IOU - fixed camera prerendered deremake

Small Update: We’re back to using blender + unity. We plan to stay here and finish the project with Unity. The last few months programmer Ali has been dedicating himself to the project. We’re calling ourselves Saedo Games.

You can have only 1 camera ,keyframed…rather than so many.

Come again? I’m using binds for the cams pos, not keyframes. The blender world is for the prerendered work. Having everything binded makes it easy to precisely render out sections of the world’s prerenders.

The actual game scene/world/cams are in Unity Engine.

Map Sketch Update o.o

From June/5th - June/9th I was on a camping trip visiting the area this game project is based on. It was a good trip. I got over 500 new reference photos and about 20mins of video reference. That should be enough to finish the world.

http://i.imgur.com/6SmL4hU.jpg

A fun note, I was playing RE2 recently and while down in the sewers Ada says this to Leon “That’s two I owe you.” Unintentional on my part. So there’s a indirect reference to IOU in RE2. I am awesome.

SEE: “2IOU”

Thanks to all the voters. Very encouraging, both results.


I’m gonna answer this post again since some time has passed

This game is a evolved version of those survival horror games. Changing it to better fit modern games that aren’t survival horror would be wrong. Wrong project - wrong type of game. This isn’t Deus Ex or anything but survival horror, its a slow paced puzzle game (with guns and monsters) Expect Backtracking and limited everything. This game won’t be for everyone, its for the people who have been waiting and waiting, all the while becoming disappointed on where things are headed (from both indie and full blown professional studios) the term survival horror is still thrown around these days but its been over 10 years since I’ve seen one.

Health regeneration certainly doesn’t belong in this kind of game because it doesn’t exist in real life …well it does but it takes days/weeks/months/years to heal in real life HA!. Health regen IS what’s game breaking in most cases, it takes the thought out of it. The play style suffers dramatically when you can just cower and wait for your health to regen. Beating a game level all the while taking minimal damage will always be more rewarding than auto regen. Anyone with a gamer background will agree. It’s a rush.

The creator of Braid goes on great rants about the human condition in games and how it’s important to have. Something to relate to and understand, to use your brain and learn something. You are supposed to be weary of your steps, not relying on a checkpoint system. Checkpoints work great in most games, not this one.

Healing in IOU will be different than Resident Evil. There will be a herb type item as seen in Resident Evil except for IOU its a very low tier healing item, that item will never bring you back to full health, it will only slow or lengthen your crawl towards death. Buying you a little more time. That’s all I’ll say on healing at this time - but I have more on it. Also - No plan to have the player turn into a playable zombie, it’s not that kind of game. Turning into a zombies means GAME OVER XD

The notebook feature. There’s no point in having this part of the code when all the player has to do is use a pen and paper in real life to keep track of things of interest. One of the programmers, Victory VD, pointed this out when I brought up the idea of a player managed notebook. When have you ever played a Final Fantasy or Puzzle game and NOT reached for a pencil and paper at some point? Yeah. No need for that to be in the game. The more I think about it, it would be silly a gimmick.


PROJECT info, The plan:
The project at hand is the forest chapter and will be on the shorter side (2-4 hours) If everything goes well we will continue the story with another game. For the city chapters I want to address all the locations we couldn’t do for the forest location. (large city locations like a police station, Bank and perhaps a Zoo) When I write story bits I’ll often find myself making events that are far off and not in the setting of the forest lodge area. The forest chapters end as Emma finally drives off away from the hellish Resort. I’m calling the City Chapters “2IOU.”
I might changed the project name to IOU1. “I Owe You One.”

I’ve placed the 2 in front of IOU because if we ever make the city chapters, the dev of that game will be backwards compared to the project at hand. Parts of the code will be reused for the city chapters and much of the story is already started. So its like a Mirror in terms of dev compared to IOU1. :wink: Backwards. If that makes any sense.

Here’s inventory test 02. Created and edited by VeXe Elxenoanizd
Inventory functions, everything else is placeholder (including item sizes and overall bag-size) I think we already have a inventory system that is smarter and more useful than RE4/5. He’s now working on optimizing and making sure its fast - this screen will be managed in real time (no gameplay pause while in inventory) so we’re building with that in mind.

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-RxdtzI6Hs

Heres some pictures of some more inventory stuff. More delays on getting my new computer, should be soon though.

http://i.imgur.com/VBgtVsJ.jpg


Some more doodles of level design ideas.

so we have made progress in 2013, lots actually. But not much to share :slight_smile:

I think my 2014 goal will be to put even more time into the projects, or projects now.
you can follow the lead programmer of iou here:

He plans on selling some systems iou will use as separate tools, unrelated to iou. So others can have a quick and easy inventory system for their games. He could explain his plans better than me though. Another thing we’ll start doing on a regular basis are meetings on a voice server/skype. Most of 2013 for me was spent on level design (mental level design that is, as I still havent replaced my broken computer) and the story line, both have made HUGE advancements this year, while the artwork is easily behind schedule now :slight_smile: but good news is I have the money and I’m buying something soon. Armed with all this mew inspiration and level design I bet we’ll see lots of 3d world progress in the first half of 2014.

I’m back. Here’s a old silly iou video I couldn’t upload until now.

^link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Wu_lUl4PY

More artwork… coming soon. Going to start the campground and basements this month.

Is that Randy Marsh? lol Anyway, keep it up, looking guud!

Yes it’s Randy. Time for change.

Some new renders:

I love blender.

Hello again.

New art video. About to start getting nature focused.

Only you can prevent forest fires

Also some cool road textures I made. Still going to add to them. You can use them for whatever you’d like :slight_smile:

Some new prerenders.

Starting to blend the texture seams.

old forest

It’s looking great and the inventory system looks especially cool.

For the pre-rendered scenes you might want to be careful about making the scene too grainy. The cycles render looks great, but if you have a non grainy object or player in the scene it’ll look out of place.

Thanks started using cycles as the main renderer sometime last month. It’s lovely!

The inventory stuff shown here is very out of date, better game stuff coming soon! Vexe has created the puzzle logic for the game, I got to test that a few weeks ago. We are making progress in the game department.

Still finding the right level of grain. And do know… I enjoy the noise more than I should.
There’s been some debate within the team that the grain is too much and I think I’ve scared them a few times with my ideas for the art direction. Just going to have to trust me, I have the old definition of this genre in mind. I joked that this is what the genre looks like in my mind after Capcom forgot it.

RE2’s models had a huge contrast between model and background so I’m not too worried. Again I love the noise.

Here’s a blender render from when the project name was dREAD (pat yourself on the back if you knew that already)
Even at this very early stage of the game project I was chasing that noise for the backgrounds.

Leaning towards the ingame models will be low poly similar to RE2/3. I think what peopel really want is another REmake/RE0 but in order for that to happen we first need to make a proper PS1 influenced version.

I’m doing all the prerenders and there’s over 1000 backgrounds. So the noise does 3 things I can think of,

  1. it’ll keep the game file size down. These renders add up!
  2. I can model and texture faster knowing the end result won’t be looking for too much detail.
  3. Artistic painting look.

I could not find any images where you actually tested the noise background with a Lowpoly Model, so i want to point out a few things.
The diffrence between the prerendered backgrounds and 3D Models was easier on the PSX (PS1), because of the very low output resolution (512 × 384).
The quality of the background should be equal to the textures of the characters, otherwise they will pop out.
So either you need a Noise Filter for your 3D Characters or you make the renders just very clean or you make a clean render and put a noise filter over the whole output (characters+background) or you use a pixelate filter.
I made comparative picture:



Please Keep in mind that i maybe did the FIlters a bit extreme, it’s just to show how it could be. Also the Diffrence would be more clear when you have a character in motion (moving along the BG).

And here some Original Screens of RE2 in Orign Resolution of 512 × 384
RE2 Screen 1
RE2 Screen 2

And here is a Page with a lot of Images from RE1 Directors Cut. You can clearly see that the 3D Models don’t pop out so much, because of the low resolution:
Link to RE1 Directors Cut Images

Good post, @cerfribar. We will pay careful attention. Personally I like pic number 2 the most, followed by 3 and then 1.