2 Years Later Video

Like always I don't know where or how to start. This is like the 10th attempt to give form my thoughts in the way that they make sense. A sc....ew that. 

Probably all of you are thinking: how did we end in this place we are right now? I myself asked the same question for the last few months and I blame this guy:

I was so stupid to fall into his trap. Filip, I want to believe that you are proud of yourself. Because of you in the last few months, I spent a lot more time on that project than I should. This was supposed to be developed in a stress-free manner without deadlines and thanks to you it turned out into a long sprint to deliver.

And mark my words I held my side of the deal: October you getting an update. Let's skip the part that I'm doing it with style. Stretching it to the limit and publishing on the last day of the month, in the evening, just before midnight. 

I'm releasing a video in the same month as the 25th Anniversary of the game. I think we can count it as a celebration? Any complaints? 

And I don't care if you think that it is absurd that an adult person cares about some comment he wrote under some other comments. Remember that the same person spent the last 9 years of his life to develop what you will see. 

Since we talking about the stuff I've worked on, here you have it:

Now that you finished watching, some of you may think: why all these changes? 

Because I can, because I want, because LBA design was cool when it was released. But it has aged a lot over the past 25 years. This is a fact that I have fully embraced and decided to free myself from shackles of the original design and do a deep dive into the unknown. What you see in the video is a result of this decision: 

My own twisted interpretation of the original Little Big Adventure.

If you like my vision, share it with others. Lets spread the word that Little Big Adventure is not dead and even after all this years, it can still look sexy and has a lot to offer. 

The last but not least important share what you think about it, what was your reaction when you saw it? I'm really curious to hear if you were disappointed or impressed or whatever else happened? Guys this is a result of the last two years of my life (+7 before content restart) so I'd like to hear some of your thoughts :D

Greg   

GiC, new video and stream

Game Industry Conference is behind us and it was great. I meet a lot of cool people, some of them even knew about Little Big Adventure. One of the more awesome meetups was with Jasiek from https://forum.magicball.net/ :]

Two "rivals" from the past in one photo (He was doing another remake of LBA when I was starting). I had occasion to show him what I working on and talk about my plans regards changes inside the game. It was cool to hear his opinion as a fellow developer.

I had also an occasion to show the game to other people. Most of the reaction was really positive but there were also some less positive ones. One of them was the opinion that I should not be doing a remake of this game. I'm really curious what do you think about this?

Now after all of that excitement, I'm really tired but also really happy and I returned once again to work on wrapping up movie content. And there is still work to do: fixing lighting issues, finding bugs here and there and improving workflow so I could do more with less stress.

In the end, the project is already in a good state and should be ready for the video next week :] As I mentioned in the previous post I will also do:

 Twitch stream 20:00 CET on Thursday 31 October 2019. 

What I will be doing I'm still not really sure :] I thought about showing some of the game, maybe doing some drawing, modeling or maybe just talking for the whole time. Well, we will see in what mood I will be when the time will come.

So till the next week.

Greg

Little Big Adventure 25th anniversary

I know that it was a long time from last updates but this time I'm not even sorry for that. I spent countless hours working on new content, improving tech and implementing game mechanics. I know that waiting is not easy but I can say that working on this stuff is not easy either. In the end, all of us know all of this already and there is no need to talk about it more. But hey here we are in the year 2019:

25 years after releasing Little Big Adventure.

This is not a big thing for a lot of people but LBA fans organizing streaming sessions for the whole day to celebrate this event. You can find more info here. I probably will watch some of them.

This year is also special for me because December will start the 10th year of remake production. Now that I think I'm really insane that after all this long time I still didn't give up. I could have this normal life without extra worries, without countless night hours spent on making content and tech for game. I would not need to read all these negative comments about how bad my work is and generally have easier life. 

Sounds like a tempting vision ... but then I would also not read all these great comments from people that love original games and support what I do. I would never learn all of these skills that I need for this game. I would also be a different person ...

.. well enough of this drama and let's move to the point: 

How Coffemonsters plan to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a game? 

The schedule is pretty short: 

• 18/19 October 2019 - I will be at GIC in Poznań where I will have my laptop with the current build of game. I will be more than happy to show what I have and discuss what I'm working on.
• 31 October 2019 - New video release in celebration of 25th anniversary which will also reveal remake. I'm sure that some of you may be surprised by what you will see :] 

I was also thinking about doing some stream 31 October where I could answer some of your questions. Would anybody be interested in that?

 And that is all for now. Times to go back to working on the project.

Greg

Xesf

Thanks to Xesf and his reply on magicball.net we have another post on the main page :D Bellow you will find my answer to him:

Hi Xesf,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts but I think that I will disappoint you a little bit with my answer. But well ....

Xesf: I see your project as a living Sandbox and a place you can try and learn new things.

I won't deny Sandbox part was always important for me. This is my playground where I do stuff however I want. They are not always working, sometimes I do mistake but hey I still learning and funniest part is that with all this years it becoming more and more entertaining for me do it :D

Xesf: I believe after this 9 years, LBA is not the real driver anymore or if you will ever to release a LBA game on it. Don't get me wrong, I love what you've been doing.
Instead, I see that the driver is the constant learning experience, the understanding that things need to evolve and learn with your own mistakes.

A lot of things happened in this past 9 years. 

Whole project sprout from this idea of making engine. But because I wanted to have something to test it with I decided to recreate Little Big Adventure in full 3D. There was no epic goal there: take a original story and replace the graphics with 3D models. 

In the end this was great learning experience I needed to learn how to make animations how to do models and how to make all of that work inside one game. There was also whole tooling which was pretty new experience for me. 

This was going nice but I knew that I can do better. Tech matured and I could do a lot more, and I wanted to do more. So without to much thinking I thrown away old graphics and recreated it with new. This was around the time of  "L.B.A. Remake: Preview 9" video.

I think that around this time I was already switching to Deffered Rendering. This was really big thing for me at that time. It allow me to do more visually appealing stuff and there was so much more modern rendering techniques that I could use. So I spend time learn them.

So you are right. This was a lot about the tech but ... (Apparently this small word "but" negating all the stuff I told before it :D) 

At that point of time a lot changed: Unity and Unreal became publicly available for indie. This mean that I could easily throw away my code and use one of them for development. This was tempting option but because I was already working in the game industry at that point I knew that my own code allow me do grow even faster as developer. So I decided to still use Custom Tech. Believe me that this was not easy decision. It is  really hard to return home after 8 hours of coding and still do some stuff on your own. 

I like to describe code base I work on as : My Little Monster. It is far from size of professional engines code bases but in the same time it enormous amount of code for lonely developer (as in 3/23/2019: 1773 files with 302 344 lines of code without comments ). This was great experience for me to learn how to work with large amount of code and not be lost in all of it.

Time flays by and we getting to the time before "L.B.A. Remake: Preview 14" video. I finally had then occasion to play Uncharted series (1,2,3) and some reflection came to my mind. That even the fist game in the series looked a lot better than what I was creating for L.B.A. Remake. This bothered me a lot so I decided to restart project to do some more epic environment for the game :D 

This was great experience for me regards level design. It was first time where I allow myself to stray from original game and have more freedom with locations. I see this as first step into what happened next ...

... reflection: I'm tired. I worked on this whole damn thing for 8 years and I still have nothing. This was rather depressing thought but it was real. In the end I felt that it would be stupid to gave up on the project after so long time so I decided to do one more push ... with a twist.

The twist is that I removed all the artificial limitation I put around myself over this whole years. This may sound like a lie but I always tried to be really close to original game in terms of look, feel and story. This time was end and I decided to go wild :]

This is what happens right now I play around with tech and play around with the game I also play around with the story. All of this resulted that in the last year I had a lot more fun from working on the remake then I had ever before I feel that finally it becoming what I want it to be believe me this is great feeling. 

Truth is that I don't know if this will be what you guys want it to be but hey this is not my problem in the end. I believe that even if you will be skeptic at the beginning when you finally play it and see what I done with it you will love it too. It won't be L.B.A. that you know but my variation of L.B.A. that I want you to meet. With this thoughts I continue developing of the tech and the game because they are not separate for me they are just pieces of the same puzzle I working on.

Xesf: The truth is that you are building an amazing piece of tech that could take off like Unity did and you should seriously think about it.

I don't plan to do it :] I'm part of the Unity Technologies (I work with them for more than 2 years right now) and I'm really grateful that they allow me to do my own stuff in free time. For me this is my tech, I want to have freedom with changing it however I want so I could use it to create my own games. 

In the end you may not believe me but for me Little Big Adventure Remake is as important as tech I working on. In the end my only concern right now is not if I can finish this remake but thought that Frédérick Raynal may one day decide to put hold to my effort in recreating the masterpiece his team created.

2019 Q1

Thanks to Phreak comment under the Tech Demo 2 video I reflected upon my behavior and decided to do some update regards project progress :] 

Because in the last year I didn't had too much occasions to do and D&D I will try to do it in most epic way that I can :D But first let's me check when the last Post was and what it was about because at this point of time even I forgot what I wrote about last time. 

Introduction

"December 2018 - March 2019 " dark times in history of the Little Big Adventure Remake. There is not many people who could say you what happened then. But people like that exist and they hiding among crowd ... If you don't know them don't worry I will tell you the story better than them because I was there.

But before I will move to telling this story we will do small recap of what happened so far: There was this guy, who was a dreamer and wanted to remade a game (You can also read this as: was stupid enough to do it. Choose which one you prefers). 

This was not any game ... it was "The Game". It had everything. It was Little .. and it was Big ... and had Adventure ... and there were two parts of it but well we will focus here on the first part. It was loved by crowd but with time it slowly aged, new games came and put it into the shadows of the past. But there were still this who loved it and they found their hiding at magicball.net. One of them was mentioned chosen one (or once again if you prefers: stupid enough to do it).

He starter his remake with his own engine. He done a lot of iterations which followed with even more iterations and then came conclusion that this was not what this remake should look like. Sad with this thoughts he thrown all content he done so far with goal to do it better this time. He approached stuff again and worked hard on new version of remake. It took long hours but it started looking better but it was still not what he wanted from this remake ... It was still missing the soul it should had. So he scraped content again and decided to do crazy thing and change the game he loved so much and make from it more modern version. Version that will charm people young and old. The one that already love The Game and the ones that still not love it but they may soon. 

The name of that person was: Greg.

December 2018

(Location: Secret Headquarter of Coffemonsters ... old continent)

Nine years passed from the faithful day when Remake started but there is still no game. Tech evolving rapidly but also decaying almost as fast. This is mystery how it survived so long but it is still there in mesmerizing harmony of creation and destruction... 

Greg stared on the white letters in the black windows of Visual Studio. His eyes were slowly getting tired but the thought of working on yet another complex solution to entity system was holding him awake. This was a long task that took him already good few weeks. In the end he didn't care: He knew at that point of his life that creating game of his dreams wouldn't be fast and for sure not easy. 

Tired, he stretched his arms and made the decision to take a coffee break. He stand up and went to prepare his Greater Black Mana Potion. He grind the ingredients which filled room with nice aroma ... then turn on stove to heat it up. Only thing that left was waiting....

Moment of relax made his thoughts going to fairy-tail Islands he worked on. Standing there he was seeing it right in front of his eyes almost like he could touch them. Decision was made - Time to work on some visuals of game - Thought Greg just when smell of Greater Black Mana Potion filled the room.

Time to use new instruments that were recently brought to Headquarter : Blender 2.80, Substance Designer, Substance Painter. Greg know that he sucks in usage of all of them but he also seen in his mind vision what he can achieve with it and this thoughts allowing him not to give up on trying.

Day after day passing without bigger results without any reward but with pure satisfaction of looking chaos straight into its big eyes. This was road that he chose and this is road he will follow till his goal is reached.... And then ... Christmas happened.  

This time mean one thing: closing all running processes, shutting down computer and leaving to spend time with family somewhere in the middle of beautiful Poland. "No work on the project while I'm there" - he thought ... Flight was relatively fast with small stop in Warsaw. After it came days spend with friends and family. But like with everything that is good this time came also to the end the  January 2nd.

January 2019

(Location: Somewhere in sky above old continent) 

Sitting in his plane seat Greg got lost in his thought. What waiting him ? How much longer it will take to finish Remake? And is it really worth it to spend so much time on a dream?

In this moment he felt lonely in this world. But isn't this how we all feel when we are left with ourselves ? This long moment was interrupt by flight attendant asking if he want a drink. He smiled and asked for Greater Black Mana Potion. Moment later hot drink was in his hands. One sip of it brought new perspective to life: It wasn't so bad so there is no point of think about all this negative things. Lets look into the future and care about the problems when they will show.

(Location: Back in Secret Headquarter of Coffemonsters)

Tired after flight Greg entered his lair. There was no life in it for long time with all of the machinery waiting in the silence. He unpacked his luggage prepare some warm drink and pressed  magical button that brought whole place one again to life. Machine awoke from their slumber and well known "Bip" announced this to whole lair. Thanks to the SSD technology it just took a moment to get to the place where whole magic happening. Few secret signs granted Greg access to the Remake universe.

This universe was waiting in the hibernation for returning of its creator. Now when he was returned whole mesmerizing fight between creation and destruction could resume.

 Time to continue dangerous game of making dreams come true.

This was thought that spawn into head of Greg and a lot happened after that: new location were born, rendering systems evolved, profiling tools upgrade and a lot of content was created. I could talk about all of them for hours or even days and you could listen about this stories if you wanted. But we don't have time for that so I will fast forward a little bit and leave this side stories untold.

February 2019 

(Location: Secret Headquarter of Coffemonsters)

Once again we can find Greg in front of his machinery. I would like to say that everything was going smoothly but looking at his face it wasn't. Delicate balance between creation and destruction was on its limit. Last change resulted in almost destroying it. Elements of whole complex system started to dying one after another.  This is not the first time that it happened but each time bringing thoughts that this may be the last time. 

At this point Greg was at his limit. He would love to fix all the bugs that were crawling inside the game universe and its machinery but he run out of time. Big ceremony of "age field" upgrade was right ahead corner and there were some preparations to be done. He focused on this work which resulted in great banquet filled with food, drinks and good friends. What else you would like to have in a day like that ? He didn't wanted nothing more. Week past and whole machinery once again failed into slumber and universe development was halt. This time because of the vacations....

March 2019

(Location: Back in Secret Headquarter of Coffemonsters ... Again)

... When Vacation Ended. Greg entered empty headquarter filled with stuff he know so well, unpacked his luggage and watched some movie. His mind was still in the sunny place where he spend his last three weeks. Somehow returning back to reality wasn't so easy. It took a while to find strength to overcome laziness but it slowly happened ....

There is no constant in this story. Game universe changing, technology that run it evolving, there is sprout of new way of doing animations and of course there is experimenting how to make it look the best how it can be. You may not see it right now but somewhere there Greg hiding in his lair and working on the game he dreams about ... maybe you guys dream about it to who knows ?

What I know for sure it is still not a time to reveal what is done. But give him some time and you may be surprised by what you will see ...

See you then 
your Game Master