Bleak Devlog 06-12-15

Final update before everything that's been worked on thus far is handed in for Christmas.

So here's the last minute mechanical additions to BLEAK.

Power, as a resource has been added. It works a little bit different to the other resources as it's not produced regularly, instead being produced in one lump sum when the building is created. That total is then subtracted from by any power-producing buildings (currently only the Brickworks, but that's going to change after Christmas) and the remainder is sold on to the BLEAKverse equivalent of the National Grid. Power currently has a value of 5 Currencies for every nebulously-defined unit, so right now it's not a particularly useful money making idea, given that the only implementation thus far of a power producing building is:

A solar array, it's small, produces one whole power, and probably isn't very good value. It's got an upkeep cost of 4, meaning that you're only getting 2 currencies back from it.

What? It's a Solar Cell, in England. What did you expect it to do. The solar arrays inefficiency is also down in part to certain hallmarks of the dystopian genre, Solar just isn't grim enough. It's too clean and harmless. Coal, Gas and Nuclear is where it's at in the Cyberpunk Dystopia's BLEAK takes its inspiration from.

Here's an example of how the solar array looks in the two lighting states. I know the shadow is super low resolution, but you're never going to be playing at this zoom level, so it's okay.

And here's a gratuitous shot of a settlement, with a meagre turnover, and no power surplus.

Bleak Devlog 5-12-15

So yeah, as mentioned in the previous devlog, today is about the creative process behind making assets. The example for this will be the Housing Department, the 'manager' building for the generic population type.

This is a building in my hometown, which although it's freely available online, I've felt the need to pixelate out any identifying marks on the photo, for as much good it'll do. Why this building though? Well, it's familiar to me, and looking at it, you've got to agree that it's drab office exterior is perfectly generic for the purpose we need it for.

Google Maps shows us that the building's an L shape, so let's work with that.
It's basic, and servicable, but one of the narrative themes for BLEAK is that everything that's happened, when it happened in the BLEAKverse, it was bigger, badder and just generally more. So let's bring that into the visual design. What's better than an L? Well I'd say a U shaped building, since it'd have another wing, and the benefit of the courtyard being enclosed, with the two wings looming over it.

So let's see how that'd work.

Well, that looks better, doesn't it! This design also has the added benefit of making more efficient use of the 30x40m footprint I've given it. Whilst stranger, tetris piece shaped buildings is something that I'd love to have done, to implement it now is much more work than I'd feel comfortable undertaking.

And here's what the 'final' design looks like:

Not much changed from the sketch, other than the addition of a courtyard area, which eventually got filled by a pointless statue, because oh lord do I love the concept of these kind of Plop Art decorations

Sneak Peek #2 - 2-12-15

I lied about the next update being a look into my creative process, here's an impromptu Video!

Enjoy!

Bleak Devlog 2/12/15

Fair amount of work has been done since the last update. In no particular order, here's the big changes

Primary control of the camera has been switched from WASD keys to the Keyboard Arrow Keys. Whilst WASD is more common for control schemes, this switch frees up the QWERTY key line for hotkeys.

Hotkeys you say? Why does Bleak need hotkeys all of a sudden?

Because gone is the old buildings area of the UI, instead now replaced by this smaller, lighter, brighter, more adjective-y Contextual area. Contextual in the sense that it changes depending on what building in the game scene the player last clicked, to take a leaf out of Starcraft's book. The different panels can also be accessed from the QWERTY keys, providing the contextual building has been built at least once.

To help sell the mood in the upcoming private alpha, I've added a tentative musical track, which can be listened to here. Music fans might be able to recognise this as a portion of Holst's Jupiter Movement. For the purposes of BLEAK however, it's been slowed down 50% to turn this recognisable, patriotic tune into something quite redolent and sinister. It captures the mood of the game quite well, and suits as a useful track to convey what I'm looking for in a main track.

The map selection screen got an update, it's now got another side that details what the player's going to expect on the other side of this screen. It's just got the one map, and I don't think there'll be any others for the hand in, so there's an element of fiction to this screen, but it's helping to convey what I want to get across.

And finally, I'm proud to announce that the generic buildings no longer include any temporary greyboxes, although that's not to say that what they do have are the finished assets.

Next devlog: A glimpse into the creative process behind Bleak.

Bleak Devlog 26/11/2015

Today, not a lot got implemented. But that's not to say I didn't do anything. Today I'd like to talk a little about what has been implemented since the last devlog, and about the smaller inspirations for BLEAK.

The above screenshot is from Mohawk Games' product, Offworld Trading Company. This game was the main seed for the aesthetics from a gameplay perspective, with the works of L.S. Lowry providing inspiration for details and overall feel.

For the parts of the game where information needs to be given to the player, one of my intentions is to use the grinding, impersonal language seen in corporate and legal missives, such as this example taken from Google:

There's something about the language that's perfectly suited to the genre and to not capitalise on that would be a mistake. 

There has however been a minor graphical addition, in preperation for a feature that will be implemented sometime soon. Power Generation and use is a hallmark of the genre, and a fairly large aspect of modern infrastructure. Tying into the precedent of there being vehicles, but no requirement for roads, power as a requirement will be present in BLEAK, but power lines will not exist as requirement to utilise that power.

The issue is that they're still a staple of the english countryside, as the above image will attest. That image is of the winning concept in the National Grid's [year] design competition to design the replacement for the tradtional lattice pylon. Whilst an argument could be made for the pylons in BLEAK to stick to the traditional design, for the retro-futurism kick, I think a blend of the two designs will be the most interesting overall.

To that end, here's the pylons in game in all of their set dressing glory:

The underslung cables are a little hard to see, so they'll need to be thickened in Maya, but they'll do for now I guess :D

Bleak Devlog 24/11/2015 - Numbers and Graphs

Very sparse in terms of actual game content today. Sorry!

But that doesn't mean that it's not an important. Lots of number crunching to come up with tentative values for all the goods and items available to the player.

However, there is one addition in the form of this beautiful thing:

Who doesn't love the idea of ruining someone's pastoral idyll through the use of a superheavy crawler. This is how the game starts, mechanics wise. Pick a spot, and your trusty behemoth with level anything in its way until it reaches its position and dumps the start of your dystopian empire down on the ground.

The farms are going to be remodelled, to keep more in line with the twee british idyll of the starting point.

Other additions include:

Tenement buildings have five variants that are randomly chosen when they're built

The game now supports negative height buildings, such as this claypit

There's a trade system, where you sell your crafted goods in return for raw materials.

The final deadline for this alpha version is the 7th of December, so brace yourself for a flurry of activity as I cover all of the bases in regards to the criteria I have to meet.

Devlog 03/11/2015

Oh boy do I have a bumper update for you all today. My apologies for not updating this sooner than now.



Recently added is a main menu screen. the buttons are mainly for proof of concept reasons, and the underlying systems may be too work intensive to warrant creating for the May degree show.



Going forward, this map selection screen will remain for aesthetic purposes, with my follow-up goal being semi-procedural maps using UK Ordinance Survey data. This is incredibly long term and will probably not be in the May release of Bleak.



A minor addition to the buildings now allows you to do this, which is pointless, but it's fun to push the tiny people around, and at its heart, that's what BLEAK's about. Making life for your citizens as hard as possible, for whatever reason you want. In addition, everything's now aligned on a 10m grid, and buildings turn red if they cannot be placed, for reasons such as insufficient space, funds, resources and population. Later iterations will have a UI element to detail what's missing.



Some small steps have been made in terms of aesthetics, emission maps have been added, along with the shift to HDR rendering with a bloom image effect, the tilt shift's been increased but that's up for debate and finally, two greyboxes have been replaced with tentative final versions, the starting tier farm, and a claypit. The claypit was finished today, and on thursday it'll probably be made more shallow, to look more like a hole and less of a hollowed mesa.

And under the hood, changes have been made to the interactions between buildings and their relevant managers. Instead of the old system where the manager produced resources on occasion in numbers based on how many relevant buildings are present in the scene, the new system has the individual buildings running themselves, updating the manager on their own time. This has the benefit of making income and resource changes more responsive.