a car would look.

All that said, I could end up winning the lottery and working on this thing for longer than needed. Never say never, ey?​

I really like the whole setting of '90s Europe with all the Eastern-Bloc states still in existence, the art-style you've chosen and the general concept of the game.

Do you mind if I ask you about the title of the game and what is the significance of "Hac". I apologies if you have already mentioned it somewhere, I might have missed it.

Keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to see how this project turns out.

Thanks for the support, it really is good to hear that this isn't just some vanity project for me, and that I don't need to butcher the whole project and turn it into yet another survival game with rogue-like tendencies in order for people to show interest.

The word 'Hac' is essentially Turkish for pilgrimage, or more specifically the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam.

At the moment, it's existing as a working title. It can be quite alienating for people, not only that it's more often pronounced as English phonetic alphabet would suggest ('c' in Turkish is pronounced as the English 'j' - making Hac pronounced similarly to the word it directly translates, Hajj), but also with the way the world is reacting to Islam at the moment, I think it might be best to have the religious themes as low key as possible.

I'm not trying to make a statement or comment on Islam with Hac, its more just an interesting objective for the characters to pursue whilst existing in a Marxist world. It's essentially there for answering the question, why are the characters embarking on this journey? Though I do believe living in a world where the media only shows a want to cover a side of Islam existed by the Boko Haram and ISIL of the world, it would be nice to just see the side where it's represented as nothing more than the personal belief's of your ailing Uncle.

I'm in Istanbul at the moment, so development is going to slow on this for the coming weeks, but the Route Generation stuff is in place, I'd like to get that posted up here for feedback as soon as I can. I've only the Germany environments built at the moment, but as a proof of concept it should be more than enough.
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I apologise if this is against the rules or inappropriate.

Thanks again,
Greg

 

This is super cool, I noticed a bug when you drive and roll the windows up/down. The windows would come off of the doors? I would really love to see this game finished. Good job, loved the art style.

 

Hi, yes that's a bug to do with moving the window to a position, rather than updating the current position of the window. So it's not taking into account the world position of the car.

Another issue that crops up right now is that you can't target a lot of the smaller interactions in the car whilst driving. This seems to be a conflict between the collider size, ray-casting and the movement of the actual vehicle. The fast the car is moving, the less willing it is to pick up ray-casts hitting a collider. Not sure what I can do to solve this yet, that's why I haven't got round to fixing the window, as I'm not entirely sure interactions will be available whilst the vehicle is moving yet (Though I do want the player to be able to have a fiddle whilst driving, like everyone who drives a real car does!).

Thanks again.

 

You could parent the colliders to the player once they enter the car but you'd have to make sure they don't rotate when the character looks around which would mean rotating the camera in both the x and y axis instead of the player rotating in the x axis and the camera in the y axis.

 

Well, the windows are already parented to the car frame, so that wouldn't solve the issue. I'm using iTween motion to animate the windows, and the problem with that is MoveTo only works in global space, so I'll have to try playing aorund with MoveBy, and setting the window position once the tween has ended to ensure it's in the right position. Failing that, I'll have to either animate them in Blender or just move through transform updates.

 

Development Update​

#1 - Dirt​

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So in an attempt to try to highlight which of my posts contain new info, I'm going to start using the above title layout.

So I've just come back from three weeks of not being able to work on this. So apologies for the lack of updates. I'm now back to working on this full-time again. anyway.

Time spent the last couple of days has been on:

• Dirt accumulation. Dirt now gathers on the car when driving through dirty zones
• New windscreen wipers. the windscreen wipers are now located on the wheel. Wipers require water to clean the windscreen.
• Car water. Located under the bonnet, at full the car holds 10 water charges. this can be refilled with water bottles.
• Sponge and bucket. Use the sponge and bucket to clean the car frame, tyres and windows.
• New interaction system. Inspired by the thought process that went into making the crowbar for the original half-life, interactions are now quick and more tactile, no longer working from a lock-and-key design which I had originally intended (more detail on this at a later date).
• Main menu and pause menu.
• Day and night cycle.

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The stuff I've got on my todo list next are things like stop off locations (part of the route generation, things like randomly placing a petrol/gas station along your route), scene transition stuff and if there's time fuel and re-fueling and pot-hole and tyre systems.

Anyway, more new media here: http://minskworks.tumblr.com/

Thanks again,
Greg

 

This seems really neat. Definitely a niche product, but I can see this being hugely popular with a certain type of gamer. Looking forward to seeing more!

 

Development Update
#3 Border Control & Scenery Generation



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So with Route Generation working, I've now built the first hub area you'll be arriving at in Hac. The border control into the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic (Česká a Slovenská Federativní).

As I've mentioned before, Hac is set during the summer months of 1990. A period in history I'm intrigued to explore. Following the fall of Berlin Wall in late '89, Czechoslovakia, like the many living the experiences of the time, entered a period of upheaval and drastic political change. This period is most commonly known as the Velvet Revolution.

The consequences of this transitional period brought an end to 41 years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and the first democratic elections in the country since World War 2. Thus, Czechoslovakia became the precursor to what we now know as two seperate countries; the CSFR.

Whilst this brief history lesson would be detrimental to the experience of a video game if delivered in the same monotonous manner, I do feel that knowing the going's on around the time period when building a game set during a historical event is essential in creating believable environments.

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I'm holding off on detailing too much at the moment. The work flow is rapid enough that I can avoid grey boxing and build intuitively, but I don't want to go into too much detail till I've done blind tests, so I make sure I'm not creating additional work when players start getting lost in at motels, etc.

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Above you're seeing a new feature to the route generation I've added; scenery generation. This is my attempt to try to break up the repetition of the generation, and to give identity to specific regions.

You'll notice that the image starts with residential scenery, then delves into an industrial region the closer the player get's to the area known as the Black Triangle.

Things I've added recently:

• Rebuild the Boot (Trunk) Inventory, the storage in-car now works using the 3d inventory tetris of the storage containers found throughout the world
• Built CSFR border crossing
• Built Motel
• Added Scenery Generation
• Added Industrial Region Scenery
• Added German Residential Scenery
• Built the Laika User Maintenance Manual, not yet in-game this document works as an instruction reference for using the car
• Bug Fixes, Collision issues mostly

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I'm unsure if I'll be adding another public build here, I've got to start considering building the project into a marketable product. I'm considering KickStarter but I'm unconvinced, anyone have any experience using this?

Thanks again any questions fire away,
Greg

 

Awesome.
Interaction is something really missing in all games, it brings more immersion like Minecraft interaction in some way.

Where are the NPC, and animals like birds ? other vehicles ? it looks very empty , too much empty right now.

About kickstarter, you should polish levels and gameplay before i think, posting too early it won't help your game and can fail quickly. Make a complete demo also this will raise a lot your chances of success, as actually your game is promising a lot but looks more like a prototype than a complete playable level.

Keep the good work.

 

Cheers zenGarden,

It's definitely still a prototype rather than a game. Something I'll be addressing in the coming weeks. My main ambivalence towards KickStarter is that I want to stay as agile as possible with this thing. It's easy to think an idea is going to work well on paper, but if you can't implement that idea well enough, it's going to have to be binned. KickStarter promises these ideas, but the execution can never be assured.

Also I know nothing about branding, marketing, etc, I just make playable things.

All fair points about the emptiness, something I've definitely been avoiding while I get the core foundations down first.

Thanks again