First screenshot!

Okay alot of the art and textures are placeholder but the game is starting to take shape and look pretty nice :)

Part One in the Diyin Serial

The bullet ripped through Point’s insides and splattered them across the desert sand. For a moment Jimmy felt a pang of…what? Regret? Or perhaps it was just paranoia. Whatever it was, it wasn’t there for long and there was no going back now.
“Poor bastard…” he eulogized.
Point had never known when to quit, Jimmy knew. Jimmy had known months ago that his business partner was barking up the wrong tree contacting the police about their problems with the Order.
Jimmy shook his head and got into the car. The things he did for white supremacy.
*
“Is it done?”
“It’s done,” Jimmy told the Doctor over the phone. “Problem solved.”
“It had better be…Kenneth is extremely temperamental regarding white failure. I wouldn’t want to see anyone get hurt.”
“Believe me Sir, I’d die before I failed the Order.”
“Good to hear. Good to hear.”
Jimmy reached for the tequila as the Doctor disconnected. His hands shook terribly as he took hold of the bottle. Try as he might he could not remove the image of Point’s face from his mind. Really, it had been the perfect betrayal and it had had to be done. Still, perhaps he could have brought Point around to the Order’s way of thinking. The pure-bred Anglo-Saxons were under fire after all, weren’t they? White values had been tarnished by a government that cared more for minorities than it did for God-fearing tax-paying whites. Unity was the answer. The Order and its allies represented a united front against all the evils of an impure America. They were up against a giant machine, it took a lot of money to fund the kind of operations necessary in a race war, Point might have appreciated that if he had known what the money was being used for.
“We don’t need protection from anyone but them!” he had said.
What about all the others? The Order wasn’t some criminal organization, they were an institution that exemplified honor and respect. They would have gladly done the work the money implied by “protection“…as long as it was in the best interest of the cause.
Just a few more shots and all those questions of morality would disappear, he thought to himself. He looked hard at the empty bottle of tequila. How had that happened?
No matter, there was more where that came from. He stood up and walked to his liquor cabinet then froze. It was unmistakably the sound of gun shots and it was nearly right outside his office. He stared at the door in disbelief as his right hand reached into the liquor cabinet and caught hold of his ten gauge shotgun.
Jimmy fidgeted but, his eyes, his eyes never left the door. Even as the sound of gunfire came to a halt, replaced by an eerie silence, he watched the door apprehensively. Then came the sound of footsteps as someone climbed steadily towards his office.
“This ain’t no cops…” he said to himself.
The knock on the door confirmed his suspicion. The cops would have just broke the damn thing down, whoever was on the other side of the door was surely a psychopath. Jimmy lifted the shaft of the shotgun and blasted a hole through the center of the door, then fired another shot for good measure.
The door slowly swung open and that’s when Jimmy saw him. It was Point. Jimmy could feel his pants getting warm as the urine exited his body. Point took a step into the office and Jimmy could see now that Point was a walking corpse. Their eyes met and Jimmy found his gaze held unwillingly. There was rage in those eyes. There was death.
“You’re dead…”
“I am.”
“You’re walking…”
“I walk.”
Jimmy fired off another shot. Point began to close the gap between them and Jimmy dropped the shotgun and pulled out his pistol and aimed. Point kept coming, seemingly oblivious to the hot metal being spewed at him.
“Why won’t you die?” he asked pleadingly, tears streaming down his face. As he backed up he could feel the glass of his window against his neck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the gas pipe that ran through the room.
“I had to do it Point…please man, you gotta believe me.”
Point was almost to him, the smell of death was thick in the air and getting worse with every step. Jimmy pointed his gun one final time and watched as the flames exploded outwards. Point was engulfed by the blast while Jimmy was propelled in a shower of fire and shards of glass out of the building.
His neck snapped like a twig upon impact with the ground. As the last strings that bound him to the world were cut Jimmy could almost swear he saw an old-time Indian walking toward him. Couldn’t be…must be the tequila he thought and promptly died.

Cholo concept

opengl stuff

Today was accomplishing. Got the basics of a rough 3d scenery engine made in opengl.
Nothing too orgasmic, just a few tall cubes textured with a brick wall image, to serve as placeholders for buildings that you walk by. Yesterday I laid the groundwork for the 2d animation system (a system that loads up a ton of .PNG files, and then swaps between them in the correct sequence to "play" animations)

Looks like we've picked up a 2nd programmer who will share the workload with me.
We also have another 2d artist who will be handling static 2d art (things like trashcans, bottles etc)

Things keep snowballing and we keep forging ahead making good progress and good time!
Yay.

One time I shot a six pack, just to watch it die...

Planning ahead...

Some concept art

Matt, our awesome character artist just whipped up this character concept sheet for one of the bikers that appear in the game.

I found the time to open up Photoshop and create an early concept of the ghost you play as, too:

THE BIRDS!!!

Yes. Today I coded birds. What that means is you can possess birds, and play as birds. You can also fly around high above the game world as birds. You can attack people as birds. I guess what i'm trying to say here is:


You get to be birds.


I added a raven as the first type of bird, and coded some fun flying physics. Birds will be a great way to travel around fast throughout the game world and scouting out mission objectives, hidden things etc. Also great for annoying and pecking at people. There will probably be about 2-3 other bird types. Buzzards and eagles are pretty much obligatory here.

Oh and yesterday I coded the in-door and out-door terrain systems. Outdoor is a highly efficient slope-based system, and in-door is a good ol' fashioned tile-based system. The in-door system still needs a bit of polish, as well as a toolset. an interesting development was the realization that we could make our interior level-building tools in flash, then export out level data to text strings which can then be loaded into our final C++ program. Having the toolset in flash not only makes level-building easy on us, but also leaves things wide open for making such a user-friendly toolset available to the end user, to make and load new levels into the game infinitly.

...and things start to get a bit spooky

Development took a turn for the sinister today... as I added the ability to utilize the attacks (and weapons) of possessed people, and also the ability to possess live people.
Live possession is a whole different beast from taking over a corpse. You approach the target and press the "possess" button just like normal, but since this person is alive and will fight being possessed, you must then press a correct random sequence of buttons to take them over. The number of buttons you must press to possess them coincides with the individual's strength.
In other words, if Strength = 5 then you'll need to press 5 correct randomized buttons.

On to attacks...

Each person or animal you possess will have an attack. Humans of course may carry weapons which can also be used. The cool part of this is that each person or animal will have an inventory, so you can for example, pick up 5 different guns with one body, jump out, possess another body who has a knife or a tool of some sort, use that body, then come back to the other body and it will still have all the weapons and items in possession.

We're also going to have a personal "spirit realm" where you can stockpile ammo, weapons, tools, items, and pointless objects (ie. skulls, newspapers, trash, empty beer bottles etc). A bit like modern RPGs that let you have a house and decorate it, and litter it with shit. Anything in the spirit realm will be saved indefinetly.

Seeing as this is Friday I'm stopping work for the weekend, must attend to important matters like DRINKING THE ALCOHOL.

Emotions abound

Today, still working in the Flash prototype, but carefully coding everything in classes for the eventual migration into C++, I laid the groundwork for the "reaction" system. This is basically a simple chunk of code that handles how living things react to your actions. So far they react to things like:

Killings,
Possessions,
Attacks made (like if you use your host body to fire a gun in the streets)

I'll be extending the system for other actions as well. Everything such as bumping into a passerby on the street, to using ghostly telekinesis to move objects around, or making yourself look suspicious by sneaking around. The sky's the limit! Different individuals behave differently, based on variables like "bravery" for example. A bravery level of 2 will cause someone run screaming in the opposite direction if they see something disturbing such as a ghostly possession or a violent attack. A bravery level of 8 will cause them to pull out their firearm and try to take you down...
Another fun feature of the reactions is I can have a person say something in a word bubble to go along with their reaction. My prototype sees a brave biker shouting "DIE YOU MONSTER!", and a decidely less brave biker running away shouting "HOLY F***!".

Also added attacks to my sole person type (a blocky placeholder graphic'd, biker) :D

Day 1...

Welcome to the official dev blog of Diverge Creation's first full-length game for PC and console platforms: "Diyin"

In Diyin you are an Apache Shaman brought back in spirit form from the great beyond, to confront the strange and disturbing evils befalling a small town in the American southwest. To do this you possess the bodies of dead people and animals. Killing innocents is frowned upon. Bringing justice to the injust is rewarded with increased spirit energy and new abilities. The game is completely open-ended and non-linear with a huge outdoor overworld, and interior areas that play more like traditional levels. The engine will feature slick and stylish 2d vector art, layered into a 3d/2d hybrid game world. "Diyin" uses SDL and OpenGL. Adobe Flash is being used to prototype the gameplay and create the 2d artwork.

Now with that out of the way...
This was the first "official" day of development. I started by programming a very simple and straight-forward gameplay prototype in flash. This prototype has basic movement and possession activity. Tomorrow I'll flesh it out a bit, adding reactions from living things based on what you do as a spirit in the world, and attacks that people and animals can perform (and by extension YOU can perform if you possess them :) )
Talked a bit with Robert Bertand (our staff writer who is assisting me in fleshing out the story, characters, gameplay, and mission ideas) and we came up with some great concepts and ideas for making the game even more non-linear and innovative.
I'll be posting here as regularly as possible. I will also be posting fun stuff such as concept art and screenshots as well.