Dev Blog #46 - Grenade Launcher BTS, ISAAC the Robot, New Game Over Screen and More!

And just like that, we have our blog post up right in time for the weekend! A little later than usual, but still on schedule for our dev blog quota of February. We've got plenty to show, including a deep dive-ish on the workflow of the Grenade Launcher, so lets jump straight in.

GOG

We've heard back from GOG, finally! 

For those unaware, we’ve been trying to get Selaco onto the GOG store for over 18 months but we never managed to hear back from GOG. We tried over and over but we got nothing. Not even a confirmation about a successful submission. To this day, we have no idea why this keeps happening.

There has been quite a sizable demand for a GOG version of Selaco so a couple of weeks ago I decided to be stubborn and contacted one of the GOG staff directly because my patience was starting to run out. To my surprise, this worked, we got a reply back after just a number of days. They were more than interested and were asking for a playable built to review for curation. We sent them the demo aaaaand……

WE'VE BEEN APPROVED! We still have to fill out some paperwork and get the store page set up, but the thing has been put in motion and for those who prefer a completely DRM-free version, Selaco will be available for you on GOG in the near future. Do remember, however, that even the Steam build of Selaco will have no DRM to speak of.

As a Patron (Assuming a total of $20 is pledged) you already own the game on Steam, so I’ll have a chat with Jason (Community Manager) to figure out how we will hand out GOG keys to those who prefer it over Steam.

Plush

This Wednesday I’ll have a meeting with a plushie company where we discuss the possibility of a Dawn plush. I’ll probably write a quick impromptu Patreon Blog shortly after the meeting to give a short summary. Stand by!

ISAAC

We all know the VAC-BOTS, right? The circle shaped robotic vacuum cleaners that roam the hallways looking for trash to clean. Fully committed to their job despite the vicious invasion and the lack of humans to appreciate their hard work.

We would like to introduce a brand new friendly robot to the line-up. Meet ISAAC (Intelligent Systems for Automated Assembly and Correction). A small repair bot that does its best keeping Selaco’s systems functional and ensuring wall panels stay in their place. This will be a fully voxelized character that actively chases down exposed wire panels and attempts to repair any damage it may find. 

You will find hard working ISAAC’s often as you venture through the campaign. Remember to show them your appreciation by tapping their head or giving them a salute, because there is nobody else to do it for them right now.

Grenade Launcher progress

Allow me to briefly recap for our new readers. The Grenade Launcher model has recently been completed and the implementation of the weapon has begun. This includes rendering, animating and coding the weapon.

The Grenade Launcher is, so far, the most complex weapon in the arsenal. It requires far more animation work than other weapons, has 3 different ammo types that need to be accounted for and has a dynamic display on the weapon. The issue here is that Selaco uses sprites instead of 3D model, which complicates things significantly. If we attach a display on the weapon that shows the currently loaded ammo type, we have to figure out a way to overlay it correctly.

Here is what the weapon looks like without overlays. Notice the empty spot at the back of the weapon? That is where the display is going to be. This part of the sprite is rendered separately, so we can swap it out when needed. 

We achieve this by rendering the weapon multiple times. First, we do a plain render with just the gun. This will render an entire animation and give us a series of PNG’s as an output. These PNG’s will be touched up using a photoshop script and get added into the game as Weapon Sprites.

Let's take the Attacking animation (work in progress) as an example here. Here it what it looks like in Blender:

We cannot render it like this, because that would mean the ‘’FRAG’’ display is imbued onto the weapon sprite. So instead, we do multiple render passes.

Render 1 consists of just the weapon with the display turned off.

Render 2, 3 and 4 use the same animation data, except the gun is turned off in favor of a display

Render 5 disables all the lights, but keeps the muzzle flash so we can use this data to make the gun look brighter in game. This is called a Brightmap.

All of these render passes give us a wide range of PNG’s to work with. So we start combining them all to get this result:

Which then gives us a proper display!

Be wary that we working out a minor issue where the edges of the monitor are *slightly* bigger than they are supposed to be. It looks uncanny, that’s why!

Just for good measure, here is the grenade launcher firing a grenade. The screen is off because we have not rendered all of the displays yet. We want to ensure all the animations are final first!

Remember the Brightmap render I mentioned earlier? That allows us to light up the gun properly! Watch how the muzzle flash properly illuminates the gun despite the sprite itself still being mostly shaded. It’s a minor detail, but a very important one.

That covers the rendering aspect which is challenging on its own. Another challenge is the ability to switch ammo types. Pressing Alt Fire will have Dawn remove the drum containing the Grenade Shells to replace it with a drum containing the next ammo type. You can keep pressing Alt Fire to cycle through them. The amount of shells in each drum will be remembered, so if you have 3 Ice Shells in your drum, swap it out with Acid Shells then go back to Ice Shells, the 3 Ice Shells that were loaded continue to be loaded. All of this will require their own animation, so I have my hands full on that as well.

…and let's not even begin about having to balance all of this! Iit’s a fun challenge that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now and am happy to see how well it’s coming together so far. I am fully expecting the Grenade Launcher to be completely presentable in the next blog post!

And last but not least, the voxels!

New Death Screen (Prototype)

Early prototype.

We wanted to get this done before the Demo Update, but have unfortunately been unable to get it done in time.

In the current Demo version, death works almost exactly like in Doom. You fall to the floor, stare at whatever killed you and press E to restart. This works well, but for Selaco we wanted to modernize it a little more. Upon death, you get a screen allowing you to restart the checkpoint, load a saved game or return to the menu. There will also be a drone noise playing in the background to dramatize the character death a little.

Voxels

We have a whole load of new voxels! Here are a couple of them:

Interactive Scissor Lift (can we raised and lowered)

Chemicals

Toolbox

Concept sketch

We currently have 7 concept art pieces in the works. Here is a WIP of the streets

Conclusion

The game continues to progress at a very steady pace as usual. ReformedJoe is currently working on the third level of the game, taking place in the Selaco streets which opens up in a classic parking garage shoot-out section.

The last couple of weeks we have been unable to actively promote our Patron so the numbers are slightly lower than it used to be. This is unfortunate, but we’ll start a new Patreon push really soon to hopefully get that number back up. You are still reading this, which means you are still here to support us. Thank you! <3

Have a fantastic weekend and we will see you in 2 weeks (and this time, we will launch the dev blog on schedule!)

Wesley de Waart