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. 

  

Back in the game.

Last week we discussed how things not going the way we want. This time we won't be so far from that theme. As a reminder, plans were to do Animation. A week later this is still a plan 😁But hey, I was not really in the mood for it. That is why we tackled something different problem: running the game, and oh boy this did not go well. 

 

Turned out that not testing the game for so long time resulted in multiple points of failure. Some of these failures resulted in data loss. Thank goodness we do not really need to recover it as some stuff will be just redone with new workflows. This will be a good occasion to see how far we got with content creation tools and help uncover hiding inside issues.

Let's stay positive as this week had a lot of positive moments. One of them was when we finally got to see that scene: 

Just a broken main menu, but so much happiness. The game was finally kind of running. Took just a few more moments to make it running enough😁

  

It still had issues, it uses old animations. The thing is that at this point in time, we are ok with that. Here we would want to say that we finally started to work on animations. 

But this is not necessarily the case. We still did not feel like doing that and spent some time playing around with ideas for the round room seen above. To tell the truth, results make us excited about things that will come.

  

If you are curious why this picture is so low-resolution, it is on purpose. We will have a whole post just about this location and how things came to be the way they are. I think this will be a nice topic that will serve as a break from these more technical topics. 

This will be a nice place to take a stop with this post. Nice things coming our way. If you are still not doing it we really recommend following the official remake in their attempts to recreate the game we all love https://www.littlebigadventure.com/. What we do is not a remake, it is just a tribute to the game we played as kids. 

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. 

Easter update

As a small easter gift let's do a small review of the project. I know that some of you were interested in the story, others more in the status of the game so I will try to cover all of them.

Tribute

The idea behind the whole project was evolving over time. When I started I wanted just to recreate game 1-1 with a small twist. Full 3D. Simple, straightforward, and not something that I was really happy about. My decision to modernize the models did not help for long. While I was playing the Uncharted game long after its release it strokes me: the game I was making was not something that I wanted to do, LBA deserved more.

I scratched everything and started again, unrestrained by old design and using the original game as a guide to tell the same story with the same character in the same universe just everything more mature and presented in the way that I believed it deserves. This took a long time to figure out and it still evolves over time. Now that the 2.21 team makes an official remake I will try to share some insight into my vision for the game (story spoiler alert).  

When I played the original game as a kid I saw it as a fairy tale and never put too much thought into the details of the world. Years of development made me lead to the conclusion that there is a lot more to it than just the tale of a guy who tries to save his fiance and as a result of this saves the world. There is a lot of darkness in this universe. There is Prison from which people do not return back, did you ever ask why nobody approaches as if they are afraid of death. Everywhere there is fear, military, and surveillance. Yet the majority of people just live their life like nothing happening. When you realize this is somehow terrifying.

The thing is that I never wanted to change this part of the game. I love it and wanted to build on it. That is why the tribute would not start inside the prison. It would start with a dream. Where you can explore the ancient temple of the Sendel. This place is where you will learn controls and at the same time explore a back story that before was written on the panels when starting the game. You would walk thru this time capsule and find your way to the place where you will experience a vision of the end of the world.

When you woke up you are at home in your own bed. Zoe looks at you worried. You are one of the people who live a normal life, if not for this reoccurring dream. Zoe is dressed to work as the ferry broke, again. She is a mechanic. While leaving Zoe tells you that you should maybe get some pills for better sleep and reminds you to not forget about today's dinner. She is preparing something special. You later learn that this is your anniversary and you have more plans than just dinner. You plan to propose to her on this occasion you just need to pick up an engagement ring.

This small setup adds so much to the original game. You first have a proper introduction to the dream. You can get used to controls, learn the story of the universe feel that you are the part of dreams we hear about so much. Then we have time to learn about Citadel Island before landing in Citadel Prison. Finally, you can better understand the connection between Twinsen and Zoe. 

There is even more to it. The broken ferry blocks you from leaving Citadel Island before finishing the prolog, and why in the 2nd game we see a newer model of the boat. Zoe being a mechanic explains her fixing the car in the 2nd game and adds extra depth to her character. Finally, dinner explains why when we meet her after escaping the prison she is nicely dressed.

This is just a small portion of the changes I planned to do. I'm able to talk for hours about all the details of different characters, places, and how I planned to do but because of the limited scope of the project, you will ever only see the Citadel Island part of it. But I try to create it in a way that the deeper you will look into it the more different aspects of the game will be revealed.

The Game 

"yeah, no point rushing it, especially after you've been working on it for 50 years already"

Friend 

There is a little bit of truth in the above sentence. It really feels like I doing it forever. The fact that I do this in my spare time, alone and with custom tech does not really helps with the velocity of the production. 

You probably thinking why then I do not use some existing engines: Unity, Unreal, or Godot? I openly acknowledge that having full creative control over tech direction, getting lost, making wrong choices, and correcting them is part of the fun and the experience for me. After all of these years, I do not think that this is a really bad thing. 

And don't understand me wrong I believe that everyone should make choices for themselves. If you think that you want to use ready tech do it, if not do it too. In the end, it is up to you. My choice is to continue with the direction that I choose even if some people think that what I do is stupid. 

The reality is that in some way, my decision may be stupid maybe even impossible. But who cares, while I do what I do I learn new skills, polish old ones, and grow as a developer and in the fact a person. This is very important because, without all of that, my vision of the project would not be what I present to you. Great things just need time.

And oh boy this project consumes a lot of time and effort. Still, I think that this is justified by looking at its scope. To give you some overview of how big it is, I'm right now maintaining ~ 450 000 lines of code. There is on top of that everything that is needed for the game like 3D models, textures, and animations. 

I still have a few things that do not really work how they should, lack some functionality or just do not exist. Still, to move the game forward I need to finish my current work on the animation system. I did it because I decided to create a new model of Twinsen with a completely new set of animations and more freedom of control. This required an update to the existing animation system.

I of course could not do it the simple way and decided to go into the unknown and explore some unique ways of creating data. The reality is that I was not even sure if this method would really work but well,  4 months later I'm pretty optimistic. I working right now on an editor prototype and things coming together pretty well. 

These 4 months were of course not exclusive to the animation system. I was doing a lot of changes all over the place. I will skip some boring details but what I will mention is work on the assets. And yes after this long wall of text, there will be some pictures.   

From now on we have Spheros in making. Did you expect that?  

There is also a further iteration on Rabbibunies that I decided to move a little bit more into the old cartoonish feel. Mostly done tweaking to the nose and eyes. I kind of like it more now compared to the old one.

Finally still tweaking a new Twinsen model. Still not ready but well if it ever will be. 

There is also a new full-body version of the statues. I will be using them all around the dream sequence so having a little bit more variation is always good.  

Finally, if we speak about dream sequence I finally know how to start it in the way it makes sense. Bellow some early sneak peek into the new location where our story will begin. 

Feel free to comment here or on Discord channel and the last thing that is left is wishing you a happy easter. 

April - 2021

I know I'm not too active the last two months but don't worry this is only because I was pretty busy working on all kinds of stuff: game content, graphics improvements, sounds improvements, optimizations, bug fixes, and tooling.

In a month (29-30 May 2021) we will also have an LBA2 anniversary stream. This time I picked 2 slots, one hour each. 

The first one named "LBA remake art creation" will be working on a clay sculpture of one of the LBA characters (Not a digital one but IRL). I still did not decide which, so if you have some preferences then drop them in the comments.

The second one "LBA1 remake Project update stream" will be showcasing the project. I will be showing some new locations that you have never seen before. I'm already working on this new content which I will just skip in this month's dev update. 

This brings us to the last topic: April Dev Update:

I will be streaming 28 April 2021, 6PM CET at https://www.twitch.tv/coffemonsters

Where I will try to cover changes in the project, will share some news about it, and generally will try to be entertaining for one hour.  

Greg

The 26th-Anniversary - 3 weeks countdown

In all production, there is a time where the final countdown starts. We are of course not there, the project is still in preproduction. But in 3 weeks I will be revealing another portion of work that is done, and I promise there is a lot to show. 

That is why if the schedule will not change, Saturday 10th October 2020 at 3:00 PM UTC Time come and join me at the official Coffemonsters channel. This will be right before the 3 hours interview with Fred and Didier the original creators of Little Big Adventure. I also recommend checking out other streamers as there will be a lot of cool content for the celebration of the 26th-Anniversary of Little Big Adventure 1.

Project update - January 2020

I know that I recently don't write too many posts on the website but this is mostly because I spend a lot of time designing and developing new stuff for the project. I promise that I will write more when I will finally dig out myself from all this work.

I probably could write posts about this right now but I don't want to. There are 2 reasons:

1.  I already split my time between too many things.
2.  I don't like to talk about stuff without anything to support that it works.

So, for now, stick with me and I will try not to disappoint:] Till then I try to do a monthly updates on twitch to show what I working on. One of them will happen next week: 

Come by if you are interested or even if you just want to say hi.

Greg

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   

Update: August 2018

Once again we have month break in posting. I think this will became standard from now on :D I finally need to be reasonable and accept that I won't be able to produce more while working, coding, creating art and the most important having private life. 

At this point of time whole project grown out of scale of something that is easy to handle. I'm dealing constantly with a lot of really complicated systems that depends on each other and I need to say that I handle this relatively well. But it is not like there is no hick ups. The thing that is most irritating for me personally is that it is not possible for me to do all the stuff I want :/ 

I'm greedy and would really like to progress all areas in the same time (concept art, modeling, level design and code). There is so much really cool things to do in all of them but reality is cruel and I can only work on one of it. When you add to that limited time you can probably imaging how I'm irritated by this whole situation :D ... thing is that I choosing to just let it go.

That is why you see so little stuff from me. I try to take it slowly this resulted in multiple things:

I gave up on milestones

This type of thing work when making game is your full time job. In my case there were always some interruptions: trips, hanging around with friends, playing other games or just laying and doing nothing to rest after tiring day. This leaving me often behind schedule which put pressure on me which I plan to avoid.

I work on project alone

Over the period of last 8 years I tried to join effort with multiple people and in the end non of this cooperation worked out. Some of this failures were my fault and some not. Thing that is important is that I put a lot of effort into whole process which resulted in loosing a lot of time. Now I take it easy and share what I have with people I know but not trying drag anybody into the project anymore.

Stability

I spending a lot of time doing all boring part of coding where I adding tests, fixing the one I broke and generally improving existing code base. Thing is that I deal with almost two thousands of files so there is a lot of stuff to do there and I need to do that so whole things roll. 

Being creative

Recently I got occasion to look over some stuff that I produced over the last 18 years. And I came to realization that I was always doing things in my own way. This applied to my drawings, graphics,  coding and generally my life. This is not always perfect solution because you make mistakes, sometimes you regret some of them but in the end you learning on them and improve next time.

This is kind of story with Remake that have its rises and downfalls. I'm really curious how many people just gave up on it at this point? Well in the end it is not mater because I can not do anything about them. The thing that I can do is to work on project and prove people that still believe in it that all this waiting was worth it.

Currently I going with my long term plan for project. Inside it there is no more space for moving backward because I'm already a little bit tired and if this attempt will fail I will dropping the whole project completely.... at this point I can say that this option rather move further and further away but sadly it still exist.   

With this dark theme I will move to final part of this post:

What you can expect this year ?

Not to much. I don't think there will be any big announcement or release. So far next few months looks rather busy (not related to project). This will affect development rather negatively but I can not do too much about this. In my head next year should be the exciting ones for Little Big Adventures fans :] . 

To not end this post with only text I will leave here this new concept of Sendel ;)

Stability

Last months were a lot into making new things. New file system, new terrain edition, new game design all of them are great tasks. Sadly in this rush for them I got somehow lost. 

Everything started few days ago in meantime of playing around with the tools. I was siting again in front of my monitors and trying to create new placeholder object for game. This days I using them a lot to have some visual representation of shape that final object will have. The fact that they don't look good doesn't matter at this point.

In my case this was this object: 

Task of creating and adding it to level was really simple and painless. I had tests done for that so I was sure that this works how it should. Thing start to go a little bit worse when I decided to add LOD meshes. I had at that point already around 10 instances of this tree. Because I don't plan to go and change properties for all of them individually I went and enabled sharing of properties between them. 

Here things start to go wrong: This feature didn't worked.

Guest what ? I didn't had tests for it :/ I fixed the issue quickly but sadly I was rather tired at that point and didn't had occasion to add test that would guaranty this feature to never be broken again. Good thing is that this task have highest priority on my to-do list and will probably happen today.

Of course this is not reason behind this post. This is just proving how testing is important when you work alone. Reason behind this post is that in meantime of this fix I discovered that I am still using old serialization system. This wouldn't be so bad if not the fact that I forgot that I had two serialization systems :/ The moment when you realize something like that you start to feel really lonely in this large code base.

I understand how I ended in this whole situation. I was jumping between tasks where something needed to be done and somehow between all of that I lost track of things I working on. This is not so weird but thought that it happened for something this big and important is still disturbing.

Well world is still spinning and project going on. I will fix the issues and continue with work. Which by the way going pretty well. To show some progress I prepared some graphics representing progress of redesigning outdoor locations in project (Thanks for people who put whole level maps to lba.wikia.com ).

Citadel Island:

Principal Island:

You may notice that right now I focusing more on Citadel Island. This is intentional. My goal is to define graphic style for whole remake and to do that I don't want to split my focus between multiple locations. So far it working great and I'm really excited about the results :) This is good sign and mean that soon I will able switch my focus and put some effort into Principal Island which funny fact is planned as at least 3x the size of Citadel Island. This will be big stress test for whole technology :) we will see how it will go.

  

Where we are ...

Last post was more about the technology behind game, this one will be almost exclusively about the game. I will cover changes that happened, happening and will happen before you will get TD3 to play around.

You guys probably remember  this one screenshot form last post:

I don't know about you but I kind of like this interface. It give me a lot of freedom in term of the creation and nice user experience:

• I can have up to 6 different answers in the same screen. 
• I can specify where on wheel I want to put each of the answers.
• I can easily reveal new answer when player gain more information.
• Answers can be pretty long.
• Selecting any of the answer have the same speed.
• There is no way to select answer by mistake (by default none of them is active). 

Only thing that is problematic with it is that it don't cover all conversation cases. This is the reason why I also added this simple view:

I won't claim that this is final state of conversations but this is really good start especially that not only UI work was done. In shadow of nice graphical frontend we have running pretty interesting backend which allow me to quickly script new conversations, change existing ones and generally affect all the important stuff like: quests.

Quests ... Ah it was funny trying to figure out how quest system would work in Little Big Adventure Remake. As you remember original game never had proper quest window. You could see where you need to go at holo map but thats all. I decided to add proper view so players never really lost track where they are in story.

This may sound like small thing but I think it is really important especially that I plan to add more content to the game. Thanks to that game will deliver additional experience for players that finished original game hundred of times. 

.. Uf this was a lot of text. So lets take break for some more visual stuff:

This view is really memorable for me. Thanks to it I realise how slow and painful designing UI is in engine :/ Some may think that suffering is part of creating stuff... Well I kind of prefers different approach: "don't like it ? change it". 

That is why I added scriptable UI where you can describe how UI looks using text. This is not perfect solution and still would love to have visual designing but for now I'm satisfied with it. In around 2 hours I switch to this new system: main menu, inventory menu and quest system.

If you curious, old way of changing UI would look like this way:

1. Change code
2. Save & Compile changes
3. Start game
4. See result in game
5. If needed more iteration start from 1.

New way for comparison looks this way:

1. Start game.
2. Change script.
3. Save.
4. See result in game.
5. If need more iteration start from 2.

Even with my pretty quick compilations this is still nice improvement in iteration speed.

After this interruption of technology details lets returning to game. Behind this view you also can find whole Quest Management System backend. It is fully integrated with dialog system and allow already on some flexibility but we will see how it will work in practice. 

This covering what was done. Now moving to stuff that happening currently we have Load/Save system which will sadly require some additional changes in engine design. I could of course quickly hack solution for it but I would prefer to do one that will be more elegant. For now I'm not really sure how to do it this way so I moved to some code cleanup and fixing bugs.

Except Load/Save only bigger thing that we missing for TD3 are notification in game (Opened Quest, Completed Quest, New Item and so on). The rest is just bug fixes and verifying that everything works.

Uff... And with that we got to end of yet another long post :) I'm would really love to hear yours opinion about this changes :) Would also be interesting to hear which other part of game you are also interested into.

Greg

Where is TD3 ...

I know that it is already past the original date of Tech Demo 3 release but please wait for me a little bit longer. I had busy time and not everything went the way I wanted... but this is not necessarily bad thing. I can say with confidence that the content finally taking form but more about this in next post that should be longer have more details and contain TD3 link ;)  Till then have faith in me and if everything will go right it should be pretty cool release.