Comments - FacepalmGames

It's releasing on Windows only but I hope we can get a Linux version out as soon as possible.

Thanks! We are :)

I guess what caught your eye is the area close to the door on the right side.There's very little bloom in that scene and it's only affecting the parts with very bright lights. I think the look has more to do with the way the textures are generated from photographs.

A more technical explanation would be: The engine uses self-shadowing normal maps. That tends to generate some errors because not all needed information can be encoded into the texture. Badly placed lights make the errors visible. That is probably what causes the hazed look on that area.

Also there's some fog in there and the colors are heavily tuned towards blue.

The concept looks pretty similar to a game I've been developing: Moddb.com
Not that it terribly bothers, just wanted to mention. There's good but old gameplay footage in the 3rd news piece.

Thanks! Yeah it´s using deferred renderer.

and now that the low-level stuff is mostly done i can finally actually start working on the game

ha don't worry :)

Thanks! The "model" was actually made of clay, then photographed and turned into normal maps. I guess I'm later gonna make a post about that because it's pretty interesting stuff. Btw could you specify more clearly what you were meaning with the head looking strange?

@Murdouken: You pretty well summed up my thinking behind the different effects. I'm hoping to make it so that most effects are not just an visual gimmick but also serve a story/gameplay purpose. A bit less obvious example is the shadow system which is used to tell the player about how it's possible to interact with different areas.

Personally I like the blur effect but it's something that can and will be tweaked a lot before any release. Here it might also look exaggerated because there are no objects in the middle ground, everything is either perfectly clear or totally blurred (and the depth of field is very short).

updownleftrightscrolling

Yeah that video surely can confuse :D The gameplay happens in 2D in these sort of three-D'ish environments. There are no actual models. What you actually see on the screen is just 2D-planes with a visual trick applied to them.

Umm… What?

Sorry. I mean we are no more using GM and if we need help we'll tell it

It used to be made on Game Maker but atm a new engine with C#/OpenGL/Mono is being built. So it's gonna be available at least on Win/Linux/Mac.

Wow, this looks really interesting and promising! I'd like to get an invitation too.

You mean the text is vague, the gameplay is vague or what? Anyway, I'm sorry for my non-native english.

Thanks! That ain't all..

Here you can see both the original and that same picture as above: Facepalmgames.blogspot.com

Thanks and thanks :)

Huge thanks for sharing these! I saw these on your other news article here on moddb and decided to google for "moddb icons". Guess what I found :D

Sure.

I agree. Too much is too much. It's annoying when one collides into the boxes that can't be seen through the fog for example..

About GM, I've asked that myself many times before. Before founding GM I had done some programming, but generally GM the thing that taught me most of my current skills. Only when starting to experiment with the graphically intensive things it started to show it's weak sides. At that point I asked if it really is the right choice, but rather than abandoning the program I took it as a challenge. Another point was that I had already developed an "engine" that used it as a base. It would have taken months to port it to some another system not mentioning all the time spent on learning new stuff.

And I'm not after all the newest graphical glitter. Instead I wan't to focus on bringing enjoyable gameplay with at least decent graphics, not spending all the time doing stuff the harder way. Sure there are talented programmers to whom that's the right way to go but I think I'm not one of them.

However some day in the future I'm going to switch to something else for 99% sure.. Even for the sake of cross-platform compatibility.

I think the same, it doesn't look that good. But first I must say that without the fog the current build of the game itself wouldn't look that good :) For the bad-lookiness there are a few reasons: the particles are Huge, they lack any animation in themselves, only thing they currently do is rotating. In the video the fog is also about twice as fast as it currently is, which makes some pretty big difference. And it's mostly way too dense so the particles show up too well. The particle count is also upped a bit from the video, making it look different, IMO better.

Probably the current fog could be made better looking also by putting there some more randomness. I think it could be a strategic element even while being not so over-visible, and compared to bushes it's dynamic. But there is going to be bushes also, and maps without bushes or fog. Generally the fog is just one gameplay modifier among others, but it's there also for the graphics. I think it's at least a idea worth testing.

Ideal fog in the terms of movement would work more like a thick fluid. I just can't think of a way to simulate it in real time so that it looked good and would also run on some older comps.

Thanks really much! Nothing is better for motivation than good feedback!