Making a Detective Horror Game! | Devlog 0 - For The Pit

do you remember those missing posters you used to find on the back of milk cartons well hypothetically imagine the missing person is some random adult and you're traveling through the forest to find them except instead of doing it to rescue them you're doing it to hunt them and hypothetically imagine these Woods are filled with crypted like Monsters and keeping in mind that this is all hypothetical imagine the reason you're hunting them is because you're part of an evil secret society that worships this giant Elder horror pit in the ground named Elijah and so you need to hunt down these people and feed them to the pit or be fed to it yourself now what if none of that was hypothetical that would mean that you're playing our upcoming single player detective horror game for the pit the title will probably be changed later my name is Isaac and I'm in charge of the game sound creatures and story I previously worked as the Director of poppy playtime my name is Gunner and I'm the one and only programmer hi my name is Preston and I'm the artist among many other things for the team the three of us met all the way back in elementary school school and about a year and a half ago decided we wanted to start making games together and formed curious Fox socks so let me tell you about this game it's sort of like a cross between solo lethal company for the horor side and papers please for the detective [Music] side you're part of this evil society that worships Elijah a giant pit but Elijah is hungry so you must enter the woods and find a missing person to feed to him there's littered items all throughout the forest and some of these come from your target aka the person you're tracking down using the clues presented to you as well as the info you have about your target you'll then need to deduce what belongs to them and follow the trail once you find the target you hit them over the head with a stick and carry them back to your truck however this Forest is haunted and the later it is in the day the more monsters you'll find such as a massive spider whose legs blend in with the surrounding trees or an endlessly long worm that always knows your location if you can escape the wood successfully you'll return to home base and feed the pit at last with the concept in mind it was time to choose a style we decided we wanted to go for a Vibe reminiscent of old PS1 games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill or for some newer examples in this style there's no one lives under the lighthouse and Mysteries under Lake ofilia so great we've got a solid concept now we just need to make it that should be easy [Applause] right okay so it's a bit hard really hard actually and one thing that was really gwing at me was the detective part of the game wanted a formula that could be played endlessly again like papers please we needed a system that could generate a random person to go after as well as generate unique items to go with them and it needed to be made in a way where the player can get better at it over time but never to the point where they can solve a case instantly the player needs to continue to feel smart every time they solve a case all of that is a lot of work to program and worst of all we don't even know if it'll be fun so I needed to come up with a way for us to test if it could be fun without us actually programming it this is a paper prototype here's how I made it so first I made these Case Files this one is for Bo Benny he's a lumberjack in game you'll get this info on your flip phone now a bunch of items are going to spawn in the forest and it's our job as the player to decipher which ones belong to Bow so put on your trench code and grab a cigarette I don't smoke so I just got this sticking out beat it to its these streets and what they used to be I don't want to start a fire so let's say we find a baseball hat and an axe he is a Lumberjack but it's technically possible he dropped a hat to we need more info and this is why we added Clues inside of these items are sticky notes which can give additional info in game you'll see these as glowy dots on the item first one for the Hat a logo but this means nothing on its own so we allowed players to take pictures of clues for extra info according to my contact that logo is for the head Warehouse which has a mostly male customer base and the hat is camo okay for the axe however we have a bean logo and the axe is two-handed which according to my contact means it's probably for wood cutting it seems like the ax is bows but the hat would also make sense and this was a problem we do want players to take an educated guess but sometimes there's just not enough info to do that this is where the Wild Card clue came in items that do not belong to Bow will get their Wild Card clue at random but if the item does belong to B then the Wild Card clue is generated to work with him let me show you for the Hat it says that some white hair was left behind and looking at Bose's case File he's blond but for the axe Wild Card the item has a B on it B for bow B for Benny probably and now we can say with almost complete certainty that this is indeed Bose's axe case solved from here I got straight to work letting people test and seemingly results were good as people sorted through the items and clues you could really see them thinking hard to figure out the answers of course things might go a bit differently once it's actually in game but we'll get to that in the next Dev vog for now we had the detective mechanics in a pretty solid place so it was time to start creating the actual game more specifically the world you play in for this I'll pass it off to Gunner so that he can teach you one major aspect that we want in our game is random generation first let's look at terrain as who would want to completely fly forc however I'll explain something first in game development if you want Randomness you'll most likely use a noise texture using the noise texture you can retrieve a float between 0o and 1 using X and Y coordinates on the noise texture amplify the value by number let's say 10 and you got yourself the Y coordinates of terrain but how do I apply these numbers to a mesh luckily gdau has something called an array mesh which gives me full control of how the mesh is shaped so after making a GD of these new meshes terrain is done but what about the objects currently the game generates 100x 100 chunks of the area in each 100x 100 chunk there are 30X 30 possible positions where an object can spawn it runs through each position has a chance to spawn an object object and if the object is assigned to that spawn it runs another process that will determine what object should go there based on a spawn chance that each object is assigned the problem with this approach is that it's not very flexible for the longest time random generation has confused me how does one go from a few noise textures to full-fledged terrain with hundreds of different structures and objects like Minecraft our answer actually lies within Terraria long story short they use noise textures to paint on an image in code and assign each pixel to a color with what I assume each color having a different outcome I tried it out and was surprised with how good this system works now that random generation is done for the terrain and objects the last thing we need to randomly generate is the target's path using a simple formula we generate a path that has three points at each point there will be a small area full of items with one of the items in that area belonging to the Target find all the clues and you will be pointed to the Target the game has an inventory system and it too has gone through changes before it was just these simple rectangles and using q& on the keyboard you could SC through the items now it is much more immersive with the player holding R to place the backpack down and look at its contents lastly we wanted the game to have that pixelated old PS1 N64 look obviously using low pool models and low rest textures help but it wasn't enough the main thing that helped was turning the XR resolution from 1280 x 720 to 640x 360 gives a nice pixelated look that doesn't take away from the visuals we also have a Shader on the tree trunks that give them that PS1 Jitter but it's not currently very noticeable the next things I'll be be working on is touching up Generation The Hideout item tables and a day night cycle touching up the generation means exactly that I still have to add a gift shop and I would like to add more objects and structures around the map and fully convert to the new method The Hideout needs textures some land adjustments and NPC function items are added to the game but their specifics are yet to be added which is very important since these allow the player to actually do detective work and not just guess which one belongs to the player and finally a day night cycle I tried adding a cycle using a physical sky and animating its rotation but this produced some strange results for one the sky just didn't look the best and two the sun would illuminate objects while it was below the map so my solution is by animating the color which produced better results in terms of lighting but it's still not fully [Music] done now I've been having to learn a few new mediums to get that retro style feel that we're going for and here is how I accomplished it the first new medium I've had to learn more about is higher resolution pixel art I've done pixel art for about 7 years and professionally for only about 1 and a half mostly stuck to a lower resolution pixel artart trying to keep around 16 x 16 pixels and this is partially due to just my fondness of the art style and the limitations and also self-hatred but one of the biggest reasons is because it's just what I'm most comfortable with now for this project it was definitely clear I had to step out of my comfort zone and a big step away from that is also by getting away from that cartoony art style now a good way I did this is by getting rid of those hard black outlines now how do I fix this you ask or maybe you didn't ask I don't know well I did colored outlines instead so what you do is you take your black outline and replace it with a dark dark shade of the color that's already on the Sprite Now by doing this it gives the texture a more realistic look but still keeping away from that cartoony style and distinguishing the object from the background as for the higher resolution itself I've had to practice filling in the spaces a little better with more shading I use methods like dithering and transitioning colors to fill the space and make it feel less empty and add a little bit more realism another great tool that I've been using to get this more realistic style and just for pixel art in general is by using a color blender you choose color one and then color two and then you select how many midpoints you want and then bam it shows every one of those midpoints in between there and you get a better transition of shade one thing you don't want to do with pixel art is just make the color darker don't do that it's just don't the other medium I've had to learn is 3D modeling which before starting work on the game I had little to no knowledge of how to do look at this early 3D model it's disgusting this is my first attempt to be fair but it's disgusting I use the program crocod tile which is specifically made for a low poly retro art style feel that's a mouthful and I really enjoy it so far and I recommend it but I will be learning blender soon now for the models we already have in the game so far the tree was the first up I started by making a 2D pixel art version of the tree this ended up helping me a lot but honestly it was originally because I was just hoping I didn't have to model yet but what I did is I cut up the branches and then I cut up the tip and applied everything to the 3D model and Bam you got a tree we also have a taller variant of the tree and how we did that is just by doubling the trunk size easy now for the branches I used a 2d plane to apply these textures a lot of older games did this kind of thing to save on memory and storage and all of that good old garbage I used it out of laziness and also to achieve the look we were going for but mostly laziness although I'm still learning I'm proud of what I made so far here are some other things that are in the game backpack being my favorite and I have many more to do and I'm looking forward to that Journey if you have any comments or recommendations or tips or something well leave them in the comments and I can read them and take note of them I'll talk to you guys later and I look forward to your feedback enjoy the rest of the video goodbye here's a few tips from me to you number one the best way to get started is just starting as simple as it sounds this going to be the hardest step for some go into it being okay with the idea of making a bad game cuz you will make some bad games start by copying a tutorial and from there try to make something simple like a platformer death toll is the first official game I've worked on and trust me it is by far the biggest but I've made a few small games throughout my life on different engines like game maker and scratch number two if you don't know how to add a feature add it in any way you can it doesn't matter how bad it is you can fix it later when I first did an inventory it was done extremely poorly but since I did it I had a better grasp of it and from there I was able to rewrite it to work better number three write out your current pl/ goals set aside like 20 minutes a day at least to just write and plan for your game and let's say you want an inventory but have no idea break it down into 10 tiny steps steps that you can do also if you already consume too much content on any social media incorporate videos about game development consuming game development content will make you more likely to work on games and the final one I want to say is get rid of your bad habits doesn't have to be all of them but you should try to reduce them at least or just straight up avoid [Music] them at this point there was one major part of our game that was still a bit lacking the game is meant to be a blending of tones we want humor throughout especially when you're talking to other members of the society but we also want horror between the three of us we ended up deciding that it would be me who was in charge of modeling the creatures of this game one small issue I I don't know how to model creatures so for the first time in years I installed blender and got to work this video from the sickly wizard was a godsend so please go check him out I have literally had the video left open on my computer for the past month because of how helpful it's been anyways we wanted the first monster that we added to the game to be easy so here's what we settled on from a mysterious hole in the forest a freakish worm with an endlessly long body will emerge and slowly but surely track towards the player through the Forest I cannot draw so I decided to use the next best thing references and this creature known as the Mongolian deathworm seemed to fit the bill perfectly in blender I started with a simple Circle and then extended it out on both sides before shrinking the sides to create that segmented look then I added another Circle this time with only three sides and shaped it into a long sharp tooth from here I wanted to just copy and paste the teeth around the whole mouth but it became obvious very fast that that wasn't going to work so instead I made the teeth a little more random and Jagged and then copied them them everywhere I took the inside of the mouth and made it dark changed the shape of the head piece to give it a more distinct look and finally added a bunch of rows of teeth then with some texturing and final touches it was looking pretty good comment any name ideas for this guy now with the model more or less done we need to actually put it in the game but sadly that'll have to wait until the next devlog in the meantime I was also able to create the rough human model that we'll use for the targets the other pit chanters you'll find around the base who are intentionally both a bit silly and a bit scary and the pit itself Elijah the Target and pit still need texturing however I also put in some work on another one of the game's Monsters the tree spider but that'll have to wait till next time too the upcoming weeks of development will be focused primarily on getting AI for some of the game's creatures and finally implementing a couple monsters into the forest along with cleaning up the game a bit so that it's play tester ready we've got some pretty intense development ahead of us as we fill up the game with all the missing beats such as a gift shop where you can buy and upgrade special tools a finished hideout with creepy NPCs 8 to 10 unique monsters is roaming throughout the forest and much more for some of us this game has actually become our full-time job so we have opened a patreon where you can consider supporting our work in exchange for some cool rewards it's starting pretty simple right now but we'll spice it up as the game gets further along for example we'll soon have our first demo of the game ready for play testing and higher tier patrons will get access to that currently we've got three tiers the first gets you access to all of our secret updates and teasers an exclusive Channel enroll in our Discord and an unreleased alpha build of our last game death's toll with ti TI 2 you also get those things and your name and the credits of these devlogs as well as the game's actual credits once it's out and lastly tier 3 will also get you all those things plus a verbal shout out at the end of each devlog and a name and quote of your choosing in the games yearbook inside of The Hideout players will be able to check out this yearbook and read what everyone wrote if you've got ideas for other Awards we could add leave a comment letting us know please consider checking out the patreon link is in the description anyways thanks for watching stay tuned to see what comes next and we'll see your soon

Channel: Curious Fox Sox

Views: 10,511

Keywords: For the pit, horror, scary, video games, devlog, dev diary, game development, indie, funny, gamedev, ps1, retro, cult, monsters, creatures, cryptids, detective, investigator, mystery, papers please, lethal company, pixel art, 3d

Id: PrrNs1PV8p4

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024