Paranormal Intelligence Bureau (PIB) - H.P. Lovecraft meets XCOM meets X-files

The Paranormal Intelligence Bureau

H.P. Lovecraft meets XCOM meets X-Files!
Control The PIB and defend the world against Lovecraftian horrors.
Don't let humanity fall to the cultists, paranormal entities, and Elder Gods!

We're currently developing a turn-based tactical skirmish game in the tradition of games like XCOM and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Our ambition
In The Paranormal Intelligence Bureau you play a section within the bureau, with a roster of agents that you will use to stop any paranormal activity.

The paranormal activity however isn't just ghosts and goblins, but also horrors taken directly from and inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's writings. You will fight cults that try to awaken Great Cthulhu or summon Yog-Sothoth to further open up the walls between our realities.

You will fight ultimate horrors that have broken through the veil between our worlds and the corrupted wildlife and humans that resided where they broke through.

You will control your agents from aboard an airship flying around the world, reacting to news of paranormal events. The Airship is your HQ and our ambition is that this base of operations should be upgradeable, much like in the XCOM games. We might go for an interface like XCOM or something else completely, we just haven't decided yet and we'll most likely go for the solution that is easiest to implement; unless we suddenly gets a load of funding.

Current status
We're using the Turn-based Toolkit for prototyping the game as it is a complete package for almost everything we want in a turn-based skirmish combat.

Our artists are currently working on the agents and the environment and you can see the character style we're going for with the Soldier below.

We will try to have an update for you every week or so.

Introducing the agents

Concept Art
We have some concept art around the general look we want for the agents, you can see what our concept artist came up with here.


We have decided to focus on three agent types as a start instead of four though, so we combined the Occultist and the Psychoanalyst into a Parapsychologist and we're going for the concept of the Psychoanalyst above.

Model: The Soldier
This is the style we ended up with for our models. This guy is made from the concept of the soldier above, but we are loving this style even more!


Follow the project
You can also follow the project closer on the following sites.

 

It's been awhile since our last update! That's how it is when we have to rely on contract work for funding I guess...

Anyways! We finally have a new update for those of you still following.

Introducing the Agents: The PIB Medic
Our character artist has finished our next model, The PIB Medic. We still love the style and really think she turned out quite awesome, don't you agree?



Current status
We decided to not go for the Turn Based Toolkit as mentioned earlier as it restricted us way too much to be able to make the game of our ambitions. We still recommend the asset for those who are less ambitious than us though, it's a great package!

We've been swamped with contract work ever since last November though, so there hasn't been too much progress since then, code wise. But our main programmer is chipping away at the task list whenever able, so we're getting somewhere at least.

Won't promise anything this time, but we will definitely try to keep you more regularly updated in the future.

 

Damn nice models Kybernesis!

If I may make a couple suggestions;
The Soldiers T-shirt and suspenders look a little too shiny to me. Consider reducing the map or channel that controls that (I can't remember which it is for the PBR shader).
The Medic's hair looks a little too plastic-e and a bit like a helmet of hair. I think it works, but might consider adding a little extra bump hair strands to the normal map to break up the rounded blinn highlight. In 3D I usually use an anisotrophic shader/material for hair because it looks more natural on hair with longer, less round highlights, however I do not know how or if that is even possible in Unity. I think the added bump hair strands in the normal map will help.
Also adding some loose strands of hair in the back and maybe on the side/front bangs will help break up the helmet look, although I don't think this is needed, will only improve the model slightly.

Overall - great style and look to both of them. Keep at it!

 

Glad you like them and really appreciate your feedback! I will pass your suggestions on to our artists, as most of what you write is way above my artistic skill levels

 

PIB Concepts: The Train demo scene
We’re currently working on the first demo of the game, which will focus on three different scenes with a common storyline.

The first scene will be the train demo scene, which was inspired by several positive comments on this concept art:


And then we got another concept artist to make a different interpretation with our Soldier and Medic agents, what do you think?


Current status
We're currently working on this train scene and the turn-based combat system. We have decided to use A* Pathfinding Project Pro for the grid and pathfinding, and it fits our purposes perfectly so far.
So at the moment, we have grid-based movement over multiple levels nailed and are currently working on the system for combat.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to effectively set up a XCOM-like equipment system, feel free to post them below!

Until next time

 

Hello!
Its a very nice design! Good job and good luck with it
By the way, right now im working on my own multiplayer xcom game(heading towards "first playable") where i've implemented a custom pathfinding solution. (works like in xcom 2, supports full environement destruction)

If you interested i could share some algorythms with you.
Long story short:

A* is not so good solution to be honest. You rather need a DFS.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search).
Its very easy to implement, intuitive and fast.
For xcom like movement i'd suggest to preprocess pathfinding data for each tile and then just use DFS with "baked" data.
This approach i've used works almost instantly at runtime with like 1ms at profiler (intel i7) and totally scale independent. Which means you can have a huge levels.

 

Thank you for the kind words

I definitely would be interested in checking out your solution.
Been using Astar Pathfinding Project so far, but I find it a bit lacking when it comes to multi-level levels. Also, I think a more specialized solution might be better then such a generic solution

Feel free to drop me a PM and we can chat further about it?

 

Well, i've tried, but it seems i cant start a new conversation with you because of some forum error. Maybe its privacy settings or something.
Could you try to a "start conversation" please? Or if it fails you could also email me at yeserro@gmail.com.