Let's Play: Tutorial Mission news - Epsylon

Long time overdue news posts incoming. News posts on IndieDB had been cut in the recent month for a reason. The news system is really time consuming. For this reason since this year news are going to be posted first on the Project Twitter Account while IndieDB will get nows posts here and there. Today is though one such day and thus without further ado...

This video here is taking you from the start all the way through the tutorial mission. It introduces the player to human game mechanics as well as allowing the player to collect his first clues and leads to get started. Creating the tutorial mission takes a lot longer than the real scenarios later on since the player has to be pulled tightly on a short leash through all he has to see and do. I had to twist, rework and modify the mission a bunch of times to get the player in contact with all important game mechanics while preventing it from feeling artificial or staged. Creating all the new art assets, engine improvements and new game mechanics consumed the rest. The real scenarios will be faster since the player free roaming there.

But enough of all this, onwards to the video. Somebody wanted to add music but dropped out some time ago. So no background music. If you want to jump in and fill this spot feel free to contact me. Also there is no voice acting in this video and will not be in future videos. It makes no sense to do voice acting if the lines are not all finished so I left it out. With this out of the way, good watch!

Out of the many things worked a few notes for those interested:

• Modular building construction. The inside of the building is made from reusable and customizeable building pieces. Each pieces holds all information: geometry, lighting, navigation meshes, collision, movie-camera areas and many more. Buildings will be generated using those later on. I'll make a separate video about the movie-camera soon.
• Finished computer snooping. Rummage around mails and files downloading them to your smartphone for later use. Need to poke at info you found? Keep the phone out keep the info ready at hand.
• Mini-Map in form of a smartphone app. No floating mini-map somewhere in a screen corner. The rest of the UI is going to vanish too soon.
• Swiss-Army-Knife. This is your Multi-Tool. Pull it out whenever you want to tinker with something. See if you can find all the things you will be able to do.
• Climbing on/through things. Player can not jump around anytime he wants. Climbing is an own action now. Much better this way
• Close-up examine objects to find more clues
• Styled-Text and dynamic content support on conversation. Tutorial sections are one use of it. More will follow.
• Materials changing with weather (wet on rainy like after leaving the building)
• More models, more textures, mode sounds, more conversation... it starts building up.