Dark depths of development

Last two weeks like always we fall into dark depths of development. Slowly carving our stuff and preparing them for another show. In sucha moments I always feel a little bit bad when I see how other projects in matters of weeks changing quickly, growing and then I'm stop feeling bad. Mostly because very often they disappear as quick as they shown and Little Big Adventure Remake still exist.

So we still doing what we should do and we do it in bigger team:] We joined our forces with music Jesse Gorter. If this name sound familiar to you it's probably because you could hear a lot of his music in our previous preview videos. 

Long story short: We cooperate with him for long time but now he is officially one of CoffeMonsters member and have access to all the stuff we do :)

He right now creating alternative soundtrack to L.B.A. We plan to use this tracks for Remake but you never know he may change his mind and make even more awesome music in the end. We will see what future will bring.

Aside from that like always Alejandro working on design trying to bring new look to game. I'm dived again into low level code and doing some under hood changes for engine and tools. I planned them for long time but I never had occasion, mood or time to do them. I decided that now is good moment and well I'm still stuck there. Fixing what I broke, fighting with quick hacks that I introduced and staring using new cool features :) I cannot wait to utilize full potential of them.

So as you see project is still alive stronger than ever.

Greg

Concept devlog

Hi everyone!

My name is Alejandro Machado and I'm this project's concept artist. So I'm going to be in charge of designing all the different species that populate Twinsun, the main characters, the clothing, the devices, the buildings... Well mostly everything.

And this leads to the question: What are we supposed to do in this game? As we all remember, the designs in original Relentless are quite awesome. They're cute and endearing and we all love them.

But it's also true that they're designs from the very beginnings of the polygon era. That's more than 20 years ago and many things have changed. We're not longer limited by the graphics and aesthetics in games have evolved over years. And we mustn't forget that this project has become more and more ambitious since it's beginnings. In conclusion, my main function here is to develop a graphical update for the entire LBA universe.

On today's post I'm going to talk about Funfrocks army and their concept evolution so far.

Clone troopers (quetch)

These are the enemies you step into at the mere beginning of the game. They're the clumsy yet dangerous Funfrock's minions that crowd every single crossroad and critical path.

They posed quite a challenge on the go, because they must look goofy but still suppose a threat on Twinsen's life: even when they're the easiest enemy, if you make a mistake they can take you down within seconds with their rifles and grenades.

Originally the idea was to make a heavy redesign of them, taking out the goofyness and going for a dark and threatening aspect.

This idea didn't advance too far anyways. If we consider the other clones, the more dangerous ones (rabbibunnies, spheros and grobos), then this design would outpass them. Besides, the entire idea for the game would go too far into the wrong direction.

So we decide to go back to the roots and look the original game for an inspiration. This time I decided to emulate the overall shape of the original ones, but adding some threatening aspects. In this case, the arms would be bigger and stronger, and the uniform more complex, full of weapons.

Spies (quetch)

This mysterious guys will be an addition to the game. Their function will remain secret for now, but we can take a glance at their overall aspect.

On my original approaches, I imagined this guys full covered in clothes with this big disturbing eyes who stare at you, making you nervous at anytime.

Even when we kinda like this idea, the main problem with it is that their intention was to clear. You know they're interested in you because they're looking at you.

So, after some trial and error I finally come up with this new design where their eyes are covered with the mask. So they can make you think they're at their own business while they don't lose any detail of you, with their microphones and other special devices.

Hope you like this first post and be expecting my next ones.

See ya!

Alejandro Machado

L.B.A. Preview 14

Promised 4 weeks passed and we are back with new preview. Almost everything went as we planned :] We are +5 builds further in development and on good road to make another preview even better. But before we will get to all comments from our side I recommend checking out new video:

New year update

Our holiday break just ended. We took time to spend it with families, rest a little bit and gather strengths for upcoming year. And in this lazy mood we passed to another year of development. For me this is sad and in the same time really happy moment.

Sad because this is 6th year of development and I still cannot show you finished game. I spend endless hours on it and its still far from finished. Happy because I see progress and how everything improving. So lets look on year 2015 and check what changed in project:

Year 2015

If I would be asked to describe shortly what we done in this year I would say that we focused mostly on Technology development. Between 01/01/2015 and 31/12/2015 there was 569 commits to git repo. Which giving nice number of more than one commit per day :D . And a lot changed:

• CoffeMonsters Team
• Announcement of change "Angelus Productions" -> "Coffemonsters"
• New Logo/Blog/Facebook page 
• New member: Alejandro Machado
• Started redesigning of game
• Improved project generator:
• New system based on python script
• Added code generation to process
• Added Visual Studio solutions generation.
• Added support to Visual Studio 2013 
• Improved building of external libraries
• New build system for continuous builds
• Created build script in python with Windows/Linux support
• Created Jenkins configuration for build machine
• Finished port to Linux (earlier Editor part wasn't finished)
• There were migration to never versions of: bullet physics and Qt
• Changes in resource system:
• Added support to animations
• Added support to meshes
• Added support to levels
• Improved Blender exporter
• SQL queries tool added to editor 
• Improved RTTI code
• Improved Rendering Code
• Better management of releasing resources
• Better management of constants buffers
• Improved multithreading
• Improved performance
• Added support to Cascade Shadow Maps
• There was added new animation system.
• Support on game side
• Editor to it in editor.
• Changes in communication editor <-> engine
• All communication is happening with use of events

This list I wouldn't call completed but it should give you overview of amount of work that was done. Remember that in meantime I was changing job and moved from Canada to UK. If not this this year would probably be even better :D

Year 2016

This year will be a little bit different :] We will of course still push technology forward. I plan to change file system management and do more improvement wherever I see place :) but it's no longer our priority. I feel that our technology matured enough to move step forward. Our goal for this year is game and we already have some great achievements in this matter:] 

Game work on AMD and Nvidia Graphics cards.

This is important because it's proving that resource system work the way it should :] Right now game require support of OpenGL 3.2 but I have already plan to increase it at least to Open GL 3.3 to support ARB_instanced_arrays which will be useful for vegetation.

06/01/2016 we created first build of game.

Yep this was big achievement for us because finally I could share build with Alejandro. This is important step because now I will be able to continue work on creating system for continuous build release which should allow us to have new build each week.

Another small "break"

I know that we didn't posting a lot in last month. Well we didn't post at all :D but this state will continue for next 3-4 weeks. I know that this is long time but we want to use this time for planning and finishing few started stuff we started. When we will return we will repay you this silence with really cool stuff :] This one thing we can promise you.

So to next time. 

Another technical stuff

Well I will be sincerely: like always in such a weeks I struggling with writing post for you. And it's not because we didn't done anything in this past week it's complete opposite. We done a lot of really cool stuff like:

• continue discussions and designing of remake,
• upgraded layers on levels,
• improved code for rendering,
• created nice system for building of externals libraries,
• ported project to vs2013 the way that vs2010 still is usable,
• some refactoring in core of game engine,
• removed some bugs from code,
• and a lot more small stuff.

I think that for project this was even better week than few previously ones but still writing this post is not easy task. 

Mostly because how to write about stuff that are not easy to explain to normal people ? I see this really well when I write about stuff I do in coding to Alejandro and he just answer me: I don't understand what you writing to me.

If artistic side of project is easy to show the technical one is the problematic. Like in all kind of works there are different kind of tasks:

• There are stuff we want to do for comfort of our work. 
• There are other which are preparation for some bigger stuff.
• There are this which we must to do.
• The last one are this which are just cool and we want to do them :) 

Difference is that even if there is big change it may end in hard to notice results. So we could of course show you version of game compiled in vs2010 and vs2013 (even the 64 bit version for 2013) but what is the point? They look the same.

The same with rendering stuff. We done better resources management and manual synchronization of GPU and CPU. This sound cool and have a lot of nice things to offer from technical point of view but at this point this is hard to notice in video (To be funnier at some point it could be noticeable in slower FPS but we already fixed that).

There was also building of external libraries :D this one is hard one. I spend more than 4 hours to find a way to compile visual studio project with dependencies using msbuild tasks. Then I spend another few hour  to figure out how to set pdb file name for bullet physics using cmake (without modifying original config file). All of that resulted in one script which I call and it build and redistribute projects for vs2010 and vs2013 in 32 and 64 bit version using original not modified source code of libraries. I'm personally really proud of final result :]

So as you see we can write really a lot about stuff we do even in weeks like that. But is this interesting for you? I'm not sure but well maybe I'm wrong.

Greg

Blueprint returns

Some time ago we were writing about blueprints. We shown then remade pharmacy rendered from blender. This wasn't for sure the best representation how game will look but it allow us to quickly shown you what level we want to create. This time we will explain why we use blueprints.

So let's first start from the interesting part:

If you compared original blueprint with what you see in this movie you will notice differences. Some of them are visible some other not so much. The one which is probably not so obvious is size. What you see here is 125% of original blueprint (Sadly I forgot to record version with original size but well you need to believe me).

We decided to resize it because previous size was dangerous for gameplay. AI and physics don't like cramped places and prefers more spacious environment. So we just increased size of building and here came with help blueprint construction. 

Blueprints like we mentioned previously are:

They are simple representation of world and they will stay like that for some time :)

When we starting redesigning of levels we had big problem with creating anything. We couldn't start at all. After talk with few friend who working on Level Design (LD) professionally I decided to try really naive approach. We created everything from boxes of different colors. 

Results were great. Quickly we forgot about all this technical aspect of modeling and jumped into designing levels. What for some were few green boxes for us were trees, bushes, blue boxes created walls and so on and so on. 

The best was speed with which new levels are created, speed of changes in design and the fact that finally we could start writing story of game. What will happen, how player can move around, what will be vibe of location, what kind of person living in given house.

In the end some of you may be afraid that because all this changes this game won't be LBA anymore. But I can assure you that we put really a lot of effort into having the heart of Little Big Adventure into it.

Greg

One Man Project ...

Last months bring a lot of changes to Little Big Adventure Remake. About some of them you know, other are still secret. But all of them giving hope on quicker finishing of project. 

This post bringing another good news. I'm glad to welcome in coffemonsters team:

Alejandro Machado

He is really skillful artist who will take into his hands 2D side of the project, designing of character and universe. If you don't believe me that he is so good check Concept Art in this post that he done especially for this occasion :) I seen already more of his works for project and I need to tell you that I'm really excited about what coming.

Thanks to Alejandro help I will be able to focus more on programming, modeling and generally more technical aspects of project.

So summarizing  Little Big Adventure Remake as one man project no longer exist :]

Greg