KickStarter STASIS 2: BONE TOTEM - new isometric adventure in Stasis universe set in deep sea installation

[Pyke]

Hey man - Ill ask nic to have a look at that. Probably some wordpress thing.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2021/11/10/mark-morgan-is-back/

MARK MORGAN IS BACK!
A year ago we launched our crowdfunding campaign! If you missed out, you can still get your name in the credits but this time window is closing. Find out here to join us here: STASIS 2

We are excited to announce that Mark Morgan is back!

He has composed a beautiful soundtrack for Bone Totem which continues his proud horror tradition with us. His work on Stasis was critically acclaimed and enhanced the visuals and the atmosphere – and needless to say, we are thrilled to have him on board.

From Fallout, The Bards Tale, and Wasteland, he brings a lifetime of talent to our project, so here is an exclusive sneak peek:

or listen here:

 

[Starwars]

Lovely! Was hoping for this, great to hear.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I'm pretty sure I backed this. How can I change my name and contact details?

 

[Star Citizen]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2021/11/10/mark-morgan-is-back/

MARK MORGAN IS BACK!
A year ago we launched our crowdfunding campaign! If you missed out, you can still get your name in the credits but this time window is closing. Find out here to join us here: STASIS 2

We are excited to announce that Mark Morgan is back!

He has composed a beautiful soundtrack for Bone Totem which continues his proud horror tradition with us. His work on Stasis was critically acclaimed and enhanced the visuals and the atmosphere – and needless to say, we are thrilled to have him on board.

From Fallout, The Bards Tale, and Wasteland, he brings a lifetime of talent to our project, so here is an exclusive sneak peek:

or listen here:

So good!

 

[Pyke]

Send a mail to studio ( at ) thebrotherhoodgames.com and Nic will sort you out!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2021/12/08/a-short-film-by-chris-bischoff/

A SHORT FILM BY CHRIS BISCHOFF

Chris recently took part in a Rokoko showcase competition.

We are using a Rokoko suit for the motion capture of cinematics in STASIS 2.

Motion capture is the process of making human (and sometimes animal) motion digital. With the help of optical sensors or markers, the motion data is transmitted from an actor to a computer. Here, the captured motion data is used for animating 2D or 3D models. In game dev and filmmaking, motion capture is an unparalleled method for making animated characters move more realistically. Compared to code based animation, it is also superior in terms of speed and accuracy.

We have also been learning the film making tools in Unreal.

What you see in this short animation is captured at 4k and edited in Unreal in real-time, which means no rendering time at all! This will allow us much more flexibility in producing quality pre-rendered cut scenes for our games.

 

[lightbane]

Cool film! Where's the rest of the game though?
Also, it features a black guy thrown into a prison, kek.

 

[Pyke]

Workin' on it! Actually finished all of the ingame level graphics yesterday for the game. I think we're in at 120 scenes across the game. It's a pretty large sprawling adventure!

 

[Daedalos]

cant wait for this! Really enjoyed STASIS and CAYNE too, albeit abit less.

Sci-fi adventure stuff, sign me the fuck up

 

[HoboForEternity]

Sci fi horror is my favorite subgenre of horror media so STASIS is just *chef kiss*

 

[agris]

Pyke can you remind me, what's the connection with bone totem and stasis/cayne? it's the same universe, right? what about timeline?

 

[Pyke]

Same universe. Bone Totem happens a few years after Stasis and Cayne - with the events from those games influencing the world and characters in the game... but its not a direct sequel in the traditional sense. So there won't be John as a character, or Hadley - but there are world altering events that get refered to.
The Groomlake Incident had huge reprocussions on Cayne Corporation and the world, and religious zealotry of the world has gone on a new tangent with people worshiping the New Mother.

I've always thought of Stasis as more of an anthology series that takes place in this world. So you can play Bone Totem without playing Stasis. Kind of like the ALIEN franchise novels and comics. They all surround Weyland and Xeno's - but are still self contained stories.

 

[agris]

Nice, looking forward to it. Are you going to make the size of the game viewport resolution independent this time around? It's probably tedious from a programming perspective, but a nice way to future proof your game's visuals and the usability of the UI. Having the view port and UI elements scale with resolution ain't great, but I understand yall have to focus your efforts.

with the events from those games influencing the world and characters in the game

Any plans to support saved game imports? Even if the ways that Bone Totem recognized decisions extracted from saves are superficial or cosmetic, saved game importing is a fun throw-back to an older era of computer games and may even spark some interest in your back catalogue.

 

[Pyke]

Stasis and Cayne are linear games - so no real 'choices' would be recognised. Also the save systems we use are so wildly different! Nic rewrote the save system for Beautiful Desolation, which is the one we are now using for Bone Totem.

Yeah - our new framework is full scalable. I'm working to ultrawide, and then everything adjusts to other resolutions. Because we are using a skeuomorphic style, it makes this a little tricky, but it's worth it. We also have things like 'classic camera' mode, which zooms the camera out and locks it off to the same style as Stasis... it's pretty cool to see.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2022/02/07/quick-post-1/

 

[Pyke]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2022/02/07/quick-post-1/

Actual footage of me working on Bone Totem.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.thebrotherhoodgames.com/studio/2022/02/15/helpful-hint-for-developers/

HELPFUL HINT FOR DEVELOPERS

I thought this might be a helpful idea for developers who need to track many global values in their games. I refer to global values as a set of values that are used to alter the game state, store quantities, etc.

I have used strings rather than numeric values in a Dictionary in the past, but I have preferred to use numeric references for value stores for the last two games we have made. I found that referencing variables by name enforced lazy coding, and using a numeric reference with a spreadsheet was more efficient.

DEBUGGING GLOBAL VALUES

One thing that helped me tremendously with Beautiful Desolation was storing the reference AS WELL as a note to the code that changed the global value. So, for example, if you look at the code above, I store a string reference to the Script file and the Method that altered this value. It may seem cumbersome now, but it has saved me hours of trying to work out where a value was set from.

I have a singleton that stores the State Array as a List that contains all of the values and the place that set them.

Here is the clever part, I also write this data to the savegame file.

This Save is a dump of the State – what this means is that I can load ANY save from a player, tester, or my code base and review where and when the value was set. This helped out a MASSIVE amount during the playtesting of Desolation, which had 1500 variables in the State.

If a player sends me their save file, I can quickly ascertain why a value is not being set, or where it collided with another puzzle. If the save file only contained the value it would be useless in a debugging context.

My ingame Debug tool also allows me to check the details on any variable quickly.

This only took a few minutes to implement and it has made my life much easier!

 

[Pyke]

 

[CyberWhale]

Cutscenes look amazing, what did you use to render them? Final trailer should probably use voice overs or at least written commentary between the scenes because this way you mostly see characters running through environment (which isn't all that interesting out of the context).

 

[Pyke]

Cutscenes look amazing, what did you use to render them? Final trailer should probably use voice overs or at least written commentary between the scenes because this way you mostly see characters running through environment (which isn't all that interesting out of the context).

I'm using UNREAL 5 as a render engine for the cutscenes - animation is mocapped with a ROKOKO Smartsuit, and the modeling and texturing is MAX and Substance Painter.

We don't have any VO for the game at the moment - We haven't even cast any actors yet. I prefer to leave it to riiiiiiiiiiight at the end, so that we can make any changes to the script without worrying about re-recording lines. This is more of a teaser for the upcoming SteamFest entry - the old trailer definitely needed a proper update!

 

[agris]

Cool video, is the rainbow watch seen around ~12 sec into the video an in-game item/rational for interactive object highlighting? Is it something we can turn on/off at will?

edit: very cool, I haven't been following this closely and didn't know it was underwater themed. "Deep Sea 15", a nod to Area 51?

 

[Pyke]

Cool video, is the rainbow watch seen around ~12 sec into the video an in-game item/rational for interactive object highlighting? Is it something we can turn on/off at will?

edit: very cool, I haven't been following this closely and didn't know it was underwater themed. "Deep Sea 15", a nod to Area 51?

It's activated by right clicking - but can be key bound to anything.
Green indicates things to look at - Blue interactible areas. We tried to tie it into the 'in world tech' - so your plug suit is guiding you to areas of interest - but you don't have to use it if you don't want to! We also have a built in hint system where you can ask the other characters for help on a puzzle - but its entirely optional.

And yeah - the 15 is an area 51 reference. Same as Groomlake in Stasis. I love me my Roswell crash! I've had a game idea based around Roswell for YEARS. It's just so 'done' now, but little bits of it tend to seep into all my work.

 

[agris]

It's nice that you're exploring very different environments in each of your releases. It would be easy to get pigeonholed in the "space horror" genre, for example. Granted there's a lot of crossover between deep space / deep ocean (claustrophobia, "out there" can kill you in an instant), but there's also a lot of unique themes and visuals. BD in-between is a total palette cleanser.

Any thoughts for environment on the *next* game?

ps: please re-render all the classic Fallout 1 and 2 videos :D Some of the Deep Sea 15 shots were was giving me strong Fallout 2 tanker cutscene vibes.

 

[Pyke]

It's nice that you're exploring very different environments in each of your releases. It would be easy to get pigeonholed in the "space horror" genre, for example. Granted there's a lot of crossover between deep space / deep ocean (claustrophobia, "out there" can kill you in an instant), but there's also a lot of unique themes and visuals. BD in-between is a total palette cleanser.

Any thoughts for environment on the *next* game?

Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too many ideas for the next game. :D I've always wanted to do something Cyberpunk'y - but it seems that that genre is a little saturated now. Harder to stand out. I would be interested in seeing if we could do something high fantasy - cos its not really a genre I 'enjoy' - so I'm not married to any of the tropes.
I've been on a bit of a Dieselpunk kick lately - more the asthetic than anything narrative. Yeah man... just so many things I'd love to explore. Ultimately I do think our games take too long to make. I'd love to get it down to 18 months!