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[WIP] Immortal Redneck - Old-School FPS + Roguelite + Egypt

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by CremaGames, Dec 4, 2015.

  1. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Immortal Redneck is a FPS set in Egypt with rogue-lite elements. The game mixes old-school first-person shooter action with a rogue-lite mechanics. Frantic gameplay, twitch controls and an arcade-style feel meet procedural dungeons, a complete skill tree, permanent death and 9 classes with different traits.


    The game revolves around a redneck tourist who wakes up mummified in ancient Egypt after an accident. Why is he here? How did he survive the accident? And why the hell is he mummified?!

    The answer lies within the three danger-filled pyramids of Giza, all protected by an army of monsters and huge bosses. Obviously, your mission is to get inside the pyramids, kill all the enemies and discover what's going on!


    Three pyramids await you when you leave the sarcophagus you awake in. Each one features a different environment, a different set of enemies and powerful bosses whose only aim is to kill you. A lot.

    The dungeon inside each pyramid is randomly generated each time you play, so every time you die, you have to face a new, unique layout of rooms. As you explore the vast area in search of special rooms, you will come upon traps, gifts from the Gods and huge enemies.


    Each time you die, you will come back to life in your sarcophagus outside the pyramid with all your previously earned money intact. Your next step should be obvious: spend the money to acquire skills and abilities. Where? At the Skill Tree!

    Offer your gold to the Gods to upgrade your skills and, literally, grow your own tree of life. Unlock new classes, abilities and weapons, improve your stats and discover new ways to reach the top of the pyramids. The Skill Tree has it all!

    Upgrade your character by playing. Every time you play, you get a little stronger. Never go back to square one.


    Immortal Redneck features more than 50 weapons. There are traditional, magical, mythological, futuristic and just plain weird weapons. You name it, this game has it. There’s even a potato launcher because…why the hell not?!

    Each of the nine classes offers a different set of weapons, some of which can only be obtained by defeating specific enemies. For example, some hold more bullets and some are more powerful. In order to succeed, you’ll have to combine just the right weapons to find your favorite ones.


    To stay up to date on all news about Immortal Redneck, follow us on social media.

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/ImmortalRedneck
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ImmortalRedneck
    Game Site: http://www.immortalredneck.com
    Crema Site: http://cremagames.com/
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2017
  2. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Stuff you might like

    We've been showing our work already in our Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as forums like IndieDB, TigSource or Polycount, but I'll give you a nice, fast TL;DR version.

    In first place, the two first guns and the first type of explosive we have. We want them to have a lot of personality, so we wrote some wacky background for them and we gave them silly names. We called the handgun is Grandpa; the shotgun, Mr. Tickles; and the dynamite is Dina. More about them here.



    We also have finished four enemies. We've only shown two of them: the Warrior, a big, slow melee hulk; and the Archer, a kind of dodgy ranged enemy with good distance and a better aim.More about the Archer here and more about the Warrior here.



    We have a very cool sand rendering shader. We are really proud of the results, whatever you use it on the floors or as a effect on enemies or objects. You might want to read the devlog about how we did this, a lot of people told us is the most impressive stuff in the game, something that make us really happy.



    Another thing you might find intereseting is our own map generation algorithm. We explained it here, but basically, we generate rooms, we link the doors in those rooms in a very specific and random way and we create huge layouts so every time you play you see a different level. The rooms themselves are designed by us, so not everything is procedural, only the map design. Here's a cool animation of how they are created and interconnected.



    And finally, a very early and rough gameplay!

     
  3. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Nice progress - with some welcome comical elements.
    Was the shader written from scratch - or derived from another existing shader - or just some trickery? It's really nice looking - looks like actual geometry in the video above. Nice work.
     
  4. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Thanks! The shader was created from scratch, not written because we made it with the awesome Shader Forge. You can read more about the shader here if you're interested (and also see the complete shader in Shader Forge): http://cremagames.com/blog/2015/10/16/sand-is-a-crucial-part-of-immortal-rednecks-appeal-devlog-4/
     
  5. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hey, guys. We’ve been a little busy this past week, so sorry for not showing around that much. We made a game for the LudumDare 34 called Mobsferatu. Try it if you have five minutes, I think you’re going to like it.

    Anyway, last week we also published a devlog about one of Immortal Redneck’s new creatures, the Monkey Statue. Since CremaGames logo is a monkey, you can imagine this is a very loved creature in our game. It’s also the one we had the most fun working on so far, so we thought about recording the whole process and show it to you.

    Below you have a lot of videos, but I think you might enjoy them.

    Concept art



    3D model



    Zbrush



    Textures



    Animation test

    Please, be advised that this is still a work in progress. We are changing some animations at the moment and we intend to make the lighting transitions a lot better.



    Well, I hope you liked our new monster. We are finishing the outdoors of the game, so I hope we can show you a lot about it soon enough. Thanks for reading/watching.
     
    RavenOfCode likes this.
  6. RavenOfCode

    RavenOfCode

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    I love the name! :D 10/10!

    The game looks really cool too, I like the style alot, and the sand shader is pretty sweet. :)
     
  7. iamthwee

    iamthwee

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    Very good the concept art through to execution is great. You've got a lot of softwares it must be expensive to use all of them in your studio, can I ask what that costs approxmately.
     
  8. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    The game looks like more like a modded Zigurat, there is nothing really new. It looks like playing Ziggurat with only different ennemies and rooms with a different design only.
    What will be the difference from gameplay and rooms mechanisms ?

    Still the quality of the work is outstanding.
     
  9. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hey iamthwee! Yeah, licenses are expensive but the software we're using worth it. The total cost for our licenses is something around 15K. Keep in mind that we use them for all our projects, not only Immortal Redneck.

    Well, I obviously disagree, haha.

    Even if Ziggurat is one of our various inspirations because we love it and we share a genre (FPS with roguelite stuff), there are some key differences between it and Immortal Redneck.

    You talked about the rooms. We're focusing on giving the game a platformer focused gameplay, we have very big rooms with diferent floors and heights and some mechanics that requires the user to make precise jumps or keep changing between floors to obliterate all the enemies. We haven't posted a lot about the rooms here, but you can read a lot about them in this post and in this other one in our devlog.

    Also, our game has a very specific pace. I mean, you play, you die and you get to an outside 'level' where you use the gold you earn inside to improve your character, to buy new guns and to plan a new strategy, since you won't always have enough cash to make the things the way you want. There's lot of stuff to improve your character, different classes to approach the combat in the way you prefer and a lot of abilities and passive perks you earn with randomly dropped scrolls.

    Keeping it short, our game has a progression system (something similar to Rogue Legacy). Immortal Redneck isn't focused on single, independent runs like Ziggurat. Instead, it's focused on progression, character upgrades, a complete skill tree and a checkpoint system for the pyramids.

    Our guns. I can't really show you much about the stuff we've got already done, but each type of gun – revolver, shotgun, railgun, sword, whip or explosive – will change how you play. In this sense, it's a lot more like an arcade shooter than a roguelite. We're aiming to an FPS experience more close to Serious Sam, Doom or Duke Nukem than Heretic or Hexen.

    The main goal here is to make a unique mixture of great things, and there's a lot yet we have to show. I understand that right now you have your doubts, but it hurts a little you say it's just a mod of other game... You could say the game is a mix between Serious Sam, Rogue Legacy and Ziggurat and you would be right, but almost every commercial game is a mix of some other games with some innovations on top.
     
  10. FancifulFox

    FancifulFox

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    So this looks like crazy fun, and if you ever released a book with your concept art, I would totally buy it. And the game too of course.
     
  11. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hey! We've been out for a few days – Christmas et al –, but we're back with a devlog. It's about how we build the outdoors of Immortal Redneck.

    Most stuff in Immortal Redneck takes place inside the pyramids, more precisely, inside one of them at a time. But – there’s always a but –, before getting inside them, you need to prepare really well to survive. You do that in the outdoors, of course.

    Take a look at how the place, ehem, looks like:



    As you might have guessed, there's a few interesting places in here. The most obvious one is The Eternal Sarcophagus, the coffin in which your soul always comes back everytime you die in the game. You are linked to it by some unknown magic, so get used to it.



    You also have the Three Great Pyramids. You'll explore them one at a time. When you start Immortal Redneck, there's only one of them unlocked and you'll have to finish it before being able to open the second one. And the third one opens only if you pass the second one, of course.



    Each one of them is filled with different kinds of enemies, so you'll have to get really good to progress. This is quite literal when we take a look at the Tree of Life and Skills, which is a quite literal skill tree. At its roots, you'll offer gold to the gods so you unlock new classes, abilities and get stronger, in general.



    And last, but not least, there's the Merchant Store. It's close by now because, well, we have yet to finish some aspects about this character. It's also really important, almost as much as the skill tree, because the merchant sells guns and some improvements, too.



    And that's it by now. We have taken our time with this. We hope that’s noticeable, because we wanted the outdoors to make a good impression as it is the first sight of the game everyone will have. Also, we thought the player would like to have a quiet, peaceful place before getting into the mayhem inside the pyramids. Our game is a hard, crazy, fast paced mystical shooting trip, but its outdoors? It’s the kind of place where you’d go on vacation. That’s what the redneck did before everything went nuts, actually.
     
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  12. marcos

    marcos

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    Looking really nice so far! :)
     
  13. taistelusopuli

    taistelusopuli

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    The game looks beautiful! What is the premise/synopsis? I'd be interested to hear.
     
  14. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Well, narrative won't be the strongest point of the game, so the premise is quite simple:

    "A nice southern fellow won a trip to Egypt in a local lottery, lucky him. Just a few hours after setting foot on the desert, he got lost and, somehow, ended up half mummified and trapped in a really strange and isolated place with huge three pyramids. Unaware of his new powers and with nowhere to go, he got into one of the pyramids and quickly died at the hands of a monster. Only then he understood that every time he dies, he gets back outside the pyramids as if nothing has happened and that he is immortal and has to fight those creatures to find what the heck happened to him."

    I know it's a really silly story, but that's exactly what we wanted. And if you find the game curious enough to read more about it, our devlog has already 14 entries and a lot of information about Immortal Redneck.
     
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  15. taistelusopuli

    taistelusopuli

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    @CremaGames That is just perfect! I'll look into what you have over there.
     
  16. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    We have a new devlog! You can read the long version in here or just stick to the short one below.

    This week, we are revealing two new enemy types: the Skull and the Flying Demon. Don't mind the names, they are just plain ones behore we start thinking about the lore and the creatures names a little more deeply – although we are pretty sure the skull will be named Manny, for some reason. Ehem.





    These two new monster are aerial enemies, so they were a particulary interesting challenge for the team. Even though the Skull was the first monster our designers worked on, we decided to practice with a few terrestrial one before. as you can imagine, since our game has two layers of height, the flying creatures needed a lot more work.

    Thankfully, we ended up making them work. We have to finish a few details, since sometimes they get stuck in stairs and such, but the main stuff about them is done.





    But enough talk, let's take a look at them in motion:



    As you can see, the Skull is a flying, melee type of enemy while the Demon is a medium distance, ranged creature. We are obsessed with variety and we want our enemies to work in different ways, but also to work together just great. These two look good just by themselves, we think, and make you move and work in very particular ways. If we added a Warrior, with it's strong but slow attacks, to the equation, it would be even harder to pass this room.

    Hope you like their designs, enjoy their 3D models and make us know if you like how the game looks so far. That last video is one of the lastets pre-alpha builds we have in the studio!
     
  17. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hi, friends. This week, I’m writing about how the rooms are built in our game. I won’t go much into technical features or detail, I’d rather show you how different heights integrate in Immortal Redneck and why we chose to build the game around jumping and shooting while moving through some floors.

    Immortal Redneck has randomly generated floor layouts with rooms that have been designed very intentionally. That’s is, the rooms are our creation, but the position and doors assigned to them are random. That means that even if we don’t know what room is on the other side of a door, we know that is has an intentional design, that its built with some ideas behind. It’s not proceduraly built, but proceduraly placed with others.

    So we control the design, and that’s why we decided to make rooms with different heights: you can move around the ground, but also jump or go up some stairs to get to the second floor of that same room.



    We did this, mainly, for three reasons: not many FPS roguelites have this – they mostly have rooms with a ground floor and enemies –, it allowed us to experiment with the redneck’s moving patterns and made the shooting far more interesting.

    After all, moving and shooting is the most interesting mechanics of Immortal Redneck, so we had to make them both available and interesting. Going around a room dodging enemies, killing them and using the stairs to go to another floor and get away from the danger is a common thing in here. Also, player awareness is increased, because some enemies will attack you from above.

    What we have

    In first place, we have smaller rooms and bigger rooms. Thanks to our awesome algorithm we can make all kinds of rooms and place them however we feel like. That’s why we made it so awesome, because we didn’t want to feel contrived by the partially random nature of our game. Look a these room, for example:



    The good thing about both layouts is that they work as well when you throw enemies into the equation. Shooting ranged creatures and dodging flying ones that pursue you up and down is great, no matter if the room is 20 or 40 meter tall.



    Obviously, this bring up some question. How would the enemies follow the player into a different height? How do flying creatures move around those heights? As you can imagine if you have developed a 3D games, the creatures have a navigation mesh that tells them how they must move around.



    Since our enemies wander when they don’t see you, they can go up and down as they wish, no matter if they are terrestrial or aerial. But the moment they see you, all the creatures will go after you: if it’s terrestrial, the navmesh help them know which is the shorter path, through stairs or jumping down from a higher place; if they fly, they will charge towards you, no matter if you are in another floor or they are.

    Fancier layouts and better gameplay

    In the end, having two or more heights in Immortal Redneck help make it more complex, in a lot of ways. You need a lot more awareness when you can be attacked from above, when you can run away from a difficult situation by going up some stairs and make the enemies follow you into a more favorable position for you.

    If we add the abilities and more specialized enemies, this gets better and better. How about an enemy that shoots grenades from above and makes moving into the ground floor really hard? That’s something we have kind of planned and that we have to test, but that’s where we are going from here. It’s not just that the rooms look great and the game seems bigger: having this structure makes playing Immortal Redneck a lot better.

    A little more gameplay

    And finally, a short video with some gameplay. We have enough stuff into the game to record how we play and show everything we said above. Remember that this is pre-alpha gameplay and we could change tons of stuff prior to launch.

     
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  18. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    The quality level being met with this is impressive.
    The polish and attention to detail should result in a positive reception from the public. Well done so far.

    I noticed in the last videos - the player doesn't have any visual projectiles. I think one of the great things that unreal tournament did, (this coming from a person who isn't a fps fan) was to over-exaggerate the look and feel of the different projectiles available from each weapon. I believe this game would benefit from a similar treatment.

    The explanation you gave regarding room construction is very thoughtful. I think adding a directional indicator, on screen, to aid the player in knowing which direction they are being attacked from - would also be an improvement over the default - you got hit screen red splotch.

    Looking forward to your next update.
     
  19. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hey, thanks for replying and for the kind words :3

    We will have a lot of weapons and some of them do have visual projectiles (you will see some soon). However, I've thinked a lot about giving more visual predominancy to the "instant" projectile weapons like the handgun or the shotgun. Unreal tournament is a good example to follow so thanks for suggesting that. Maybe we can add some temporal smoke line (like in Unreal's sniper) or some sparks in the line that the projectile travels...

    Also, about the directional indicator on damage it's currently on our ToDo list :D it is a very very needed feature.

    Thanks again!
     
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  20. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Today, we are getting a bit technical. Actually, most of the stuff in this Immortal Redneck devlog is only interesting if you make games or you are interested in making them with Unity in the future. If you are working on a game, maybe you'll find our plugins list helpful. If that's not the case, here's a photo of a very cute kitty and a really bad joke to entertain yourself. In any case, enjoy!

    Behavior Designer

    Behavior Designer was our choice when we needed a solution to develop Immortal Redneck's AI. It was compatible with other AI solutions, with state machines and with Behavior Tree.

    Before choosing BD, we tried Raid. It was free, and that was great; but we had lots of efficiency problems. Behavior Designer was a lot more compatible, had official support and we could work with a visual interface, not only with lines of code, which is always welcomed by programmers and artists equally.

    A* Pathfinding

    We wanted enemies to move around scenes in their own, different patterns. Unity's default navigation system didn't let us move a navmesh once it was generated into a scene, so we looked for alternatives and quickly found and fell in love with A* Pathfinding.

    This plugin let us create meshes a lot faster in execution time and integrated quite well with Behavior Designer, which was a great plus. We particularly had to make a few changes in certain areas so the meshes stayed with the rooms themselves. This wasn't strictly necessary, but it reduced loading times by a good margin.

    Instant Good Day



    Immortal Redneck's outdoors are the first impression you have of our game, so we wanted the place to be great and special. One of the first things we decided was that it needed a day and night cycle, even if most players won't stay long enough outside to watch it entirely.

    After looking for a lot of assets, we opted for InstantGoodDay. It seemed like the best solution given our needs. We wanted to change every little detail of the animation so the cycle looked original and unique, and InstantGoodDay allows you to change every hour of the cycle. It has lots of values, from fog to lighting and also colors and stars in the sky. We worked a lot with it and we integrated StylizeFog by our own.



    Colorful

    A huge effects library, with lots of post-processed stuff. At this moment, we are only using it for the transition from the outer camera in the main menu to the inside of the sarcophagus. Obviously, we'll use it with more stuff, like rapidly changing the rooms interiors and their mood.

    DOTween

    We know DOTween from some time now. We started using it while developing OMG Zoo Rescue, and we loved it. This plugin let us code animations in a fast, easy way. It's perfect for menus and UI, but also sprites and even models in 3D and cutscenes.



    Also, Mobsferatu's intro and ending were made with DOTween, so that's how much we love and trust it.

    Clean Empty Directories

    Having empty folder is no such big stuff, but when you are working in a big game like Immortal Redneck and when you have a git repository it starts to get annoying. This plugin job is to erase all the empty folders without a constant use by any user. So even if that's not a big deal, it's a good way to keep your stuff tidied up.

    Editor Auto Save

    I'm sure everyone making games has suffered an unexpected failure while working. Sometimes is your computer, sometimes is Unity and sometimes is something or someone else, like your cat. The outcome: hours of work lost in a fraction of a second. We've been there lots of times. So much crying...

    Anyway, we looked for a solution and we found Editor Auto Save. It's the best plugin around for this: it saves every scene and project (along with all the modified prefabs) on regular basis and every time you do some specific action (like playing) so you don't lose much stuff if you forgot to pay your bills. Ahem.

    Master Audio

    Even though Unity 5 has improved a lot its audio systems, there are better alternatives outside the official channel. Since the beginning, our friends at Sonotrigger told us that we would probably have to use something else so they could do their magic work with Immortal Redneck's sound effects and music.

    So we chose Master Audio. Not only it give us access to a lot of tool, but our main reason to use it was so the audio team could integrate everything easily in the game without a lot of programming work. It's about resources and managing our time.

    PrefabEvolution

    Nested prefabs is one of the most requested features for Unity – that's why they are a part of the company's roadmap now. So, meanwhile, we had to find a third party solution, and we chose Prefab Evolution for Immortal Redneck because it's the most used and supported. Thanks to this asset we could use nested prefabs and reuse particles in different objects.

    Sadly, we had some problems and we were not entirely happy with it. Immortal Redneck is a big game, and that didn't go well with PrefabEvolution. Compiling and testing are stealing us a lot of time, so if your game is not a little project, maybe you should make an unified system and made just for your needs.

    That's actually what we are doing: we opted not to use it in the end and we are changing our workflow so we don't need so many nested prefabs and we can use our own tool in those cases we really need to do it.

    Rewired

    Unity Input is one of the least advanced tools since the engine conception. With a big game like ours, we wanted a lot of flexibility with our control system and needed a lot of compatibility with PC peripherals. Thanks to Rewired, everything is made around actions and are mapped with each device. Also, since it doesn't have any native code, it would work in consoles if needed.

    ShaderForge

    ShaderForge is one of the best assets we'd used and we can't stop suggesting you use it. Working with shaders is our Achilles heel: we don't have a person specifically coding shaders. Thanks to ShaderForge, our artists started making shaders without programming knowledge and with really great results. For example, this is one of the shaders we've built in Immortal Redneck.



    StylizedFog

    A fantastic asset so you can have, heh, stylized fog in your game. You can use gradient colors so it paints the fog with those tones, and you can even mix two colors. When you have InstantGoodDay too, you can build some cool scenes with fog, changing open areas and such. We're going to use it in Immortal Redneck indoors, too. That's how much we liked it.



    TextMeshPro

    A Unity classic. We've been using it since our first game with the engine (Ridiculous Triathlon) and it's been with us since then. If you need to make nice texts in Unity, we don't know a better tool than TextMeshPro. This plugin allow us to use words independently of their resolution and/or size and you can apply various effects (like shadows, outlines, gradients, glowing) easily. See those damage numbers? TextMeshPro.


    (The hammer animation is ours, but the rest is UFPS)

    UFPS

    UFPS helped us with Immortal Redneck's engine fundamentals. We used it in the beginning so we had a solid foundation that we could modify as much as possible. At this moment, we have changed everything in UFPS so it adapts to our most specific needs. We kept the procedural animations and event system, but excluding these, there's little stuff left. It's the best starting point if you are willing to build lots of stuff on it.

    And that's it! What tools do you usually use? Should we try an alternative to ours? Hope you find this interesting, or at least not very boring. There's a lot of stuff going on behind a game when you build it, so taking a look behind could be great.

    You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for further content about Immortal Redneck.
     
  21. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    When developing, sometimes it's hard to display the new content you have in your hands. It’s not about keeping something secret for the sake of it, it’s just that it’s not really finished. But instead of keeping our mouths shut for this week until we have something, we are showing you some stuff we have half done, haha.

    Since this forum does not allow to embed more than five media files, I recommend you read our full devlog to see everything we have right now.

    We are building new rooms, like this with lava statues!



    We’re always making new enemies for Immortal Redneck. They are a huge part of its gameplay, of course, but also of its appeal. You can’t make people like a game about shooting monsters without cool creatures moving around and doing stuff.


    Oink, oink

    Weapons
    Enemies are important, but weapons too! We’ve shown you the Redneck set, that’s comprised of Grandpa, Tickels and Dina, which are the handgun, the shotgun and the dynamite sticks, respectively. At this moment, we are working on a new set of guns. It’s the Seth set and no, there’s no pun intended: Seth is an Ancient Egypt deity.



    Menus
    With tons of different options for you character, abilities to develop and weapons to improve, we had to create a cool and clear interface to make all this stuff work.

    This is what you see when you try to get into one of the pyramids:



    And this is what you see when you die.


    Start getting use to those words

    And that’s all for now. We don’t want to ruin the surprises of future devlogs, so we are holding some of the stuff we have. You’ll have to wait a little more until I can write thoroughly about all this stuff. No reason to worry: we’ll be back next week with something new to show.

    There’s plenty things we want to put into our game and we are always improving our approach to new creatures, weapons and the scenery, so we want your feedback. Please, reach us on Twitterand Facebook and tell us what you think about Immortal Redneck and how you think we can make it (even) better!
     
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  22. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Last week, I showed you some new art and concepts that will be into the game in a near future as enemies, new structures and more. This week, I thought this time it would be a good idea to please our glorious 3D artists.

    We working on more details for each room in the game. Making all of them kind of unique is not easy, but we’ve got tons of different items to place.

    Here's a platform and a new door we have to texturize yet.



    We are making each room more complex and make them have more light sources.



    Also, we made this fancy animation with everything that there's in the game's outdoors.



    We also have new enemies, like the grenadier, almost finished. Here's the creature animations:



    And this is a look at the finished sarcophagus, the center piece of the outdoors and the place where your soul is born again after you die.

     
  23. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    That's really nice.
    What tool do you use to retopology it ? It is separate pieces retopology ?
     
  24. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    We use both zbrush and 3ds max retopology tools to retopo our props, zbrush one is better for organic stuff such as monsters, rocks, walls etc... while 3ds max one is better for props like weapons, columns, doors, windows, pedestals etc.

    Yes we dont connect all the pieces together, there's lots of floating geometry in them.
     
  25. Schneider21

    Schneider21

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    Really pro-looking stuff. Soooo jealous that I can't make art like this.
     
  26. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Classes on Immortal Redneck

    Hi, there. This week I'm showing you two of the first classes of Immortal Redneck. We have a very clear idea about how the must be. In first place, they are unlockables, so they have to feel like a personal achievement when you earn enough gold to buy them in the Literal Skill Tree. We don’t plan to make it unnatural: you unlock them as if they were new abilities, so you just need to spend some time and play good enough.

    In addition to this, you need to know that you won’t be able to play always with the same class. We are not so cruel as to impose one random class with each new run: it's possible to choose between two. This way, the player might use one that’s not his favorite, but that he doesn’t hate as much as the other one.

    And as you might have assumed already, these classes are godlike blessings based on different deities. If you offer enough gold at the Sacred Tree of Life and Skills, they’ll give you some of their powers (different stats), one or a few abilities (active and/or passive) and their favorite weapons. Each time you are reborn in your sarcophagus, you’ll have two of those blessings at your disposal.

    Classes will have a huge impact in the way the game is players, specially in the first minutes of each run. At this moment, there’s a total of 9 classes, but today I’m only talking about two of them: Redneck and Seth.

    The reliable Redneck



    Of course the redneck is a class, damn it! It’s the most basic one, of course, and does not have any active nor passive ability. It doesn’t have any interesting stat configuration, either: they all rank in the middle. It’s strong, fast and their guns are also quite good. You know, sometimes the most balanced option is the best one, even if that means not having some special abilities.

    You might already know his guns, but we've worked a little more on them, so here they are again:

    'Grandpa' is a handgun and a good balance between damage and range. 'Mr. Tickles' works better in short distances and makes a lot of damage. And 'Dyna' is a explosive that hits really, really hard, on contact with an enemy or in an area after a few seconds. Yup, the names are really stupid, but they have a meaning.



    The electrifying Seth



    Seth, or Set, is one of the most well-known gods in the Egyptian Pantheon, and one of the first ones to welcome the redneck’s tributes. After all, he is the god of foreigners. He reigns over chaos and storms, so earning his electrifying blessing is a good idea.

    These are the weapons of this class:



    In first place, the Thunderstrike. Melee weapons in Immortal Redneck does not require ammo, so that's an advantage in exchange for the additional risk of melee combat. Since he has no matter with most contemporary weaponry, he also concedes you the Coilgun, a rifle that projects pure lighting bolts that spread through the enemies. And finally, there’s the Seth’s Breath, a direct hit of mythological, uh, halitosis that works like a flamethrower, but with electricity.

    I can’t show you this weapons in action yet – I’m keeping that for a another, really cool devlog –, but I can talk about the ability of the Seth class: the Shock Sphere. And neither that Thunderstrike nor the ability are final, but I had to show something about the Seth in movement!



    Every time you use your ability, a bright sphere of pure electricity and magnetism will surround you and expand until it hits a certain distance. At that moment, the sphere will slowly decrease until it disappears. So, for a few seconds the energy of this lighting ball will hit with shock damage all the enemies.

    And that’s it for today.
     
    zenGarden likes this.
  27. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    About replayability, will you make more specific classes with their own gameplay like overwatch has ? Some can run faster for example.
     
  28. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Yeah, that's the idea behind classes. For example we will have a class which has an extra permanent jump or another class which can heal himself. We're still working on ideas for the classes and specially the unique weapons defining each one.
     
  29. Sabathius

    Sabathius

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    This thread makes me feel inadequate. :D Phenominal work, @CremaGames
     
    Schneider21 likes this.
  30. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Thanks man :rolleyes:
     
  31. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    I think we all consider Editor Tools a great and really useful aspect of Unity. Working with it has allowed us to create prototypes really fast and makes a lot easier to build prototypes, to add new objects easily and to assign variables. It's a huge improvement in our work flow. The thing is, as Immortal Redneck grew bigger, we started to needing our own tools and we could use Unity editor to build them fast.

    Here's five tools that have helped us a lot, but we've got more in our devlog. If you find this post interesting, you might want to read the complete version.

    Game Design Tool
    Immortal Redneck is a big game � at least for us. In addition to the amount of development hours, it would require a lot of balancing: there's guns, enemies and skills, so we wanted this task to be as easy and simple as possible.



    That's why we built this tool, to change things almost on the fly. Right now, we can alter:
    • Global parameters like drop rates and spawn times between enemies
    • Each class statistics (HP, Attack, Defense, etc.)
    • Enemies' stats. In the future, we want to change their global behavior and change when they attack, when the hold, at what distance they start moving...
    • Weapons' damage, range, spread, ammo, recoil...
    • The skill tree's levels, gold rates, statistics it changes...
    Room Utils
    We want our game to have a lot of rooms, so we needed to have the capacity to create them fast and well. We coded a few tools to this intention.

    In first place, we created a menu that looks like ProGrids so we can mix everything. We can duplicate objects in each axys really fast because that's what took us most time in the first days of development. Also, it was excruciatingly boring and repetitive thing for the team to do.



    There's another tool that allow us to check each asset we've created on a catalogue, and paste what we want into the scene. It's almost automatic and works really well. We can place the asset in the place we are looking at or select something in the scene and replace it with something from the catalogue. This is a really, really fast way to replace a whole floor or wall.

    RoomScene Inspector
    Each one of our rooms is a scene due to a optimization requirements. Even though Unity 5.3 has evolved a lot in this matter, it's still kind of hard to work with them in comparison with using prefabs, for example.



    We decided to work that way, creating various scenes and using a ScriptableObject as a reference for each room. This ScriptableObject has the data of each scene, but we can also use it to open them, add them to Build Settings and more stuff.

    We work constantly with Custom Inspectors in Unity because of this, and that's why we've extended the default editor and added more options. We've even added a room preview because Unity is not allowing that at the moment and it's something that we need to quickly identify what we are changing in the scene.

    Object Randomizer
    In order to build the three pyramids of Immortal Redneck, our artists made different rock blocks that they would have to pile to create the pyramids sides.

    To do this manually would be hard, so we coded a little tool that would take rock lines with little variations. This way, our artists could create as many lines as they wanted and build the pyramid faster without repeating patterns. Later, they made some little changes, but the pyramids were done in a jiffy.



    Gizmos
    Unity has a very interesting feature: it merges Gizmos with scripts. Gizmos are conceived to show graphics over the scene so some stuff is easily seen on it.



    For example, in the room above, we've got gizmos showing spawn positions and interest points for their AI.

    Red spheres show the enemies avatar so we can see where they'll spawn, while red squares do the same with walking creatures. In a similar fashion, blue spheres represent the flying enemies' interest points and the orange squares on the floor are interest points for the walking ones.

    At first, it might seem crowded and confusing, but it really helps a lot once you get used to it.
     
  32. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Thank you for the insight of your custom tools.
    Some little tools like combine, create material or component clipboard would do well on the Asset Store.
     
  33. Schneider21

    Schneider21

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    After looking at this thread, I just want to CMD+A, DEL my whole project.
     
    musaranya likes this.
  34. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    NOOO...
    Use it as motivation to improve. :)
    Plus - as long as your targeting different user base - it's cool to have different scope.
     
  35. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Yeah, probably. But making documentation, supporting the users and polishing it enough for end users it's a consuming and boring task ha! Maybe we take some time to do it in the future.
     
  36. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hi there!

    We are back with new improvements on Immortal Redneck, more precisely, on our enemies movement. We had some problems concerning how they moved through different heights and how they reacted to another creature in their path, so we implemented two solutions.

    In first place, we built a tool to tell the enemies where they had to jump down a ledge if that helped them pursue you.
    His main function is to figure out the exact positions creatures have to jump from.



    The tool finds out the edges on each plane or object and determines a initial jumping point and a final one, creating an extra link for the object (enemy) that’s moving vertically. Here’s a comparison between how the warrior fall down without that animation and with it.

    OLD ONE



    NEW ONE



    Another aspect of the enemies’ movement that we improved is their still pose and how they interact with each other.

    In the beginning, one archer could block a warrior’s trajectory because it stood still in front of him before shooting you.



    We solved this by making a hole in the mesh each time a enemy stopped moving. Sounds silly, but works beautifully. When an enemy ‘notices’ that empty space in the mesh, the creature will figure out a new way to reach you. And since each enemy is programmed to follow you through the shortest path, they will change their course just a little so they can avoid it the empty space in the mesh and charge again towards you. It looks really natural, don’t you think?



    Before implementing this, we considered making different points around the main character so enemies would focus on different points while moving and attacking. It was a little problematic and this other solution we did was just simpler and more effective. We love it when one solution actually solves several potential problems.

    We want our game to be silly and funny, but not in a Goat Simulator way, where everything fails around you and you laugh at it. Quality and presentation can be really different depending on the game – Goat Simulator is perfect in its own way and it’s great –, and we chose to build a neat experience that, even if our resources are limited, seems solid and unbreakable to the eye.

    Something as silly as an enemy not going after you the way you understand it should can really break your fun.
     
    RavenOfCode and zenGarden like this.
  37. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    I had the same problem with a melee guy blocking another magic one shooting fireballs. I choosen to make the magic move on the sides and try again each time he is blocke by others.
    I still don't understand your solution reading it :D

    I don't see lot of difference between the old and the new jump system, why an ennemy just falling down like the first version video was not good ?
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2016
  38. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    The difference in the jump system is mainly with the animation. In the old one the warrior keeps "running" in the air with the same animation and in the new one it has a custom pose for when he's falling. Little details matter!

    Regarding our solution for "cutting" meshes, I don't know how to explain it easier, maybe we can take some videos in action in the future.
     
  39. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Hey!

    The next devlog is going to be delayed for a bit, so while you're waiting we want to show you one of the weapons in Immortal Redneck we're working on.

    Half Life 3 confirmed? :D

     
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  40. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    The weapon is copyright ? :D
     
  41. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Yeah - by Ace Hardware. :D
     
  42. Dvonio

    Dvonio

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    Hey! This hasnt been updated in a loong time!

    We have a gameplay video for you all!



    Enjoy and let us know what do you think about it!

    Thanks!!
     
  43. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    I like a lot the hub and the skill tree idea, great job here.
    Do you plan some rooms with open roof ?
    Also the actual rooms are very red lightening only, they would need some more lights and floor diversity like blue glowing big foutains areas you can walk on or some green poisonous areas , i don't know.
    Keep up the good job.
     
  44. NiloBR

    NiloBR

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    nice.... really cool game... i wanna play this!!!
    my only criticism is that i wish that the shader were more in line with your concept art.... is such a beautiful art style u have here, i want to play on that world.... :)
     
  45. KheltonHeadley

    KheltonHeadley

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    Love the art style dude.
     
  46. Dvonio

    Dvonio

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    Hey! Not with fully open roof but maybe with some holes in them so the light comes in from the exterior! we are including water in the rooms now and in the future we plan to include more nature elements, thanks for the comment!

    Thanks guys!
     
  47. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Why not ? Like Ziggurat, there is no real technical issue to make open roofs.
     
  48. Dvonio

    Dvonio

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    In Immortal Redneck you are in the inside of a pyramid, theres no real reason to make complete open roofs, will take a look into it tho, but cant promise anything.

    Is not about technical issues! :p
     
  49. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    I see, but it is still a game, you can do anything, why not some connected pyramids ? When you finished visiting one pyramid and beat the boss, you could roam in dungeons with open roof leading to the next pyramid.
    Anyway, it is perhaps better you keep it simple to finish the game instead of bringing more diversity that means more work.
     
  50. CremaGames

    CremaGames

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    Blacklight and RavenOfCode like this.