This is the project i'm currently working on, it's a long term project that i'm putting in an hour or two here and there per week, so won't be a while until it's playable.



Description:
This game is story driven mystery adventure, with puzzles, and a small amount of first person combat.

The player finds himself in the role of Mike, a facilitator for hire, starting in Mikes apartment you will find an email awaiting you on a laptop, this email is a new job, the job is to locate a missing archaeology professor, you will find that he has been studying a theory called "parallel evolution", his theory is that on a remote island somewhere there is a species of ape that evolved separately from humans, but in a similar way.

The chain of events will lead you to the professors house, the museum he works at, and the city docks, and eventually you will find that the professor decided to use his private yacht to sail to the island he has been researching to find out for himself. The island is blockaded by the coast guard, supposedly due to suspected pirates operating out of the island, so you hire a captain to sneak you in under the radar. But you soon find that the coast guard's story is just a cover story, in fact the coast guard ships aren't really coast guard ships.

You arrive on the island and begin your search for the professor, as time moves along you will begin to explore, all the while you will glimpses odd things, movement in the trees, shadows, odd feelings and so on, and the occasional clue to the location of the professor. It turns out that the professor has been abducted by soldiers posing as coast guard and spirited away to a secret research facility on the other side of the island.

While you are exploring and searching for the professor you will catch glimpses and signs of the ape men, over time these signs will get stronger, and the sightings more often. The ape men won't attack you, but as you work your way further inland sightings will become more frequent, and eventually you will stumble across what looks like a prisoner of war camp, with various clues and puzzles, which eventually lead you to an underground bunker where you are captured and need to escape.

The exploring goes on inside the bunker, with the odd attack, and puzzles to complete, leading to the discovery of the lab, in the lab you discover that experiments were being carried on prisoners kidnapped and transported from the mainland, horrible sick experiments to discover a way to combine the DNA of humans with the ape men to create hybrid soldiers, as you search the lab you find more and more information about what was happening, including a video diary that explains what happened in the end. It seems that one of the hybrids retained more intelligence than the others and eventually broke free, releasing the other hybrids and slaughtering the scientists, including the professor you are searching for.

At this point the hybrid attacks begin in earnest so you escape the lab via a hidden tunnel you make your way to the other side of the island, where you find that a few of the scientists survived the uprising. They are fighting a war against the hybrids and don't want any witnesses .... you are a witness and at this point it's a fight to survive, commandeer a boat and escape.

Looking great! Very realistic placement for the island. I'll be watching this one.

Looking Great ... Good storyline
I think the batteries run out a little to quickly though which for me would be annoying ...
What would be cool is you could have a cycle through day and night using different levels so you wake up at sunrise ( not to dark ... not to light to check things out ....next level mid day ....then night when things really start to happen ....Just an idea

@D13 - thanks, it's going to take me a long time to make the levels, i'm a little OCPD so everything will need to fit together perfectly and realistically, but hopefully that means I get a visually better game than I would otherwise

@Synchromesh - Cheers mate, I spent ages trying to think of a good story for my first game, everything I could think of just felt like it had been done and overdone already, then I thought of this while brainstorming with D13 over PM's, and although it's been done before, I don't think feel as if it's such an overdone story.

The flashlight is just temporary (as is the hud obviously), that will be tweaked later, the collectables were just in the video because I was testing some scripts, and I left them in to have something other than scenery in the video. You're 100% right, the battery decay is way too fast, it can be easily changed in the script I think, so that shouldn't be an issue, the character probably won't find the torch until later In the game.

The different levels at different times of the day sounds like an awesome idea, i'll very likely steal that one for sure, thanks again.

If anybody else has any suggestions, ideas, criticisms, i'd be very grateful for any input

Been working on the HUD and added thirst and hunger to the game, also reduced the speed of battery drain to 5 seconds per 1%.



Thanks to smallg for the base script for the flashlight hud/batteries, as well as the custom hud script, and Tarkus for the hunger/thirst script.

I really like the start of this Belidos. Cant wait to see more.

Thanks Cryptweaver.

Here's the latest video, showing the new HUD, survival mechanics, some dodgy voice acting, and the hybrid (minus animations at the moment).

This isn't how the start of the game will actually be, you won't see a sign of the hybrid's for quite some time, and finding a weapon won't be this easy, i'm just testing mechanics at the moment.

I've been working on a script that makes the hybrid creatures try to sneak off if you get too close.

This is looking great Belidos. Looks very atmospheric. I see you like detail in the level design too.

That's looking Incredibly good and very playable !!

One thing missing that would make a huge difference .... A few claps of thunder and a little lightning ..

I am actually planning to do that, i'm just not sure how I would do it.

If you use soundbinau.lua, assign it to a dynamic entity and get it to run a thunder clap sample, a long looping sound with rain sounds too, say about 3 or 4 minutes long, use loopsound in the script rather than playsound, and create it as a MONO WAV file the sound will be positional too. Dot a few of the entities about maybe use a different thunder loop on each one and the effect can be quite amazing.

If you have a light position over the entity too, using a script with lighton and lightoff using a timer, have it flash at random intervals when the player is close by. Make the light about 1000 in brightness and it will light up quite well

I think I understand "if you use ..." the rest just exploded behind my eyeballs :p

Do you have soundbinau.lua, try adding the sound 1st. I'm trying to get a convincing lightning effect with the dynamic lights. But it's proving a little tricky.

Nope I don't have that script, must be a custom one. But I've worked it out anyway, new video incoming.

and now with added weather ....

I decided not to make it an abandoned hotel, and have it as a secret bunker instead, which you will discover at the end of the second area.

Here's a glimpse of the entrance ...

Neat! Can't wait to see this progress!

I like what you have achieved so far and its atmosphere. Are you sure about handing the player a shotgun so early in?



-Wolf

Thanks wolf.

The player won't get a shotgun that early on, as I said before the video is just a test of mechanics and shader settings etc.



I'm taking this very slowly, I won't even be starting on the levels until I have texted all the various scripts and models I have planned, to make sure they don't conflict and work as planned.

That is so much better .... Brilliant work

Thanks.

I've updated the opening post with what think is a better storyline.

Here's another model I've been working on. In the actual game the beach scene will show a deserted island beach resort, the kind made out of open plan wooden buildings, tiki torches and grass skirts. It's obviously deserted and for some time. There is a jetty/dock with a boat tied up, however, the jetty is severely damaged and you can't reach the boat without swimming, below the jetty will be randomly swimming sharks, meaning no boat for you!

This is looking fantastic! Nice work!

Thanks.

Modelled, two more pieces for the Jetty, once put together it'll be a wooden wharf with a couple of huts, leading onto a long jetty, broken in the middle, with a t-piece at the end.

If done well, this would be very suspenseful!

Your Jetties look good! I hope you'll finish this project



-Wolf

I don't know how I haven't posted on this thread yet!

This is looking awesome.

I like your attitude of taking your time and getting everything 'just right'. I try to take that approach when I am full of ideas, just make sure that you don't go too slowly, to the point that you end up procrastinating and then the project just drops off the map. (no pun intended)

Wish you all the best for this project and look forward to seeing more.

Cheers

Jay.

Thanks guys.

Yeah, I know what you mean, that's happened to me in the past. Although I am taking this one really slow, I am forcing myself to put a couple of hours a week in no matter what to stop it stagnating, so hopefully it shouldn't fade away

I've got most of the scripts that I want so far, and I've been testing them together to make sure they don't conflict. I'm making some models based on my rough idea of a storyline while i'm at work (naughty, naughty lol), and my next step will be to map out a more complete storyline, then plot along that storyline where each area/level is going to be.

Quick video to show off the completed jetty:

This will be the entrance to the hidden bunker.

great work Belidos.. i really like your asset and the mood of the game and the survival aspect too..

it's similar to my WIP but you are faster thsn me since i think mine nver will be released LOL..

Looking good dude

Form the other side of the door:

(not sure whether to keep it grungy, or make it a pristine looking facility once you get inside)

I like the grungy inside ... Maybe a gradual change to the interiors to that as you get further in ...
But that's to extreme from whats outside to indoors ...It would totally lose its atmosphere ...

Just my thoughts

My thoughts exactly to be honest, what I will probably do is change the walls and ceiling to a chipped painted texture to differentiate in from out, and use the tiles in "clean" rooms later with a dirty overlay.

Yes that would be great ...
Besides that looks like a loading bay as well so the first initial area wouldn't really have nice tiled walls and floors like an office.
The grungy looks perfect ...

Not too crazy on the clean look either. (Perhaps its the specific textures you use but it would also ruin the mood for me.)

I'm fond of the Bunker entrance though!



-Wolf

Thanks.

I don't think it's so much the textures of the clean room, it's probably more the fact that it's so clean, I haven't added any dirt or cracks, and marks to it yet. I think as a later room, maybe some sort of lab or operating theatre with dirt overlays it won't look so out of place.

Awesome work, cant wait to see more

Some corridor models:

Been working on the underground bunker corridors:

This is amazing! Can I please get the flashlight script and HUD? That's like perfect! If not can you link me to whoever owns it as this can be handy thanks a bunch!

Good luck my friend on this game can't wait to see it's final finish <3

All the HUD scripts are here on the forum, I've messaged you where to find them.

wow, that's amazing!

Thanks Nuncio.

Well, I was going to do some more work on it last night, but ended up almost throwing it all out because I thought I had broken something.

The background rain sound had stopped playing, and I couldn't work out why, I spent about an hour and a half pulling everything apart trying to figure out if it was a script conflict with another script, and was about to give up.

Before giving up I decided to take a look at the music.lua script to see if there were any issue, and boom I noticed the changes I had made to music.lua, then I realised I was on the beta and when it had updated it had overwritten my music.lua.. d'oh!

So I decided to make a copy of music.lua, call it bgmusic.lua and put it in another folder, then proceeded to search for the entity I had put music.lua on to swap it out..... 2hrs later and an almost empty level it suddenly hit me ... you don't put music.lua in an entity, it loads up automatically and you call it from another script.

Anyway, half an hour later, after trying various things, I find out you can just put the copy of music.lua into a non-static/always active entity and it overrides the default one.

That's 4hrs of dev time wasted on something as silly as that. LOL.

Moral of the story: For those of you who pester Lee saying he should fix "this" or "that" because it "should only take him 5 minutes" (and yes I am guilty of this too), be a little bit more understanding, and a lot more grateful when it's done, because nothing is simple, and even silly little things like this can take hours to diagnose & fix

I've been working on the HUD, integrating medkits, food and drink into an icon panel with the torch, ammo, halth, and lives icons, creating new medkit, food, and drink scripts to pick them up and add to the count instead of using them instantly (thanks go to 3com, smallg, and mchapman for the inspiration from their scripts). I've also added a click sound whenever you turn the flashlight on and off.

I've been silently following this, and it keeps getting better and better. Really looking forward to playing this in the future!

The game has a very subtle and subdued aesthetic to it, yet that HUD is glaring red and very large. I think it would look much better if it where smaller.



-Wolf

Yup, that was just to show how the layout work, it's not quite finished yet, when done it will have a fairly high transparency so won't stick out so much, and the plan is to have I a little smaller.

Very nice work so far! Seen a few good looking WIP's of late. Great atmosphere here.

Already much better! Really cool.