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Big Design Updates

Hey ho! It’s been a while since last devblogging. The development was a bit sluggish with lockdowns and all causing a bit of strain but we are back in business and with some more stuff coming up. There’s been more design work, patching up those open questions about the final game experience. There’s more content coming.

I will list here the more considerable bits.

  1. The game experience will shift towards 1. slower, 2. atmospheric, 3. “survival”. This means that playing the game won’t be all jumping around and tossing the parts to places, but the game experience will also involve finding the parts and hauling and handling them. The game will try to create an immersion where the player can feel the toil of handling heavy objects and also feel the weather conditions.
  2. Following this idea, walking will be a bit slower than your average FPS and the character won’t run and jump at least so easily. There will be fatigue.
  3. Immersive weathers. A level can be initialized with varying weather parameters including wind, heavy rain and blinding sunlight. Unlike in FPS games where weathers are minimised not to disturb the main focus which is shooting the enemies, in Junk Architect the game allows using immersive weathers. Weathers are mostly implemented at this point.
  4. Levels will be created by reusing maps with different weather parameters and object locations, which should give a feeling of being in a new world every time, because the maps are not the main focus in the game but the resources are. Whether to use procedural generation here is an open question but at least AI will be used in generating static levels.
  5. The game idea is to flatten objects, such as cars, to building elements. To add immersion and atmosphere, the player needs to manually perform the deforming using the……… SLEDGEHAMMER. This will be a dynamic deformation – you’ll bang the objects and they will change shape dynamically which will be controlled to guide the final shape. This is implemented by actually deforming the object meshes. These will add to the creative immersion: each flattened object will look different and the wall you erect looks like you, because you just freely shaped it from a car. This is also quite a scary thing to try and pull off – players will be easily able to somehow destroy the game unless the deformation is very accurately controlled.
  6. The character has first person arms and there’s IK when grabbing objects, so the character’s hands are following the objects the player is handling. Previously the arms were third person arms which severely limits your options. These are kinky to optimise and you don’t see them used a lot in lower budget games. There’s been a lot of learning to use the Opsive character controller library, which by the way is great and with a bit of learning seems to get anything done, so kudos to Opsive.
  7. First person animations are already done for
    1. A hauling hook with rope
    2. Sledgehammer
    3. A bottle of go juice (will be used to replenish that fatigue somehow)
    4. Pushing an object: the player will mouse-drag and the character will push forward. The player will be able to control the direction.
    5. Lifting an object: same as above but the direction will be upwards from the control point