Cataclysm: Fall of The Cog (WIP): Page 4

Cataclysm: Fall of The Cog (WIP)

cybereality

HashTag NewGodotLogo

xyz

Here's rocket/satellite model. Although very simple, it visually works well in the game. White accents are tinted with dominant color and they start to blink after the deployment.

This is the first actual 3d asset. All things so far have been generated via code or built in primitives.

Erich_L

@xyz said: By popular demand, worked a bit on Cog dehumanization. Tried to polygonize them more.

Good, good. These are cogs that would step on your completed lego set while you watch. These are cogs that would pull the Ethernet cord while you're in the middle of an important skype meeting. These are the cogs that would throw away that sticky note you wrote the password to your crypto wallet on. These are the cogs that give you a new but outdated book on C++ for Christmas.

When they talk, they burst out the sounds of a dial up modem from clearly broken speakers. But, do they tell me they love me while stabbing my guts out? I wouldn't say so. But that's probably too far anyway, hahaha, so you've probably dialed it in just right.

xyz

@Erich_L The project's scope is just too small to studiously deal with the question of tone. I'm still figuring out the mechanics, which is the most important component for me. I'm certain I'd like to keep a relaxed ironical approach to narrative elements. Look at the city names.

Maybe the Cogs are like Daleks. They are extremely dangerous because we say so. Although they can't climb up a stair.

But I'm not dead set on this. If you think it should go into more serious/dark dimension, and have some world-building suggestions regarding it... I'm all ears.

cybereality

I think it's good to keep things mysterious. Have just enough art/dialog to make it seem intriguing but not go too far with the story. I thought Doom Eternal did a pretty good job with it. They actually gave Doom a story, but it is abstract and confusing, and does not distract from the action. Just enough to give you a reason to play.

Megalomaniak

@xyz said:

Maybe the Cogs are like Daleks. They are extremely dangerous because we say so. Although they can't climb up a stair.

They are extremely dangerous! Unless they are met with a patch of mud they can't traverse. They are extremely dangerous! Except for when you wear a trashcan over your head and make robot noises. They are extremely dangerous! Except for when they are out of wifi range. They are extremely dangerous! Except for when they run out of battery!

Erich_L

@xyz said: But I'm not dead set on this. If you think it should go into more serious/dark dimension, and have some world-building suggestions regarding it... I'm all ears.

no no no in all seriousness I think you've already made the cogs wonderfully easy to hate on because of their rate of reproduction. Sorry if my rants distracted you from just getting a demo out for us :3

Edit: in a side note, I saw a guy going into my complex with the word COG in big silver letters on the back of his jacket. it's already started

xyz

@cybereality said: I think it's good to keep things mysterious. Have just enough art/dialog to make it seem intriguing but not go too far with the story. I thought Doom Eternal did a pretty good job with it. They actually gave Doom a story, but it is abstract and confusing, and does not distract from the action. Just enough to give you a reason to play.

Agreed. Mystery, ambiguity, just hinting at things... all great narrative devices that entice imagination, and let the player fill in the blanks. I find these things much more stimulating than hearing the story verbatim.

The "story" in Doom Eternal fits perfectly, but that game could really get away with anything posing as a story. It's an ultimate masterpiece of fps gameplay. I wouldn't say though that Doom didn't have a story before. If we look back at various installments of Doom/Quake there was always a tendency towards what we today call "environmental storytelling". It's actually my favorite approach to narrative in games. I happen to be a Dark Souls fanboi, and Dark Souls just excel at this.

There was a minimal impromptu intro blurb in the Cog prototype that I think worked well together with city names to create some basic narrative structure to an otherwise very abstract game. I'm not much of a writer and English is not my native language so brace yourself. All your base are belong to us.

The sketches I post here are highly non-committal, done mostly for fun. Maybe something usable develops, otherwise I'll revert to text only. Here's some more:

jbskaggs

The cog do not have to be masterminds. Only extremely efficient. A great version of this is a real enemy mankind. A creature that has no weaponry, cannot cause death, is very stupid, slow, but is has three very real gifts: they breed fast, they are hard to kill, and they do one thing perfectly. Im talking of course about bedbugs.

If the cogs are as tenacious and efficient as our real world bedbugs they will be very hard to beat- regardless of how smart or evil they actually are.

xyz

@jbskaggs That exactly is the whole premise. In the game they do nothing but replicate :) For all we know they could be mere self assembling minecraft cubes. But I do think it's always better to have something anthropomorphic in the game, at least some semblance of characters. On the other hand, there's always sudoku, which works well with numbers as only actors.

However @Erich_L needs Cogs to be exceptionally evil. Otherwise his gentle conscience will issue an objection whenever intentional blizzards and earthquakes are unleashed upon Cog's heartless steel :p

xyz

A little something for @jbskaggs' wife :)

I'm time and again amazed how malleable and versatile Perlin noise is. With a little bit of cheap remapping, layering and animation trickery you can produce a broad range of resolution independent effects. Currently, the majority of effects in the game is Perlin based.

jbskaggs

That's great! I have never heard of perlin noise as an animation technique before.

xyz

You can animate various noise parameters and get all sorts of interesting results out of it. This project relies heavily on procedural noise. There are almost no pre-made textures. All is shader-generated, and most of it in realtime. Neat thing with procedurally shaded stuff is that you can zoom into it as much as you like without texture pixels showing up. Some Perlin-ized things from the game:

1- flood effect - sequence of several layers of animated noise. 2 - hurricane dissolve - hurricane spiral is itself procedural (with parametric hole size and number of arms that change with hurricane size. Bigger ones have more arms). Masked with threshold-animated Perlin. 3 - fire effect - 3-octave Perlin with animated threshold 4 - lava - ridge Perlin mapped via polar coordinates onto the cone. Threshold changes with elevation. Radial noise coordinate is animated for sliding effect. 5, 6 - low frequency Perlin is used as a mix parameter between several other Perlin configurations to break the uniformity of land/sea distribution across the planet.

I just love this stuff :)

jbskaggs

That is so cool, is this hard to learn?

xyz

There's nothing much to learn here really. Once you set up the basic noise function in your shader, it's all pretty much improvisation, playing with parameters in time and space, combining different configurations...

Good starting point is the book of shaders: https://thebookofshaders.com/11/

jbskaggs

@xyz said: There's nothing much to learn here really. Once you set up the basic noise function in your shader, it's all pretty much improvisation, playing with parameters in time and space, combining different configurations...

Good starting point is the book of shaders: https://thebookofshaders.com/11/

Thanks Ill read this :)

cybereality

Shaders are not really that hard. They are similar to C programming, and the syntax and available functions are very limited, so there is not much to learn. However, you do have to have some understanding of how GPUs and graphics APIs work, because it is on a lower level. But you could get a lot done without knowing this, it will just be harder to debug and optimize the code (and shader debugging is super complicated without specialized tools). If you do these tutorials you'll probably understand. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/shading/your_first_shader/index.html

cybereality

This looks really amazing @xyz , I'm surprised how much progress you are making in a short time.

Erich_L

@xyz said: However @Erich_L needs Cogs to be exceptionally evil. Otherwise his gentle conscience will issue an objection whenever intentional blizzards and earthquakes are unleashed upon Cog's heartless steel :p

All that sarcasm and you still can read me like an open book. BTW I love the volcanic fire! Let them burn!!!!

xyz

@cybereality said: This looks really amazing @xyz , I'm surprised how much progress you are making in a short time.

Thanks! I think I'm starting to get the hang of this Godot thingy :)

@jbskaggs I assumed you have some basic shader knowledge and were asking about noise specifically. If you've never programmed a shader, yeah, better start with something very simple. It's pretty much like coding in c, with one catch - the whole shader code is just a single step of an invisible loop your GPU runs iterating through all pixels/vertices on the drawn object. So it requires a little bit of mental perspective shift compared to "regular" coding. You need to observe things from the standpoint of a single pixel (or vertex). I find it quite fun, as you can do stunning things with very short code chunks. It's like playing in a visual sandbox.

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