Category Archives: menus

New boss, new areas and new logo

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Hello everyone! We are back from the update hiatus to show you how things are progressing and take on different areas of the development. We’ve had some setbacks the last months regarding the bosses since they needed a LOT more testing and fixing than we previously expected.

Our main problem with the “human” ones is that we wanted them to perform as realistic as they can (reacting to the player, activating traps, taking countermeasures on Subject W’s skills and more) so they prevented us from progressing with other parts of the game until they worked fine. Hopefully the new ones will take less time considering all the experience learned from them. In any case, let’s have a look at some of the stuff we’ve been working on.

The Simbiot

This is the boss designed by one of our top tier backers, Yannis Tanopoulos. It is an hybrid robot that combines the organic properties of a bio-engineered seed with the dangerous AI programmed by the G.E.R. specialists, resulting in a non-stoppable machine. Players will have to discover how to take it out and retrieve the shell ability generated by its core.

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The design process for the Simbiot took a little while, and it evolved from an animal-focused robot to a human-like prototype (an upgraded version of the cervids). We know that some of the quadrupeds look rad, but we faced two problems with their appearance: 1) this design required problematic animations and 2) the level design of the boss stage was created to match a more platform focused confrontation -the assembly line-, so we decided to go with the biped concept.

The armour idea was there from the beginning, but Yannis realized that we should give it a more organic look since the metallic plates didn’t match the shell effect created by the skill of the Simbiot core. With this in mind we decided to integrate the spikes from Subject W’s shell design, developing that peculiarity on the game’s script and giving it a narrative purpose.

 

 

One thing that makes it stand out is that it has 3 different animation sets. After receiving an attack the shell that protects it will broke, showing less pieces of armour with each clash until exposing its core.

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New designs for backgrounds and color grading

Areas under construction

To avoid repetition on some locations we decided to include new sprites to represent work-in-progress sectors of the facility. This designs show structural building materials such as pillars, wall plates, ladders, and cables.

Other levels have one set of wall sprites and for this area we created two: one composed of darker pieces -for the raw background- and a second one for the metallic frame and the plates without painting.

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To emphasize the isolated feeling we avoided to put lightning inside this corridors and added darker Hue/Saturation layers to give an additional somber tone to it.

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Following this concept we created more elements for abandoned elevator shafts where players need to do some platforming and find the correct path in order to advance.

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The lightning bulbs serve to identify the gaps on the floor connecting each height.

Cold chamber redesign and chemical area

A graphic overhaul has been made to this stages since we released the demo. We felt that the grading layer (or LUT) applied to the camera killed the tones of Subject W, the enemies, and the interactive elements, so in order to fix this we touched a little bit the color palette. Now the background pieces have a brighter/more metallic look, the strong blue lightning contrast of the friezes has been reduced and the color grading is lighter (the old one looked over-saturated on certain screens).

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The sprites remain practically identical with the exception of the pipes that now have a more volumetric effect accompanied by a parallel shadow effect.

They are also connected to the higher part of the wall instead the low part of the frieze (it was a little odd since this element doesn’t have depth).

The old storage wall plates have been reused for an area where the chemicals of G.E.R. are stored. For this section we can apply a stronger LUT than the one used to the cold chambers, reinforcing the visual sensation of chemical processing (plus most of the enemies of this sector are hazard-suit scientist / cervid robots which stand out more than other enemies on strong RGB LUTs, so it ended up being a win-win situation).

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Surveillance area

The corridors connecting the surveillance sector now have the same frieze design of the server/control rooms, giving more continuity to this area. A different blue-ish LUT has been applied to the camera to avoid color overlapping / desaturation of certain tones such as orange, yellow and green (maps, signals and even UI elements were affected by this).

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New game logo and menu

It’s been a while since our last UI / graphic design update so we wanted to show you the all new Paradise Lost: First Contact logotype.

Some time ago we abandoned the narrow font style used in multiple UI elements because they have readability issues in long paragraphs (problematic in lower resolutions or smaller screens like the Switch one) so we decided to implement a more rounded font on the logo, following the same design lign of the menus.

Besides this, a lot of games and sci-fi movies use the same kind of aesthetic defined by a stretched height font with fixed-width between letters akin to  A L I E N   (see what I did there with the spacing? XD).

The leaf graphic used on the HUD and other menus was added to close the A / E gaps and decorate the lines of other letters, giving a more distinguishable and original look to the font.

Game menu

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The main menu has been redesigned too. The list of options and the new logo have been moved to the left, giving more space for the animations to stand out and allowing us to add new lines if needed. The leaf selector and the font follow the same UI design used on the Skill tree, Pictures/Bios and other options, giving more cohesion to all the game menus.

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Some of you might prefer the old design but the non-pixel font inside the monitor seemed out of place and everything looked too similar to the Super Metroid menu.

Animations for cutscenes

Creating a dialogue sequence

The other big obstacle to overcome as of now is the big amount of animations that need to be done for the cutscenes. On most cases the characters require multiple animation sequences with the start, loop and stop states to read a paragraph.

The first and last states are designed to move from one action to another without cuts, and this is multiplied by the number of poses needed to reflect the mood of a character while doing a scene (hesitant, angry, frightened, etc.).

Only one member of the team takes charge of this so it is taking a while to complete all of them :-/  We try to recycle as much dialogue animations as we can, but sometimes is easy to lose focus on what is needed/what doesn’t worth the time, so planning is essential before we start working on a cutscene.

Monitors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the conversations between important characters take place via videoconference. For this purpose a lot of graphics were designed to show the other person on a big screen, so players can see who the speaker is and what is doing. They are also used to show maps or other info related to the events of a scene.

Scientists

 

 

 

 

A lot of scientist appear on cutscenes so a big amount of animations have been prepared for them. Since we are still waiting for some backers to fill their bio files they are mostly bald until the final images are sent 😀

Guards

 

 

 

Guards needed additional actions outside their gameplay routines like use objects, salute, run without pursuing or get frightened.

Leonard White  

 

 

 

 

White is one of the main characters of the game and the responsible of the Robotics section of G.E.R. He will be tracking us down and following our every step in order to stop us. He also works with the engineering labs, where they developed his prosthetic arm.

Fixing things up and tweaking some mechanics

Besides level design, boss development and cutscenes we’ve been upgrading some mechanics and doing an exhaustive work of testing to fix key areas of the game. Here are some of the things done in the last months:

Cervids

We worked a little more on the cervid behaviours. This enemies are able to rotate half of their body to see if Subject W is on their surroundings, causing problems in the way the body turns if we are near them and interact with their patrol. They also had problems shifting from an attack state to the uncovering action at the moment W entered a hideout, launching their electric whip instead of kicking the plant out of it.

Another fix was related to the way multiple cervids reacted inside a room and how they electrocuted the conducts if W was inside one and suddenly exited from the same trapdoor they were using to generate the electric current (doing it too fast broke them and they didn’t attack us after pursuing the plant).

Saws

The original saws had their patrol area outside of them, which occupied the entire floor of a room. This made them extremely dangerous because when players touched the ground the saw came right after them from any point of said room. Now this area is within the saw and covers a shorter range, giving more time to maneuver.

In addition there’s a new script called “first avoid” to force them to go in the opposite direction of players when they enter a room regardless of the direction (it was nerve-racking to see them coming after you while crossing the door).

Recovery time before blocking them with a decoy is a little longer too, allowing players to reach safe platforms easily.

Pushable boxes

This elements move twice the distance that they did before. Some parts of the game are based on moving boxes from one place to another and this make the mechanic less stressful.

Gas grenades with a timer

The grenades dropped on conducts by guards have a time before extinguishing, giving players time to re-enter it again from a trapdoor without the need to respawn the level.

Falling from corners

Subject W’s running and falling actions have been altered in order to properly recognize a platform’s corner (running transitioned so fast from one state to another that it jumped states and showed the plant falling with the run animation instead of the slip one).

Persistence of collectibles and room swapping

Now pictures and skill point containers work on both versions of a room. In PLFC a room can change its status while maintaining its current position on the map (for example: from regular lab to lab on flames > both rooms have the same collectible to pic, independently of the state of the level). Essentially, they are different rooms that change from one to another when a trigger is activated. Now this elements detect if they are being collected in any room version in order to disappear on the rest of them (we needed to reesctructure some levels too in order to let players come back for this objects regardless of a level state due to narrative events).

Reinforcement

When the alert state goes off and the enemy has lost track of Subject W the reinforcement exits the room ignoring the “find and seek” state, making things easier for the player to escape.

We also included a new script that allow enemies to call different types of reinforcement depending on our necessities and the type of level that fits them better (cervid, guard, pyroguard…)

Prompts

The interactive prompts have been reworked to follow the player while moving near an object and the button/key graphic has a darker fill to help them stand out on any surface.

Mines

This useful traps now have lower colliders to allow players perform the double jump easier.

Backer bios

We still need some of the high-end backers data to fill their documentation on the avatar form sent to them through Kickstarter private messages and e-mails.

If you are one of them and don’t send us the proper info in a few weeks we’ll need to include you with a design and name of our own choice (the development needs to move on and the bios section/cutscenes of the game have to be closed). Don’t miss that out!

Reuploading the web

Some of you have written us about a virus that infected our web, so we are doing maintenance labors on it and moving from WordPress to a dedicated space where we can have a better control of anything that involves the site. Sorry for the inconveniences and thanks for keeping an eye on it!

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We are still working seven days a week to have the game as early as possible this year, but sometimes unexpected things get in our way and delay the development process. Being a team of three doesn’t help much either since every member needs to do multitasking on multiple areas, but it seems that we are able to handle everything for the most part. If other setbacks appear on the way be sure that we’ll inform you about it and hope that we can dodge any bullet that comes our way!

In-game menus, new traps, shader improvements, debugging

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Long time no see! We’ve been on multitask mode the last months, balancing the gameplay with continuous testing and adding new content in form of enemies and bosses.

A lot of time has been spent debugging one of the most challenging chapters of the game, focused entirely on puzzle solving and interaction with the player surroundings. It took us a little more than expected but the result was worth the effort since it gives a twist to the game narrative and adds a great variety of mechanics.

And in the end that is our main focus with this project, trying to develop an experience that is constantly shaping the gameplay and allows players to face situations in their own way. Now let’s take a look at some of the things that we’ve been working on.

Start Menu: skills, collectibles, tutorials and options

All game menus are coded and completely functional by now, though some of the designs like the skill set descriptions, photo locations, or tutorials are unfinished and will remain so probably until the game is completely balanced and tested -Fx need to be added too-. Here you can have a look at the structure of the START / ENTER menu and its navigation in detail.

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Skill tree

This is the interface where players will be able to see what abilities have been unlocked, their skill set and the number of skill points obtained to enhance them.

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The skill points are shown in the center of the tree and can be used to power up all the abilities that have an icon with the shape of said points below them.

These abilities can be reset to LV1 on Garden rooms -Save places-, giving the possibility to readapt the gameplay strategy for each player -some may prefer to boost the offensive skills or upgrade other stealth techniques instead-. This makes the gameplay more malleable and could help players to overcome certain situations if they have problems solving them with their current set of abilities.

Collectibles

Pictures

Della’s pictures will be scattered throughout the facility and will reveal the location of hidden skill points. Once players figure out the room revealed by a photo, an interactive prompt will appear upon the object that hides the skill point. Pressing the action button near it will drop this item.

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Bio Files

Once an important scene has been played the personal info of certain characters will appear below this submenu.

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The texts will expand the universe of the game and, also, show the Kickstarter profiles send by backers of the Replicant and above tier -don’t worry, we didn’t gather your bios yet. We’ll let you know by private message and e-mail-.

Options

Not much to say about this. You’ll be able to change the resolution, audio, language, and other common stuff that can be found in most games. The game options submenu allows to load a game file or exit to the main menu / desktop.

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New development tools

Development tools have been created in the meantime to improve different work routines like to speed up the creation of rooms and the testing process. This is a selection of some of the most useful:

Room Version Swapper

This script allows us to change entire rooms, adding or modifying enemies, situations, and graphics inside them such as backgrounds and interactive objects -platforms, panels, etc.- while maintaining the main structure of the rooms unaltered -sorting layers, positions, and others-. This was required for different reasons like changing complete rooms for aesthetic purposes -going from a regular background to a burned one with partial parts of both rooms intact, for example- or the need to show a different color adjustment curve for a certain situation.

 

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In reality, this script only changes the room a door is pointing at, so when you cross that door the room seems different than before. The consequences of doing this, however, are much more complicated to deal with, considering that we have to update the map and the internal information about the room. Persistence of objects in both rooms becomes a bit tricky too.

Replace instances

A simple tool to replace selected game objects with other ones on the editor, useful for changing decorations on duplicated rooms or updating objects without losing old prefabs. It preserves the position of the object on the scene and the sorting layer.

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Improved climbable platforms

Since not all the platforms need to show a climbable prompt on both sides – for example, connected shelves, stacked piles of boxes, etc.- we needed to unfold each interactive platform on the project hierarchy and deactivate its properties in order to make it unclimbable.

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With this new script we can check / uncheck this option inside the script if an object needs to have an active corner to be climbable.

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Additionally, any side that’s left activated will check every frame if it’s truly climbable or has to deactivate itself in case anything is blocking the way like a pushable platform, or moving the platform itself and losing the ground.

Upgrading the World generator

The rooms are conceived as individual entities which in turn are part of another GameObject: the chapter in question stores multiple room prefabs with different components and properties so it took some time for the engine to create playable builds for testing. The larger the project was growing, the longer it took to generate those builds so we decided to make a new option on our own Level editor tool to generate specific areas of the map instead of loading the whole bunch of stages and connections between them. Now we can create test builds in no time and perform changes faster.

Gameplay updates

Removing the walk restriction for the Camo ability

As you were able to experience after unlocking the Camo skill on the playable demo, anytime you make a movement while having the invisibility on Subject W will abandon this state and left the player exposed to the enemies.

Our main goal with this ability was to give players a tool to resolve certain situations and not overshadow the rest of the skills or avoid the use of the surroundings -basically going invisible and walking by most of the enemies-. Allowing certain npcs to detect us depending on the Level of the skill helped to balance it, but on the other hand we couldn’t help but sense that penalizing players to stay quiet during its use was a little bit harsh and the cost of wasting an energy leaf if they press the skill inadvertently or need to maneuver during its use might be a little abusive.

We tuned up this mechanic and now you can move with the camo active. Enemies will still be able to detect Subject W if you move on Camo mode and they will attack until the plant stays put in another position (think of it as the Predator visual effect: quiet is untraceable but the graphic distortion generated by any movement reveals its position). A light tint effect was added to the camouflage on movement to differentiate both states.

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As you can see in the video, enemies will stay in front of the last point where they identified the plant so players won’t walk past them every time to avoid complex situations. Upgrading the skill to another level will increase the time of use to avoid enemies on alert state.

Pixel perfect animations for state bubbles

So far these bubbles -which represent if an enemy is distracted, searching, alerted, or knocked out- showed a smooth transition emptying the bubble of its color to reflect the amount of time left.

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Each bubble box has an icon inside it, and these kinds of transitions sometimes blurred the graphic and the final design wasn’t very clear so we decided to show progress pixel by pixel, blending with the pixel perfect look of the game.

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New decoy

Well, not exactly new but we made a few tweaks to it. First of all, we noticed that making the decoy appear by Subject W’s side caused different errors like getting stuck inside a box or appearing in the air near a corner before falling:

 

Now the decoy appears in front of Subject W to avoid these problems:

Also, in order to differentiate both W and the decoy we changed its color scheme and tinted its seed green like the one of Subject W to relate them aesthetically.

Graphic improvements

Door mechanisms

It is only a simple detail but now the door gap shows more detail instead of having a black mass on their inside when the door is open.

New corridor maps

These graphics have been reworked to show a more clean design of a sector and stand out the colors representing Save gardens, elevators, and others.

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Also, the squared modules are imported as individual game objects instead of full maps designed by hand outside the game engine. This helps decrease the size of the graphic atlas and allows to quickly modify them if rooms that are changed or replaced.

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LED lights for different decorations

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Animations of flickering LEDs have been added to different elements such as computers, servers, and other electronics, giving more depth and richness to the backgrounds.

Climbable surfaces for the decoy

A lot of interactive panels can -or must- be accessed by the decoy so we created larger surfaces for this elements in order to see that they both work as a panel and as a platform.

Skin shading achieved

As shown on Update #49 we were looking for a way to modify the color palette of a character while applying other effects above it, like the red alarm layer. Eventually, we ended up doing one of the first ideas we had and one which was suggested by some of you -huge thanks to those that tried to help us- so we made an uber-shader capable of processing all the color effects in place at any given point.

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A shader is created for every type of enemy that we are going to need, these shaders take a variable amount of colors -that varies on the type of character- and when the shader detects a pixel with one of these colors it changes it to another color -for every original color we have another which is going to replace it-. Apart from this, the shader is capable of tinting and blending external color effects with the character’s current palette.

More enemies and traps

Machinegun

These turrets won’t allow Subject W to go through a specific way by shooting viciously in our direction if we dare to go pass their warning range.

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They can be disarmed if we deactivate their button from behind or drop a decoy without being noticed:

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Saw

Remember those annoying enemies from Megaman that run in your direction any time that you put a foot on the floor? They are back! Well, more or less…

The saws are designed to interrupt their patrol routine when either Subject W or the decoy are at surface level. The camo ability doesn’t work in this case but the decoys can stuck them temporarily.

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Development status

It could seem that we slowed down a little bit in content creation since the game required a huge amount of debugging for certain levels that were built with multiple versions, but we are developing most of the milestones much faster that months ago. Still, there’s sooo much stuff that needs to be added, especially in the bosses department. We are putting around 10 hours a day on the project -and happy to do so if we manage to give you a polished and entertaining product- but even with all that time invested in the development, we are still unable to give a closed release window as of now. We usually resolve key milestones while building levels and testing, but there’s a limit to the stuff we can do being a team of 3 with a single programmer. Luckily the core is solid and from now on most things rely on already made gameplay mechanics, but a pair of enemies and some of the bosses still require new structures and ad hoc routines that can’t be reused from other ones.

In any case, we can state for sure that 2018 will be the final year of development for Paradise Lost and we’ll -luckily- complete the final bits of the game for the first quarter of the year. With that in mind, we don’t want to rush it and have an early release with a lack of content so we’ll keep you constantly updated about any issue.

As always, thanks for your support.