In Solitary Echoes you step into the shoes of a character, who's cool and edgy name I have yet to come up with.
You were a technical support engineer on a geoforming outpost on LV-513, tasked with changing a very important lightbulb when the outpost was overrun by a hostile alien lifeform. During the attack you managed to grab some supplies and lock yourself into a maintenance room. After some days, the noise and the screams from outside slowly die down. After some weeks, your supplies slowly run out. Time to head out. See what's going on. Find help. Survive.
Hope you're excited for some typing!
In Solitary Echoes you are always just barely staying alive. Weapons, ammo and healthkids are very scarse and often well hidden. You have to constantly organize your few resources, always evaluate if the fight is worth spendingh the precious ammo, or if there's a way to bypass it.
There's also combat.
Solitary Echoes - the fun adventure for the whole family! Coming soon™ to a Steam library near you!
Hey survivors! It's been a long time since the last update. We haven't been idle and want to show you some of the features we implemented since the last article.
The first thing we want to talk about is communication between the player and NPCs. There's traditional in-engine cutcenes to create some atmosphere and drive the story forward. But there's also a system where NPCs can contact the player over radio. This can be used in situations where the player is unsure what to do and needs a little help. NPCs can also comment on the player's progress or give some small hints. To make it clear, when the player is getting such a radio call, there's a new notification icon on the lower part of the HUD during the transmission.
The player will also answer those radio calls (although not dynamically) and there will be full dialogues. That whole radio system makes use of our custom env_radio entity, which will always play back the used wav files exactly at the player's location (as opposed to a fixed location in the map). This entity also handles the rendering of the notification sprite.
Note the small notification icon at the bottom (left of the player's hand).
Next, we'll talk about some eye-candy: We switched all lighting effects from brush-based additive textures to sprite-based effects. We use a technique where there's several overlapping sprites with varying angles, creating the illusion of volumetric lighting.
Comparison between the different lighting effects.
There's also some new effects like Opposing Force styled electrified wires and prettier smoke/steam effects (both adopted from FreeSlave's fabulous Half-Life featureful SDK) as well as some home-grown water effects.
Electrified Wire FX
Smoke FX
Water FX
A little more technical: We also adapted entities like trigger_look, env_modeltrain, env_spritetrain and monster_target from said SDK. These entities are already doing their magic in the newer maps, enabling a more dynamic and somewhat up to date gaming experience.
Overall progress is coming along nicely. We fleshed out the idea of releasing Solitary Echoes in three different chapters. For this, we created a small hub map where players can select which chapter they want to play or start the training course you already know from the demo. The first chapter is about 1/4 done and we will release the mod once it's finished. Chapter 2 and 3 will follow after this. I guess you could call it a free DLC. :)
We're also toying with the idea of some humanoid enemies just to mix things up a little. But it's way too early to show something here, so consider this the obligatory teaser.
If you've made it that far, you might enjoy those screenshots of some new locations in chapter 1.
Stay happy, stay alive!
simbl for Team Lambda.
Have a peek at Solitary Echoes presented in a stunning new look, thanks to ReShade! Also small update on the demo release.
We're happy to announce that a demo / playable teaser for Solitary Echoes will be released soon!
We've finished the shooting range of SE's trainign course. The course itself is nearing completion / closed beta testing too. Also in this artice: A tease...
I Understand that is is like survival Horror, but can there be a mode or difficulty where ammo and health is plentiful? To accommodate different playing styles.
Not sure if this is balanceable with the gameplay. I guess this is where cheats would come into place. ;)
The game will be divided in 3 chapters, which will have fokus on slightly different gameplay mechanics (survival/stealth, action shooter and so on).
i like this! I've been waiting a long time for a mod about aliens
This looks really nice, definitley looking forward to the final release
What's this new "Reshade" thingy?
It's a software which can add some post processing effects to 3D rendered objects. I use it to add some effects like for example bloom to Solitary Echoes. I made a preset for ReShade that is specifically tuned to the mod.
The whole thing is completely optional and tweakable though, so if you don't like the look, you can either keep it vanilla or use ReShade but tweak it to better match your taste.
This looks so good! Can't wait for release. I wish you all the best, and please, don't abandon this project.
Thank you so much! And I'll try my best! :)
god damn this mod looks so ******* cool keep the hard work
I will, thanks!