Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[Technomancer]

Some force screens. Since I saw some leaked force action and I gotta tell it looks much better in motion, stills don't do it justice. It's far superior to original placeholder effects from kickstarter force demo.

Blast aka Force Push

Barrier I assume

 

[Dadd]

Are they aiming to fix the drunk flailing movement or is that intentional? The lighting and the refined looking armor look great in the first screenshot by the way.

 

[Technomancer]

Are they aiming to fix the drunk flailing movement or is that intentional? The lighting and the refined looking armor look great in the first screenshot by the way.

Only feels drunk in first days of play and if you are doing it wrong. Check out good players, their control over characters is very precise. If it's just not your thing then that's it, devs are happy with controls and so is their community.

 

[Pink Eye]

Nice. Now to wait several more centuries for it to be ready for play. After all, we got to make sure the effects are of pristine quality and, of course, feature velvet simulation.

 

[Dadd]

Are they aiming to fix the drunk flailing movement or is that intentional? The lighting and the refined looking armor look great in the first screenshot by the way.

Only feels drunk in first days of play and if you are doing it wrong. Check out good players, their control over characters is very precise. If it's just not your thing then that's it, devs are happy with controls and so is their community.

Even good players appear fully drunk. Beginners just look much worse than completely drunk.

 

[Technomancer]

Even good players appear fully drunk. Beginners just look much worse than completely drunk. Seems like this topic gets brought up often, with people replying you won't ever look not drunk no matter how good you get.

Usually it's brought up by newbies or people who played for a bit but were unwilling to learn and decided to change the game instead by complaining on steam. It's not going to change. Developers are happy with how it plays and so is the core playerbase.

If you think it's drunk then I doubt I can say anything that could convince you otherwise. I do immediately spot when experienced player is playing however. For example, see how he moves around? How he throws his body weight into punches for extra damage? This shit is tricky and you need some insight in controls, try this stuff on first week of playing and you will just stumble drunkenly.

 

[Dadd]

Even good players appear fully drunk. Beginners just look much worse than completely drunk. Seems like this topic gets brought up often, with people replying you won't ever look not drunk no matter how good you get.

Usually it's brought up by newbies or people who played enough but were unwilling to learn and decided to change the game instead. It's not going to change. Developers are happy with how it plays and so is the core playerbase.

If you think it's drunk then I doubt I can say anything that could convince you otherwise. I do immediately spot however when experienced player is playing. See how he moves around? How he throws his body weight into punches for extra damage? This shit is tricky, try this stuff on first week of playing and you will just stumble drunkenly.

I'm not talking about precision of controls. I'm talking about the movement being given to flailing, drunken-looking motions. The controls could be extremely precise and at the same time the movement could be flailing as if the extremities are unnaturally heavy. In that video the character does appear drunk, and obviously the appearance of drunkenness is much more pronounced when wielding weapons. Even when the player is skilled enough to reliably flip around opponents with swords, he continues to look drunk.

 

[Technomancer]

I'm not talking about precision of controls. I'm talking about the movement being given to flailing, drunken-looking motions. The controls could be extremely precise and at the same time the movement could be flailing as if the extremities are unnaturally heavy. In that video the character does appear drunk, and obviously the appearance of drunkenness is much more pronounced when wielding weapons. Even when the player is skilled enough to reliably flip around opponents with swords, he continues to look drunk.

Huh, really? In my eyes it's weaponless fighters who always looked the most drunk. But yeah, I didn't see anything being said on that like "we gonna work on this". Closest I saw were some hypothetical tweaks to parry animations.

 

[Pink Eye]

I'm talking about the movement being given to flailing, drunken-looking motions. The controls could be extremely precise and at the same time the movement could be flailing as if the extremities are unnaturally heavy.

Meh. When you're focused on the controls and moving around you don't really pay attention to that.

 

[Dadd]

The combat is still excellent. The movement issue is a relatively small thing that I'd like them to reconsider before full release.

 

[ItsChon]

The main thing that sticks out is the foot movement. Sometimes the legs get way too close together or too far apart. Perhaps there is a way to create a happy medium between visual accuracy and precise controls?

 

[agris]

Well, we know this team is really focused on the details of the engine. That's why Examina is taking so long. So the fact that SG will inherit the Examina engine is good; there should be minimal work needed under the hood. Thankfully we know these guys are content creation machines - they just pump it out - so all SG will need is content and no engine tweaks. That's the team's strength!

SG is way too ambitious, it will take a long ass time. Content aside, core idea of dynamic quests and NPC roles will take years of coding and design. This is the part that worries me the most because nothing like that was done before.

I look forward to my grandchildren telling me about SG's release as I lay on my death-bed.

 

[agris]

Dadd re: drunkness; do you think that your impression is colored by the animations you are used to seeing?

To my eye, most attacking animations in games are robotic. Which makes sense, given how animations are created. But the machine-like efficiency and repetition of almost all game's attack animations are not natural, but we are used to them.

Examina's animations look much more realistic to me, although they are a bit slower than real life. Examina's NPCs appear to have distributed weight, not just centroids, and incorporate momentum / intertia into movement.

Perhaps it's the slowness - which I expect is to keep it usable - combined with the fact that we're so used to seeing robotic anims, that leads to the drunk impression?

 

[Technomancer]

5/9/22

This week we've made some great progress on the barrier based aspects of force thaumaturgy. This will include quite a few defensive and crowd control powers, making up a good chunk of the tree. We previously figured out how we would make some nice force effects in any shape, in a way that could support various things we needed it to do. We've now improved on that a lot and focused on the barrier power, which is a large flat "wall" of force, and the most technically challenging for various reasons. The fact that it's flat means giving it a shape that looks 3D from different angles is particularly difficult, but we finally got some good results. We've also got nice effects for collisions, spawning and dissipating, lighting and sound design and it's all looking good.

We've got the building blocks for just about everything force now and we've tackled the difficult uncertain bits, but before we start building and completing all the individual powers we're going to switch gears for a bit and focus on the game mechanics side of things. There's quite a few changes to thaumaturgy in general with multiple domains, potency levels and required UI changes, new mechanics for casting, AI reacting to the new powers and so on. Once things are properly integrated into the game we'll go through the force tree and finalise the powers one by one.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

12/9/22

This week we've been working on the new thaumaturgy system mechanics and updates to the user interface for it. With the update you will have access to multiple domains at once (mind and force), and with this also comes the Potential mechanic with various implications.

Currently you learn a power and that's that, but now you will also need to earn potential through certain actions or events, which will affect how strong your powers are. Potential is channelled into specific powers, but also boosts the entire domain. Typically you would have an innate domain which is easier to channel, while other domains are more expensive. The Unknown character in Exanima however has some different things going on. This is an important change that adds a new progression mechanic and a new aspect to builds. This was always planned, but didn't really make much sense until multiple domains were added. Now it is fundamental and its value will increase as we expand the game.

The user interface for thaumaturgy is getting some important additions and changes to support multiple domains and mechanics for potential. UI design is no joke, and implementation is time consuming. We'd been juggling concepts for a while and still had some doubts, but the final design came together really well. It's all finalised visually and animated, and nearly fully functional.

We've got a bit of work left to get all this properly integrated, then we'll go through all the force powers one by one and get them all fully implemented into the game. We're not sure how long this will take, but we hope to get through it quite quickly; force may be the most notable addition, but we'd like to include various other things in this important update.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

19/9/22

Work on thaumaturgy continues and we're making steady progress. All the updates to the thaumaturgy UI, mechanics for multiple domains, potential and channeling powers are now complete. Force thaumaturgy is now properly integrated into the game (though we still need to build most of the individual powers) and everything is set up for future domains too.

As tempting as it is to just add more force powers now, we want to make sure all the mechanics are very well established, so we don't have to go back and make changes later. Right now we have two very different powers, blast and barricade, carefully chosen for covering the most challenging and different elements of force. In terms of effects, lighting, sound and physics these are well developed and provide the building blocks for most other powers, but there's still important details to get right before we consider them fully complete.

One important thing we focused on immediately is "casting" mechanics. So far using mind powers has been a completely hands free action, but this is not the case for the new powers. There's now casting animations and stages, specific action conflicts, recovery periods, input queuing, cancelling windows, new input modes and so on. Force is quite a combat focused domain and this is all very important for how the controls flow and feel. There's a lot more going on now and we actually re-designed our input processing, not just to support all this, but also future additions and some general improvements.

Everything is going really well, but there is a lot to get through. This feels like the biggest update yet in terms of gameplay. Force really adds a lot of new tools to the box, there's some real build diversity now and new progression mechanics that also tie into the story. We're going to have to make some tough decisions about what to include now, when it might matter most and what to leave to future updates. We know some of you probably just want anything as soon as possible, but a few small additions can make a huge difference in value when you dive back into the game to experience it all.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

26/9/22

We've been working on completing gameplay mechanics and making general refinements for force. In particular we worked on things like aiming, smart targeting and placement, environment interaction and some final layers of polish for the effects and their animations. At this point all this seems to be in a really good place and the only thing really left which we're actively working on now is AI interaction.

AI interaction is a broad topic and largely dependent on how much we're willing to do, now or in the future. Our AI is mostly driven by an emotion system, and that covers quite a lot of what we want implicitly, but also having done mind thaumaturgy previously we have the tools to manipulate that system. There is a lot of potential to do cool stuff here, and also an opportunity to flesh out general AI behaviour with more context, but for now we're trying to focus on the essentials. Some force powers involve various types of barriers that can collapse when receiving too much punishment, so something we need is AI engaging in combat behaviours against things other than characters or creatures. This would also include doors, dummies, targets, other objects, and things we can't talk about because spoilers, so it has a lot of future applications.

Force introduces some pretty intense visual effects, especially in terms of lighting. The game is very well optimised and so for a while now we've been thinking about what we could do with all that extra performance on recent powerful GPUs. We've been testing some ideas and when analysing the performance we found a GPU data optimisation which skyrocketed it. We then realised we could use this to boost performance in general, and somewhat ironically instead of improving visuals at the cost of performance for high end GPUs, we ended up improving performance for the low-end. We expect this will have a huge impact there, but also a substantial boost for the mid-range.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[fork]

This scam still going?
lmao

 

[Artyoan]

This scam still going?
lmao

It may not be a fully realized game but I got my money's worth from it when I played it. Especially the arena portion. Steep learning curve but getting the aiming/timing just right to waylay somebody in the face for a KO was quite satisfying.

 

[fork]

It's a scam.
Poor man's Star Citizen.

 

[mkultra]

Mostly scamming themselves then, because i highly doubt this game sells in droves or that keeping it half-finished forever is something that keeps either hype, interest or sales up tremendously. It does not have a gigantic following from what i can see anywhere.

There has been actual scams on KS where they took the money and ran. This is pretty far from that, more like the opposite of that..

 

[fork]

Mostly scamming themselves then, because i highly doubt this game sells in droves or that keeping it half-finished forever is something that keeps either hype, interest or sales up tremendously. It does not have a gigantic following from what i can see anywhere.

I hope they'll starve or freeze to death then.
Incompetent fucks.

 

[Kruyurk]

I hope they'll starve or freeze to death then.
Incompetent fucks.

Maybe they should be branded "incompetent fucks" so wherever they go, others would know what to expect.

 

[fork]

You're being sarcastic, but I agree.
Alternatively they should be prosecuted for fraudulant business practices and put into jail for a decade. These "devs" are scum.

 

[Technomancer]

3/10/22

This week we've been getting deep into the AI side of things. We've gone a bit beyond our initial goals of combat interactions and looking at a few aspects of AI that need to be expanded on or improved. There is an amount of overlap between our immediate goals and the two following major updates (the second of which should be the final update for version 1.0). The update following this one will focus almost entirely on AI related things, expanding the role system for important story and other interactions. We won't reveal much about the final update, but it will introduce some key things that from an AI perspective will benefit from the work we're doing now.

We have a strong foundation with a lot of untapped potential for the AI with the emotion, relationship and role systems, which will be expanded on in the update after this. The core essentials are also important (and not simple), like combat which has received big revisions in recent updates, and navigation which we're in the process of making some improvements to. Beyond navigating the environment though, AI currently doesn't have much awareness of it, or anything really beyond other characters and some scripted locations and triggers tied to roles. This will change, with the AI being able to recognise and react to every little object or thing in their vicinity. This is something we've been carefully building towards from the very first steps in development.

We touched on this last week, how we wanted AI to react to and in some cases attack force powers. But this isn't through some specific behaviours for this or that, we're building a framework for AI to perceive and respond to anything, based on their unique qualities, knowledge, emotional state etc. Breaking it all down into a common system is how we respect all these things on both sides of the relationship, and approach something that resembles intelligent behaviour regardless of the situation.

This might sound like a lot, but we've been considering these problems for a long time, it's all part of our plan and we're already well into implementing it. In fact from here it's largely a matter of finally giving some meaning and purpose to all the work we've already done. The game has absolutely grown beyond its planned scope and far beyond the level of refinement, but this shift occurred long ago. We know by now that "good enough" just isn't a thing, and while we don't know how far we will ultimately go, what's important is that when we take a small step it isn't into a dead end, but that we're also laying down the path ahead. For you right now this just means that AI will react to your showy new powers in a way that isn't stupid and immersion breaking, but it's all part of a bigger picture.

We've broadened the scope a bit here, but sometimes a bit of context can be good. This aspect of AI has always been a strong design focus for us, for the same basic reasons as physics has been; it's not really about combat or to support specific gameplay elements, we hate restrictive, highly purpose designed mechanics. We want a world where things work the way you'd expect them to, so you can be creative with how you interact with it and be rewarded with plausible outcomes that contribute to immersion. We might not get it exactly right or do it all in one go, but we are making the effort.

Have a great week!
-the BM team