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Immortal Redneck – The definitive redneck FPS roguelite

A topic by CremaGames created Dec 01, 2015 Views: 10,709 Replies: 28
Viewing posts 1 to 20
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Immortal Redneck

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Hi there! I'm Guillermo, co-founder of Cremagames, and I want to present you our new game. It's called Immortal Redneck and it's wacky as it sounds.

THE BASICS

Immortal Redneck is a FPS set in Egypt with roguelite elements: random generated floor layouts, permadeath, different classes with their own abilities, a skill tree to grow and lots of weapons and abilities. The setup is very simple: the redneck won a trip to Egypt, but after some random event, he ended up mummified and shooting mythological monsters inside some enormous pyramids while trying to understand what the hell is happening.

The game will launch around Q4 2016 in PC (and with a bit of luck, in consoles, too) and mixes old school FPS gameplay, like quick controls and projectiles shooting monsters, with all I told you just before. You buy upgrades and skills with gold, but money can only be spent outside the pyramids. Each time you die and regenerate in your sarcophagus, you have to spend it all, either paying the merchant for new stuff or offering it to the gods under the literal skill tree.

INSPIRATION

Our main references are Ziggurat and Rogue Legacy, but there are bits of other roguelites here and there as well as some old school shooters. There is also some Serious Sam in Inmortal Redneck because, you know, Egypt. Each class has their own skills, stats and weapons, and there is also a literal skill tree outside the pyramids, so you could say there is some RPG elements too. We have nine different classes in mind right now.

UNITY 3D

Immortal Redneck is being developed in Unity. We have some experience with it and we feel comfortable enough with the engine. We have a very cool sand simulation and we are trying new stuff every day that can help us with the light simulation. I'll try to show you some as we progress because we are building some tools by ourselves and I think we need the feedback.

WHAT WE'VE DONE ALREADY

We've been showing some stuff already in Twitter, Facebook and other forums like IndieDB, TigSource or Polycount, but I'll give you a nice, fast tour to what we have already shown.

In first place, the two first guns and the first type of explosive. We want them to have a lot of personality, so we wrote some wacky background for them and we gave them silly names. We called the handgun is Grandpa; the shotgun, Mr. Tickles; and the dynamite is Dina. More about them here.

Now, we have already finished four enemies. We've shown two of them: the Warrior, a big, slow melee hulk; and the Archer, a kind of dodgy ranged enemy with good distance and a better aim. More about the Archer here and more about the Warrior here.

Here's our sand rendering shader. We are really proud of the results, whatever you use it on the floors or as a effect on enemies or objects.

We also have our own map generation algorithm. We explained it here, but basically, we generate rooms, we link the doors in those rooms in a very specific and random way and we create huge layouts. The rooms themselves are designed by us, so not everything is procedural, only the map design. Here's a cool animation of how they are created and interconnected.

And finally, screens! It's just a pre-alpha, so there's room for improvement!

And some very rough gameplay

SOME ARTWORKS

If you are really curious about our game, just ask away or read our devlog. I'll answer you gladly, and I'll also love any suggestion or critique you make. That's why we are here, isn't it?

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I saw your screens in a different thread, Immortal Redneck looks freaking cool!

Thanks a lot! :D

I've also seen it around. I think I first saw the sand blog posts. It was a really nice effect. I love when people put that much effort into details. Art style - A+. On the gameplay side it also fits into my interests. So, looking forward to it!

Main character in our game is of a similar persuasion. Though he's headbanger first, he has some redneck blood in him. We should make a crossover episode "Redneck vs. Headbanger" ;)

Best of luck with the game!

Thanks a lot for your nice words :D

What's the name of your game, by the way? You mention the main character, but we want to know more about it!

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Oh, it's called Seum. I thought it would visible on my profile, didn't want to hijack the thread :P

Okay, let's get up to day with our official devlog. I'm gonna show you a few screenshots and ideas about the rooms in our game.

So Immortal Redneck has different types of rooms and they are all made by us, so yes: proceduraly generated layouts, but individually designed rooms so they all have some specific stuff in them.

And what rooms do we have? In first place, ordinary room, those in which you'll shoot your enemies down and try to survive while you get scrolls, ammo and life, if you are really lucky. These are the most abundant and diverse kind of rooms, as they will hold like 85% or 90% of the map.

Next: skill rooms. They name almost says it all: rooms that challenge you to do some specific stuff. Really hard to achieve, but with really good random prize: a new gun, a great new ability, a lot of ammo or health... We don't know yet the exact range of gifts, but you get the idea: you'll have a room where you have to avoid any damage to win the prize; another one with a time trial; a room in which you'll have to survive for a certain time before the chest unlocks; or even one that challenge you to open the chest without damaging any enemy.

Unfortunately, I don't have a in-game screen for this kind of room, they need more work and we're a little shy about unfinished work.

There's also special skill rooms to challenge your aim, the Bullseye Rooms, that we preferred to separate from the rest. In them, you either have to shoot some literal bulls-eyes without failing a single shot or you have to hit a target that is very conveniently hidden. You won't win in this last scenario unless you have some special guns with modified trajectories, but hey, they are optional.

Another one: gift rooms. There won't be a lot of them, but you'll feel blessed each time you find one. Right now, blue is the color that identifies this rooms, but we don't know if we'll change that eventually. We want to play a lot with colors inside the pyramid and limiting one to one type of room may be a bad idea.

More rooms: the floor connections. These rooms are just normal ones, but they'll connect each floor of the pyramid and will end up each 'level'. We're not sure about using platforms in here, so we might end up using some stairs or something like that.

Last but not least: the boss rooms. Each pyramid will have a mid-boss encounter and a final boss fight. Really, really hard challenges that will probably make you angry, but hey, nobody said this game was easy. We are holding our bosses screens a little bit, sorry.

And that was all for today. We aim to create a lot of diverse situations by making a lot of room designs. Can't say a number because we have to finish other stuff before, but we want the players to feel that each one of them has something special.

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I first heard of this game from a post at Unity's website about your amazing sand shader. Keep up the good work, everything looks amazing so far!!

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Hahaha, it seems everybody loved the sand shader. So happy to hear it.

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Admittedly, the name of the game turned me off a bit, but I'm glad I checked it out! The concept art and screens shared here look great!

Looks pretty good! I love the style you chose. I'd add some sounds, even free ones, to the gameplay video, though, it'd make it more, well, alive. Anyway, looking good, keep it up! :D

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Hi Guillermo. Nice to meet you. I know your game from the TIGSource forum :) I must say your game look totally great! I have two questions to you:

1) Did you play the Serious Sam #1 or #2? And if yes, are you inspired by this game in any way?

2) How do you feel with developing it in Unity3D? Do you like this engine or maybe you wish you did another choice in the past?

We are developing our game in Unity3D too and generally we love this engine but the worst part of the all development tools is the Visual Studio (MonoDevelop too).

Good luck with your game! We are following you :)

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Hey there!

Yes, absolutely! Serious Sam is an awesome, fun game and it has inspired us a lot. You know, Egypt, haha. It's one of our main references along with Ziggurat or Rogue Legacy.

About developing with Unity: it's fun as well as it's challenging sometimes. We love using stuff like shaderforge or behavior tree, because we save a lot of time, but in some areas it falls a little short, as you said.

Thanks a lot for your comment and congratulations on your game, man. Looks really nice and I already love that dog, haha. Keep on that great work.

Thank you for kind words! :)
One more question. Which IDE are you using for development? Is it Visual Studio? If yes, have you got ReSharper plugin that extends VS capabilities? We don't have that because it is too expensive for us for now, but it seems worth buying.

Yeah, we're using Visual Studio but we're not using ReSharper. We've heard so many nice things of it but haven't tried it yet. Do you miss anything in particular from VS?

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Forgot to put here our Screenshot Saturday video!

So, what do you think about @ImmortalRedneck day and night cycle? #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/hCJulK7eSZ
— CremaGames (@CremaGames) diciembre 5, 2015
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Hey, guys! We are currently working hard on our still unnamed game for the Ludum Dare Jam, but last friday we published a devlog you might like. I'll give you a TL;DR version, or in other words, just the videos about how we created our new creature, the Monkey Statue.

Speedpainting

3D modeling

Zbrush

Retopology

Texturing

Animation (WIP)

This animation needs some work, but we wanted to show you anyway.

Thanks for reading! Well, for watching.

We are making a lot of progress in the outdoors of Immortal Redneck. Here's two screenshots we did for this Saturday. If everything goes as intended, we'll write a devlog this week about it.


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Hey there! It's been a little since our last devlog, but we got something really good this time. We are ready to show Immortal Redneck's outdoors. We've spent a lot of time in this particular area, so we really hope you love it.

Immortal Redneck's outdoors

Most stuff in Immortal Redneck takes place inside the pyramids, more precisely, inside one of them at a time, but before getting inside them, you need to prepare. And that why the outdoors are so important. Take a general look at the place.

The Eternal Sarcophagus

The Eternal Sarcophagus is the center piece here. After all, is the container of your soul, the sacred case where you are reborn each you die. It's very likely you end up bored of it, so take a look at it and appreciate it a little.

The sarcophagus podium is quite big and sits almost in the middle of the scenery.

The Three Great Pyramids

This is the big stuff now. The Three Great Pyramids are enormous, of course, and inside them lots of enemies crawl and live waiting for you to challenge them. First time you play Immortal Redneck, only one of them will be open.

The way to get inside the other two? Easy: beat the first one, and the second one will open. And once you have conquered this one, the last one will receive you with open arms. This last thing is quite literal, look:

Inside the pyramids, no matter which one, you won't feel the pass of time, but outside them? Admire how beautiful this scenery can be at different hours. The day cycle while take a whole hour, so this is a fast version.

There lot of little details we've put around the pyramids. This is the only place in the game that it's not randomly arranged, so we tried to make it really special and unique.

Who watches the Sacred Watchers?

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Oh, don't get to much attached to this sand cascades: once the curse of the Immortal Redneck takes places, a unholy sandstorm will block all the way to them. You won't be able to take this picture even if you really try it. A impossible photography at an impossible place.

The powers behind this setup, behind the monsters inside the pyramids and the responsible of the curse/blessing of your immortality remain a secret, but take our word: you won't be disappointed.

The Tree of Life and Skills

Look at that tiny, poor sprout. It's hard to believe this little thing has so much power, but the Tree of Life and Skills, which we have always called the Literal Skill Tree – because that's what it is – is really important. The redneck progress depends almost entirely of the good being of this acacia, so making it grow strong will make you stronger, too.

This is a mockup of how we want the skills and abilities and classes to develop. It's a little rough at this moment and not finished stuff at all, but we wanted to show a little about it. You'll need a lot of gold to complete this...

Also, look how beautiful this sacred acacia looks at three different times of the day. And yes, this is how big it can get once you have fully unlocked every little branch. It will take time and money.

The Missing Merchant

Oh, this guy is missing. We have to nail a few things about it, but it's a very necessary element for your progress. If you get stronger with the tree, your weapons and explosive and harmful stuff, in general, will need the professional skills of this mysterious Merchant.

Worry not, we have plenty of time to talk about him. Just wait a little more time, please.

More stuff to do

This is just a little sneak peek into the outdoors of Immortal Redneck. Oh, yes, we still have some stuff to implement – the Merchant, mainly, but also the final moon, the fire in the torches, some more colors in the sky when the day goes on...

We have taken our time with this. We hope that's noticeable, because even if most of the game takes place inside the pyramids, where the rooms are randomly placed each time, we wanted it to make a good impression with the first sights of the game.

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Wow, so much great stuff there :D

The sarcophagus is really cool, and the skill tree is a very good idea too ! Everything looks great !

Yay, thank you so much. We are trying to finish the tree so we can start working on more stuff inside the pyramids. We'll show more about it soon enough, hopefully.

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Hi there! It's friday and we've got a new devlog. You can read the long one in here or you can just get the TL;DR version below.

What's this devlog about? It'a about the Skull and the Flying Demon, two more enemies of Immortal Redneck. They are both aerial creatures, but they attack in different patterns. First of all, a look at them.

The Skull is one of the first enemies our 2D artists designed, but we prefered to start developing other ones because the flying stuff of it was tricky. Once we nailed it, we moved to the next one, another flying monster: the Flying Demon. Don't mind the names: they are not final.

Here's two gifs of the monsters' evolution. Our great Alex, king of Mobsferatu, is the main artist behind their looks.

Now, how do they attack you? The Skull hurts you by contact, following you around and charging down towards the moment it's close enough to the redneck. It's fast, maybe not very strong, but it's definitely annoying.

The same could be said about the Flying Demon, although he attacks from afar. Not very far away, but just far enough that you have to pay attention to where you shoot and what weapon you are using. It's unlikely you'll hit him with the shotgun, for example. Its spread would make it a lot less useful because of the distance the creature usually shoots his fireballs from.

As you can imagine, both flying monsters get along just incredibly well and make things hard if you have a Warrior or another kind of melee enemy stalking you at that moment. Thank god the redneck's fast as a bullet.

Working with their flying patterns was the hardest part of creating them. Immortal Redneck has different heights layouts, as you already know, so a flying enemy needs to work perfectly in all of them. We had to try and change the behavior of the skull, for example. The creature loved to get trapped in corners or in the stairs, and also loved to nose-dive, something we actually fixed just a few days ago, when we noticed it.

Take a look at the lastest pre-alpha of Immortal Redneck, with the two creatures fighting together.

And that's it. Right now, we have five enemies done and about three more half finished. Hopefully, we can show them soon enough.

PD: We are also working on Immortal Redneck's lava shader.

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Hi, friends. This week, we are showing how heights work on Immortal Redneck. It's not that we are making a platformer, but sometimes you'll jump and want to get he high ground to shoot your enemies.

WHY HEIGHTS MATTER

Immortal Redneck has randomly generated floor layouts with rooms that have been designed very intentionally. That's is, the rooms are our creation, but the position and doors assigned to them are random. That means that even if we don't know what room is on the other side of a door, we know that is has an intentional design, that its built with some ideas behind. It's not proceduraly built, but proceduraly placed with others.

We control the design, and that's why we decided to make rooms with different heights: you can move around the ground, but also jump or go up some stairs to get to the second floor of that same room.

We did it because not many FPS roguelites had this kind of structure. It allowed us to experiment with the redneck's moving patterns and made the shooting far more interesting. Going around a room dodging enemies, killing them and using the stairs to go to another floor and get away from the danger is a common thing in our game. Also, player awareness is increased, because some enemies will attack you from above.

WHAT WE HAVE

We have smaller rooms, medium rooms and bigger rooms. Thanks to our awesome algorithm we can make all kinds of rooms and place them however we feel like. That's why we made it so awesome, because we didn't want to feel contrived by the partially random nature of our game. Look a these room, for example:

The good thing about both layouts is that they work as well when you throw enemies into the equation. Shooting ranged creatures and dodging flying ones that pursue you up and down is great, no matter if the room is 20 or 40 meter tall.

Obviously, this bring up some question. How would the enemies follow the player into a different height? How do flying creatures move around those heights? As you can imagine if you have developed a 3D games, the creatures have a navigation mesh that tells them how they must move around.

Since our enemies wander when they don't see you, they can go up and down as they wish, no matter if they are terrestrial or aerial. Obviously, that is rather strange: they will easily see you when you enter a room. So normally, every creature will go after you: if it's terrestrial, the navmesh help them know which is the shorter path, through stairs or jumping down from a higher place; if they fly, they will charge towards you, no matter if you are in another floor or if they are.

In the end, having two or more heights in Immortal Redneck help make it more complex, in a lot of ways.

If we add the abilities and more specialized enemies, it gets better and better. How about an enemy that shoots grenades from above and makes moving into the ground floor really hard? That's something we have kind of planned and that we have to test, but that's where we are going from here.

It's not just that the rooms look great and the game seems bigger: having this structure makes playing Immortal Redneck a lot better.

SOME MORE GAMEPLAY

And now, a new short video with some gameplay. We have enough stuff into the game to record how we play and show it to you. Remember that this is pre-alpha gameplay and we could change tons of stuff prior to launch.

Hey, there. We though you might find interesting what Unity tools we are using in Immortal Redneck. So here's a list of them, hope you find it helpful for your own games.


Behavior Designer


Behavior Designer was our choice when we needed a solution to develop Immortal Redneck's AI. It was compatible with other AI solutions, with state machines and with Behavior Tree. Before choosing BD, we tried Rain. It was free, and that was great; but we had lots of efficiency problems. Behavior Designer was a lot more compatible, had official support and we could work with a visual interface, not only with lines of code, which is always welcomed by programmers and artists equally.

A* Pathfinding


We wanted enemies to move around scenes in their own, different patterns. Unity's default navigation system didn't let us move a navmesh once it was generated into a scene, so we looked for alternatives and quickly found and fell in love with A* Pathfinding.

This plugin let us create meshes a lot faster in execution time and integrated quite well with Behavior Designer, which was a great plus. We particularly had to make a few changes in certain areas so the meshes stayed with the rooms themselves. This wasn't strictly necessary, but it reduced loading times by a good margin.

Instant Good Day

Immortal Redneck's outdoors are the first impression you have of our game, so we wanted the place to be great and special. One of the first things we decided was that it needed a day and night cycle, even if most players won't stay long enough outside to watch it entirely.

After looking for a lot of assets, we opted for InstantGoodDay. It seemed like the best solution given our needs. We wanted to change every little detail of the animation so the cycle looked original and unique, and InstantGoodDay allows you to change every hour of the cycle. It has lots of values, from fog to lighting and also colors and stars in the sky. We worked a lot with it and we integrated StylizeFog by our own.


Colorful

A huge effects library, with lots of post-processed stuff. At this moment, we are only using it for the transition from the outer camera in the main menu to the inside of the sarcophagus. Obviously, we'll use it with more stuff, like rapidly changing the rooms interiors and their mood.

DOTween

We know DOTween from some time now. We started using it while developing OMG Zoo Rescue, and we loved it. This plugin let us code animations in a fast, easy way. It's perfect for menus and UI, but also sprites and even models in 3D and cutscenes.


Also, Mobsferatu's intro and ending were made with DOTween, so that's how much we love and trust it.

Master Audio


Even though Unity 5 has improved a lot its audio systems, there are better alternatives outside the official channel. Since the beginning, our friends at Sonotrigger told us that we would probably have to use something else so they could do their magic work with Immortal Redneck's sound effects and music.

So we chose Master Audio. Not only it give us access to a lot of tool, but our main reason to use it was so the audio team could integrate everything easily in the game without a lot of programming work. It's about resources and managing our time.

PrefabEvolution


Nested prefabs is one of the most requested features for Unity – that's why they are a part of the company's roadmap now. So, meanwhile, we had to find a third party solution, and we chose Prefab Evolution for Immortal Redneck because it's the most used and supported. Thanks to this asset we could use nested prefabs and reuse particles in different objects.

Sadly, we had some problems and we were not entirely happy with it. Immortal Redneck is a big game, and that didn't go well with PrefabEvolution. Compiling and testing are stealing us a lot of time, so if your game is not a little project, maybe you should make an unified system and made just for your needs. That's actually what we are doing: we opted not to use it in the end and we are changing our workflow so we don't need so many nested prefabs and we can use our own tool in those cases we really need to do it.

Rewired

Unity Input is one of the least advanced tools since the engine conception. With a big game like ours, we wanted a lot of flexibility with our control system and needed a lot of compatibility with PC peripherals. Thanks to Rewired, everything is made around actions and are mapped with each device. Also, since it doesn't have any native code, it would work in consoles if needed.

ShaderForge

ShaderForge is one of the best assets we'd used and we can't stop suggesting you use it. Working with shaders is our Achilles heel: we don't have a person specifically coding shaders. Thanks to ShaderForge, our artists started making shaders without programming knowledge and with really great results. For example, this is one of the shaders we've built in Immortal Redneck.

StylizedFog

A fantastic asset so you can have, heh, stylized fog in your game. You can use gradient colors so it paints the fog with those tones, and you can even mix two colors. When you have InstantGoodDay too, you can build some cool scenes with fog, changing open areas and such. We're going to use it in Immortal Redneck indoors, too. That's how much we liked it.

TextMeshPro

A Unity classic. We've been using it since our first game with the engine (Ridiculous Triathlon) and it's been with us since then. If you need to make nice texts in Unity, we don't know a better tool than TextMeshPro. This plugin allow us to use words independently of their resolution and/or size and you can apply various effects (like shadows, outlines, gradients, glowing) easily. See those damage numbers? TextMeshPro.

UFPS

(The hammer animation is ours, but the rest is UFPS)

UFPS helped us with Immortal Redneck's engine fundamentals. We used it in the beginning so we had a solid foundation that we could modify as much as possible. At this moment, we have changed everything in UFPS so it adapts to our most specific needs. We kept the procedural animations and event system, but excluding these, there's little stuff left. It's the best starting point if you are willing to build lots of stuff on it.


And that's it! What tools do you usually use? Should we try an alternative to ours?

Hi, there! I'm Bruno, Community Manager of CremaGames, and I bring you a new devlog!

If you are developing a game or have read about what's that like, sometimes is hard to display the new content you have in your hands. It's not about keeping something secret for the sake of it, it's just that it's not really finished. When you work as a team, you have to keep up with your partners and work in the same stuff, or at least, some related content. But even if we work as one most of the time, we can't always finish everything and show it immediately.

That's why this week there's nothing really done I can show you. But that's not bad! I can show you some stuff we have half done, instead.

In and out

I've already shown you tons of videos and concepts about the outdoors. Also, some stuff about the rooms inside the pyramids. I'm kind of tiresome about it, but I love the peaceful landscape outside the pyramids – mainly because it's basically done. Yet, there's still some details we wanted to include, and to do that, we need 3D models, textures and more... Anyway, let's take a look at some stuff we've got:

Seems like you are not the first fellow in here. How did this guy die, anyway?

And a lost concept about the cliffs that close the map

Where the hell are we?

We are also adding some postprocessing to the sand, so it looks better when you move around.

We're also creating new room decorations. For example, a room with lava!

And these are the artworks of that statue:


Enemies

We're always making new enemies for Immortal Redneck. They are a huge part of its gameplay, of course, but also of its appeal. You can't make people like a game about shooting monsters without cool creatures moving around and doing stuff.

Here's some new enemies' concept we are putting into the game. I'll show more about them in the near future, when we have them totally finished! And no, no name for them yet.

That eye...Oink, oink

Who called the artillery?

Weapons

Enemies are important, but weapons too! We've shown you the Redneck set, that's comprised of Grandpa, Tickels and Dina, which are the handgun, the shotgun and the dynamite sticks, respectively. They were the first because they are part of the first subclass in the game, and that makes them the most basic weapons in Immortal Redneck.

At this moment, we are working on a new set of guns. It's the Seth set and no, there's no pun intended: Seth is an Ancient Egypt deity. Take a look at it. We'll explain everything about them in a future devlog, I promise!

The sword

The coilgun

The lightningthrower

Also, we are looking for the perfect particle and distorsion effect for the sword.

Menu

Oh, yes, we have menus! After all, this is a game! Games have menus and words and even some sentences!

With tons of different options for you character, abilities to develop and weapons to improve, we had to create a cool and clear interface to make all this stuff work. These are some of the first ideas and concepts to implement. Programming is working hard on it, and we'll probably have the scrolls pop up that appears when you pick one up really soon.

You must offer your gold to the gods in order to get into the pyramids. Greedy bastards...

This is how you pick up a scroll!

Start getting use to those words

We also have kind of finished the game's HUD, as you can assume by that screen.


And that's all for now. We don't want to ruin the surprises of future devlogs, so we are holding some of the stuff we have. You'll have to wait a little more until I can write thoroughly about all this stuff. No reason to worry: I'll be back next week with something new to show.

There's plenty things we want to put into our game and we are always improving our approach to new creatures, weapons and the scenery, so we want your feedback. Please, reach us on Twitter and Facebook and tell us what you think about Immortal Redneck and how you think we can make it (even) better!

Hello, friends!

Last week, I showed you some new art and concepts, so we thought this time it would be a good idea to please our glorious 3D artists.

We are working on more details for each room in the game. Making all of them kind of unique is not easy, but we've got tons of different items to place.

There's so many stuff outdoors that watching them one by one is kind of mesmerizing...

The Sarcophagus is the main piece in the center of the outdoors, so working on it was really enjoyable for our team. They did a terrific work, of course.

There's something you can't see in that video: the crack in its back. The redneck's soul gets inside the coffin through there every time you die.

You already know this hulky 'friend'. We'll give you his internal name: The Grenadier. We're not sure if that's going to be his final name, but we'll get there on the right time. Sorry to be such a tease.

Also, I give you a new enemy first steps in Z-Brush.


And that's all for today, folks. You can follow Immortal Redneck on Twitter and/or like the game on Facebook, too. We tweet and publish stuff once or twice a day, as much, so we are not very annoying, I promise.

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Hi! I'm Bruno, Community Manager of Cremagames, and I'm here with the twentieth Immortal Redneck's devlog. Given that these past weeks I've shown you some 2D and some 3D art of the game, I thought I might talk about something more specific, like two of the first classes you'll play with. Yes, Immortal Redneck, as both a FPS and a roguelite, needs different approach to shooting, survival and skills, and the class you choose certainly set what you can do.

Classes on Immortal Redneck

We have a very clear idea about what Immortal Redneck classes' have to be.

In first place, they are unlockables classes, so they have to feel like a personal achievement when you earn enough gold to buy them in the Literal Skill Tree. It might seem like a way of stretch the hours of play, but don't worry, we don't plan to make it unnatural: you unlock them as if they were new abilities, so you just need to spend some time and play good enough.

In addition to this, you need to know that you won't be able to play always with the same class. I understand that you might have a favorite one, but what's the fun if you don't try each one of them sometimes? There's fun in trying new things! Obviously, we are not so cruel as to impose one random class with each new run: we make you choose between two of them. This way, you might use one that's not your favorite, but that you also don't hate as much as the other one. Oh, you think two of them are not enough options? Well, there's a skill that let's you choose one of three...

And finally, as you might have assumed already, this classes are godlike blessings based on different deities. If you offer enough gold at the Sacred Tree of Life and Skills, they'll give you some of their powers (different stats), one or a few abilities (active and/or passive) and their favorite weapons. And each time you reborn in your sarcophagus, you'll have two of those blessings at your disposal.

Summarizing: you class will have a huge impact in the way you play, specially in the first minutes of each run. At this moment, there's a total of 9 classes, but today I'm only talking about two of them: Redneck and Seth

The reliable Redneck

SethGIF_400

Of course the redneck is a class, damn it! It's the most basic one, of course, and does not have any active nor passive ability. It doesn't have any interesting stat configuration, either: they all rank in the middle.

This sounds bland for a redneck that cannot die and that has fights thousand of enemies, but, hey, it's just the standard character. It's strong, fast and their guns are also quite good. You know, sometimes the most balanced option is the best one, even if that means not having some special abilities.

You probably already know about the redneck basic weapons, but I'll show them again.

Grandpa is a handgun and a good balance between damage and range.

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Mr. Tickles works better in short distances and makes a lot of damage.

And Dyna is a explosive that hits really, really hard, on contact with an enemy or in an area after a few seconds.

There's a lot of mystery around how our dear southern fella got his powers. We know how he got to Egypt –because he won a trip to Giza–, but how did he end up mummified and immortal? Where the hell is he exactly? And why do all these gods and goddesses care about what he plans to do?

He is after the answers to all these questions, whether those responsible for his curse want it or not. And it seems the only way to find it is by exploring and fighting his way through the three huge pyramids in front of him...

The electrifying Seth

SethGIF_400

Seth, or Set, is one of the most well-known gods in the Egyptian Pantheon, and one of the first ones to welcome the redneck's tributes. After all, he is the god of foreigners. He reigns over chaos and storms, so earning his electrifying blessing is a good idea.

Some may say that he's kind of a jerk, but it's not like you can turn down any help the gods give you: they are really greedy and also proud. Even if he's not the most trustworthy deity, Seth's powers and weapons adapt to all kinds of situations and their shock damage could make a difference.

As a cunning warrior, Seth loves melee weapons. That's why he hands you over his own sword, Thunderstrike, a steel blade infused with lighting that's perfect for close combat situations.

Since he has no matter with most contemporary weaponry, he also concedes you the Coilgun, a rifle that projects pure lighting bolts that spread through the enemies.

And finally, there's the Seth's Breath, a direct hit of mythological, uh, halitosis that works like a flamethrower, but with electricity.

I can't show you this weapons in action yet – I'm keeping that for a another, really cool devlog –, but I can talk about the ability of the Seth class: the Shock Sphere. And neither that Thunderstrike nor the ability are final, but I had to show something about the Seth in movement!

Every time you use your ability, a bright sphere of pure electricity and magnetism will surround you and expand until it hits a certain distance. At that moment, the sphere will slowly decrease until it disappears. So, for a few seconds the energy of this lighting ball will hit with shock damage all the enemies.

And more to come


And that's it for today. Now you know something about the first two classes of Immortal Redneck. I can't insist enough on how important each one of them are going to be and how much will determine every run into the pyramids. It's not the same to fight your way with a handgun than with a sword, although I can assure you it's fun no matter what class you use.

I think we all consider Editor Tools a great and really useful aspect of Unity. Working with it has allowed us to create prototypes really fast and makes a lot easier to build prototypes, to add new objects easily and to assign variables. It's a huge improvement in our work flow. The thing is, as Immortal Redneck grew bigger, we started to needing our own tools and we could use Unity editor to build them fast.

Here's five tools that have helped us a lot, but we've got more in our devlog. If you find this post interesting, you might want to read the complete version.

Game Design Tool

Immortal Redneck is a big game – at least for us. In addition to the amount of development hours, it would require a lot of balancing: there's guns, enemies and skills, so we wanted this task to be as easy and simple as possible.

That's why we built this tool, to change things almost on the fly. Right now, we can alter:

  • Global parameters like drop rates and spawn times between enemies
  • Each class statistics (HP, Attack, Defense, etc.)
  • Enemies' stats. In the future, we want to change their global behavior and change when they attack, when the hold, at what distance they start moving...
  • Weapons' damage, range, spread, ammo, recoil...
  • The skill tree's levels, gold rates, statistics it changes...

Room Utils

We want our game to have a lot of rooms, so we needed to have the capacity to create them fast and well. We coded a few tools to this intention.

In first place, we created a menu that looks like ProGrids so we can mix everything. We can duplicate objects in each axys really fast because that's what took us most time in the first days of development. Also, it was excruciatingly boring and repetitive thing for the team to do.

There's another tool that allow us to check each asset we've created on a catalogue, and paste what we want into the scene. It's almost automatic and works really well. We can place the asset in the place we are looking at or select something in the scene and replace it with something from the catalogue. This is a really, really fast way to replace a whole floor or wall.

RoomScene Inspector

Each one of our rooms is a scene due to a optimization requirements. Even though Unity 5.3 has evolved a lot in this matter, it's still kind of hard to work with them in comparison with using prefabs, for example.

We decided to work that way, creating various scenes and using a ScriptableObject as a reference for each room. This ScriptableObject has the data of each scene, but we can also use it to open them, add them to Build Settings and more stuff.

We work constantly with Custom Inspectors in Unity because of this, and that's why we've extended the default editor and added more options. We've even added a room preview because Unity is not allowing that at the moment and it's something that we need to quickly identify what we are changing in the scene.

Object Randomizer

In order to build the three pyramids of Immortal Redneck, our artists made different rock blocks that they would have to pile to create the pyramids sides.

To do this manually would be hard, so we coded a little tool that would take rock lines with little variations. This way, our artists could create as many lines as they wanted and build the pyramid faster without repeating patterns. Later, they made some little changes, but the pyramids were done in a jiffy.

Gizmos

Unity has a very interesting feature: it merges Gizmos with scripts. Gizmos are conceived to show graphics over the scene so some stuff is easily seen on it.

For example, in the room above, we've got gizmos showing spawn positions and interest points for their AI.

Red spheres show the enemies avatar so we can see where they'll spawn, while red squares do the same with walking creatures.

In a similar fashion, blue spheres represent the flying enemies' interest points and the orange squares on the floor are interest points for the walking ones.

At first, it might seem crowded and confusing, but it really helps a lot once you get used to it.

Hi there!

We are back with new improvements on Immortal Redneck, more precisely, on our enemies movement. We had some problems concerning how they moved through different heights and how they reacted to another creature in their path, so we implemented two solutions.

In first place, we built a tool to tell the enemies where they had to jump down a ledge if that helped them pursue you.
His main function is to figure out the exact positions creatures have to jump from.

The tool finds out the edges on each plane or object and determines a initial jumping point and a final one, creating an extra link for the object (enemy) that's moving vertically. Here's a comparison between how the warrior fall down without that animation and with it.

OLD ONE

NEW ONE

Another aspect of the enemies' movement that we improved is their still pose and how they interact with each other.

In the beginning, one archer could block a warrior's trajectory because it stood still in front of him before shooting you.

We solved this by making a hole in the mesh each time a enemy stopped moving. Sounds silly, but works beautifully. When an enemy 'notices' that empty space in the mesh, the creature will figure out a new way to reach you. And since each enemy is programmed to follow you through the shortest path, they will change their course just a little so they can avoid it the empty space in the mesh and charge again towards you. It looks really natural, don't you think?

Before implementing this, we considered making different points around the main character so enemies would focus on different points while moving and attacking. It was a little problematic and this other solution we did was just simpler and more effective. We love it when one solution actually solves several potential problems.

We want our game to be silly and funny, but not in a Goat Simulator way, where everything fails around you and you laugh at it. Quality and presentation can be really different depending on the game – Goat Simulator is perfect in its own way and it's great –, and we chose to build a neat experience that, even if our resources are limited, seems solid and unbreakable to the eye.

Something as silly as an enemy not going after you the way you understand it should can really break your fun.