Spooky Action at a Distance Games

Made from this spritesheet:

{
    "name": "Vertical door, 2-tile",
    "door": {
        "walls": [
            {"offset": [-1, 0], "wall": "east"},
            {"offset": [-1, 1], "wall": "east"}
        ]
    },
    "multitile": {
        "tileset": "ArthurVista-dors-4export-v1.0",
        "static_tiles": [
            {
                "name": "opened",
                "fragments": [
                    {"offset": [-1,-1], "id": 34},
                    {"offset": [0,-1], "id": 35},
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "id": 44},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "id": 45},
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "id": 96},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "id": 97},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "id": 54},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "id": 55},
                    {"offset": [-1,2], "id": 64},
                    {"offset": [0,2], "id": 65}
                ]
            },
            {
                "name": "closed",
                "fragments": [
                    {"offset": [-1,-1], "id": 34},
                    {"offset": [0,-1], "id": 35},
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "id": 44},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "id": 45},
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "id": 70},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "id": 71},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "id": 54},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "id": 55},
                    {"offset": [-1,2], "id": 64},
                    {"offset": [0,2], "id": 65},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "id": 74},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "id": 75}
                ]
            }
            
        ],
        "animations": [
            {
                "name": "open",
                "fragments": [
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "name": "door-v-open-upper-nw"},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "name": "door-v-open-upper-ne"},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "name": "door-v-open-upper-sw"},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "name": "door-v-open-upper-se"},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "name": "door-v-open-lower-w"},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "name": "door-v-open-lower-e"}
                ]
            },
            {
                "name": "close",
                "fragments": [
                    {"offset": [-1,0], "name": "door-v-close-upper-nw"},
                    {"offset": [0,0], "name": "door-v-close-upper-ne"},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "name": "door-v-close-upper-sw"},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "name": "door-v-close-upper-se"},
                    {"offset": [-1,1], "name": "door-v-close-lower-w"},
                    {"offset": [0,1], "name": "door-v-close-lower-e"}
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

My programming language of choice, Rust, allows you to write code in independent libraries of modules, called “crates”. Other languages do it too, it’s nothing new, but in Rust it’s seriously easier, and the benefits are immediately usable.

This has this effect on our progress: a programmer can work on independent crate for months, without a visible effect on the main project. It happened when we worked on crates for:

• Shadowcasting (for visibility and projectiles) – credit to Maria;
• Tiled (tile map editor) integration with graphics framework;
• Animations engine – credit to Maria;
• Talk (our dialogue engine);
• UI – credit to Maria;
• “Buff/debuff” – an engine for effects like “10% to speed, Speed gives extra +15% Dodge”;
• and lately – Thin Walls.

Now I can declare that Thin Walls are officially ready for beta testing.

Wait, what Thin Walls?

In short, this is one of my bad decisions that prolong development for months and lead to overengineering. It is a gimmick – I wanted to have not only traditional roguelike full-tile walls, but also walls between tiles.

This broke a cascade of things:

• Shadowcasting;
• Pathfinding;
• Map loader;
• Tiled maps.

But now it’s usable in the game engine. Thanks to this, I have the map from an earlier post running in the engine. Green lines are a debug tool for actual walls, red circles are tile visibility.

Now, next crate I’m creating is – finally – Combat

I’m finally working on something that resembles a game. This something is an example for Combat crate. In Rust, again, there is an out-of-box mechanism with which you can create examples for each crate, for documentation, demonstration or learning purpose. I also use them to try out my code design for this crate.

In this crate, that depends on Thin Walls above, you actually control a character, and, tada! you have a team of enemies that can attack you with melee or ranged attacks. This crate is about creating the dumbest AI that I could think of.

It’s still blocked by the lack of pathfinding and some features in visibility on Thin Walls, but hey, I’m getting close to that.

Here is the Combat crate example. Looks a bit like LaserTag room, isn’t it?

Some of Snorri’s new animations and ArthurVista’s environment. Slightly NSFW… well, not really. We just need the naked base to start animating different clothes on top of it.

A feature that was long due, integration with Tiled editor.

It uses so called Wang tiles to mark up the walls on the map, so the editor can design not only visuals, but also a topology of the map. In future, we will expand the number of tile kinds that game engine “understands” in the map.

It’s still rough around the edges, rendering order needs to be improved, but it’s the beginning.

Temporary character credit: body/female/reptiles/red_winged.png: by Nila122, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), Stephen Challener (Redshrike) on OpenGameArt one two three.

Hello everyone. It’s been a while since we posted on this blog, so I felt like we should do a little re-introduction about our studio and the project we’re working on. 

For the past several years, we’ve been working on a role-playing video game called “Stepsons of the Universe”. It is a game, in which you explore a strange anachronistic sci-fi world, where humanity has split itself into communities, each mirroring a specific part of the real-world history. 

You begin your journey in a rural area, where tribes of people live as if the Neolithic period has never ended. You’ll have to find a way to survive in these harsh conditions, as well as take part in local conflicts. As you venture further into the world, your surroundings change, almost as if you’re going forward in time. You’ll find places that are stuck in the Medieval era, or in a Renaissance era, or maybe a series of settlements engaged in a miniature version of the Cold War (though, do keep in mind that the specific historical eras, that are going to be featured in the game, are not currently set in stone). 

A mock-up image using in-game assets of how the game is potentially going to look. Not the final product

As you progress, you’ll learn new skills, acquire new equipment, and complete various main and side quests. Along the way, you’ll have to interact with an AI named SHTURO and share information with it, as you both attempt to find out what happened to humankind in this universe and how to stop an incoming world-ending cataclysmic event. 

Our ultimate goal is to create a unique role-playing experience with an engrossing narrative, a fast-paced dynamic combat system, as well a distinct visual style. We want to make a game inspired by the classics that we grew up with, such as the original Fallout, Rogue, Chrono Trigger, Ultima IV, and many others. 

Players will be able to craft their own character, with a certain set of skills and stats, each of which will affect their future play style and unlock certain branches of the storyline, some of which are only available to characters with specific stats. 

The game will feature a turn-based tactical combat, inspired by the likes of Jupiter Hell and All walls must fall. Both the player and the NPCs make their turns at the same time, so when a player takes a shot from a gun the enemy does so as well, and bullets, projectiles and other types of attack all take time either determined by a specific animation, or a speed of projectile. So as the enemy shoots at you, you have a chance to dodge or take cover, as the bullet takes time to reach its target. It’s a much faster, more aggressive style of combat than the ones we usually see in turn-based RPGs, where in crowded battles you can spend a lot of time just waiting for all enemies to take their turns.
What’s unique about our combat system is that the players will have a choice to either take a combat action, or a speaking action. Instead of swinging away at the enemy or shooting from a bow or a gun, you can try talking to them mid-battle, persuading them to stop fighting, betray their comrades, or maybe intimidate them into surrender. This action will also take time, so you’ll have to choose between fighting and talking. Not all battles can be resolved with words though, so be careful. This particular aspect is inspired by tabletop role-playing games, where there is always an option to talk as a secondary action during your turn. This part of role-playing experience has been historically very overlooked when it comes to translating tabletop rules into the medium of video games.

A few words about our team

As of now, we’re a small and humble bunch. We call our team “Spooky Action at A Distance”, or SaaaD for short, which is a cheeky reference to the fact that most of us live quite far from each other and have never met in person.

I’ll start with myself. My name is Snorri, and I’m the narrative lead on the game. I’m the one writing the story, and the dialogue, I design and plan all the quests, and, as of recently, I am also making animations for the game (gotta use that Animator’s degree for something). Before coming onto this project, I’ve been mostly writing TV Shows and feature films. My short film, “Hyperion: a scholar’s tale” has also been featured in an International animation festival Animator in Poznan. 

Next up is @HughHoyland, who is the project founder as well as the lead programmer. “Stepsons of the Universe” is an old dream project of his that he originally started with some of his friends. He has brought me onboard in 2021 and we’ve been working ever since.

The art of our game has been so far mostly done by the talented arthur_vista (you can find more of their work here). They make our sci-fi nonsense look extremely pretty and appealing to the eye. We are extremely lucky to have them.

There is also Maria, a Senior Researcher in Ukrainian Centre of Marine Ecology. Decided to switch her career to software development and is now making great progress in Rust, because marine research in Ukraine will be hazardous until the total demining of the Black Sea.

It’s about now that I should also point out that all members of our team are from Ukraine, and most of us are still living there despite the 2022 invasion. We’re making good progress on the game, but as you might understand, working while under constant threat of bombing raids, blackouts, and other hazards is quite tough. We have already lost at least one member of our team to this war, and we can’t know for sure what will happen to us next. So while we’re committed to finishing this thing, there will most certainly be setbacks and maybe even bigger problems. Please, be patient with us.

As of now, we have a functional game prototype, over 250 pages of written dialogue and quest descriptions, and some very nice pixel-art character models and assets.
I’m hoping to give you more updates in the future, and starting from now I will try to write more development updates on this page. 

It has a long way to go, but the engine now has:

• Dialogue engine (see the first post in this blog);
• World state;
• Scripting in Lua;
• Rudimentary battle system.

Our next goal is buff/debuff system, which is known to be a hard problem. Probably I’m going to overengineer it, even if I try not to…

Second, shadowcasting (great job, Maria!), which will be used for:

• vision,
• lighting
• and ranged combat.

Obstacles can have different permeability for light and projectiles. For example:

• smoke can be very thick but completely “transparent” for bullets,
• while armored glass is the opposite of it;
• smoke and glass both can be 50% translucent, and a wooden wall can provide only 50% of cover.

But enough words, here’s a picture of obstacle shadows and target visibility:

Just lazy about the blog.
Let me share a few new parts of our engine.

First, animation engine (by Maria) and Tiled map editor integration (by hugh):

Credits for art used:

• Map tiles: anonymous OpenGameArt contributor,
• character: body/female/reptiles/red_winged.png: by Nila122, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), Stephen Challener (Redshrike) on OpenGameArt one two three,
• clothes: ElizaWy, Marcel van de Steeg (MadMarcel) on OpenGame Art one two.
• clothes: bluecarrot16, David Conway Jr. (JaidynReiman), Joe White, Matthew Krohn (makrohn), Johannes Sjölund (wulax) on OpenGameArt one two
• character sheet created in Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator.

A lot of project have devlogs. It’s motivating, it may serve your promotion, but mainly it creates some connection with people who like your project.

Legend, inspired me to continue blogging.

In the last two weeks our prototype got:

• Shooting! You can:
  • shoot volleys (the weapons are described in JSON and can be created arbitrarily);
  • kill mobs;
  • miss! (I invented an original weapon accuracy formula);
  • reload;
  • see the mob in focus, its HP and hit probability;
• Vision field (thanks to bracket-pathfinding);

An animated GIF is worth two thousand words, so here you go – a testing map, and then the data that defines it:

As some may notice, the demo is taking a bit of inspiration in my favorite roguelike, Jupiter Hell. Go buy it. Yes, it is totally worth it. No, the price will not be lower.

Our fantastic screenwriter has finished a scenario plan and is pushing me towards a minimal combat/plot demo. He’s absolutely correct, and it means I have to finalize the essential combat features like:

• mob inventories;
• simplistic monster AIs (wander, seek, shoot back);
• time, (where each action may take a different amount of time, and this defines turn order);
• shotguns;
• melee;
• cover;
• (maybe) destructible environment;

And non-combat plans for the demo:

• redo the conversation UI – it’s supposed to be nonmodal;
• and, very likely, migrate to graphics. With the tech I want (pixel graphics + lighting), it’s a huge task, but, er, I really want it.

I want our screenwriters to have a great tools, in order to be able to:

• Write dialogues/quests in a simple, human-writer-readable-writeable format;
• Quickly run and test them;
• Be able to do automated validation: dangling brancehs, branch prices/probabilities

When I searched for a dialogue engine (format + editor/prototyping tool + library) at the beginning of the project, I only paid attention to Ink and Twine.

Ink is mostly suitable for IF (interactive fiction), not CRPGs.

Twine‘s integration into game engines is mostly nonexistent, and its format is a cryptic Javascript embedded into HTML.

So, I wrote my own dialogue engine and language (see the previous post). A prototype of such, but anyway.

What happened next?

I found YarnSpinner!

• It integrates into Unity (who knows, we might end up there. Everybody uses Unity).
• The syntax is simple, and there’s a grammar definition, almost ready to be reused in my own parser.
• It has a rapid prototyping tool, too.
• It can both integrate the RPG engines’s state into its formulas, and change it by sending “command messages” to the integration API.
• And it has stuff I didn’t think about, like localization support and the above-mentioned commands.

Sigh.

I’m seriously considering throwing Talk (my dialogue DSL) away and rewriting my dialogue engine in YarnSpinner.

OTTH…

I looked for “nested Stories” tool for a bigger game, because dumping all story nodes on one screen scales pretty horribly.

Only one tool, Articy Draft, can do it. It’s a commercial tool, with an unreasonable monthly subscription cost ($60/month), but luckily, it has a once-purchaseable Steam version for $100. Much better than $60/mo.

The quest continues.