Epsylon - The Guardians Of Xendron

Background Story / Introduction

   It's late this afternoon when Sam and Tedeon are resting on the near hillside. Georgo joins up to tell them about the informations he squeezed out of his informant. They learned some days ago that the old facility in the valley side has found some new occupants. A year ago the facility had been shut down. But now there seems to be life in there. Sam and Georgo decide to pull off a night operation. After the nightfall the two enter the office part of the facility. To their astonishment nobody could be found. From the last time they entered here they knew where to find the labs. Down there nobody could be found neither. It looks like they had been forced to leave. Damage marks suggest there had been a fight. After some more searching around they find a address of a dimension: alpha-10, the world Odjin comes from. They had been there only once when they met Odjin. With only this little information they decided to head over to alpha-10 with the entire team to investigate further. The next day they set off for alpha-10 not knowing that they ended up in one of their most tricky case they ever had.

Gameplay

   All your actions have large influence on the events in the world. It is better to conduct your investigation without lethal force if possible. As you are a stranger in this world people tend to not tell you all they know so you have to find your own ways to gather the informations you need to crack the case. Sometimes you can not get around taking a fight. There are multiple ways to solve the case depending on how you approach the investigation. Be careful though with whome you talk and what you do. The underworld is watching you and if they catch wind of you messing with their business they will carry out counter measures which can range from making "vanish" information you seek all the way to trying to silence you. Various features can help you on your way:

  • The interactive environment allows you to use objects in various ways. Especially useful sneaking around in places you are not supposed to be to begin with. The AI reacts to the changes which can be to your advantage (for example blocking view) or disadvantage (for example objects missing from where they should be).
  • Fully interactive computers are a good source for informations. Snoop through emails or in general the content of the computer. You never know what you find in there. Some computers also control other objects.
  • Different camera perspectives including the Dragon-View mode allow you to play the game the way you like it.
  • Implant systems are useful to get throught tight and deadly spots where other characters have troubles. Odjin is equipped with one of those and is especially useful for entering hostile zones.
  • Investigating alone can be dangerous and inefficient. Use your team members to work on cases at the same time. This can be done by working them in different locations or entering places as a group. Whatever you do keep in mind that the individual characters have their individual strength. Combine them to get through to the end.
  • The investigation system helps you solve your cases. Keep track of informations about various entities in the world as well as the progress on your investigation. Most of the time you are not told where the information is you are looking for so use the entity informations as well as snooping around to find it.

One of the key points is that the story is part of the game mechanics. It is not told to the player by hitting NPCs. The story is the main case in the investigation. So to learn the story solve the investigation. Depending on how you solve it you can learn more or less about the story. It is therefore useful to look sometimes deeper than requested.

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2 comments by Dragonlord on Dec 3rd, 2011

Monorail System

   The main work went into building a monorail for the player to use. This took longer than expected mainly due to the fact that the monorail had been modeled in Blender 2.6 and the export scripts had to be ported over first. Since B26 is entirely different than B249 in the Python API this took a lot of time to get working properly again.

   The monorail is a City Internal Monorail System found in larger cities. There's also an intercity monorail but that one looks a bit different. The player can use it to get from one part of the city to the other. It's thus a sort of fast-traveling system just that the time runs with it. The original high resolution model can be found here (click on the image):


    In this post you find also links to the high resolution versions of each individual rendered image. The in-game version you find below in the video. The total triangle count of the entire train with 3 wagons clocks in at around 200k.

   To get this working a couple of features had to be implemented first. The monorail composes of various individual parts which can be assembled in the world editor like the wagon, interior, doors, seats, windows and so forth. So you can assemble your own monorail easily by stringing together as many wagons as you want and adding whatever props to it. For this to work Prop elements obtained two now properties "name" and "attachTo". Instead of an automatic (ID) based attachment system the game uses a pure property based attachment system. So each wagon has a unique "name" property and all props you want to attach to it has to have a matching "attachTo" property. You can use this for all kinds of objects descending from Prop. Once placed the game takes care of linking the entire train properly at run-time for you. This also includes the wagon connectors which deform if the connected wagons angle.

Monorail

    Another nice addition is the Track System. The game provides a bunch of Track Segments you can place in the world editor. They define track points allowing the game to automatically connect them to a fully functional track. Just place the track segments in the world editor touching each other and you get a fully functional track with no additional work. Place the monorail on the track and the game assigns it automatically to it. This kind of automatic assignment will be used more in the game later on to make map crafting faster.

    Last but not least the monorail wagons have various dynamic texture panels all around. I placed some example ads on them including some which obviously will not be in the final game. Furthermore they have two monitors which can be used for dynamic stuff if required.

   The travel screen will be added later on including monorail stations. So here a little test video showing a simple riding on the monorail without map transition (if ModDB doesn't show HD go here).

Promotional Image

   A Promotional Image has been created recently for those interested in showing their support. You can download the image from the deviant art post directly to show your support giving them to your friends or including them in your blog.

Miscelaneous

   Some time during this year a new team member tried his hands on office props and such. I didn't mention this earlier since it has not been sure if he sticks. Since I didn't get any response anymore since a couple of month he's most probably MIA, a common problem. Nevertheless I managed to get some work in progress of the props before he vanished. Made a few of them game ready. More to come once the monorail is fully working with map transition as I want it.

Some Office Furniture

IOTY

Indie of the Year Awards

It's the time of year again as you have noticed for sure. So let's see...
 
You want to do some detective work "your own way" where your decisions matter?
You want to solve a big case with mysteries and conspiracies?
You want to use fist-arguments if conversation doesn't help the trick?
You want to know how a dragon can help solve tricky cases?
You want to see some unconventional dragon augmentations?
You want to play an augmented dragon?
You want some non-cliché dragons in a non-cliché sci-fi world?
You want to know what Full Body Motion Feedback is all about?
You want a native Linux game that's not Yet Another FPS Game?
You want to get your hands on a game with great modding potential?

 
Then it's time to show your support by voting for us in the IOTY as an Upcoming Game! You find the "Vote Now" button at the top of the Epsylon game profile.
 
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Comments  (0 - 10 of 105)
SkitZaY
SkitZaY Aug 3 2010, 7:15pm says:

Woah, you've been going on this for ages.

+4 votes     reply to comment
CD_TOASTER
CD_TOASTER Jul 13 2010, 8:42am says:

i've been watching this for years (i dont mean this to say you should be working faster), good to see things happening

+2 votes     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jul 13 2010, 10:37am replied:

Yeah I know it's not the fastest. But if you are forced to do all on your own things don't go fast. I'll though implement in the time to come some stuff which should help me to get things done faster. Not optimal but it should allow this project to get somewhere in a reasonable time.

+3 votes     reply to comment
Savci
Savci Aug 17 2010, 6:07pm replied:

I'm sure you know the 0 A.D. team a bit, that game's Alpha took 9 years I heard.
But yeah, we look forward to updates till then!

+2 votes     reply to comment
SinKing
SinKing Feb 27 2010, 5:24pm says:

you have to include some pretty pics in your updates, not just user interface pictures :)

good job though, still on course. Respect!

+2 votes     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Feb 27 2010, 7:12pm replied:

Sorry, don't have an artist. I'm limited in what I can do.

+2 votes     reply to comment
thunderising
thunderising Jan 20 2010, 10:07am says:

this is dead//

-3 votes     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jan 29 2010, 1:32pm replied:

So with other words you have to watch the game profile and the "Drag[en]gine Game Engine" profile as the updates are posted there. Unfortunately required since the ModDB profile link feature only works on paper but not in reality.

+1 vote     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jan 28 2010, 9:20pm replied:

It's not. The updates are just posted on the game engine profile not the game profile itself.

+1 vote     reply to comment
LiquidusWolf
LiquidusWolf Dec 20 2009, 2:15am says:

Really nice ideas

+2 votes     reply to comment
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Epsylon
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Windows, Linux
Developer
Team Epsylon
Engine
Drag[en]gine
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