Dev Blog #59 - Current State of the Game, Uncompressed Realms Deep trailer

Happy Monday everybody!

We have survived the dreadful week of September. The extended demo has launched and the release date has been announced, so now we can focus entirely on the release of the game with no other distractions. Or at least, no planned distractions. Fingers crossed that we can make the game in peace moving forward!

In this blog post I want to focus on the current state of the game, rather than showcase what we are working on. We’ll be doing that at the end of the month!

Release Date

Let's start with the biggest thing that happened between this and our last blog post. A release date has FINALLY been announced!

We launch Chapter 1 in May 2024. We open up right away with a whopping 25 levels (or Area's, as we call them, spread over 7 massive levels) and 11 weapons. Basically, Selaco is already a full game in EA, but expands further from there. For some, this may seem relatively far away, and unfortunately, some players expected the game to launch a little earlier. But  anything sooner just wasn’t possible, not without severely compromising our vision.

The reception in regards to our trailer has been great, and I was truly happy to read each and every comment regarding the trailer. Such a relief, too, since many players always assumed Selaco’s environments were nothing but blue corridors and a bunch of offices, and now we’ve finally proven that the game is so much more than that. And with this being the first trailer I have ever made, it surely put a smile on my face to hear praise in regards to the editting. That was very unexpected.

Realms Deep was nerve-wracking. What didn’t help was how the event was a massive 4 hours long while we all assumed it would have been just 2 hours. We didn’t know when Selaco would air either, so when every hour passed, the nerves got worse! And guess when Selaco was shown during the event? NEAR THE END!

Uncompressed Release Date Trailer

YouTube’s video compression did not do the trailer any favors. All of the moving bits and pieces combined with fast movement resulted in a very pixelated mess. Thankfully, you’re a backer, so here is the download link to a (mostly) uncompressed version.

Enjoy!

Download Link (422 MB)

(The quality is still poor when viewed through the Google Drive Video Player. We recommend downloading the video and watching it using something like VLC Media Player).

Promo Artwork

This is another case of 'Did We Share This Already?', so apologies if this is a repeat.

We made this to announce our Realms Deep trailer. The full resolution with no text can be found here!

Timelapse:

Current State of the Game

With the Early Access announcement out of way, I thought it would make sense to break down different parts of the game and elaborate on where we are right now.

Levels

The vast majority of levels are close to completion, with only the second half of Level 6 being largely absent. A lot of the groundwork for Level 6 is already done (primarily asset creation), but it has yet to be designed.

This means that the game is practically playable from start to finish already!

All other levels are of high quality as we speak. They are polished up, tested and a lot of fun to play through. But there’s still a bit of extra work we want to put into them before we consider them 'Selaco Quality'

Closer to launch, we will still be going over each and every level to make some finishing touches. Like adding a few more level events, some extra worldbuilding or other stuff.

Gamepads

Support for Gamepads and Steam Deck is close to being final. We still have a few more tweaks to make here however, like improving our Weapon Wheel and making it possible to properly swap Throwable Items. Other than that? Finished!

Enemies

All enemies are in and most of them have finished sprite work, minus the Sniper enemy who still has nothing (the poor guy is the simplest enemy to make, yet the slowest to get actual improvements). There are also some lackluster / unfinished animations here and there that still have to be ironed out.

In terms of their design in the game itself, they are mostly final but there are a few enemies I am not quite satisfied with right now. Small issues, like Air Drones not moving the way I want them to, and Juggernaut feeling a little outdated compared to newer enemies.

AI

We have a lot of ideas in regards to enemy AI and it won't be possible to put all of them in Chapter 1. With that said, the current state of our enemy AI is great! They have gotten really good at pathfinding, they can flank, they react to player actions, feel properly threatening and can communicate using the Squad Overseer system. Read this post for some extra information on that!

We did want to implement a Cover System for AI where they can lean around corners and move towards cover, but this is probably going to be a thing for Chapter 2. If development goes really well, we may try to squeeze it in Chapter 1, but it seems unlikely right now because it's quite a hefty change and will take a considerable amount of time to test.

Weapons

Weapons are 95% finished. They are properly balanced, feel satisfying to fire, have all of their upgrades and the customizable alt fires are mostly done.

There are still a few rough animations and sound effects here and there that could go with some work.

Workshop

The core mechanic of the workshop is fully functional. You can upgrade your weapons, you can modify alt fires, you can restock on ammo, see live stat updates and more. This all works effortlessly.

Transit System

(Mock-up image - is not ingame)

We allow players to seamlessly travel back and forth between levels using an underground subway. This is only used to find collectibles you may have missed in prior levels, or unlock some very mysterious doors that would not open before. The back-end system for this is in place, but the UI elements and the actual train have yet to be made. We will probably start working on this next month or so.

Mutators

Nothing! We have yet to begin. All we have is a design plan, a bunch of ideas, and a few mutators that work but cannot be used without command hackery. 

For the uninitiated, Mutators are smaller gameplay tweaks that players can toggle on and off using the Workshop. These are often quite small, like having Red Blood, Headshots Only, Confetti Headshots and more. But can also have a large effect on gameplay, like having new enemies spawn at random positions of the level, or making enemies explode when killed.

Mutators purely exist because they’re fun. They don't have to be used and will not provide any new rewards other than an extra dosage of fun.

Mod Support

Works fine. Of course it does, it’s GZDoom! We have yet to streamline the mod support though! The ‘’Mod Settings’’ menu still doesn’t work, the image above consists of a bunch of made-up stuff to get an idea across. We want to add an ingame Mod Loader to simplify the process. Ideally, players just drop a pk3/zip file in the “Mods” folders and they are good to go.

Engine

Tough one. Is an engine ever finished!? Most of the essentials are in place, but there are a few more problems that we have to iron out, and about a billion ideas we would love to introduce to the engine (mostly performance related).

For one, we cannot utilize Overlays for weapon sprites without introducing a flickering issue. Which is quite a problem for a weapon like the Grenade Launcher, that utilizes many different overlays for the screen. Here is a GIF of what I mean:

(Overlay Flickering issue introduced by our Multithreading solution)

This happens because of the multithreading system. Since sprites are loaded on a different thread in real-time, they have a tendency to not load fast enough and appear a frame later than intended. Perhaps we will precache these, I’m not entirely sure what Cockatrice wants to do here!

For that reason, in the extended demo, your very first shot with a weapon will not produce a Muzzle Flash since it uses an overlay. Nobody picked up on this, thankfully, but I do. Every single time! :(

We also want to clean things up a little. GZDoom is a bloated engine, and it often feels like 90% of the features it has, are not ones we are interested in. Why would we need MIDI support, for example? The game doesn’t support GLES and Software Rendering, yet the engine does, so why keep it? Simplifying the engine will make maintenance easier and significantly reduce the overhead.

Optimizations

We believe performance is in a very solid place right now. Players of the Extended Demo reported solid performance across the board, with only a few dips during combat that we still plan to iron out. 

I am, however, very bummed out about the whole lightmap situation regarding GZDoom. We talked about this many blog posts ago, how enthusiastic we were about GZDoom getting a Quake-style lightmap solution. This would mean that we could replace all of our dynamic lights and replace them with static lights to gain a good chunk of performance with no visual compromise (in fact, things could even look better!). 

Unfortunately, we tested this a few weeks ago, and it was nowhere near production-ready. Parts of the level would not light up at all, parts were lit incorrectly, voxels and sprites did not properly update depending on lighting condition, etc. 

Here is what the demo level looks like with light maps:

As you can see, many areas are pitch black or lit poorly. The grey areas are skipped entirely. That's unfortunate, but understandable from the GZDoom side of things. It's a hard thing to implement and will probably be a while longer before it can be used reliably.

Perhaps we can play around with this post-launch, but truth be told, I feel very sad about this. Something as important as performance should be solid right from the get go, and now weaker hardware will likely end up with fewer frames than we hoped for. Performance will likely be fine for most, dont get me wrong, but it could have been better.

Chapter II and Chapter III

(Old image from 2 years ago, but it's the only Chapter 2 screenshot we have right now.)

Believe it or not, some work on the next chapter is already in motion. Everything has been planned out roughly 3 years ago, so we already know where to take the player in these chapters. We have one enemy type designed (image below) and will slowly start working on the textures (floor, walls, ceilings) so we can start mapping when Chapter 1 is finished.

We also have A LOT of ideas. So much so, that we doubt even Chapter 2 and 3 have enough space for all of them.

The length of these chapters is still unknown. We aim for them to be a little shorter than Chapter 1 (because Chapter 1 is just that big), but these levels will probably be bigger and more complex since it's later in the game.

Despite some bits and pieces of Chapters 2 and 3 being in motion, the core focus remains on the initial launch for now

What happens to Patreon after launch?

Someone asked this in our Discord Server a while ago, and quite frankly, I blanked out. I really do not know what is going to happen with our Patreon when we launch in Early Access. 

Selaco costs quite a bit of money to make given the emphasis on effects, artwork, voices, and more. Patreon allowed us to get a budget and get these things done. But, if Chapter 1 launches, and the game is successful (fingers crossed!), do we still need backing? I think we’ll have to wait and see.

If we do decide to keep using Patreon, we will probably continue making these blog posts like we usually do, except go a little more in-depth on how we approach things and show more work in progress rather than just results. That way, we can use Steam Blogs (public) to showcase important bits that are finished and use Patreon Blogs (exclusive to backers) to show and discuss progress while having an open dialogue on what we are working on. Maybe we'll even make the Trello Board public so backers can actively see what is being worked on.

Time will tell! I would love to keep doing this; it’s a lot of fun to talk about the game in a smaller circle and respond to questions.

Conclusion

It’s quite a relief to finally be able to focus on usual game development again. A lot of progress was made, but many distractions in September prevented us from achieving the progress we wanted. 

If you have any questions regarding the game as a whole, its development, or the Early Access launch, respond below! I’ll reply as soon as I can. 

Thanks, everyone! Have a great week. 

Wesley de Waart