Diyin Development Blog

So much has happened

2010-03-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

since my last update. We have finally brought on a dedicated and skilled 3d artist by the name of Jonathan Viejou. the engine continues to progress. the game's design is further taking shape. we have basic audio in the game now. we have the beginnings of cpu multi-threading.

we have a full-fledged particle system which is linked to our toolset. more info will be given in detail soon. for now here's some very recent screenshots:

progress report

2009-12-31T18:59:00.000-08:00

Didn't get alot done today.

* some small optimizations to the post-processing stage
* rebuilt the DOF pass to utilize a half-rez downsampled screen texture. this not only yields a performance boost but also gives a meatier blur. still have to fix that fucking foreground leaking...

Progress Update

2009-12-30T15:51:00.001-08:00

I am going to post daily progress updates so I can track my productivity starting today. Here's what I worked on/accomplished today.

* Optimized the render pipeline a bit. Engine runs much faster now. This was a major victory.
* Worked on the .obj file loader system. almost done
* worked on improving the DOF feature. could run faster and also the foreground leaks MUST be fixed.

A long period between updates

2009-10-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

which is odd because the gap between updates has seen the engine progress more so than ever.

I don't feel like posting about all of what i've been working on just yet. so in the meantime here's a screenshot.

BLOOM BITCHES!

2009-06-24T22:44:00.001-07:00

The engine now has bloom lighting, and also the beginnings of HDR!
Much rejoicing in the streets!

with Bloom:

In other news, I'm currently working on the World-builder tools. You can see it in it's infancy in that shot, with sloped dynamic terrain. Each segment of terrain can be a different texture, have different decorations (like grass, rocks, cacti, etc), and a different surface (which is two-pronged: it will affect gameplay physics like friction, and visually it will trigger different shaders)

A look at a more finalized "Spirit form" shader

2009-03-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been busy working on the world-builder for the game, and other more practical, non-renderer work. Also tax-time has forced me to work on other projects to keep afloat... doh!

Here's a look at the "spirit form" shader.

Damage Shader

2009-02-14T15:15:00.000-08:00

The shader that tells the player "you're almost dead, moron". Finished.

Basically it takes whatever pixels are the on left and right side of the screen, blurs them based on X position, then over-exposes the red value of the pixel, resulting in this fully-conceived version of the "death haze" shader I posted earlier. Next on the shader to-do list is bump-mapping. At some point I'll be adding displacement (warping) effects as well. If it's possible I'd really like to have a full HDR lighting pipeline for the game too... but that might be pushing it. Totally possible if we end up adding 1 or 2 other programmers to the team. At this point it's just me, about 3 artists, and a writer/co-designer :)

Fullscreen shader fun

2009-02-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

Well it was a bit of a bitch to get working right, but after about a day of f**king with it, I finally got a Frame Buffer Object implemented in the engine. This coupled with my custom shaders yields some interesting results.

Next on the agenda will be finishing up the stencil shadow system, and hooking up a parallax bump-mapping shader to our buildings. The shader-side of it shouldn't be too hard as I already have a shader to perform parallax mapping, but I have to re-code the function that loads in our 3d models, which is kind of pissing me off because I thought I had a good function that worked. It was pretty n00b by most standards (it simply grabbed vertex and triangle arrays from .h files then drew them using openGL's glDrawElements() function), but it worked well for some stuff. But I finally realized I need to do things the right way and load from actual model files. We'll be using md2's, with each frame of the model file being a different variation of the building (so we don't have 30 identical grocery stores in the damn game world)

Ultimately I'll need to build a system for handling different materials on the different parts and pieces of each building. Hell maybe it will end up being a bit like Lego...

Enjoy some prototypical shader screengrabs:

Satanic hazy red filter (I'm thinking this will be great for when one of your host bodies is just about kaput)

Outside a host body, the ghost's connection to our physical realm is iffy at best, this is reflected with this bitchin shader that creates a blur+overexposure effect, for vaguely metaphysical goodness.

This final screenshot illustrates how things look when "all is well" (ie. when you have a host body and are not taking severe damage). No shader no cry...

Status update

2009-02-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

Finally got shaders working in the engine!
I'm on cloud 9 right now. It's taken a long time but we finally have a basic blur+over-exposure shader working in the engine. I'll be implementing a frame-buffer object soon, so we can displace, blur, and in general F up the game world accordingly using our lovely shaders, next.

After that I plan on finishing up a simple stencil-buffer shadow system. And then after that I've decided I'm going to discipline myself here, and suspend all work on the renderer, and just concentrate on gameplay programming and design for the rest of the time leading up to GDC.
(to clarify we are not showing the game at GDC, we will be attending though and talking to publishers)

Heightmap Grass

2009-01-29T03:22:00.000-08:00

Busted ass on an extra feature for the heightmap tech: grass sprites. Still needs some optimization but it's looking pretty good.

New developments

2009-01-09T00:01:00.001-08:00

Holy crap it's been almost 2 months since I posted anything here. Whats funny is in the past 2 months so much has happened with the project, and yet I haven't posted about it.

First of all, the engine continues to shape up nicely, the graphics renderer is really starting to mature and soon we'll be introducing shaders.

2nd of all we not only have support for 3d model structures in the game, but we also have basic lighting in the game as well.

We have fully functional particle emitters which look awesome. They will be great for blood fx. (in layman's terms basically it's an object that shoots out XX number of say, blood drops, for example, then deletes itself)

We also have proper perspective, and now have a huge plain of terrain going off into the distance. Today I added heightmapping technology to the game. It's going to need some work and it runs a bit slow but I'm confident I'll be able to straighten out these minor issues, and wow does it add alot to the visuals.

And finally a HUGE announcement. The game now has a new 2D artist:

Jay Ziebarth AKA "Zeebarf", acclaimed artist and animator, of TV's "Sons of Butcher" and the online game series "The Journeys of Reemus" fame.

!!!

Here's a more recent dev pic. (final game won't look much like this, but this is closer to what it'll look like than the last pic I posted in November).

First screenshot!

2008-11-13T17:44:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-08T22:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

opengl stuff

2008-10-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

Planning ahead...

2008-10-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

Some concept art

2008-10-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2008-10-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-03T16:12:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-09-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

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.