BGMC 17 | A Walk for Water

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
#1

It’s time for my second participant in Blender Game Engine Contest, also known as the GBMC. After my last entire which turn out pretty slow after a while (It was too long, with too little variation) I’ve decided that I would make a really fun game next time, something more of a platformer. Something easy where you jump, run and shoot. But as it turns out that’s not me.

Instead I’m going for this:
A happy family is in the desert, still able to see the city far away. They are playing and having fun. Suddenly a great sand storm comes in and they get separated. When the main character, the father, wakes up he’s alone. What’s coming next is a search for he’s family and a more desperate walk for water.

A walk for water is going to be an emotional game without any violent. As for now you’ll have some water that you will have to use carefully to survive the heat of the desert, stay in the shadows to not black out. In addition to this you’ll have to follow the cues you’re wife and son has left behind. Here’s a first gimps of what the game will look like.

As for now the animation and graphics is anything but final, rather sloppy. I’ve just wanted to be able to do everything I want in time. If i’ll have time left in the end, all the cutscenes will get a great (needed) polish (or perhaps redo). Hope you like it so for! And as always is any suggestions for ideas of what to do while searching for water, family in the desert… don’t be afraid to share your thoughts!

(I’ll include hallucinations of oasis, feels like an obligation in a game taking place in the desert)

#2

Looks immersive as heck already!

A bloom filter would do this justice. You could really blow out the exposure and give everything that glaring-under-the-sun look.

Hallucinations sound like a great opportunity for easter eggs!

#3

Did you really make this all in one day?

#4

Less. More like 5-6 hours! There’s only five textures at the moment (the sand, the grass, the storm clouds, the footsteps and the title screen). The facerig isn’t anything fancy, the eyelids pretty much sucks and has to be scaled for the blinking animation. This will look a lot better in the end of the week.

Love the idea about using bloom filter, if it doesn’t drop the framerate a lot (60fps atm, but feels silly to count right now since is so far from finished). Bloom filter tends to slow down a lot.

#5

I really like the style and idea of this game- it looks really good considering the competition just started.

#6

yeah all I have so fare is some basics down like my player cylinder and mouse look set-up working. They have well .70% of a level done.
How do we know what we can use like free 3d models from websites and textures from other free websites?

#7

YOu can use anything if you show it’s source(where you get it) in your WIP thread.

#8

Looks great already! You made Rainbow last time didn’t you? I’ll be excited to seewhat you make this time.

BTW:that dust storm effect might cause a bit of a graphics drain. Blender doesn’t handle full screen alpha objects very well for som reason…

#9

It’s correct that I did Rainbow last time. At the moment everything runs 60fps with the dust storm, this is in fullscreen mode. If I turn on bloom it drops to about 50 (and I’m really not sure about the bloom-effect…). I’ll do everything do make this make running as great as possible, during the fullscreen recording in dropped somewhat in the first cutscene. I’ll make sure to hand out a copy in a few days to make sure that it doesn’t slow down. :slight_smile:

At the moment I’m working on ways to not have to use bars for the water, but rather something else. Last time I tried to do this in Rainbow with the balance animations, but ended up having a balance meter anyway. This time… I hope to do something that really works. I love this shorter competitions, it makes it impossible to stay too long doing the same thing.

#10

It’s time for an update! Or time… I have a list of a great number of things to do, but I wanted to give you something. I’ll give you a version with a huge drawing distance (which is not to be in the game, just for this demo to see how well it runs). It also includes an hallucination. Let me know what you feel! And the main purpose, does it run well? (Gameplay wise it’s so far from playable, no level design and and some bugs.)

Oh, the controls. WASD to move, drink water with space. Take cover in the shadows (just the stone-shadow for now) and pick up water with shift. A bug makes it impossible to drink when it’s empty.

Attachments

Walk for Water.zip (7.89 MB)

#11

An video update!

#12

Did you use blender 2.75?
When I tried it the cut scene ran OK but the main scene crashes instantly, no reported errors. I’m using 2.75a and I’ve noticed crashes with some other people’s blends for seemingly no reason.

Anyway, the cutscene looks great.

EDIT:
I’ve managed to narrow it down to something on the second layer, layer one and three run ok for me, but the player hit box is doing something strange to cause the crash I think.

EDIT2:
I changed the character hit box to dynamic (from “character” type) and it runs fine. No lag, pretty good performance. Changing back to character type physics crashes again…

EDIT3: using character type physics in my own projects causes the same crash.
hmmm… I’ve never used that physics type before so I didn’t notice anything wrong.

#13

Glad it preforms OK. I’m using 2.74 so that could probably the reason. I’m going to update to 2.75 immediately for more then one reason. The main is that it’s possible to animate a lot values in alpha, colors and so on.

Could change to dynamic, maybe there’s a problem with “character” in 2.75.

#14

I got it working, after changing the character physics, and enabling the other layers that the main scene needs.
(don’t use Character physics…they’re broken)

I get about 2.5fps at 640x480 :frowning:

Doing a bit of optimisation (namely turning down the shadow quality on the sun) made it a playable 10fps
Optimize, man!

The animation and sound, and visuals over-all look really great so far! Turning feels strange (I don’t know how else to describe it).

#15

It seems weird that it would go that slow, tried it out on an old AMD 1.6 Ghz, 4GB and got way more. Perhaps 20-25fps. Adding that it’s really old and aren’t almost able to play 480p on Youtube properly without any lags. Seems like something is weird.

In the end, if there’s time, I’ll do two versions. One with higher quality and one with lower. Remember that the drawing distance will be about 100 and is in the test scene at 1000. There’s about 300 trees and a great deal of other things.

I think the turning feels a bit weird since it doesn’t have a turning animation.

I’m thankful for you taking your time!

#16

20 FPS cutscene, ~25(20-30) FPS gameplay on my low GPU. Game is fine - nice ambience. However, it is hard to see something when climbing downhills.
Good luck with future progress!:wink:

#17

Playing in the embedded player seems to work much better. I can get about 25-30fps now after doing a bit more optimising (removing the subsurface mod from the player model helps a lot). Once the sand particle/sheets start coming into view though, it quickly tanks down to 2-3fps again. But this machine has never been able to handle overlayed transparency like that very well, for some odd reason, so I chalk that up to entirely being an issue on my end.

Changing sun shadow quality to 512, applying the subsurface to the character, and changing the blowing sand material from ‘opaque’ to ‘alpha blend’, and my fps is a good 30-40fps at the same resolution that it was originally. Lowering the draw distance and the amount of sand planes in the scene will help this even more.

EDIT: I changed the view distance/mist distance, and now its 30-60fps no matter how much sand is blowing around.


And it doesn’t look too shabby, either!