Things are moving on nicely, here are the highlights for this Friday’s development blog:

 

Weapon System

The weapon system has gotten quite a nice treatment, with having the M37, the rest of the pistols and rifles all coded and working as expected. There’s still some work left to do on the melee weapons, but overall we’re happy with the progress.
 

Map Progress

A lot of progress have been done on the Society of Leopold maps and Empires. Improving the maps usually take a lot of time but they worth the effort. It goes without saying.

Teemu

Teemu insisted on making this blog being less technical for this once, so here are his thoughts on the design part of the project.
 
Hello everybody!
 
My name is Teemu Andreas and I work as a UI designer and a visual artist on this project. I thought I would write couple words about the work I have done and my overall thoughts about this project. I’ll try to keep it short because my writing skills aren’t nearly as good as Arthur’s.
When I was asked by Stephen to join him and Arthur on this project I happily agreed. Bloodlines was one of my favorite RPG games I had ever played and I was eager to start developing new visuals for the game. Bloodlines had amazing atmosphere, deep character development and a ton of replayability. It is well known that the development team had a lot on their shoulders when trying to rush the product to meet the deadline. It was also the first game on the brand new engine, Source. As much as I have enjoyed the game, there is many improvements that can be done, enhancing the gameplay even further and pumping some new blood in to this classic. One of these improvements is the UI design.
 
When we released the first few images of the new UI concept there was a lot of feedback. Some people didn’t care for it at all and some were excited about it. We cannot please everybody but we keep our minds open to ideas and feedback from the community. That being said, the UI concept page is now updated completely, and can be found at the same place as before: http://teemuandreas.com/vaulderieui. One of the major changes to the design is the color scheme. After the first round we experimented with the original Bloodlines color palette and decided to ditch the blue scheme for good. It brought that familiar feel to the design, gave it a lot more contrast and also revealed what was lacking from it.
 
Second bigger change to the original concept is the addition of a radial quick menu system in the game HUD. This would allow fast access to different disciplines, weapons and items with a click of a mouse. We also talked about implementing a similar time slowing effect as you may have seen in Witcher 2 when using the quick menu, but this only an idea at this point. With the changed color scheme I aimed to minimalize the HUD even further but in exchange to give it a more stylized look. This change can be also seen in the new Discipline icons, made in the spirit of the original ones.
There is a lot of work to be done before we have a finished UI for the game but I can say I’m pleased for the result so far. We have many ideas how to bring these elements alive through animation and subtle effects, but that is something for another blog.
 
Thank you for the feedback and support!

 

Remade Weapons

Iraito has done a fantastic work with reworking the models from scratch and having them PBR ready. This week’s weapons were the M37, Severed arm, Fire axe and Glock.

 

Interface

Teemu has done a lot of fantastic work reworking the interface with the new scheme as mentioned above. Most of the updated UI work can be seen in the link above as well.

 

Character Sheet

The migration to Unity’s new UI migration has gone quite smoothly, but there are still some issues they have to iron out. The character sheet was one of the first ones to have the pleasure of being reworked for the new UI system.

 

Misconceptions

There are a few misconceptions which I wish to address as soon as possible. First of all, the previous remakes of Bloodlines done in Source engine was done only by me. There was no Source team. There was no real or long lasting interest from any Source programmer or otherwise, nobody on the Vaulderie team ever worked on Resurgence. Project Vaulderie, on the other hand is still going strong. Does doesn’t necessary means it will eventually get done by tomorrow or next week, but that means it keeps being worked on, whether there are visible outcomes or not. In short, the Source port was doomed to die sooner or later, and I think the length and the same walls being hit over and over speaks for itself. There was never any possible way to achieve every feature that was present in Bloodlines to be also present in Source, mainly because of the limited SDK for modding. Without engine licensing, without full access to the engine code, you can only do so much.

 

Secondly, there would never be a proper cloth simulation, no new updates from later Source games, in short, there was no solid future for Resurgence. This is when Unity came around and turned everything around. We managed to get done so much under such a short time, which were never managed to be fully done in the Source version for all these years.

 

There was no real reason for us to stick with Source. As technology moves forward, we too want to implement the best out of everything if possible, to have complete freedom of work, and Unity allows us to achieve those in a short manner and reach the end goal much faster. Since the switch, we can prototype faster than ever, write our own tools to help with development, and we don’t have to worry about any sort of engine limitation. Unity receives updates at a very alarming rate, and with Unity 5 being around the corner, we can’t be more happy to have invested into this engine.
We might give you the impression that it’s not being worked on, lacking gameplay media or any short snippets from time to time, but that should be very obvious by the development blogs we post every other Friday, and rest assured that the project gets constant work done.
 

Wallpapers

Teemu has created a set of new wallpapers reflecting the new direction for the overall look and feel of the project so far. You can grab them here.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Summary

Progress is going as expected, nearing each time to a playable demo somewhere between this month and next month. These are not the final dates but they are pushing us to have something solid for you guys to try. Might end up either a part of the single player or a multiplayer demo, but the output may vary.