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Games [Released] Beyond The Veil - Narrative Survival in the Wasteland

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by Shemamforash, Nov 29, 2017.

  1. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
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    Thin Banner.png
    Overview

    Beyond The Veil is a hybrid text-based/top-down/survival game. Take the role of The Wanderer, as he journeys across a dark wasteland at the behest of The Necromancer, an immortal woman who believes she can save her dying world by raising the gods from their eternal slumber.


    Gameplay

    Beyond The Veil uses light RPG mechanics paired with a real-time combat system to complement the narrative themes of the story. The wasteland is a harsh place, and its inhabitants no less so. In the Dark World death will always find you. Even if you find manage to find enough food and water, even if you keep your demons at bay, and you keep the nightmares away, it will catch you. So just keep moving.

    Game Screen 2.png

    To survive you will need to find water to quench your thirst and food to stave off your hunger. Resources from ancient wrecks and ruined temples offer you respite when the harshness of the world becomes too much to bear.

    A host of additional characters can help The Wanderer. Each has their own story to tell, attributes, and unique abilities. Living weapons, ancient armour, and mysterious trinkets can all be used to aid you in your quest to awaken the gods of old.

    Combat 1.png
    The weather of the wasteland is extremely varied- sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse. Whilst heatwave will dry the water from the earth, rain will return it. Always keep an eye on the mood of the sky, it can be as much a boon as a hindrance to you.

    Procedurally generated areas and gear, dynamic weather, and a variety of characters create a different challenge every time you play the game.


    Map 1.png
    Why text?

    I believe that text is something that is not fully exploited in modern games. The written word has an ability to stimulate our imagination that no other media can. Beyond The Veil is heavily text-based to immerse you, the player, and to allow you to visualise it as you see fit. By allowing you the opportunity to fill in detail that is not provided visually, I believe that your experience with The Wanderer will be uniquely yours.

    Where can I get it?

    Beyond The Veil is available on Steam.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/922020/Beyond_The_Veil/

    You can follow Beyond The Veil on Twitter and Facebook, as well as on my site Incubator Creations
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2019
  2. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
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    What have I been up to since last time? Well, both a lot, and not much. I was away last week, so programming work has been limited to the past week only. However I've spent a great deal of time thinking over the gameplay, the story, and the UI. So, in no particular order, this week's updates are:

    • First draft of the story done! Due to the way that I am dishing out the narrative it's quite tough to plan out the flow of the story and maintain pacing through the game. In the end I decided to just write it out in prose, then I can dip into it and break it into chunks later. My intention is that the story will be delivered in segments between days. At the end of each day (i.e. midnight, as the game is in real time) a short paragraph appears to progress the story and give some indication as to how close the 'end' of the game is.
    • Game length sorted- I had a number of ideas of how I would actually control the length of the game. The general premise is that you are outrunning a storm, moving from location to location to keep ahead of it. However you can't stay ahead perpetually, so there is a semi-fixed time before the storm catches up. Of course there is nothing stopping you from ignoring the storm altogether, but (not to give too much away) this might not result in an unsatisfactory ending. I'm aiming for a maximum playthrough of 30 in-game days- enough to deliver the story, but not so much that the gameplay becomes rote. Just to note, the duration of play modifies the difficulty of the game, so there is a difficulty ceiling to prevent endless progression.
    • Simplified much of the mechanics. In principle I like the idea of enormously complicated systems that are all procedurally generated, but in practice it's a lot of work and there are many points of failure.
      • I broke the character generation into a Class and a Trait- the class dictates the base attributes of the character, as well as which in and out of combat skills they have, and the Trait is a modifier to make the characters a bit more varied.
      • The number of different environments that the player can visit has been reduced from 10 to 5, making it easier to balance, and creating a bigger difference between the environments. The impact of the environment on gameplay has been simplified, with each environment having a different quantity of each resource, and different weather types.
      • Temperature has been simplified into Very Cold, Cold, Warm, Hot, and Very Hot. Characters require 20%, 10%, 0%, -10%, and -20% food in each temperature category respectively, and the inverse requirement for water (this water/food requirement modifier used to be a value that was calculated from a continuous temperature range).
    • General improvements to UI and usability. I'm desiging with Keyboard/Controller input in mind, so everything has to be easily navigated in as few button presses as possible. Of course this still needs to be balanced with having each menu display only the information it should display, rather than overloading it to reduce key presses (my main example this week is adding tabs to inventories to make it easier to find items, and to reduce key presses required to highlight said items).
    upload_2017-12-14_17-31-8.png
    New tabbed inventory functionality

    upload_2017-12-14_17-31-42.png
    Replaced the in-line weapon details from the inventory to a new weapon to make it easier to upgrade & equip.
    • Another aspect of the UI I have improved is the way in which attributes are displayed. Previously I was using the format "currentval/maxval", however I felt that showing this info textually made it difficult to find the required information on the page, and needlessly increases the time required to decipher the information. To replace this I've used a simple progress bar of sorts. White diamonds represent the current attribute value, grey diamonds indicate the maximum value, and a red diamond indicates the limiter value. To explain, there are 4 attributes- Endurance & Strength, and Stability & Intelligence. Endurance and Stability are both attributes that affect gameplay in their own right, but they are also represent the max value of Strength and Intelligence respectively.
    upload_2017-12-14_17-30-31.png

    In the next few weeks I'll be working on implementing progression so that, in theory, it'll be playable from start to finish (though incomplete). If I can get that done I'll start sending it out to friends and anyone interested for testing.
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Dec 14, 2017
  3. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
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    This week I'll delve a little deeper into the non-combat mechanics of 'Beyond The Veil'. At it's core the game is centred on resource management, be it time, health, or some of the more obvious resources like food and water. Since this is a text-based game it's important that A) gathering resources is fun and varied, and B) the use of resources is abundantly clear (by use I mean both purpose and interaction between resources).

    During play your characters will periodically consume Food and Water when available, and starve or dehydrate when unavailable. A starving or dehydrated character will, if no food or water is provided, die after a period of time. Additionally when a character becomes starving/dehydrated, they receive a penalty to Endurance and Stability respectively, thus reducing their ability to travel and explore.

    Scrap can be found in the environment and used for a variety of purposes. A number of 'buildings', such as a water collector, animal traps, and shelter, can all be constructed from scrap to reduce the need characters to spend their time collecting the more vital resources of food and water. Scrap can also be used to improve weapon durability, thereby increasing their effectiveness in battle, and to craft magazines for weapons.

    Magazines can be found in the environment, but are primarily crafted from scrap. Magazines are weapon-specific, and have varying scrap costs depending on their intended weapon type. 'Beyond The Veil' deviates from the formula used by most combat mechanics, in that magazines are the primary resource in combat, rather than units of ammunition. If you choose to reload before a magazine is fully emptied, you lose the remaining ammunition for that combat encounter. At the end of the encounter you can recover a number of magazines proportional to the amount of ammo left in any magazines discarded during combat, so the ammo is not permanently lost. The reasoning behind this decision was to bring the resource management element of the game into the combat.

    Fuel is the last major resource. It is the least immediately useful resource as it does not directly impact play, but is required in order to travel to a new area in your vehicle (fleeing the oncoming storm in the process). The quantity of fuel required to travel depends on the total weight of the items you choose to bring with you. All characters, items, and resources have an associated weight and fuel requirement. If you want to bring more characters or resources with you, you must spend more time collecting fuel at the expense of the other resources. Deciding when is the right time to leave and what should be brought with you should be a major decision within the game, and will have a strong impact on the player's ability to survive.

    upload_2017-12-22_15-24-2.png
    Temporary logo designs and first pass at a proper fog/mist effect
    On the practical side of things, this week I have implemented the magazine crafting menu. I've also done a lot of work with other menu functionality, particularly the tabbed menus to ensure that when two tabbed menus are open the tabs can be navigated individually.

    upload_2017-12-22_15-21-23.png
    Magazine crafting menu with moon in background

    The sleep and energy mechanics have also been implemented. When awake, energy is used at a constant rate of 1 unit every 2 hours, or 1 unit every hour when travelling. The amount of energy available to the character is limited by the endurance of the character, and can be recovered by sleeping.

    Weapons can now be improved and equipped, though weapon improving is currently instant, where it should take a duration og 0.5 hours. All actions in the game will have an associated time cost, so I guess I missed time out when I was talking about resources before.

    When at low health there is a heart beat sound and image effect on the edges of the screen (to reduce the amount of information the player needs to actively take in).

    A number of behind the scenes features to make it easier to work with opacity and menu elements- hopefully reducing the opportunity for bugs to exist!

    Changed the combat UI layout to keep the list of enemies central in the player vision, and move the player info to a less intrusive area. This also helped to centralise the entire layout to be more in keeping with the symmetrical/centred theme.

    upload_2017-12-22_15-19-36.png
    New Combat Menu with low-health effect around edges

    Made a proper logo for the game! In case you didn't notice, it's supposed to be a compass rose, tying in with the themes of loss (geographical and emotional!). I've also made some (hopefully exciting) progress on the story, which I'll continue working on over christmas.

    I won't be working next week, so Happy Holidays everyone! Very pleased to say I met my deadline to have all major systems implemented by christmas, and even managed to get the combat system in which I hadn't anticipated. My next milestone is that I hope to have a fully playable alpha by March, leaving April-August for balance, refining features, steam achievements, and content.

    Merry Christmas :)
     
    Last edited: Jan 20, 2018
  4. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Finally I am at a stage where I can start writing the narrative in earnest. After a good think over the christmas holidays I've decided to abandon the idea of character classes... well, sort of anyway. Initially I had planned for additional characters to be randomly generated from a set of classes and names. Turned out this doesn't make it easy for a) me to tell stories through the game and b) for players to become emotionally invested in anyone except the main character. So I decided to overhaul it slightly and have a number of additional characters, each with abilities that correspond to one of the old classes. Each character has a unique name, and a story to tell. When these characters rest, they will relate their story to the player, piece by piece- so you'll have to keep the character's alive to hear their entire story.
    upload_2018-1-5_15-49-55.png
    Prototype Exploration Interface

    Another thing I've been working on is the exploration side of the game. Essentially there are a group of regions connected to eachother. Characters can explore these regions to find resources, items, other characters, and encounter dangerous foes. When a character arrives in a region they are presented with a number of choices, either:
    • Look around the region they just arrived at to gather resources, before returning home.
    • Abandoning their search and returning home (if nothing is found or the character runs out of food and water).
    • Examining a set of clues in the area in order to discover new regions.
    I've been focussed primarily on the last bullet point, the clue mechanic. In essence the clues are a series of environmental indicators that either turn out to be correct or incorrect. For example a clue might be:
    "A dry riverbed cuts its way through the sand before you.".
    If the character were to then investigate that clue they might find water. All clues have an associated Intelligence (from now on referred to as Perception) requirement. If the character doing the exploring has a high enough perception to meet or exceed this requirement, they will receive additional information about the clue. For example the previous clue might read:
    "A dry riverbed cuts its way through the sand before you, any water that passed through here is long gone."
    This mechanic should make exploration more enjoyable for the player, provide an incentive for high Perception characters to be used for exploration, and to generate more risk-reward scenarios. The further the character travels from home, the higher the average perception requirement becomes.

    Only a little post this week- trying to keep it short and sweet. Happy New Year everyone!​
     
    Last edited: Jan 5, 2018
  5. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    "The Last Road" is now "Beyond The Veil". This decision was made primarily because The Last Road is already a popular android game, a play, and a movie. However I feel that the new name better reflects both the mood and the subject matter of the game.

    The Combat side of the game is nearing (ish) completion now. Implemented the melee minigame I had been planning for a while now. It's similar to the quicktime events in the new Tomb Raider games, where you are shown a button to press that is within a small ring. I've linked a video, but here's a description anyway. A large outer ring collapses down onto the smaller ring, and when they overlap you have to press the indicated key to succeed. This version uses the WASD keys as the target keys to press (aligned to the correct sides of the screen i.e. Top, Left, Bottom, and Right). Players are given a sequence of this minigames, each with a shorter duration than the last. If the player succeeds an individual minigame they deal damage to the enemy, if they fail, they receive damage. Whoever loses the final minigame is knockeddown for a couple of seconds. During melee you can't be harmed by other enemies, and the combat encounter is essentially paused.

    Melee Video: https://imgur.com/gallery/VYA62M3

    MeleeScreen.PNG Melee Combat Screen

    Also implemented a few new enemy types:
    • The Warlord summons allies when their health is low. This can quickly overwhelm the player, but they can be interrupted. There is a hard limit of 7 enemies on screen so Warlords cannot summon allies beyond this number.
    • The Witch can throw Grenades which either directly cause damage, or inflict conditions on the player. They have low health, but are always equipped with a condition-dealing weapon.
    • The Sentinel boosts the power of nearby enemies, and recovers health when in cover.
    • Grenades (not strictly an enemy) explode when they touch the ground, dealing damage, knocking characters back, and inflicting conditions. All explosives can be avoided by Dashing.
    • Mines cannot be seen until you are close to them. This distance depends on your characters perception.
    • Decoys look like regular enemies, but have no health, and disappear when shot.
    Weapons can now apply condition damage, which is the final addition to be made to weapons, so aside from variety and balance, these are feature complete. There are 4 types of condition:
    • Pierce: Either deals 50% damage to a single enemy behind the target if unarmoured, or deals 50% damage directly to the opponents armour if armoured.
    • Bleed: (Stacking) Each stack deals 1 damage per second. Stacks decay after 5 seconds.
    • Burning: (Stacking) First stack deals 4 damage per second, second stack deals 2, third stack deals 1. Stacks decay after 2 seconds (though this will probably change in testing).
    • Sickness: (Stacking) Stacks have no inherent functionality. When 10 stacks are applied to a target, a large amount of armour-ignoring damage is dealt to their health, then all stacks are removed. Stacks decay after 2 seconds.
    Explosives, conditions, and skills should all provide methods for players to deal damage to targets regardless of their armour level and health. Higher level enemies have more health and more armour, so there is an even greater need to use armour-removal effects in order to conquer them.

    On a slightly less exciting note the save system is semi-working. I've built a fairly robust system that recursively creates an XML file containing all save data. This is done primarily because it's easier for me to read and debug XMLs. I will try and find a way of obfuscating the save data so that players can't fiddle the numbers at some point in the future.

    Finally I've recorded a video of the gameplay to show everything in action. Please be aware that I've focussed on the functionality of the systems, so there might be some text that doesn't make sense, or a few buttons that don't have any navigation so I've had to use the mouse. The game speed is also significantly higher than it will be at launch, so if things are difficult to take in, don't fret- it's just for testing! All this will be fixed in future, and I will be providing full support for Keyboard Only, Mouse and Keyboard, and Controller input.



    If you have any questions at all or want to know more about the project, please do ask away! Hope you enjoyed reading another update, and have a great weekend.
     
  6. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    I did not realise I wouldn't be posting anything again for 3 weeks, but almost all the work I've been doing hasn't been very visual- so no nice screenshots or anything. At the moment I'm trying to get the combat to a testable stage. It's very close now, all mechanics are in place, and I've wrapped it up into a short minigame-style package so that it can be played independently of the main game.

    I also removed and simplified some of the weapons in the game to ensure that the weapons that remain are different enough to encourage a variety of playstyles. We now have very close range shotguns for a personal touch, as well as long range sniper rifles, crazy high fire rate SMGs, six-shooters, and high capacity LMGs (among other things).

    Character and Weapon skills are in, but not balanced. These skills require a resource called 'Rage' to be activated. Rage is generated by dealing damage to enemies, and the amount generated is in proportion to the amount of damage dealt. Rage can either be used to activate skills with a variety of effects; throwing grenades, 'teleporting', headbutting enemies, etc. or can be used for a short boost to fire rate, critical chance, and reload speed.

    Brawler and Mountain enemy types have been implemented. The Brawler will run at you in a similar fashion to the Martyr, and will engage you in melee combat when they get close. The Mountain is a fairly simple type, it has high health, moves slowly towards the you, occasionally stopping to fire, and won't take cover.

    Enemies can go behind the player, when they are behind you their location becomes invisible, and their UI is no longer updated. To add to this whenever a character fires at another characters back, they deal bonus damage. This adds a bit more to the situational awareness part of combat, reducing the static feeling it had before.

    Character Attributes (Strength, Willpower, Perception, and Endurance) all have an effect on combat now, increasing your health, skill cooldowns, weapon damage, and movement speed respectively.

    There have also been a whole lotta bugs to fix, but the list is getting smaller every day. Hopefully next week I'll be able to upload the Combat Minigame for testing.

    Thanks for reading as always!
     
  7. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
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    It's a very busy time for me at the moment, both with work and at home, however good progress is being made.

    I've had a few people play the combat side of the game so there has been a lot of feedback to work off from that. The main issue with the combat system is giving the player the experience of a real-time combat game, without overloading them with information. I decided the Rage mechanic was distracting, so all character skills are cooldown based. However to get around the old face-roll on the keyboard issue that is inherent to cooldowns, whenever a skill is activated, all other skills are also disabled for the duration of the cooldown. Now if a player uses a strong skill with a long cooldown it means they are forfeiting their ability to use weaker skills with shorter cooldowns.

    All combat skills are now tied to a progression mechanic within the game itself. Players will have to complete certain milestones (known as Brands) in order to unlock skills for use in combat (for example kill 100 enemies at point blank range with a shotgun in order to unlock one of the shotgun skills). Ideally this will make the combat friendlier to new players, and add an element of character progression to the combat.

    Weapons, Armour Plates, and Trinkets (accessories) can give additional benefits to the bearer when inscribed. Only rarity 3 and above items can be inscribed. Inscriptions are designed to allow a greater level of customisability to gear, and to provide more character progression opportunities to the player. Inscriptions cannot be removed from a weapon, only overwritten, so they must be used with care.

    upload_2018-3-2_16-4-52.png
    Revised Gear Menu- all gear types can be accessed, changed, repaired, and inscribed from this menu. This screen shows the player comparing their currently equipped weapon (Shining Skyscatter) with other weapons they can equip.

    Armour as a gear type has been removed. Instead characters have two slots for armour plates. Plates (along with all other items) come in 5 different rarities. The protection offered from a plate corresponds to it's rarity- so two rarity 5 plates offer 10 points of armour (or 100% damage reduction in combat). Plates take damage like health, and can be broken if they reach 0 armour (and are subsequently lost). Plates can be repaired for a cost, and high rarity plates do not break.

    upload_2018-3-2_16-6-52.png
    Gear Menu now showing equipped armour plates, and available plates

    Based on feedback I have decided to use a map for the exploration section of the game. Due to the complex nature of procedural text generation and the time I have available, I felt that although text-based exploration would be ideal, it would be difficult to get right, and a visual map would be more easy to interpret for the player than a textual interface.

    Lastly, and as always, I am constantly beavering away creating menus, updating existing UI elements, making it easier to navigate, and planning for the future. Thanks for reading! Sam.
     
  8. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Diligently working away here, I haven't disappeared! Apologies for the lack of updates for such a long time. The list of things to implement grows smaller every day, and every day I feel more and more excited/scared about releasing. Anyway, since last time I have:
    • Implemented 14 out of around 20 different enemy types.
    • Created a responsive keyboard-based input method for controlling the character in the top-down combat.
    • Written most of the procedural area generation code for generating rocks, fire, barriers. Needs a bit more variety and needs resources to be placed for the player to collect.
    • Removed the magazine mechanic, and replaced with a better, mysterious mechanic.
    • Written a basic 2D light system that is A) fast (doesn't use the Physics engine) and B) free.
    • Tied the menu, exploration, and combat screens together, making it possible to actually play it as a whole.
    • Written a procedural map generator with on-the-fly region generation.
    • Increased the amount of data saved to XML, allowing regions and maps to be saved and loaded (as well as characters, enemies, inventories, etc).
    • Implemented Grid-Based pathfinding for enemies.
    • Crafting...?
    Going to keep the updates light from now on. If you haven't already, please do follow me on Twitter or Facebook (links on first post). I'll be trying to update those more regularly as development goes on. For now here's a couple of quick teaser gifs.



     
  9. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Just a quick demo of the combat mechanics in action.

     
  10. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Working on some more interesting area generation algorithms rather than just scattering rocks (though there is still a lot of scattering rocks involved). The new labyrinthine area revealed a whole heap of bugs living in my 2D Light algorithm, so I had to spend a few days redoing that, however I am 99% sure it is good, clean code now, short of a few optimisations.

    Labyrinth Region Demo.png

    Also done a bit of visual work, tweaking some of the menus and button behaviours. Written a fair few new effects for top-down rain, and an evil little shadow effect for certain locations on the map menu.

    Region Demo.gif

    Oh yeah, I also did a couple of backgrounds for the game screen, just to add to the atmosphere and give the game a bit more visual presence. I think they work pretty nicely, but please do tell me what you think of them!

    Desert Environment Demo.PNG

    Defiles Environment Demo.png
     
  11. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    What haven't I done since last time? Wait, no I won't answer that. This is what I have actually been working on:
    • Crafting- various items and objects can be crafted to help you, including water collectors, armour pieces, traps for animals, and more. Crafting is simple and only intended to aid the player- this is not a crafting game!
    • Consumables- food and water by itself seemed pretty bland, so I've added consumable to have varieties of food and water. Now there are region-specific consumables, as well as ones with temporary mechanical effects.
    • More enemy types! The revenant enemy type splits into weaker clones on death, whilst the shadow darts about and knocks the player around.
    • Mines! Don't step on these.
    • More generated areas- canyon type area and ruins. Canyon is pretty much done, but ruins needs a bit of visual polish.
    • A player compass to point the way to nearby resources.
    • More story!
    • Shrines with events. Optional challenges that grant permanant modifiers when completed... or failed.
    • Randomised boss generation for shrines and temples.
    • Temples, similar to shrines, but must be completed to progress the story.
    If I'm a little light on the descriptions here it's because of videos!


    Shrine Demo


    Temple Demo​

    Compass Demo.gif
    Compass Demo


    Consumable Menu


    Ruins region (in progress)​
     
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  12. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Another month of work, another veritable pile of new features added. I'm fairly confident that I'll meet my deadline of end of August-early September to release, so that's exciting! Hopefully I'll get a trailer put together in the coming weeks, then I'll be able to get a page up and running on Steam (finally). As normal, here's a list of what I've been working on, along with some tasty gifs. If you want to see more gifs and get regular updates, please do follow me on Twitter or like my Facebook page.

    • Massively improved the pathfinding and general enemy behaviour. I'm moving towards having larger crowds the further your progress, so "intelligent" behaviour isn't as key for that kind of thing. Enemies will reliably find their way to the player and at least make some attempt to stay out of harms when when they need healing/reloading.
    • Implemented weapon inscriptions huzzah! Weapons can now be modified with inscriptions to further make them your own. Like all gear, inscriptions come in 5 tiers, with each tier providing a great bonus than the last.
    • Removed all item weights and the carry capacity mechanic (because it was boring).
    • Added cool looking flowing trails to the map to indicate paths between regions.
    • Added animal enemy types.
    • Items can now be picked up and used from the environment.
    • Water sources drop ice when temperature is below 0, ice needs to be melted before it can be drunk.
    • Added Shrine of Rites- select a rite out of a choice of 3, fulfill the requirements, then test your worth in a challenge, succeed and gain permanent buffs, fail and be cursed for the rest of your journey.
    • Added story echos, picking up an echo allows the current character to remember part of their life, and recite it back to you (in text of course).
    • Added steppe environment generation.
    • Added a ton of new art for the temple, the Shrine of Rites, plants, floor tiles, region icons, fountain, and revamped the art for the wasteland environment type (4 other environments to be done).
    • Added a fancy noise displacement field shader to add some sinister looking clouds to the map screen.
    • A hundred other small features and bugfixes!
    Map Screenshot 2.PNG
    Map Screen with new icons, route indicator, and spooky shader

    Game Screenshot.PNG
    New environment art for wasteland environment

    Save Stone Demo.gif
    Monument (save point)

    Rites Demo.gif
    Rite Shrine

    Fountain Demo.gif
    Fountain
     
  13. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

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    Hello all! Exactly a month since my last post (by one day), and boy do I have a lot of things to upload, so give my apologies to your bandwidth.
    • Added the Shelter region type. Shelters contain a playable character who, on speaking to them, must be protected whilst they leave the area. If they leave successfully (i.e. don't get killed) they will join your party.
    • When completing a rite, a portal appears allowing players to teleport to a small challenge arena.
    • Added lovely, lovely blood effects when things get hurt.
    • Added a small amount of screen shake and some sick sound effects so that guns feel nice and powerful.
    • Added a bunch of other sound effects for the environment, weather, enemies, misc.
    • Improved weapon DPS scaling.
    • Movement on the map is now done using the mouse keys rather than traversing a list.
    • Players can now eat food and change equipment whilst in combat.
    • Added several boss monsters that the player will have to face when they complete all the Temples.
    • Optimised the lighting system.
    • Optimised pathfinding with jump point search so enemies will feel more responsive and the player's computer won't melt.
    • Added a lot of save functionality.
    • Added the ability to restore save data from a seed (thank jebus for procedural generation).
    • Fixed so, so many bugs sheesh.
    • General polish.
    • New environment art (but I'll save that for next time).
    • Working on expanding the story (4000 words + extra for flavour so far).
    The list of things to do before release grows smaller every day. As of now, I have a few more environment paintings to finish, 2 more bosses, and the character designs. On the programming side of things I'd like to make the name generation more varied, and currently, there is no event that triggers the gate boss battle. Apart from that just accumulating more sound effects, balancing skills and gear, making sure enemies behave how they should, and of course, a lot of bugs to squash.

    As always, if you like how the game looks, please do follow me on twitter, I upload things regularly there and could use your support!

    Anyway, here's the good stuff.







     
  14. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2013
    Posts:
    69
    I realise I am not the best at writing updates about my game, something I will definitely be trying to do in future. I always find that by the time I have a moment to write an update, there are just a couple more things I could work on in the game before I start writing- so nothing ever gets written! Anyway, without further ado, an update on the development of Beyond The Veil.

    map new.jpg

    Map Overlay

    I'm well into the polishing stage of development, though that doesn't mean I'll be done next week! Most of my work has been spent fixing bugs, improving the feel of things, putting audio into the game, and more. On the subject of audio, a close friend of mine has offered to write some music for me, so there will be a melancholic soundtrack to accompany you on your journey across the wasteland.

    • Worked on all 5 bosses to add more interesting behaviour and mechanics to the boss fights. All bosses have multiple stages that progress as they take damage.
    • Massively improved the UI, both in terms of design and speed.
    • Updated all gear with better names, functionality, and stats. All weapon types have different firing modes for more variety.
    • Updated almost all player skills to allow viable combinations of any class and weapon.
    • Refined enemy skills to be more readable (by adding skill animations), and more interesting.
    • Added difficulty scaling so that encounters become larger and more complex as you progress. Gear also scales to the current difficulty to match.
    • Improved loading times across the board.
    • Improved enemy behaviour, and simplified their pathfinding to suit the progressively larger encounters in the game.
    • Added journals to the game to deliver story.
    • Added the ability to dismantle unused gear for resources.
    • Added additional recipes and resources for the late game.
    • Improved the performance of the lighting, and made it considerably more moody.
    • Added a vignette to everything!
    • Added weather effects in the combat, and improved those outside of combat.
    • Added unlock camera setting for peope who suffer from motion sickness.
    • Improved save system.
    • 3rd pass on the story, added 3 new character stories. Wordcount now sits around 11k.
    • Improved Rite trial system, player can only recieve trials they currently have the ability to pass, can never recieve duplicate trials, and can only track 3 trials at a time.
    • More things...


    This week I would really, really like to have a trailer done so I can put the Steam Page up. From now it's mostly more of the same, with a focus on bugtesting, balance, maybe a bit of optimisation, and the audio (oh the audio!).

    As always, if you want to ask me anything or just have a chat, leave a message below!
     
  15. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2013
    Posts:
    69
    Once again, we draw closer and closer to the completion of this huge challenge I have undertaken. I spent the week before last designing and editing the trailer for Beyond The Veil, which you can now watch on the recently published Steam page! Woohoo!


    Improved Shatter Effect

    As a gamer I'm sure you are sick of hearing developers ask for you to wishlist their games and throw us a like or share on Twitter. The thing is these small things are enormously helpful to us developers! With every Wishlist on Steam, Beyond The Veil becomes more visible to others, and will rank higher in the Coming Soon/Newly Released sections. Although I am certainly not in the industry for money, financial success will mean that I can continue to support Beyond The Veil after launch, and hopefully build on the foundations I have made over the past year to bring you more, exciting games.


    Improved Fire Effect

    Anyway, I'm sure the real reason you are reading this blog is to get some more progress updates. Good news all round on that front then! I think it's been around a month since my last update, and there has certainly been a lot of polish going on since then. Let's get down to it.


    New Character Layout​
    • Generally improved the Map generation and appearance.
    • Added a Tutorial to the game. I've tried to keep it to a minimum, as most features of the game should be fairly explanatory either from past experience or just through experimentation.
    • Removed target locking from controls- this just made the combat boring and took some of the player skill away. It's supposed to be difficult!
    • Vastly improved performance across the board. Large assets are preloaded at start up to improve scene transition time. Lighting speed improved, reduced the particle count in lots of systems (still looks great though).
    • Changed the Character UI to a horizontal rather than vertical layout. This is far easier to read, but more importantly, easier to navigate using a keyboard/gamepad.
    • Added a whole bunch of decorations to the UI, icons, glows, dividers, etc.
    • Reduced overall information density to make it easier to read the screen, particularly in combat.
    • Lots more visual feedback when clicking on things or performing actions like crafting, activating skills etc.
    • Simplified the armour mechanic and shatter damage. Armour provides a flat amount of damage reduction per point of armour, and can only be damaged by shatter attacks (no more dividing up health and armour damage from bullets).
    • Removed autosave feature, felt a bit counterintuitive in a game like this. Now all saving must be done manually, even on game exit, to avoid situations where an autosave occurs before a non-survivable situation.
    • Improved fire and shatter attacks to have a bit more visual punch.
    • Added a new attack type- Needle. Starts as an immobile projectile that constantly accelerates until it hits something.
    • Burn/Shatter/Void chance is now modified by magazine size to prevent high fire rate weapons triggering effects more than they should. Also results in Rifles effectively becoming fire cannons.
    • Lots and lots of bug fixes.

    Example Tutorial Screen


    New UI Design

    That's it for this week. Hopefully, I'll get some good actionable feedback from some playtesting over the next few days. Incredibly my to-do list has only 2 items on it now, so I must be doing something right (or I'm just blind)!

    Follow me on Twitter and Wishlist on Steam!
     
  16. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2013
    Posts:
    69
    It's out! It's finally out! After almost 2 years in development Beyond The Veil has been released and I think that officially qualifies me as an indie dev. Thanks for all the support and interest from my followers, and please do go check it out (sorry for the shameless plug!).

    See you again ;)

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/922020/Beyond_The_Veil/

    Available Now.png
     
  17. bComponent

    bComponent

    Joined:
    Apr 8, 2019
    Posts:
    9
    Despite the fact that I neither played the game nor that this type of game is particularily intersting to me, graphics and visual appearance are top notch. I absolutely adore the clean font and how all elements evolve around it very well.

    Good luck with it :)!
     
    Shemamforash likes this.
  18. Shemamforash

    Shemamforash

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2013
    Posts:
    69
    Thank you for the kind words :)