Rebirth Windows, Mac, Linux game

2 comments by Rico21745 on Mar 27th, 2013

So it's been a while. Sorry about that!

I've been super focused on the game and trying to get work done every day after I get home from the day job. Little by little, the game is really starting to take shape.

There are some rather large systems I've been working on in the last few months, which really are hard to show to people since some of them are tweaks, others are complete re-writes (woe is me, I always have to fight temptation to re-work stuff when I feel something isn't up to snuff). Things I've been working on like the camera system, horror... stuff, a lot of internal tools to allow the team to produce content so that we can start getting cranking on some more sorely needed content for the game.

Here's a short list of the things I've been working on, cutting away the other less meaningful stuff to external folks:

• Procedural Building generation - Some large improvements here.
• Procedural Terrain generation - We can now create huge, seamless, procedurally generated terrains at a whim. My goal is to integrate these into the game so that when you start a new game you get a brand new world every time. Currently I'm generating the worlds in our editor, but my goal is to later build it into the game.
• New Camera - It's still very much a work in progress. This camera works a lot more smoothly, uses physics and has some more advanced capabilities like mouse smoothing, acceleration, post process effects, etc.
• New enemies - We'll show these guys soon. I'm still working on getting them ingame, I'd rather show them to you in video form :-)
• New environments - You will see these, coupled with Procedural Building generation 2.0 next update probably. I'm SUPER excited to show you the work of our new artist, Braiden. It's a marked improvement over some of our current indoor environments.
• A Menu system - For the longest time, we have worked without menus of any kind. What I built is a little rudimentary since I find it hard to motivate myself to work on menus when there's bigger stuff to work on, but this is all part of a push on my part to get a good vertical slice of the game ready this year for a potential alpha. When it's done!
• New abilities - The ability to throw rocks to distract enemies, for example.
• New Events system - Allows us to create events using our editor, such as horror scares and such. A key component. It also allows me to randomize the chance of these events... muahahaha!

Today's Juicy update

So I managed to pry myself away from work to show you guys some WIP shots of our procedural terrain generation. These terrains were created 100% procedurally, no artist touched them, it was all automated and created by a series of variables. Notice there are no buildings and such placed, that's the next step!

The key importance here is really two-fold:

1. It creates endless possibilities by allowing us to create endless amounts of randomized levels and terrain types, thus expanding replayability.
2. It allows the artists to focus on creating 3d assets for the game. Our resources are few, time is limited, so this will be a huge time saver.

Without further ado, here are the shots. Enjoy!