Just another update.

I initially planned to write something new for the blog, but the FB post came out so well that I think we will go with it:

This was a long time of silence :( As you know I'm always struggling with finding topics that I think are interesting. The last six months were interesting ones. They were full of surprises, tough decisions, and some easy ones but in the last 19 years, the project is still pretty much a constant in my life. I'm also one of the lucky ones whose family supports me in what I do even if sometimes I do not understand my motivation behind this project. I'm also happy that I do not need to work on this project alone and some people still follow it even if sometimes I'm lazy with posting new stuff.

The project like always moving forward but at the same time not moving as fast as I would want it to move. Still, there is some stuff that we managed to do. Created SDF text built into the engine that will give us nicer UI, decal support, text in the scene support, improvement for lighting in the level, and improvements in the animation system (this one came with some funny screenshots, guess which ones :D), tools improvements, and a lot more things that I not necessarily remember.

 

There is sadly one common theme in all of this work. There is some "deposit" that we need to put before we would be able to work on some new stuff. Currently, we are trying to use some resources from other people NatureManufacture, and Rokoko to make them usable in our technology. To achieve this we need to make importers, add shaders, and make some changes and fixes in our pipeline. This will save us time later but for now, pay the price in time and changes in technology (which is not necessarily bad).

So we put the visual part of the work on the game for now on hold and focused on the way Twinsen will behave in the game and the tooling that will allow us to make it the best we can. We also still following our quest to bring the new Twinsen model to the game in all its glory.

As you can see there is a lot of stuff happening and even more will be coming soon. We just need some more time.

Doubts

We always forget how time flies by. Here we are in the second month of 2025 and there is no update regards Tribute. For this worrying that we gave up, we can guarantee that we did not. There is still a lot of progress in the project even if doubts are sneaking into our minds.

We mostly dig through code and try to make something usable from what we have but it is not easy. Balancing life and work on this personal project is challenging at times. This is not only because of lack of time but also because of motivation.

These days more and more we catch ourselves being lost in what we do, and that is why we started writing down the final version of the story with dialog and all the events. This is to gain more focus on what we do. The whole thing starts with:

Every story has a beginning and the good ones hardly ever start in the prison. That is why ours starts at home with the warm sound of cracking wood in the fireplace. In the background, a TV set plays on some news channel reporting on a lively speech given by the Fun Frock. He speaks about people who call themselves "the rebels" and are a threat to the peace on the planet. (...)

 L.B.A. : Tribute - story

While writing down the stuff we try to catch thoughts that sneak around our heads. This is not always easy as they sometimes hard well. There are days when things look like TV series about making games and there are these other days when nothing goes right. 

Still, we preserve and try to do what we can. We switch to different tasks, trying to approach things from different angles but this is not always helpful. We are just humans and humans are flawed. This is also what is so impressive about us. We are flawed but at the same time, we can reforge these flaws into our strengths and create impressive creations.

We want to believe that this will be the case with Tribute. What we learn by resolving our current problems will become the foundation that will make the final product better. In this place, we want to congratulate the team of the official remake of L.B.A. for succeeding in shipping the game. This is not an easy task.

And this is all for now, We are getting back to working on the project as the game will not make itself. 

  

Dr. FunFrock

This time we feel like we should talk about something nontechnical. Sadly we do not have something specific in mind so I will try to reply to question 2.21 posted recently on X :

"Check out the new look of Dr. Funfrock! What are your thoughts?"

For me personally, I have mixed feelings about the new version of Dr. FunFrock. I think that the changes done to his face will fit nicely with the new style. The addition of a mustache and eyepatch is also ok as it gives him an interesting look. I really do not mind changes like that. 

What I do not like is his body. I watched this fragment from the trailer at 25% of the speed and his posture looks pretty muscular compared to the chooby version we know from the original game. I kind of liked how he was before as it gave him this unique look compared to all the classic evil characters. Another aspect that feels weird, is his clothing. Looking at his shoulder pads I suspect that they wanted to show him as a dictator, with a look closer to general than as a researcher. But I once again am not really sure if I like these changes.

Still, this is the first look at his new design. Looking forward to the finished version of the game.

We know that this is a short post but this was a tough week where stuff with the project did not really go how we would like it. The plan was to actively work on a new animation system and we ended up repairing stuff and going in the circle with some other changes. This is part of the "fun" of making the game with its custom technology. Want to believe that this week will be better. 

Tribute and its small disclaimer.

There is this small post introducing a new logo:

Just recently we noticed a comment written a long time ago:

Shame on us for not noticing it earlier and addressing it. We will try to fix it.

For a long time, we were using the name L.B.A. Remake. This made sense as there were no signs of an official project. When this changed, we wanted to be clear to people that what we do is just a fan project and they should not expect it to be a whole remake. 

This disclaimer is also a play on the lyrics from the song Tenacious D: Tribute. Which in our heads makes sense in the context of our work. LBA is LBA and we will never be able to reproduce something like it. We should not even try and just find our own way of telling its story. 

That is why we added this small disclaimer. It may not be needed but we just like it that way :D 

Dream space

I don't know why but I thought that less time passed since the last post. Turned out that it had been almost two weeks. This is crazy how fast time flies by when you are busy and we were busy. 

L.B.A. Tribute is our reimagination of the game we all love. When I started the last iteration of the Tribute, I thought about the beginning of the game and how it feels like something is missing. To fix it I added some story which covers why we ended up in prison. This felt right, but something was still missing there.

For a longer time, I thought about the tutorial level. A place where new players could explore mechanics and thanks to that feel less lost in the world of Twinsun. I tried a few things but none of them felt right. This is how sometimes the creative process works. You try very hard and things do not work out how we want. 

Sometimes seeing what is the most oblivious is the hardest. The dream world was something like that. Talking about dreams and visions is all over the place. The initial video shows the end of the world, with dialogs mentioning it multiple times. Even the reason why we ended up in the prison. This just makes sense and we went with it. 

Dream space came to life as a place where we learn controls and how to interact with the environment. Then we decided to incorporate the content of the initial texts panel into it. This would make it more sense, story about the planet and four races could be incorporated there in visual ways. A great idea that still missed something. 

This thought that this is not what it should be has always bothered me. What this dream space really should be? Who built it?  Why everything is ruined?  Why we are brought there? I may not have all the answers but I believe that this dream space will be a place where the past, the present, and the future come together. A place that will answer a lot of questions but at the same time create new ones. 

What you see is another small spoiler for the dream space. I will still leave it only as a spoiler as the whole idea behind it still evolves. What do you imagine this place like? 

I had single active task on my list ...

Last week we can count as a productive one. There was a new post and soon after that, I managed to finish the last part of the work related to visual scripting. Finishing something is always a piece of great news. To celebrate it there was an extra update on our Discord:

With that, I finally could return back to the animations. Recovering this single system would bring us back on track with work on the L.B.A. Tribute. We were excited by this perspective as it was too long from the last time we worked on it. 

This negligence showed up pretty quickly. Broken animated characters popped up on our screen. If we had a working game this would probably not happen, as you can see below it is hard to miss it :]

Sadly we do not have it right now and because of that, we missed it. This mistake cost us only three days (if you are interested in details check this thread). From the positive stuff, while working on it we discovered some other issues which potentially could be also hard to track. Now things looked good.

It was once again time to finally work on the animation system. I started doing some prep work, till I realized that the world editor emits errors that I do not see in the tools logger.  This is rather a game-breaker. You never want a case where something goes wrong and you do not know about it.

This rather long and boring story brought us to today. Logging is almost done but cost us a few extra days of work. The results are not bad even if some stuffs were left as to-do to save some time.

The whole situation feels a little bit like: 

Just for me, it feels like "I have a single active task on my list. Started working on it, and now I have ten active tasks on me." But with logging out of the way I can now return back to prep work on animations and with this, soon we may return back to working on the game. Hold crossed fingers for that, I need mine to continue to work on our little adventure. 

Dark places.

Another time full of challenges behind us. The biggest one would be my head 😓Over the years I had a lot of discussions about how over-ambitious I am. One of my friends describes it: 

"Creating the game in Unity or Unreal is hard. Then I tell people that I released a game on my engine, and they look at me as if I'm insane. Then there is this guy [me]."

The thing is that we do not really create a game with its specialized engine. Our goal is to create a game technology that will allow us to make Tribute and further productions, whatever they would be. This type of approach is hard.  It challenges our skills, pushes them to the limit, and opens doors that never would open otherwise. At the same time, there is the price that we need to pay for this approach. Long development cycle, multiple iterations on systems that do not fit design. We could of course try to clone what other engines do but this is not our way. We like to explore, feel creative freedom, and just do what we want to do. 

All of this sounds great, except anyone who works on long-lasting projects knows that with time comes fatigue. When I started working on the project 14 years ago everything was simple I wanted to make L.B.A. remake. Now things getting complicated, I'm a lot older, and have a job, responsibilities, and family. Even things with L.B.A. got more complicated, we have an official remake and a whole team working on it. Where there are only two of us working on Tribute and we are still stuck on technology. All of these things lead to doubts if the path I chose was right? Was restarting the project some ago really smart? Would it not be easier to give up ...?

When this happens it is hard. Doubts grow in our minds and bring us to dark places which stop us from seeing positive things. The thing is, that there is a lot to see. We still may not be close to finishing the L.B.A. Tribute but whole tools grow with every week, they become more stable and just look awesome.

Editor use for creation L.B.A.:Tribute

Twinsen House (Editor view)

Script editor with a visual selection of translated text.

The same thing with the official remake, I'm sure that what they do is something really cool. But what we can do is take a whole story for a spin and retell it in our own unique way. How this will go we will see but I think this will be something awesome.

What do all of you think about this whole thing?

Home sweet home.

The last four weeks did not go how I wanted. One simple thought of using https://www.mixamo.com/ as a source of test animations started a chain of decisions that lead to my downfall or maybe something greater in the long run (Spoiler alert: I'm still not able to use the animation from the database). It got even worse, I did not even spend any time o the animation which did not move the gameplay a lot.

So probably you are curious about what I was working on this time. The answer is pretty simple:

I created a lot of content which led me to tinker around with Twinsen House: 

This like always did not when smoothly at first. The whole idea of using https://www.mixamo.com/ for animations lead me to a bigger change in the way how I interact with content. Small impact on the content creation itself but more than two weeks of iterating on code. In the longer perspective best decision ever.

After that, I got annoyed by the long loading times in the tool. So I looked into it, improved it, and broke a lot of my content. The majority of the locations look like that:

Missing materials on all the objects. Which is once again fine as I finally cleaned up some code that I wanted to touch long ago. With improvement in other content tools recreating this data is only a question of time. 

There is also this weekend which I could spend on the animation system but decided that I really need to do something about my icon generation. A small thing where while icons generating editor sometimes freezes. Already been resolved, still not part of the main codebase but getting there.  

Generally against all the odds pretty nice few weeks. But the goodies do not end here. 

2.21

This week we got from 2.21:

Funfact #2 : The 4 species of Twinsun

Which is an interesting dive into the process of creating the original game. I was specifically entertained by the large nose Quetches :) they look funny. I also would love the idea of giants being used in further games. This is a pretty cool idea even if the technical part of it would be a nightmare.  

For this who missed it, there is also a previous one: 

Funfact #1: The origins of Twinsen

I mentioned this because while doing content I finally had time to think a little bit: 

Who Twinsen really is?

This a simple question, which bothered me a lot. Think about it, what do we really know about Twinsen? 

• He is a guy who was put in prison for having weird dreams. 
• He has a girlfriend Zoe.
• In the second game, we learned that they have a kid. 
• Their house in the first game has a freaking secret cave full of ancient stuff. 
• In his wardrobe, he has a magical robe.

These past weeks allow me to explore this topic a little bit more and I think that I finally have an answer: 

For now, I will stop here as I still want you to have fun exploring the universe of Tribute. Leaving some mystery. 

But to make it more interesting I would like to hear your theories: 

Who do you think Twinsen really is?

Development - March 2022

Before we noticed another month slipped thru our fingers. I would love to say that there was a lot of progression in the project, but I would lie. This was a month focused on technology, workflows, and boring improvements. Because of that, this post will be a little bit more technical so continue reading it on your own responsibility...

Development Setup

Because Coffemonsters is a really small group, for a long time our projects were developed in a really simple setup. We had a virtual server running:

* gitea (https://gitea.io/) to store code,

* perforce (https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core) to store data

* mediawiki (https://www.mediawiki.org/) for some guides and documentation. 

It somehow felt that we did not need more. But recently thanks to my friend we got an infrastructure upgrade. He crafted for us a really nice development environment with a dedicated server running dockers (https://www.docker.com/), our own gitlab (https://gitlab.org), perforce, wiki, CI (Continuous Integration) builders, and a lot more. 

This was not a step that was needed but it was planned for a very long time. Thanks to finally doing it we can slowly start building CI  and an automated build system which will bring us a step closer to opening access to game builds.

All of that sounds great but it has some price, we are still in the middle of a transition to this new work environment. Most of the stuff just worked from day one, some others not so much. One of the things that went rather terrible was fact that we neglected some automatization scripts. This mistake resulted in significant maintenance work. The first part, "project generations" is mostly done and only took three weeks. This was the worst part because it was a blocking one. Now we moved to the second phase which we can do in parallel to our normal development: simplifying the environment setup. The goal is to pull a branch, run one script and be ready to develop the game. When we finish with it we will finally be able to start CI and create an automated build system. Sadly getting to this point will take some time and a lot of effort.

Tools improvements

Switching to new infrastructure was not the only thing that was done. We still working on improving the game which leads us back to improvements in some tech. Who would expect that doing simple ladder-climbing could lead to so many interesting problems?

One of them that fascinates me personally, is not a super technical one but related to tool UI (I still have a hard time acknowledging it). Everything started with switching to document-based tooling in the engine. The idea is simple: You want to edit a file just open it in the new tab (just like a browser). 

 

We never regretted going into this direction but there was one flaw with it. Some objects can contain embedded data. A good example of it can be a visual script that can be unique for every instance of the object. In the past, in an attempt of editing, we would just open a new detached window. It would be a blocking one so you could not change anything on the scene while you modify the script. 

With the document-based tools UI, we have a problem. The visual script doesn't have a file because it depends on data from the level. This makes the opening of a new tab for it weird and confusing. We would lose this way visual difference between embedded data and the one with the source.

This bother us for a long time but we did not really have a nice idea of how to solve it ... till recently.

Our solution to the problem would be building relations inside the tabs that will look like this:

Selected normal tool:

Selected tool owning embedded data (f.ex. Level):

Selected Tool editing embedded data (f.ex. Visual Script):

Look when there are multiple nesting:

As you can see this is still a work in progress but it looks promising. Thanks to this very generic approach we will be able to unify internal workflows and if everything goes right, completely forgot that the problem existed in the first place.

The Game

We know that all of you love LBA. Guess what? We too. That is why we would really want to bring to you our tribute as soon as possible. Sadly making the project takes place whenever we have time and energy to do it. You can probably imagine how hard is to balance normal life and work on this freaking awesome but ambitious project.

This limited amount of time forces us to prioritize one stuff over the others. This was the case this month, we got a great opportunity to switch infrastructure which would be hard to say no to. We tackled technical problems that bother us for a long time. But we also did not forget about the game. We did an awesome poster, some improvements in the player controller, we iterate over the new Twinsen model which soon should be ready to start bringing it to the game for tests (Last chance for complaining about its look). 

For some, this may be not a lot. In our opinion, we just took another step in the right direction and this is what matters.

Tribute

When the announcement of the original project (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/) was published, our work was thrown into chaos. We quickly needed to figure out what to do. There were so many questions in our minds: Drop the project? Continue original plan? Adjust to a new reality? What about the name? We could no longer use word "Remake". At the same time, we needed something to distinguish our work from the official project.

This is where the name "Tribute" came. It was a word that describes perfectly what we trying to do, why we do it, and on top of that nicely distinguishes our work from any other projects. This was the essence of all these years spent on development and all these changes we were doing. Everything to give a tribute to the games that all of us love and the people who created them. 

Six months later we believe in all of that even more. Official developers (https://www.2point21.com/) work hard on bringing us more LBA content. To avoid issues, a fan project like ours should never be mistaken for what they do. That is why we plan to shift some of our "branding" (if you can call it that way) to make it more clear for people that this is just a tribute, made by fans. Results of this work can be seen below. What do you think? 

 

Development - February 2022

Following last month's promises, we are still working on the tribute. This is not necessarily an easy task as this was a rather busy time, full of unexpected situations. So here we are in the times when the world is once again in chaos and a lot of stuff does not make sense.

The last post spawned a lot of discussion regards Twinsen model. Most of the voices were that you don't like the new look :/ This was a little bit heartbreaking but well, we could fight these opinions or just accept them and return back to a drawing board. Took us a few hours to process all feedback, replay comments, make a copy of the original model, and open the blender to start working. A few iterations later we have some proposition.

If you are interested in the whole progress you can see it at or discord channel (https://discord.gg/vBtsvRqWa7). For those who are curious, we attaching a comparison with the previous model in the engine.

This is still not a final version as some things will change over time. What do you think about it?

The truth is that changing of Twinsen model was the easiest part of the work. The biggest challenge this month was fact that the engine used by the game became really unstable :( At first, we thought that this was a result of one of many changes we did. Reality proved us wrong. The issue was that we made stuff more efficient..., yeah, by doing that, we surfaced some timing issue in our multithreaded code that was there forever. In practice, this was just a few hours of work to fix it. In reality, two weeks of intense tracking in the evenings, in the meantime, we started questioning our own skills and generally, sanity.

To protect the last one we did some experiments with the content creation. By doing that we tested tools, pipelines, and I personally de-rusted my skills in creating models. Results are not bad but also not great. 

Or conclusion from this is that we will mostly use these assets as an addition to the levels and not to create whole locations. We believe that we can do better using different workflows and plan to deliver.

Another thing that helped with our sanity, was adding of new developer UI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to the game, and some fixes and improvements of the tooling. This will not affect the game directly but will make an investigation of the issues a lot easier. 

Finally, we were working on improving a player controller. We want Twinsen controls to feel more natural, include better feedback when he lands on the ground and some new animation. In practice, we are switching whole code to support State Machines that are also used for AI. For those who are not familiar with State machines, they are graphs (we created a visual tool to define them).

Graphs have nodes (boxes) that define different states and connections  (arrows) that define how we can transfer between them and conditions that need to be met. This is a simple, yet powerful concept which already proving to clean up our code a lot. 

With this, we are getting to the end of this month's update. As you can see we are busy, doing what we can to make tribute a real thing. We are a few step closer but there is still a lot more challenges ahead of us. 

Like always feel free to share, comment, join our discord channel where we post more often updates about development.  

Little Big Adventure 2022

The last two months are pretty interesting ones for the LBA community.

• We learned about the new name for the official games
  (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/lba-new-name-twinsen/) 
• We got a message from Didier Chanfray regards the plans for the IP
  (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/a-message-from-didier-chanfray/).

In meantime Coffemonsters is silent ... Some may think that because of the announcement of the official project we gave up on ours. The reality is that we know we cannot compete in terms of news from [2.21], they are the creators of the official project. Members of Coffemonsters always were and will be supporting them in their work to bring us games from Twinsun's universe. 

But this also does not mean we gave up. While reading the message from Didier Chanfray we can encounter the sentence: 

"If you wish to create something around the original games yourselves, we've open-sourced the code for the original games and will support any fan project/mod to the maximum of our capabilities."

This makes us believe that there is a place for a project like ours. What we doing is not a competition to the official game but a tribute to the original games and people who created them. This is our reimagination of them and answers to the question: What if ...? 

This led us finally to the topic of our "LBA: Tribute" project which still moving forward. Like always we spend a lot of time on technology and tooling but we also try our best to never neglect the game. We recently added our first, rough version of the skeleton:

We have some nice use cases for it in the scope of the tribute (1st island). While iterating on camera and character movements we also created new clothes for Twinsen. 

From other important announcements, we plan to be a little bit more open about our development processes. This should translate into more development news at our discord channel (https://discord.gg/Tc9Hs5h9), more news about work in progress stuff, and our long-term goal is to release development builds to everyone. This should allow you to look into the newest changes and explore the world we created while waiting for the official game. The reasons why this is not happening right away, are technical issues that we need to resolve before releasing builds.

We believe that right now we have really exciting times for all fans of LBA. I know that we all wait for more news from https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/. But I also want to believe that news and progress from our small fan project bring some joy to your life. So, till the next one.

27th Anniversary of LBA 1

Finally arrived LBA 1 release anniversary. This year it is a pretty weird one. On one side it is a happy one because we got the announcement that a new entry to the universe will happen. On the other hand a little bit sad because our celebration stream was canceled. I initially planned to replace my stream from it with another dev update, but then life happened. 

I got super busy, partially upon my own request. Specifically, I work on a presentation for the GiC conference where I will be talking about a custom resource management system. I think that this will be an interesting lecture, mostly because I will be talking about the engine that powers the L.B.A. Tribute. If any of you will be there somewhere around and see me don't hesitate to come by and say: hello. 

Now after this long intro, let's focus on the project. From the last update, nothing really changed. The plan is to work on this nice small demo containing only Citadel Island. I will release it when I will be done with it (Sadly there is still no release date). 

Currently, I am focusing on AI. I was not really happy with my previous solution and decided to improve upon it. A few AI-related presentations later I felt like I'm still lost. I understood what they talking about but still did not sorted stuff in my head to make a final decision regards my approach to it. This came later after few beverages (alcoholic and non) and discussions with friends. The last one probably helped here the most.

I decided to use behaviors graphs. How they work for those who don't know: when designing AI you building different states and defining conditions that need to be met to transfer between them. A simple example can be seen below.

Little did I knew, how this decision will backfire on me. The next weeks were full of UI work. Not a lot of AI but mostly thinking about how to make the creation of graphs possible in the toolkit. This was important for me because I would spend a lot of time using this tool later.

Right now I think I'm done with most of this work. It took forever, lead to some interesting discoveries, performance fixes, bug fixes, UI improvements, changes in the workflows, and generally a lot of boring topics that I will spare you. What is important, now I plan to continue work on AI with the new tools I designed. How this will go we should see soon.

January - March - 2021

This last year was a really weird one. I will say that I'm happy that it ended but we still need to deal with its aftermath in this year and every next one. This won't be easy but well, there is not a lot of other choices here, then just move forward. 

This year I wouldn't call a boring either. We are still isolating at our places waiting for our turn to get vaccinated, and doing stuff that we can to not get crazy. I spent time working, playing games, making a game, drawing, doing some electronics, assembling models, and probably a lot more stuff that I just forgot. If you doubting my words there are some samples at the bottom of this post. 

Well, in the end, you probably did not end here because of my hobbies but because of the remake. You may not believe but there is a lot happening around it. Some of them are under my control and others not so much. But in the end, I still working on it and plan to give you a playable version. Still don't know when but I will and I'm excited to tell you that we are few steps closer to this moment:

The new YouTube video focuses purely on the game progress but there is a lot more happening than just that. I did also improvements in technologies and tooling. Everything to make stuff you see possible. In the end, most of them are still work in progress but at a slow but steady pace, we are moving forward. If you are interested in these more technical details I recommend coffemonsters twitch channel where I cover in update streams the game and tech behind it.

From other more important news coffemonsters have now a discord server where you can discuss with me and other people the remake or just have a chat about random stuff. I'm always happy to do both of that. 

The last "announcement" (funny how formal this sounds) I am taking a break in March from streaming and plan to do some rather light development. I will be back in April.

Now only thing that left is just to ask you: how are doing? Do you have some tips on how to better deal with whole isolating? do you have some hobbies that help you with it?  

Cheers,

Greg

RGM-79SP GM SNIPER II model (assembling and painting)

Atari 800 XL controller (I also made a USB adapter that allows to connect it to PC).

Some old-style drawing: