Hi guys

Just wanted to get involved in this community since announcing my next game recently. It is called Ergastulum and is a spiritual successor to my last game Dungeon Nightmares II. Here is the announcement trailer I made last week.

I will be working alone once again but this time around I will be working full time on this project trying to make it the best I can. As of today, I have been working on this since September 2016 so its just been over a year.

Why not just make sequel to Dungeon Nightmares? well, this new title would allow me to have a bit more freedom in the direction I wanted to take it thus giving it a new new.

What did I want to do that I couldn't before? I wanted to explore bringing more fantasy/magic ideas into the gameplay as well as implement mechanics that you would find in traditional adventure games, such as an Inventory system. Dungeon Nightmares was always just a high paced action game whereas this game will have light adventure/RPG elements that wouldn't fit in the Dungeon Nightmares world. That being said, I will definitely have elements I used in the DN games that fans loved but also bring new ideas to the table.

I mentioned bringing over asian folklore into this world and one such thing is the Jiangshi. I grew up watching Chinese horror movies and always felt they never had exposure in the western world. So I decided to try and blend/fuse it with western Vampire ideas to create something a bit different.

Most recently, I just started showing off the Dark Souls inspirations in my dev logs. The game uses lost souls as a form of currency and this can be used to feed the Well of Souls. Feeding the Well will open up portals to other worlds. Alternatively, you can also use the souls to bind them to your Crucifix making it gain extra abilities. So if you manage to find those souls, and take them back safely, you can either put it towards opening a portal faster OR upgrade your Crucifix. You can split the currency in any way you like too.

WIP video from the Editor: https://streamable.com/bo2rx

Anyway, I don't want to ramble on too much as theres so many games here for you guys to read up on as well :) but if you like what you see... just give me a shout on here as I will be actively updating it. Also, you can follow my Twitter @kmonkeyblog

Thanks for looking :D

Here is the final Well of Souls implementation.

This is how a certain portal can be opened to take you to new worlds.

Just recently put in grabbing and throwing breakable objects. This will later be used for triggering off traps in the dungeon that is high on my list of things to do next

Made new animations for the Skeletons. Intentionally slow but can charge the player and quite deadly up close with their fire breathing.

I've been extremely busy making the controls work with the Xbox controllers but that is now done!

I also recently finished the new Exit Portals. This now replaces the very old exit lifts/shafts in the game.

https://streamable.com/y013nMerry Christmas to all!

I've recently put some work into the dungeon traps and started with one of the primer traps.

The glowing symbols around the trap can only be seen when your Crucifix is in use. These symbols indicate where the pressure pads are that will trigger the crusher.

WIP crusher test:

Testing out the latest build and traps

The game finally has a proper Title Screen!

Working fully with controller support since this was for Xbox One compatibility.

Recently added a new enemy that is dark magic based and has projectiles

added impact particles to the projectiles and made the AI work indoors too

I went back to finish up on these walking screamers and finally put them in the game.

These walking screamers are non-violent but do let out a chilling scream when they see you. The scream will alert others of your location.

The game needed a wandering spirit :)

Hidden passages are finally in the latest BETA! makes using that map even more important than before :)

Its been a long time coming but I finally put in breakable walls (and possibly later on, floors) to the game.

I've had a tiny bit of experience in the past with a feature like this in my last game Dungeon Nightmares II and the results were satisfactory.

However, for this new game I wanted to get away from the neat brick work that made the walls stand out too easily for the player to find, without the need of using the map to reveal hidden chambers.

Voronoi Algorithm

I stumbled across something in my search for better fracturing and its called Voronoi generation (http://alexbeutel.com/webgl/voronoi.html).

Since I use Blender, there were also plugins that made use of this algorithm so I decided to venture down this route to find a better smashable walls that also hides it well in the scenery.

Blender

The first test is shown above. Whilst this worked ok, I wanted to try and minimise the chunky look at the shards.

I decided to rework the wall and break it down to the size of the bricks rather than punching a hole through it.

This was quickly followed by creating the breakable piece.

Once I was happy with the above, it was time to get it into Unity.

Unity

For Unity, each shard needed a rigidbody that is disabled at launch.

Each piece can be poked and prodded in the game and depending on what threshold I choose, the rest of the wall will fall under its own weight.

and now hot off the press, I added interactive chains to the game for meaningless fun :D

Swiftly moving onto Act II!

It's good to finally get away from all the browns of Act I. This Act use lots of metal and flesh as it slowly goes towards the later stages.

Tiny update in the Act 2 area as I later found out that the Butcher was too tall! Had to make the level even larger to fit him in :D

Been a while since my last update here but some big news. I've received my Xbox One X and S dev kits and have been working away optimising the game to run on those machines. It was a tough start but I've managed to make it work on the X thus far with a super stable frame rate and keeping the IQ intact as much as possible. Hopefully I can share more on this soon when more of the game is up and running :)

https://twitter.com/kmonkeyblog/status/970235605341949954

Here is a first look at it running on Xbox One :D

Putting it all together now and stress test on Xbox :)

Starting a test for daytime lighting which will have real time day/night cycle with the system clock

sped up day/night cycle

Go to sleeppppp...

Work in Progress for a new enemy. A Werefloofwolf

WIP animation states

Recently started to create more spell casting enemies for the game. This is the Shaman, she is a summoner of spirits...

Here she is in action :)

Started to create a shader to transition the player between worlds.

also updated the skybox in one of the later areas outdoors

Had a short break but back with some new things!

I created a Moth shader to help me save a few GPU cycles to do all the animation and added it to a particle system... stress tested it to show thousands.

This is how it looks in a real scene in-game

Starting to rearrange the room and giving the "corpse" a new pose

I bet you thought this project was dead? nope :D

Visiting the game at specific times can result in a change of your surroundings. make sure to explore at different times of the day ;)