Pitfallen Facebook Group

I have it on good authority that the best way to 'get the word out there' is via a Facebook Group - not a Facebook Page.  Allegedly the latter are rubbish.  Anyway, I have both. Here's the link to the group as that may well become the single point of reference going forward regarding developments.

Best thing to do is follow, like and share everything.  The more followers we can get the better.

I thank you.

Loot

A big bugbear of mine in games is mobs that don't drop what they have on them.  Let me explain.  I was reminded of this recently in The Division.  I kill a bad guy who was clearly shooting me with a firearm of some kind, and he drops, gloves, or a backpack, or a scarf, or nothing at all.  Or a completely different gun.

In Pitfallen / Underland / or 'Doings in the Dark' as Alastair Cornish (he's the Creative Director of Splash Damage by the way, and I spent a highly entertaining Saturday a few weeks back, tabletop roleplaying with him.  He gives good dice.)  In this game we're going to do things differently.

WYSIWYG loot.  What you see is what you get.  (+ a few extras if applicable, because obviously you can't tell what's in a guy's pouch until you open it up!) WYSIWYG+ I might call it - conceptually at least.

I wrote about this in a blog I used to tend about as frequently as my garden. For completeness I'll include the link - (You kill the poison turtle and it drops a magic battleaxe) - the blog in general contains some meandering, unedited insights into what I like and don't like about games, with a slight leaning towards tabletop RPG, but there's quite a lot of videogame content too. If you do click-through, don't come blabbing to me about poor sentence construction and typos, I did warn you about the lack of edit - but you might, and I hope you do, find something of interest there....

Anyway, in brief, it goes on about mobs dropping what you expect them to.  You kill a guy with a sword, you can loot his sword... and his breastplate, and his boots and everything else you can see on his person.  Depending on how he died, it might be a bloodstained shirt. You get the idea.

In the game this will be handled by loot tables specific to each creature (maybe shared amongst creatures for the sake of efficiency, and we may employ additional tables for the contents of their pouches).  That's a lot of tables you might think.  But it's important to get this stuff right, I'd counter, and anyway, if we're smart about the way we pre-load stuff, then I can't imagine it slowing the game down any.

The game will have to generate environment beyond that which you see on the screen anyway, so there's no loading time, but we probably won't bundle in the loot at the point.  I like the idea of looting a corpse taking some time, rather than the stuff spraying out in a cloud or arcade bonus.  So the time it takes to loot could be the time it takes to lookup what the loot should be.  I even have a solution for environment loading time (The Dreamscape) but that's for another post.

And with that I shall bid you good night.

Farewell sweet prince / princesses.

Pitfallen!

As you know, Underland is a working title, Dread Pirate Booty I'm just not into. I'm considering Pitfallen.  I like Pitfallen for two reasons, 1) It's a nod to the classic 80s Atari game which I'm taking a little inspiration from, and 2) the 'fallen' bit kind of suggests undead, or lost souls, which is definitely an aspect of the game.

What do people think of Pitfallen?

To be honest, I'd much rather go with something like: What we do in the shadows (which is a great film btw! - check it out).

So we could go with something like: What happens in the shadows.  Not too keen on it though.

I'm really stuck on this, I like the idea of a phrase style title.  Any suggestions, stick 'em in the comments below!

Concept Art

So after significant delay I've finally gotten around to collating some materials for my Concept Artist, the inimitable Robin Bazalgette.

Below is an extract of what I've just emailed him.  Looking forward to what he comes up with!

______________

What needs to be shown is first a normal map, and then a rendering of that map as passageways, chambers with most of the boundaries and out-of-bounds areas blacked out or with subtle rock / earth / lost trinkets detail, and the main passageways illuminated with background features and objects and entities.

The two images need to show clearly show how the top down, plan view of one, translates into the up and down, left and right of the other.  North on the roadmap = up in the gameworld.

An example roadmap taken from google maps.

The above images show the original screenshot taken from google maps (obvious in plan view with up being north), and the concept of how the game will convert this to 2D side view with north becoming up.  It also indicates how notable structures like buildings will become chambers in the game.  Also the type of buildings will inform background furniture or even interactable objects.  I.e. a factory might produce a chamber with a background of cogs, with some interactable levers and mechanisms the player can activate.  These will likely be tied to nearby gates, doors, trapdoors, or traps.

I included a bunch of Limbo screenshots to illustrate what a predominantly dark, moody and silhouetted game looks like. Not that I have any intention of copying Limbo in that regard, it was more for atmosphere. Below are a few more images I have trawling the web that had a similar appeal in terms of atmosphere and general weirdness.

Disclaimer: None of these images are by me or my team, nor are they part of my game or purported to be from my game. They are purely included as part of a mood board to provide some guidance and inspiration to my concept artist.

Below are some stylistic concept pieces.  These show potential content for the actual passageways, chambers and catacombs…

And here are some potential character ideas…

The actual feeling I want to go for is something like a dark fairytale with some pirate / aquatic content as well as some more traditional Dungeons & Dragons style content.  But everything must have the overall feeling of a spooky, nightmarish fairytale.

Now I certainly don't want to copy Limbo. That was unique and special in its own way. It's included here really to illustrate the style of a game where vast tracks of the screen are blacked out.

The perspective in my game is intended to be different, rather than distant diffuse backgrounds, the only real illuminated stuff will be the content you close to. That's the general idea anyway. In this case is very much a case of let the artist do their work. They know best.

It should also be noted that none of these images are mine. They are included for informational purposes only and if copyright owners wish me to remove I'll be happy to do so of course.