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A true-first-person VR game in homage to the classics such as Nethack and Eye of the Beholder, with a focus on survival gameplay.

Post news Report RSS Storyteller: Fireside Tales Released! [Alpha 0.2]

Storyteller: Fireside Tales Alpha 0.2 Released - I've finally got my immersive audiobook player (includes 7 public domain H. P. Lovecraft audiobooks) to a state where it's worth sharing. Supports Oculus Rift DK2 and monitor play.

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Storyteller: Fireside Tales Screenshots and Splash

Storyteller is an immersive audiobook player. It makes a regular audiobook sound like it's being read to you from the storyteller hermit character in his hermit cave. Play one of the included public domain works of H. P. Lovecraft, or play your own by replacing user_audio.ogg in the .exe directory with your own .ogg file (MP3 support planned), and then selecting "User Audio" on the menu.

KEYBINDS/HOW TO USE

Keybinds:

  • F1 - Reset HMD (I don't know if this works)
  • Spacebar - Pause/Play current book (I think it might not default to anything, so if nothing happens when you press Spacebar, select a book on the menu first).
  • Enter - Create bookmark at current time. Note: This does not currently save per-book. So you could do weird things like make a bookmark that's greater than duration of the audio. I don't really need bug reports for this case - I know it's there but can't fix it until I get home today.
  • Right/Up Arrows - Cycle bookmarks. This will skip to the first bookmark, and so on, until it loops bookmarks.
  • Escape or F2 - Opens or closes the menu-book (you can exit from the menu, just hover over the book in the center column, bottom row).
  • ~ (Tilde) - Brings up console

Using the book-menu system (see below for screenshot examples):

To use the menu, just look at one of the books - text will appear and slowly fade from one color to another to indicate activation time. It takes 4s to select a book. The text will change colors to indicate this. Once an item has been selected in that way, if it's an audiobook title, it will start playing and the menu-book will close.

Blog Page: Storyteller: Fireside Tales Info and Download Page

Download: Storyteller: Fireside Tales - Alpha 0.2 Build (IndieDB)
Download: Storyteller: Fireside Tales - Alpha 0.2 Build
(Mediafire Mirror)

Updates/New Features

  • Added tesselation to the player body and head - I don't know if this is really doing much since the model isn't really set up for it, so let me know your feedback. I can also turn it down more, as it's on pretty high right now.
  • Added some dripping effects for the puddles, as well as sounds. I tried to make the sounds for the drips low enough that they sound good but are not distracting.
  • Fog!
  • Reflection capture probes. These should make everything look a bit nicer and don't cost much.

New Menu System

  • Instead of one large book, which had a convoluted method for determining what word was being looked at, I've switched to using an array of 9 books floating in front of the player.
  • Text his hidden by default - when you look, it appears and starts to (smoothly - I hated that ticking fade in the first build) fade to the activation/highlight color from the default color.
  • The activation time is now 4s. With the smoother fade between colors, I felt this time was also a nicer feel. Long enough to not accidentally activate something, but shorter than the 5s wait from before.
  • The logic and code behind how the timer for fading works, as well as for activating a book, is far cleaner and more efficient than before.
  • It's overall a lot less buggy and feels much nicer to use.

Screenshots

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