Clairvoyance: Age of Starflight - Topdown Adventure Game

This is Clairvoyance!

CURRENT PHASE: CONCEPT

Clairvoyance: Age of Starflight is a topdown shooter sandbox adventure game. The theme is “part of a whole”. As in, the game won’t treat the player as a legendary hero, chosen one, or otherwise godly being. This is a concept that always irked me in openworld design, especially in MMOs (DISCLAIMER: No online play is planned!). In my opinion, why go through a beautiful, inhabited world if you’re not regarded as part of it, and instead as “someone better than it”? Sometimes, you just wanna be part of it. That’s what I’m trying to do with Galaxy.

The basic concept of the game is a big universe. There are multiple star systems, each with one or two landable planets. Each planet will have a city on it in some form, sometimes small, sometimes half-decently-large. But always different. The player will be able to touch down planetside and traverse the city, talk to people, grab a drink, get a mission, and go into their ship to fly to their next destination. (Yes, ships will be flyable! But only in space. There’s going to be a lot to do in space, from random anomalies to discover, to pirates and muggers to overcome, and even a war! But I’ll get to that.) Yes, I’m aware that this project will take a lot of time, dedication, and talent. I’m totally aware of that. But I’m hoping that a thread will help keep me on track with this one.

This may be a deal breaker for a lot of you, but this game will be a topdown shooter. Both in space and on the ground. WASD will move (changeable, of course!) and the mouse will look around. In your ship, WASD will move the ship, but mouse will serve more as a reticle for targeting. Turning will be done with A and D. (The reason for the separation between space and ground controls is to keep things different enough to feel fresh, but not different enough to look like two totally different games (lookin at you, Star Trek Online!).

The way I want to do the “story” is with a web. Think of an advanced Star Fox 64. Instead of one starting mission with hidden objectives to get to the hidden missions, there are multiple starting missions that give you different missions depending on your outcome (ie. win or lose, and sometimes choice). To get technical, I want to do this with tiers. I’m thinking seven tiers. In tier 1, you have the option of taking one of the missions of that tier. Once you complete that mission, you’ll unlock the missions that connect to it in tier 2. So on and so forth, to essentially create your own story.

As far as side stuff, I want to really make the world pop. I want to give the player the option of joining the GUM (Galactic Union Military) and fighting against the forces of evil. Literally, evil. Think “The Fifth Element”. Except it has physical minions. And if the player doesn’t want to join the war, they can be merchants. Or adventurers. Or bounty hunters. Or galactic racers. Or Jedi ripoffs that I’m calling “Seers”. Or their evil counterparts, the “Blinded”. I’ll go more into the lore as the game develops.

My overall plan is to post here once a week and talk about the changes I’ve made, including plans, concepts, and actual physical progress on the game itself.

Now, if anyone’s interested, here are all of my little demos!

https://www.mediafire.com/?bkup0uib39nbqx9
^^^Demo - November 30, 2014^^^ (This is a .exe, and only runs on Windows 64bit. Sorry!)

https://www.mediafire.com/?j88w6ei4yc7yp8k
^^^Demo - Deceber 12, 2014^^^ (This is a .exe, and only runs on Windows 64bit. Sorry!)

http://pasteall.org/blend/33418
^^^Demo - December 19, 2014**^^^ (This .blend only works for 2.66. Sorry!)

blend: http://pasteall.org/blend/33620
exe: https://www.mediafire.com/?z9cdvy9e0pph3d4
^^^Demo(s) - January 2, 2015^^^ (.exe only runs on Windows 64bit, and the .blend won’t work for anything beyond 2.67. Sorry!)

Let me know what you think! Constructive criticism welcome, but please refrain from “0MG 2 AMBITIOUS 4 U” commentary. I’m fully aware of how ambitious this project is. Let’s keep discussion to the project itself.

I’m interested, I’ll post some feedback as soon as I get to try out the demo.

It’s looking pretty good, solid gameplay so far. I think working on game mechanics such as shooting enemies and opening doors and picking up items before moving on to any more graphical refinements would be a good idea. The current visual style is very good in that regard, solid and functional, it’s easy to tell exactly what you’re doing without getting lost in the scenery.

The one bug I saw was that sometimes moving right or left with the gun holstered the player plays the walk cycle backwards while facing forwards. I expect that’s to do with the way he walks when holding a gun (moonwalking while looking at the target). It might be good to specify movement behavior differently for both states, with a gun and without.

At this stage of development you also might get more feedback with a demo in Blend form, rather than the EXE. It’s not easy to give constructive feedback without knowing what’s going on under the hood, like I don’t want to say “you should use an Finite State Machine for player movement” because you might already be using one. Also the sooner there’s something for players to do in the way of combat or pickups or whatever the better as that’s when you start to get real feedback about the project, when people are playing it.

If you’re worried about the game being over ambitious you could try abstracting one part (the space section for example) at first, like with an abstract mission map and then when you’ve finished the ground combat section you can go back and fully develop the space part. Then you’d be able to get a partly functional game up and running at the soonest opportunity. That’s the plan for my own project anyway. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the awesome feedback, Mirror! What I really wanted to do with the demo was basically get feedback regarding the controls. I’m here to make a game, not a Blender game (if you know what I mean). I want it to feel like something any gamer could pick up and play. That demo is just to see if people get that vibe from it. At least concerning the controls. :stuck_out_tongue:

My defining goal with this one was to get an art style going first and foremost. I’ve known for years what I kinda wanted to do mechanics-wise, and I’m not exactly a wonderful artist, so I wanted to start somewhere that I was uncomfortable with and establish arguably the most important first-impressions aspect of a game. But yeah, now that I know how my humans are gonna look, I’ll focus on fleshing out the mechanics a bit more.

I’m totally aware of that bug. In fact, I thought I squashed it. I’ll work on that.

My biggest fear of using .blends instead of runtime .exe’s is something that I’ve been told is minor and nothing to worry about, but I don’t care and worry anyway, and that’s the fact that once it’s on the Internet, anyone can grab it and claim it as their own. Which is, of course, something I want to kind of avoid.

That’s a pretty good plan. I just want to get my space scene set up, getting location and ship data when loading in, adding the basic mechanics, etc. Then I’ll work on ground stuff. Once all my mechanics are in place, I’ll do a pre-alpha release, then start working on content.

Thanks again for the feedback, it’s appreciated!

cool concept.

Why? A small nice map with working MP and some decent weapons could fuel the development… and a galaxy with other players walking around is even more lively, so is the cancelled online-play a technical decision?

nice… will there be a main plot (war of good against evil?) or is this planned as a decentralized web of quests?

agreed! espc. for people using unix, a .blend or unix runtime would be the choice…

hm, you never know, so maybe you can’t avoid that anyway if this has to happen. to me it always seems like the choice of the way of open or closed hand. looking at the movements of share economy evolving these days, the decision of sharing content in sense of “open hands” wouldn’t be the worst choice to grow your ideas on the game and its content.

1: Mostly technical, yeah. The thing is, the game is already a super ambitious project as it is, and turning it into an MOG would be too daunting on me, especially for what’s already there. I’ve seen lots of projects die from bad multiplayer. I don’t want that to happen to mine.

2: The war of Good vs. Evil will be a main thing, but not the main thing. Think the wars in the Elder Scrolls games, where you can join a side and take part if you want, but it’s not required. I wanted to kind of steer away from “main” plots, because in an open world, following a predetermined main questline turns a game into an interactive museum tour. In my opinion, anyways.
Like I said, there WILL be “main” quests, but they’ll be up to the player, giving more of a sense of choice in where the real importance lies.

4: No, I can’t avoid it anyways, but I’d rather not put a public link on a public website that anyone (or anybot) can click, download, and claim. Don’t want to make it easy for them!

…true that! but a basic multiplayer (for example a multiplayer battleground in one galaxy or on one planet) would be interesting as i am enjoying the most playing with friends rather than playing alone. people could make money in the galaxy and spend it on weapons and vehicles for simple mp - battles…

cool!

That’s… actually a really cool idea. But the problem lies in the fact that the game isn’t built around multiplayer. Any additions would feel like it’s tacked-on, which is something that turns people away from multiplayer games.
I’ll keep that in mind for a future project, though. Heck, it’s YOUR idea, you should take it and run with it in a project of your own! It’s a great concept!

thanks… but the concept of owning something is a bit whacky and outdated to me. you know, there are no pockets in a shroud. you see, the gollum - character from lotr is a perfect metaphor for this owning - concept, at last the owner only cares about himself and his goods, on his own, just looking at his own… would be sad as there is just little inspiration from a doing like that. so i think the act of putting ideas into words doesn’t necessarily found a claim of ownership. i’m more like running into projects open to everyone…

Yeah, a game needs to be built from the ground up to have working multiplayer. You’ve got to make a lot of sacrifices and compromises to get it working at all and then if people have any problems (and there’s always problems) they get turned off the game completely.

I think the art style looks pretty good. I’d like to see the guy with some clothes on perhaps. :slight_smile:

How about having some targets to shoot, or dangerous obstacles to avoid for the next demo?

That’s certainly the plan! In order to test out combat, health, pickups, etc., I’m gonna do a survival kinda thing for the next one, with enemy waves and pickups. Super easy to implement, even as a side thing for a little demo, just to show off the capabilities of my setup.

This week in the Galaxy:

I made a comicbook-style hit effect bubble that pops up when someone gets hit:


I also added a little block that moves around! I’m using it as a moving target to test out damage in combat. Shooting it will make it shout “Oof!”, and touching the block will cause damage to the player. (Note that in the final game, touching enemies won’t cause damage. Just touching their blasts will.)

Also, I’ve fixed the walking-forwards-but-backwards bug that Smoking_Mirror pointed out. Turns out I just needed an extra if statement in my animation script. Always the simple things, right?

I may as well discuss some of the lore here, too. I may have some illustrations next time I talk about it.
This is going to be a human-populated galaxy, but without Earth, and without a clear origin of space travel, Star Wars/BSG style. There’s a large fantasy element to it. The Galactic Union, the undisputed and democratically-protected leading force in the galaxy, is struggling to combat the forces of pure Evil. They’ve gathered in droves, creating matter out of seemingly nothing and recruiting (read: literally mentally corrupting) men and women to fight and die for the cause of utter destruction.
The Order of Clairvoyance, a powerful group of people who have mastered the mysterious resource they call Oversight, have taken a stance with the Union to fight against Evil. Their agents, known in their ranks as “Seers”, are brought on as military leaders in times of necessary, heavy battle.
Not every Seer wants to fight Evil, though. There are those few that have been corrupted by Evil and have joined up with the other corrupted troopers. The OoC has called these once-agents “Blinded Ones”. Those who once saw, but no longer can.
Despite the intense warring going on, there’s still a lot of general civilian activity, including a thriving market economy and a popular entertainment and recreation industry. The Speed Syndicate is the forefront of sport activity, showcasing dangerous races in space and on the ground. If you’re not into racing, there’s always the criminal underground. Someone will always want something they’re not allowed to have, be it a banned substance, a stolen vehicle, or the dismembered head of someone they loathe. If you can deliver, someone can pay.

That about wraps up what I wanted to talk about for now. My goal for next week is to have the core basics of spaceflight. Hopefully, that demo I post will let you check it out.
No demo this week, though, because the changes and additions I’ve made so far are really minuscule and not really worth downloading a whole 'nother demo to check out. At least not yet.

It sounds good. It also sounds big. :slight_smile:

One way you can shrink a project of this size is to use procedural generation. If you make a couple of themed missions about each of the factions, and then you can fill up the content using random missions. For example, you take on some missions for the speed syndicate, there are couple of procedurally generated races, then a scripted mission to end that chapter. Or you do some sneaking and recovery of some kind randomized of mcguffinmissions, then the final mission reveals what you were doing and why the syndicate wanted you to retrieve the item.

There are a lot of ways of procedurally generating content for your game, for the simple expedient of having predefined areas and then populating them with random enemies, to creating a full blown level generator.

It can be a little harder to create game mechanics for a world that isn’t set in stone, but the result is a game which feels orders of magnitude bigger than it really is.

That’s a good idea, I’ll keep it in mind. I was planning on a mission generation system already, and that node pather you came up with intrigues me, I’ll look into that.

Quick mini-update, no pictures sorry:

Added spaceflight! The player’s ship flies like a dream, with an Asteroids-esque control scheme. I’m gonna need some feedback on it, in the upcoming demo.

My work this week mostly focuses on the way I’m going to do player ships. See, space and ground gameplay will take place in two different scenes. When the player enter the Space scene, it gets added as an overlay to the Ground scene, which gets suspended. So when the Space scene comes in, it gets the position that the ship is supposed to occupy according to the Ground before it freezes.

Each ship will have some interior. The way this will work:
When the player enters a ship from the ground, they’ll be teleported to their ship’s interior map in the ground scene (which changes according to the ship itself, of course). On the ship will be two important things (among others), the cockpit and the landing computer.
When you activate your landing computer, a cutscene will play of your ship either taking off or landing, depending on where you are. Then your ship will be in space. And when you activate the cockpit (assuming you’re in space), you’ll take control of the ship in the Asteroids-style scene I mentioned.

More on this on Friday!

Have you seen the way my list based weapon manager works?

You can use it if you want,

it will make it easy to use randomly generated weapons, etc :smiley:

also it can handle any number of items, besides guns…

:smiley:

I don’t want randomly generated weapons, though. Weapons will be static, which will give them more of a presence in the world.
Random weapons are a cool idea in theory, but in practice they just create junk. Once you find a 5 Rifle, your 4 Rifle is useless. Then you start finding nothing but 3 and 4 Rifles. It just litters the gameworld with unusable things. No matter how you argue it, 90% of the loot you get is just more money that you have to go claim.

And as far as “other things”, I prefer to develop my own systems for most stuff, unless it’s something I couldn’t begin to comprehend (like Mirror’s nodepathing). But randomized items, I’m sure I can handle. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

My system is a infinite sized list, that spawns the item in and parents it to the manager,

the ammo type, clip size, ammo usage, projectile type are all stored in the gun,

So, when you contact a pick up item, it just adds the name of the weapon (that is spawned in from a hidden layer)

to the list.

Once you set this up, you don’t have to set it up again later, and can add as many weapons/items as you wish,

also, you can use thew list to display a inventory of icons , and selecting the icon, sets the list index, spawning in that item :smiley:

(I did not mean for you to use the system itself unless you wish to, however the underlying mechanics could be useful to you as well)

Kay, I’ve been polite. Time to be honest.

Why do you have to push your own projects on everyone? Like, almost NOTHING I’ve said in this thread has anything to do with your system. You didn’t even offer any feedback; you just jumped in with your own advertisement.
I even said “no”, and you proceeded to tell me more about it.

This isn’t your project, BPR. If I wanted help, I’d have posted in the Team Projects area.

Actually, I like the idea so much I wanted to help,

I am not pushing a project on you, merely the idea of setting up some base system that operates all weapons and items, that will cause you less pain in the future,

I really do like the idea, and want to see it able to grow rapidly, and scale well.

I have put a lot of thought into how to make projects scale…

and honesty is being polite,

I like you and your help you have given in the past as well,