Bi-weekly blog post
Hello! This blog post will be a little different than usual. We are preparing the Admiral Tier demo that takes place in 2 weeks and are currently working a few more hours than usual to get everything done. Rest assured; we are not crunching inhuman hours! We’re just spending a little extra time to get everything ready in time. This is also why this blog post arrived a bit later than usual, apologies!
As usual, remember that GIFs do not load on mobile!
Dawn sprites
We finally began working on player sprites! While working on this we could not resist to also add a Chasecam, allowing you to see the action from third person.
One of the goals we’ve set from the beginning is to give Dawn the exact same animation fidelity as any enemy in the game. Meaning that most of her actions will have proper animations to go along with it. If you jump, you will see her perform a jumping animation. If you toss a grenade, she will play a grenade toss animation. We’re making good progress here! The gif above is still largely WIP, but it’s fantastic to finally have an actual player sprite instead of a cardboard cutout from her concept art.
While on the subject of animation, let's dive deeper into how we achieve that
Animation
Ever since we’ve shown our first bits of gameplay footage, we often received praise for our ‘’low FPS animation’’ style that is used in Selaco. Today I’d like to dive deeper into how animations are done.
It is no secret that id software used clay models to get sprite references for most of their sprite work. They would sculpt the models, pose them, take digital scans then clean them up by hand using digital software. Our approach is actually not that different, except we rely on 3D models instead of clay. Allow me to explain!
Given that we use 2D sprites for our enemies, we did not want our animations to look too perfect and clean, which certainly helps given how none of us have a proficient background in animation. Rendering animation at a lower resolution certainly helps, but when using advanced animation tools things can quickly become ‘too perfect’, which is not what we are aiming for. We are trying to achieve a 'stop-motion' style of animation where it becomes obvious that it's done by hand and not improved / touched up by interpolation algorithms and what not. Usually when animation is done using 3D, many different techniques are used to get seamless motion. Like keyframe blending and Controllers. This applies to most games out there, including indies. For Selaco however, we use none of these techniques. Every single frame of animation is posed by hand with no blending in between!
I don't have much of a background in animation, so this was a huge challenge for me. We made use of the aforementioned animation tools in the past, but I was never quite satisfied with the results. After doing our frame-by-frame posing method in the similar vein as id software did back in the day, I finally started to appreciate how the animations looked in-game. Still smooth as hell, but it feels more hand-made and less overly perfect, which made the low FPS Animations look very artificial.
To give everything a more sprite-like appearance we need to remove as much perspective from the image as possible, otherwise the sprites will look way off when seen in-game, like legs not properly touching the floor. This is an easy one! We simply replace the Perspective camera of Blender with an orthographic camera. This removes all the depth from the camera, making the whole thing seem flatter.
With the animation ready to go and the camera being set in place, we can begin rendering! We use a custom Blender script that plays and renders the entire animation we have created, while taking 8 ‘pictures’ from multiple angles. This allows us to get all the sprite angles as a series of PNG’s while also automatically assigning the correct naming convention into the file. 
We have all the data we need and could start moving them into the correct SPRITES folder so the engine can read them, but we're not done yet.
The models are designed with sprites in mind, however, a straight render from Blender is not often convincing enough. We still need to apply some changes in photoshop to make it blend better with the game world. Everything in Selaco is colorful and bright, so we need to color-grade the sprite to match it.
Default
Edited
The next concern is the amount of lights on Dawn's armor. As you can see in the screenshot below, Dawn has bright lights on her armor. If a bright object on the sprite is not properly lit in-game, the whole thing starts to feel fake. We need to find a way to illuminate these bits in the game engine to ensure that these parts of the armor pop.
To do this, we use a technique called ‘Brightmapping’, color data for GZDoom to decide what parts of the sprite should be brightened up. This allows it to glow ingame and make sure it lits up accordingly in the darker areas of Selaco. To get brightmap data, we turn off all the lights in Blender, set the Ambient Lighting down to 0 and make the glowy parts of her armor Emissive and amplify it ever so slightly to get a powerful Bloom effect. Then we repeat the same Sprite batch rendering step and get a whole new set of images This will result in a black silhouette where only the emissive data is shown.
When this is all done, the animation can be added in game! [The color artifiacts are due to the GIF's color limitations. These are not in the game!]
Wrist Codex
To close this blog post, here is a sneak peak of the Wrist Computer working in-game. The Wrist Computer is far from completed, but will function as a powerful information device that allows you to retrieve emails from other people, get information about the enemies you've encountered, find information about the current Invasion Tier (which we will dive into later!) see Level Completion or even read some miscellaneous about Selaco as a whole; it's origins, the brands involved with the game world and much, much more.
Ken Coghlan, our dedicated writer, is going to have a lot of fun with this and hopefully the players will appreciate the amount of background lore we are providing in the Wrist Codex. The Wrist Computer is a prime example of just how powerful CockUI is going to be!
That's it for this week. A different type of blog post than usual. Let me know if you prefer to see more ''making of'' stuff moving forward. By the next blog post we'll show a new enemy type called The Enforcer, probably our most heavily armored unit yet which we are really stoked about. Stay tuned!
As usual, none of this would have been possible without you guys. Thank you so much for your support with this project. See you in 2 weeks! ❤
- Wesley de Waart
2021-10-13 00:05:34 +0000 UTC
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Hello you wonderful patrons,
A shorter blog post than usual, but a very juicy one! Most of our time is currently spent getting the Pre-demo ready for our Admiral Tiers (which launches October 25th!).
The real challenge with this blog post is to ensure a minimum amount of typos, since our 'proofread guy' is currently away so I hope to not disappoint anybody. Here goes!
Completed - Dawn 3D model
Dawn's 3D model is completed! The next step is to rig her up, animate her, render the sprites and add them to GZDoom! We're aiming to get these done before the 10th of October.
The level of texture detail is kept relatively low in this case, given how it's meant as a reference model for sprites (which are rendered in 256x256). A more detailed version will be made later down the line, which will be used for promotional material. The model itself consists of 1.500.000 triangles currently!
As an added bonus: Here is Dawn without any hair!
(WIP shot from a month ago)
SMG Taser
(For demonstration purposes, the duration of the shock is exaggerated. In reality is last about roughly 5 seconds before the enemy is back on their feet.)
A few days ago we announced our SMG weapon on Twitter (click here for the tweet). As mentioned before, the SMG comes equipped with a taser and we finally got around to add it.
With the SMG equipped, Dawn will use the attached Taser during her melee attack to electrocute enemies. This is a VERY powerful tool, capable of crippling an entire squad of units if you manage to get them grouped together.
When you electrocute an enemy with a melee attack they will enter a 'Shock' state, which immobilizes them for a brief period of time. However, given our ''Geometry Collision'' mechanic, we've been able to add an additional layer of power to this weapon; if you hit an enemy with the taser equipped, and the enemy collides with a nearby wall at enough velocity, it will emit a shockwave which electrocutes everybody in a small radius, the GIF above demonstrates this lovely effect.
Given how powerful this tool is, it will come with a significant cooldown. When the cooldown is active, SMG melee's will behave like a regular melee attack.
Speaking of cooldowns...
Cooldown Indicator
(Icon to the far left is a placeholder)
With the power of CockUI (See our last Blogpost) comes a new addition to the UI: Status Indicators!
Whenever Dawn has a debuff (Frozen, burned), a buff (Double Damage, Evasion) or a cooldown (sliding, SMG Taser), circles appear at the bottom of the screen with will dynamically stack up next to each other, giving you a clear idea of how long something is going to last.
Cover
Borion's voxels are about to become a lot more interactive! I wrote a system that allows the player to knock cover onto their sides for increased protection. Unlike the sequel of a game we take a lot of inspiration from, this will be a useful addition to the players toolset. Currently this feature is exclusive to Stretchers, but will be expanded upon further by giving it to other objects in the near future.
Some voxels can now be punched / slide onto their sides. Doing so will make the object more resistant to enemy fire, and the hitbox of the object will always be high enough to cover the entire body of the player when crouching.
Remember that all cover is still fully destructible. You are not safe for long, but at least you can return fire from a safe spot.
Pro tip: When taking cover, prioritize the shotgunners. They can easily get rid of any cover you hide behind. If you see a red blinking light, run! It means he is about to shoot.
Halloween Emojis
October is upon us! So we will be theming our Discord channel accordingly. Say hello to the new Dawn emojis that will uploaded to the Discord channel soon. If you want to download all the emojis we have so far, refer to this download link to get them in their full resolution.
Closing
That's it for this week. Given how GIF's dont work on the Patreon App, I've uploaded all the gifs to Imgur!
Thanks again for keeping your pledge up. It's hard to put into words how much this means for us. You allow us to make the game we've always wanted and not a day goes by where we are not grateful for the amount of support we've gotten so far. Patreon has been a relatively slow build up, but the last couple of months have been amazing.
Next week we'll dive deeper in the so called 'Wrist Computer' that is attached to Dawn's arm and show some of her animations. See you then!
- Altered Orbit Studios
2021-09-27 21:23:29 +0000 UTC
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Hello you beautiful Patrons!
Time for another bi-weekly update.
Last update we mentioned that we are working on preparing the Patreon Exclusive demo. On October 25th, the Admiral Tiers will be getting their hands on the demo which features one level of the game (lasts roughly 40 minutes). Other patrons will get the demo as soon as most of the issues are ironed out. The past 2 weeks have been all about ironing out the final few kinks and getting things ready. Lets go take a look at what we've done!
Big Box
We have been approached by a well known publisher who is interested in publishing a big box version of Selaco. Unfortunately, at this point in time, I cannot share more than this. It's a big opportunity and once we have an agreed upon deal, I'll let you know as soon as possible with an impromptu blog post! But first we have to wait to see if the deal goes through and we both come to an agreement.
Bare in mind, this does not mean they are going to publish the entire game! We remain fully independent and full creative freedom will persist. They are just going to help us out getting an awesome big box version out there. I cannot guarantee that Patrons will get one for free, but I am going to push for a discount for backers of a certain tier. You deserve it!
New Weapon Pickups
At long last we have proper Voxelized (I'm still not sure whether or not that is an actual word) weapon pickups! In the early days we used poorly converted ''Obj to Vox'' algorithms which made the weapons look godawful. Borion swooped in and recreated all the guns by hand using voxel software. Take a look!
Keep in mind that these are not all the weapons that will be present in the game. Only the ones we have shown so far!
For comparison sake...Lets take a look at the old models.
Now lets move on and never look back at the old models ever again, ewww! Thank you Borion for saving our eyes from these hideous old models!
3D Model Update
Shaping up well! I have already shown a rough WIP shot in last weeks blog post, but things have advanced significantly since then and we are ready to move on to the next phase.
We are finished with shapes and basic colors of the armor. The next step is to apply the texture maps.
I am currently looking for a professional Blender Rigger to help us rig this model so we can begin animating our protagonist. Finally after all these years we're getting an actual in-game character to look at when standing in front of a mirror. Stoked! Very stoked! No more Cardboard Dawn.
Dawn's face will not remain plastically, that's just because it's a WIP.
Levels revisions
The demo level that you will get to play soon is the first level in the game; the Pathfinder Memorial Hospital. This level was made a while ago, and my experience as a level designer has improved significantly since then. I finally had time to revise all the area's present in the demo which are quite a few. I am not going to show all of them, because I don't want all environments to be spoiled before you get to play the game, but here is one of my favorites.
I always strongly disliked this hallway. It's cramped and the encounters that play out in this area were never engaging. Linear hallways in general are a no-go in Selaco as they make combat boring. We don't do boring! I redid the colors completely, added an additional doorway to flank, made it wider, added some more cover and also did some extra stuff which cannot be seen from this angle.
I'll be continuing the revisions this week so it's more on-par with the quality of the rest of the maps.
Introducing... CockUI!
(Billy Mays voice) Cockatrice here to tell you about the benefits of CockUI!
Yes, as dumb as the name is it’s a real thing. CockUI is the UI framework I have been writing from scratch in ZScript for menus and in-game interfaces. While it’s being made specifically for the needs of Selaco, the CockUI framework is intended to be released along with Selaco to help modders and GZDoom developers alike create interfaces that can handle varying screen resolutions with a minimal amount of effort.
But first a little history on why CockUI is necessary. Skip most of this if you have no interest in modding, coding or GZDoom in general!
When I first came on board with Selaco I started making interfaces (such as the Keypad and Upgrade screens) using another framework called ZForms. As far as I am aware it’s really the only publicly available interface framework for GZDoom and a number of other projects have used it in the past. Well, the more I used it the more I realized that it was doing some very, very inefficient things behind the scenes. ZForms absolutely chews through memory non stop while a menu is open due to the way it inefficiently creates and destroys hundreds and thousands of temporary objects (depending on complexity of the interface) EVERY FRAME.
ZScript is a garbage collected language (Garbage collection is basically a way of automatically managing memory by collecting discarded objects and later releasing them in batches). In GZDoom the garbage collector is not active while the game is paused. This means that when you have ZForms menu open, every frame you are eating more and more memory and none if it is getting released. When you finally close the menu all of those collected objects need to be destroyed and this would cause some incredible lag in the game for a few seconds, depending on how long you had the menu up.
Selaco being what it is demands a level of polish that you probably won’t see in most Doom mods or GZDoom standalone games. Because of this we hit a limit very very quickly as to what ZForms was capable of, and it required starting over from scratch.
That’s where CockUI comes in. CockUI is like ZForms in that it allows you to create graphical objects to put on screen, such as buttons, images, moving objects etc. without having to worry about how those objects are going to be rendered or configured. CockUI goes a few steps farther than that and creates a view-model system similar to what some might be familiar with when writing apps for tablets and phones. Like those systems, CockUI views can be anchored to other views and to the sides/scales/sizes of their parent view. This creates a flexible system that is largely independent of screen resolution and does not require the coder/modder to manually position objects every time something changes in code (such as screen resolution or view positioning etc.). So far CockUI performs fantastically quick and is not at all a memory hog. In fact while just rendering the interfaces there is almost no noticeable increase in memory usage.
Currently we support standard views such as buttons and tabs, images (including 9Slice), checkboxes, scrollbars, scrolling windows, horizontal and vertical auto-sizing layouts, draggable windows and dropdown menus.
A more complicated feature that is still in the works, is a built in animation system that will handle the task of moving, scaling and fading in/out views in a standard way so the coder has to do very little work to make convincing transitions or movements.
Many more features will be added in the coming months, hopefully making CockUI an extremely robust but lightweight framework. It is my hope that in the future (after the release of Selaco) more GZDoom projects will adopt CockUI as the standard. Everyone needs a little Cock in their UI.
(Editor node: I did not approve of that final line but I want to keep Cockatrice his artistic integrity intact)
Key Cards
While Selaco borrows many modern game design elements, we still have lots of retro influences. Obviously, colored keycards are a part of that. We have updated our keycards to fit our game world better. The previous cards got the job done, but their design was boring.
Here is a picture of the old cards we used:
Conclusion
Steady progress for the past 2 weeks. As you can probably tell most of these are revisions and updates towards existing assets. If a project is in the works for over 4 years, eventually things get old and no longer match a quality standard, which has increased drastically ever since we announced the game. It's immensely satisfying to get these out of the way because they stick out like a sore thumb whenever we test the game. Still more replacing to do, and I will absolutely share more of the updated assets as the time comes!
I love you all, see you in 2 weeks! ❤
2021-09-13 22:14:26 +0000 UTC
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Admiral Tier Pre-demo Testing
We've been discussing this for quite a while now. Given how Selaco is still relatively far from releasing (insert obligatory 2255 joke here!) we were hesitant to share a demo with anyone who wasn't part of our current (playtesting) team. We are currently far enough into development to confidentially say that we are getting close to the vision that we have for this game and are ready to get some more testing done with a larger group of people; our Admiral tier backers. Our current target is to get the demo ready on October 25th, 2021. The Pre-demo test will be updated weekly as new content and fixes are added to the game. Eventually, when everything is in place and most of the reported bugs are ironed out, a more polished version becomes available to Lieutenant Tier and above. We are still aiming to get this done in 2021!
Pre-Demo testing will require you to sign an NDA. Everybody eligible for the Pre-Demo test will receive an Email with more information a few days before the demo hits. After the NDA is signed, you will be handed a Steam Key to play the game along with a Discord Invitation to a private playtesting server.
Patreon Merchandise
Another thing we have been discussing for what feels like an eternity is the inclusion of Patreon Merchandise. Starting tomorrow, our Patreon Page will start using the so called 'Loyalty Feature', where backers using the Commander Tier or above will get rewarded with physical Selaco items every 3 months of backing this project. This is a fantastic way to reward long-term backers with exclusive rewards that will not be available anywhere outside of Patreon!
If you are already a Commander Tier, you are automatically eligible for Merchandise. The graphics below are not final and are subject to change (Especially the clothing items! We are going to make custom art for those and make sure they are gaming related clothes that you would actually want to wear!)
(Altered Orbit Studio's is not responsible for the quality of the Merchandise. Patreon is handling all of the merchandise and, outside of sending the graphics, we are not involved with the process)
Apologies for these terrible background graphics, our graphic designer is on a break!
Dawn 3D model
Our character artist (Arturo Pahua) has started working on a 3D model for Dawn. This model will be used as an ingame sprite reference so we can get some proper window reflections going, but also to aid us with promo material. There is still a lot to do here, as you can tell a lot of things are still missing compared to the Turntable shown below. We can show you the full model in about 2 weeks.
The goal is to show visible wear and tear in Dawn's mirror reflection. This will be done in two ways:
Armor wear & tear - If the player has no armor, no armor will be shown in the mirror. If the player has armor, armor will be shown. However, as the campaign progresses, the armor will appear more worn out and damaged when compared to the early game.
Brushes and scars - Show damage to Dawn's skin based on player health. Having her appear more bruised and damage the lower your health is. Kind of like Doom guy's mugshot in the original Doom games, except cooler because it's a full body reflection in a mirror! Showing armor damage is going to happen, but brushes and scars are still under consideration.
Because uhh.. Here is what our current Mirror Reflections look like. You literally play a cardboard cutout right now and we cannot wait to remove this curse from Dawn.
Sieger Death Animation
Last weak I've showed the model of our new enemy type, the Sieger, and explained how he worked.
I've spent some time adding proper death animations for the siegers. It being a flying enemy gave me a perfect excuse to blow him up in spectacular fashion. After being killed, they will either fly straight down to the floor, or fly towards the left / right and explode as soon as they touch something. On lower difficulties, the Sieger Death Explosion will only be lethal towards World Objects and Enemy Soldiers, the player will be fully immune to this. This will not be the case on higher difficulties.
We've had some interesting discussions with our Patrons on Discord about how we could potentially make this even better by adding a tactical element to it. What if you could manipulate his death direction? As in, if the enemy is doing a strafe run to the left side, and you kill him during this motion, he will consistently fly towards the left after being killed. A skilled player will be able to abuse this system and allow Siegers to fly into the direction of a group of enemies, killing everyone caught in the blast radius. You bet that we are going to look into this feature!
Menu Progress
We always felt that GZDoom's default menu is starting to show its age. Cockatrice is currently rewriting a large portion of GZDoom's menu system to appear more modern, show a proper preview of what each and every graphical setting does and to allow us far more control over how we control the look and feel of our menu's. The screenshot below is still an early draft and will look better in a later version. It's shaping us great!
That's it for this week! Apologies for the lack of SMG in this blog post, we are still wrapping up the animations. As soon as it's ready, I will do a follow-up blog post dedicated towards the SMG. Rough estimate should be 4-5 days from now.
Remember to join our Discord Channel where we show Patreon Exclusive content on a near-daily basis! Thank you all for backing us, looking forward to sharing more in the near future!
- Wesley de Waart
2021-08-31 19:19:38 +0000 UTC
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In our last blogpost I mentioned that I wasn't particularly happy with the current state of the game. Due to a short deadline to get our submission ready for Realms Deep, we've spend a lot of time making things look presentable, but everything was held by duct-tape. The weeks after submitting our video we're spend correcting all of this and ensuring that the quality of the game remained high. We're happy to say that we are back on track! A lot of bugs have been ironed out and we even managed to squeeze in some new features into the game and get continue mapping.
Please remember that GIF's do not load on mobile!
New weapon added: SMG!
The model is finished and has been added to the game! It's still mostly in 'Prototype Mode' as the weapon is not capable of doing anything else than firing. The muzzle flash effect is not yet added (the one in the GIF is a placeholder effect from our Assault Rifle) and lots of animations are still missing.
The SMG (UC-11 Compact) is the compact version of the UC-36 Assault Rifle. The UC-11 is a powerful damage dealer capable of dishing out far more DPS than his bigger brother, while also remaining much easier to control during your attack. A complete monster at close range, a bruiser at medium range, unreliable at long range. The UC-36 will remain the most versatile as it is capable of dealing with every combat situation imaginable, but if you know when to switch to the UC-11, the tide of combat can easy move to your favor.
We're still considering the addition of Dual Wielding, but cannot confirm at this point. We have been doing tests, however...
New Enemy Type: Sieger
The most agile enemy in the game! Unlike most enemies in Selaco, the Sieger is capable of flying into the air and continue the fight from above. Low cover becomes problematic as the Sieger can easily engage you from their higher position, while also being able to effortlessly go behind you when cowering beneath high cover. when facing one of these it is important to stay on the move and keep shooting.
While being able to bring high amounts of pressure to the player, the Sieger comes with a huge design flaw: their jetpack. Shoot their jetpack and the Sieger will fail to maintain control in the skies, causing them to either crash into the wall and explode or...Fly into an enemy squad and explode! The amount of happy accidents with the Sieger make him a fun yet threatening opponent.
The Sieger fires blue sharp projectiles which chew through your armor, taking more armor points away than any other enemy weapon in the game. If your armor is high, take these bastards down as fast as possible! Armor is a precious resource you do not want to lose in battle. To easily defeat them, try to keep your distance and take them down from afar, as their projectiles are slow and easy to dodge as long as you can see them coming.
New Feature: Hardcore mode
After starting a new campaign, the player will get to choose between 2 modes. Traditional Mode and Hardcore Mode
Traditional Mode will play the game as originally intended; the game will autosave on key moments, quick saves are available and your health will regenerate to 35 if it gets too low, allowing you to always stand a fighting chance against the enemy.
Hardcore Mode takes all of that away from you. The game no longer automatically saves your progress, quicksaves are locked and Health Regen is no longer available. To make matters worse, saving the game can only be done as Gwyn Machines and costs you 200 credits, disallowing you to spend all of your credits on armor, health or ammo. We think Hardcore Mode completely changes the way you play and adds a new element of strategy. Do you save often and play it safe at the cost of being able to purchase resources? Or do you risk long stretches of play without saving to maintain a high amount of resources? Of course, resources are always available in the level if you willing to look for them, but if you are not careful enough, Hardcore Mode is capable of bricking your progress due to a shortage of health before a hard encounter. Stay on your toes and don't get sloppy!
New light switches
Health Regeneration Indicator
We've added a small indicator next to the health bar to communicate when the health regeneration begins to activate.
Added Voxel Switches
Added tier-based Destructible Pallets
Conclusion
We got a lot done this week! Our new level is shaping up great, a new weapon is in the works, and the Sieger is promising to be a lot of fun. We'll continue iterating on them for the coming weeks and hope to show you a more in-depth demonstration of both the Sieger and UC-11, just like we did with the Nailgun
For the next blog post we'll dive deeper into AI and the sound design of Selaco. See you then!
- Wesley de Waart
2021-08-18 01:51:13 +0000 UTC
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A year ago during Realms Deep 2020, a certain gaming magazine called E1M1 revealed themselves to the world. A retro shooter magazine which, surprise surprise, covers the type of shooter we all hold near and dear to our hearts; retro shooters (or as I prefer to call it: Throwback Shooters). They are gearing up with a new Kickstarter campaign and the line-up that I have seen is looking incredible.
2 months ago I heard the amazing news that Selaco would be covered on E1M1 among many other awesome titles. I didn't know any details yet outside of ''we're being covered''. A week or so later I woke up with a Discord message from Zach (founder of E1M1), containing nothing but a picture. I opened up and saw a sketch of Dawn kicking all kinds of ass. It was a rough concept and I had no idea what he was getting at. ''Why did you commission something Selaco related?''. It was here that everything started to snap into place for me. ''Are we being featured on the cover!?''
artist: https://twitter.com/atomikranger
How damn amazing is this piece!? Zach was kind enough to allow me to share this with you guys. Remember to keep this a secret for the time being! This issue, among other details, will be unveiled at Realms Deep on August 13-15.
I am so happy with how all of this turned out! Being featured on a gaming magazine is all sorts of awesome and having such an amazing piece of art to go along with it is just the cherry on top. I cannot go into details about this issue yet, and I unfortunately cannot share a text-less version with you guys. I'm share Zach will share more details on it when the event begins!
Studio Name
Back in April when I put the project on Steam, it still felt appropriate to put the game on there with me being credited as Sole Developer of the title. This was my baby, this was 4 years of my life and I did not feel comfortable sharing the credits with other people because (roughly) 95% of the work was all me, with other stuff being commissions from talented artists here and there.
A few months have passed since then and a whole lot has changed. The team grew bigger, everybody's motivation to work on this project went through the roof and it no longer felt like I was the only one keeping the project afloat. Nowadays it's a full team effort. Between the amazing art assets our artists are creating, the amazing UI elements Cockatrice is implementing, the glorious audio effects and music from Lawrence Steel, the writing of Kenneth Knot... It is all here! Everybody is giving it their A-game these days to a point that I refuse to credit the game as a solo-developed game. It is no longer the game it was before we announced it.
Ken and I started talking about the future of Selaco and the team and decided to turn it into a game development studio where we all remotely work on this project and hopefully more in the future.
I'm happy to introduce to you... Altered Orbit Studio's!
And our new Selaco logo
(Alternative versions can be found here https://imgur.com/a/qZzBl4D)
Ken and I have been working on this game for a very long time. Nothing of what existed 4 years ago still exists today. Switching from a generic male Space Marine who did nothing but grunt in pain, to a well developed female lead who is fully voice by a professional voice actress (Melissa Medina). The switch from a horror focused experience to an action packed experience. From a generic grey techbase setting to a beautiful underground city full of bright lights and colors. From fighting red blooded humans to fighting neon purple blooded Aliens. The list goes on forever.
Not only that, even after we locked down certain decisions, things kept changing. We have re-casted the actress for Dawn multiple times, the UC-36 (assault rifle weapon) went through multiple complete overhauls because it was a weapon crucial to ACE Security, the story we once loved so much eventually turned out to not be engaging enough so we kept tweaking until everything was satisfactory. I can go on for hours! I can fill an entire year worth of blog posts about all the ideas that didn't make the cut or has been significantly altered. Change is a common theme for us in this team. We are not afraid to love something and letting go of it because we feel like we can do better. ''Altered Orbit Studios'' is a fantastic name that reflects us. Not only in how we operate, but also in the story of our flagship title, Selaco, where the character AOS is a crucial centerpiece of our story.
Ken and I quickly grew attached to the name. And the moment we pitched it to the rest of the team, everybody was on board with it. Then the logo designed by the same guy who designed our Selaco logo; Paweł Kozak, knocked both of these logo's out of the park and we are happy to have worked with him.
The future is looking awesome and we largely have your support to thank for that. We are trying to get that demo in your hands are soon as we can, please bare with us a little longer!
Nailgun Revision completed!
We finally got to revise our Nailgun! There is a clip on YouTube that you can watch here. Here are two high resolution renders of the gun in First Person view:
I am really happy with how this one turned out! Thanks to you for making this possible!
SMG
Development is progressing smoothly! A rough low-poly has been created and Silvia and John are working together to make sure it matches the concept art. Here is the current version of the SMG:
VERY WIP:
Last week we heard that images were not loading for a lot of people. GIFs weren't loading for anyone on Mobile. Moving forward I will create an Imgur album which consists of all the images and gifs shown in the blog post. Here is the Imgur album for this week: https://imgur.com/a/lxpXQ4n
That's it for this week! Apologies that it's a little shorter than usual. A lot of time is spend creating textures, map assets and other artwork which we think are best kept under wraps for the time being!
Please let us know your thoughts about the things discussed in this blog post! Looking forward to the next one.
Thank you,
- Wesley de Waart
2021-08-01 19:00:26 +0000 UTC
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RealmsDeep
We shared our submission for RealmsDeep two weeks ago. You can see the video here. I want to take a moment to reflect on how the process went.
With the rising popularity of Selaco (thanks to you! <3) we knew our chances of getting a RealmsDeep showcase would be relatively high. As such, we planned what we were going to show beforehand. Knowing how many developers are showing their games at the event, we needed to come up with something that would stand out and make us different compared to many other showcases. A trailer was originally planned (we even already wrote dialog for it!) but soon realized that most developers are probably doing a cut action trailer, so the decision was made to go for a raw uncut gameplay video. The goal was to create a brand new level that we have not shown before and use that level for our video.
We assumed that the deadline would be around September. Mostly because that was when RealmsDeep was shown last year and we assumed 3DR wanted to avoid doing RealmsDeep close to QuakeCon, so September still made sense. Unfortunately, after being invited to the super secret RealmsDeep Discord chat, we soon heard that the deadline for our video submission was 2 months earlier than anticipated; July 14th. We did not hear this until about a little over a month prior. Given how we did not want to rush anything and maintain a high production quality to whatever we are doing, this became a problem.
To be perfectly honest with all of you, this hit us with a ton of bricks and was the main reason I needed to take a break a while ago (https://www.patreon.com/posts/development-blog-53048492) . This was our first chance to show the game to an audience that wasn’t Twitter or Discord, so we had to make it count, there was no time to take lenghty breaks. We had a lot of things we wanted to wrap up before recording the video, but even with insane crunch (which is all done by the team's own initiative. I never ask the team to work overtime), this would not have been a realistic target to hit. To top things off, exams and the final stages of an internship also got in the way, meaning I (the lead developer) did not have as much time as I’d like to work on the video.
We made a list of things we needed to do and got to work immediately. The Weapon Upgrade menu you see in the video did not yet exist, the nailgun did not yet exist, the background track did not yet exist, an earthquake system did not yet exist and it was not yet possible for AI to detect if they were alone or not (which is where the ''They are all dead!" line came from) . Everything was made as quickly as humanly possible. For most of us, this was obvious in many cases as we not quite satisfied with a lot of things; the Nailgun’s model did not match the quality of the other guns, the Weaponbar was completely broken (you can see it when I switched to the Shotgun or Nailgun), we had a bug where pieces of Seaweed would randomly show up on undesired locations (the table in the conference room for example) which was secretly kind of hilarious, and many other things that occurred because we rushed things.
I prefer to have some leeway, so recording began 3 days before the deadline. The biggest challenge was completing the demo run in less than 3 minutes, which was how much time we were allocated. To make this work, many things had to be cut. Including a combat snippet against the Juggernaut. I still want to show a ''Directors cut'' of the gameplay trailer at a later point, exclusive to Patreons. But for now we just wanted things to get back on track.
We don't like having to rush things. Submitting the gameplay video gave all of us a bit of a weird aftertaste in our mouths. Selaco has been very polished game for a while now, but weeks before the deadline we got sloppy with the game's development due to pressure. For the past few weeks we have taken our time to polish everything up and fix all the problems that occurred while getting the video ready. We are back on track, the polished gameplay experience has been restored! Let's start with the nailgun.
Nailgun
I mentioned that the Nailgun did not quite match up to our quality standard. Mostly because of how plain the back of the weapon looked. We fixed that! We’ve added some additional doodads on the back and added a small scope on top of the gun (which can be used!) and added a satisfying sound effect that plays when your nails miss their target and end up penetrating the wall. We then proceeded to improve the feedback of the weapon by adding proper death animations. You can now pin enemies onto the wall!
Full HUD Rewrite
Originally, GZDoom uses a so-called ‘’SBARINFO’’ lump to control the HUD in the game. This works in many cases, but ended up being relatively limited and disallowed us to make what we wanted to make.
Even though Selaco is a (mostly) low-res pixelart game, we wanted the HUD elements to appear crisp and sharp. SBARINFO gave us many problems with the scalablity. We love Ultrawide gaming but the current implementation did not allow us to scale things correctly (the visor borders, for example, would break when going Ultrawide). We also wanted the HUD to feel more dynamic. We wanted the HUD to react to whatever is happening to the player. Such as a gentle HUD shake when landing on the ground after a leap or when taking damage. Or HUD effects like hexacons showing up when your armor gets destroyed. You can see some of the effects in our video, but these we’re mostly ‘’hardcoded’’. Playing at any resolution below 1080p or switching to a different aspect ratio would break things. We don’t want that.
Cockatrice is currently rewriting the entire HUD system using Zscript, allowing us full creative freedom and proper HUD scaling. Ultrawide / 4:3 users out there, we got you covered! The essentials are done, we’re currently adding the other bells & whistles. We will share some video later on!
New weapon: SMG
While the Nailgun is mostly finished (outside of some little bugs that still have to be ironed out), Silvia and John are working on the next weapon: The SMG.
The SMG is a standard issue weapon used by the ACE Security force. With a high rate of fire and limited recoil, this weapon will be a reliable choice in close range encounters and semi-reliable in medium range encounters; capable of dishing out more Damage Per Second than the Assault Rifle at the cost of ammo efficiency and a much higher spread.
Below the barrel we have a mounted Taser! All guns have their very own melee attack, most of which knock enemies away from you. The SMG however, has the added benefit of also shocking the enemy during the punch. This means that stunned enemies will need more time getting back up. Granting you more time to eliminate your target or to deal with the strays while the other guy is still trying to get back on his feet.
Just like with the nailgun, we will show video when it’s done!
Studio Name
Next week! :) After RealmsDeep, we will continue development of Selaco as a game studio, rather than an individual (currently Selaco is credited as a game by ''Wesley de Waart'' (me)). But the game is a team effort these days so it no longer felt right to credit myself. We will announce the name and logo on Patreon next week.
Revising Old Assets
Selaco changed a lot. Many of our past assets did not age well, so we are diving back in to revise these.
Frag, Ice and Poison grenades.
DISCORD GIFS
To all Patrons who are not in the Discord Chat, we often post development videos in the Showcase channel. If you are interested in seeing that sort of stuff, remember to join our server (https://discord.com/invite/qDvNcMmSee)! The gifs below come from the Discord channel.
Testing Earthquakes
Pipe Bursts - All brown pipe textures spawn steam. When the pipe runs out, steam will no longer spawm.
Discord Emojies. Because obviously!
Unused Sketches for the end-trailer banner.
That's it for this week! I would like to do a Q&A soon. If you have any burning questions regarding the game or any of it's developers, comment below or send me a DM on Discord! I will answer them in the next Patreon Blog post.
We hope to see you again next week! Tons of exciting things coming up that we cannot wait to show you!
As usual, massive thanks for backing us!
Kind Regards,
Wesley de Waart
2021-07-25 19:30:38 +0000 UTC
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Heads up: This video is currently exclusive to you and your fellow patrons. Please do not share this gameplay video with anyone outside of our Patron Community!
It is finally done! Most of stuff seen in this trailer was not present 2 months ago. This is an all new level, all new textures, an earthquake system (that we are still improving further!), Nailgun, greatly improved AI Hit Responses & Voice work, a full Upgrade Menu among many other things.
We were limited to only 3 minutes of gameplay footage, which was highly unfortunate because we had to cut out a lot of awesome stuff we want to show, including having to remove an entire combat encounter that takes place right after ending the first encounter (due to reinforcements arriving on the scene), the Juggernaut combat encounter also had to be cut and we did not have time to show off Dawn's Wrist Computer, which functions as a Doom 3-style PDA. Rest assured, we will upload an Extended Cut later on!
The Patreon Exclusive blog post for this weekend will dive deeper into all the things we had to cut in order to make this work. There's quite a story here!
#ReleaseTheSelacoUncut
2021-07-13 19:14:55 +0000 UTC
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Heads up: animated GIF's are used in this blog post which will not display on mobile devices. Send your complaints to Patreon about this issue!
Here's a fun fact: Back in the early days of development, Selaco used full 3D models, normal/bump mapping and PBR materials. It looked pixelated yet very high-end at the same time. It didn't take long for me to realize that it just looked wrong especially because we still used sprites. There was a huge disconnect between the world, the enemies and the player weapon.
A few months later, the user fgsfds (known for his voxel work on Blood: Fresh Supply and Ion Fury) approached me and asked if he could convert the models into voxels. He did not need more convincing than that, it was an instant ''yes''.
As time went on, we realized the scope of the project was far too big for one person to handle, so we brought Borion on board to create brand new voxel objects from scratch, who is well known for his Sprite to Voxel conversions for Duke Nukem 3D.
The challenge here is that voxels are not exactly ''one and done''. Given our emphasis on destruction and weapon feedback, the decision was made to create a ton of different variations of existing voxels. A chair, for example, will have scorch marks on them when destroyed by a grenade, will have holes in its plastic frames when shot by an assault rifle, or will simply blow to bits when hit by the powerful blast of a shotgun or taking too much damage.
Voxels are also often used as Particle Effects. With the Honeycomb cases and Crates (among many others) we spawn individual chucks as they get shoot which feels immensely satisfying. At times I wonder what the real reward is; killing the enemy or missing a shot and killing whatever object lies behind him?
Next week on Patreon: Our Realms Deep gameplay demo!
Again, thanks for supporting this project of ours! We're still brainstorming Voxel ideas so if you have something fun in mind, sound off below. We're open to ideas!
Wesley de Waart
2021-07-10 14:24:28 +0000 UTC
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Stress
In our first ever Patreon post I mentioned that I wanted to feel comfortable opening myself up. In our Discord server I am not often one to speak about what is going on in my life as I consider myself a rather private person. I think I have reached a certain boiling point where I feel like it’s best to start expressing myself and explain what is going on lately, because I think I am going to drive myself insane if I keep things to myself any longer.
On December 14th, we were all casually working on Selaco like we always did. Outside of a few playtesters, nobody knew about this game yet and we weren’t planning to go public anytime soon. While the product was shaping up amazingly well, we felt like it was not quite presentable yet, there were too many placeholders and other things that were not quite there yet. After thinking more and more about it, I got the idea to open up a Twitter page and start showing screenshots every now and again. The game might not be ready, but who cares, a first tweet never gains much traction anyway. I wanted to slowly build up an audience as time went on, and once a decent audience has been reached, release a trailer to get a ball rolling. I booted up the game, took a screenshot and shared it in the developer chat.
‘’Should we just post this on Twitter and announce Selaco today?’’ I asked in the developer chat, completely out of the blue. We decided to just do it. Fuck it. What do we have to lose? The game might not be exactly according to our vision yet, but it will be by the time we have a decent audience
I put the tweet out there, not expecting much traction because it was our first ever tweet. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my phone go absolutely haywire upstairs. Constant loud vibrations of my phone resting on my wooden desk upstairs. ‘’It’s probably just a bunch of Discord DM’s’’ I thought to myself. I took a bottle of cola from the fridge and went back to the office.
When I got back I took a look at my monitor and managed to get a feeling of shock. I had to do a double take. ‘’20+ notifcations’’ according to Twitter. ‘’Yeah this is spam, has to be” After clicking on notification button, it turned out to be a ton of retweets, likes and comments because people liked the screenshot we posted. People with rather large audiences like Gianni Matragrano and Civvie11 saw the tweet and shed a light on it.
As time went on, the tweet managed to reach a 1000 likes within 3 hours. For an account that had literally 0 followers, that is absolutely huge. At the end of the day, we managed to hit 2000 likes on the tweet, and a 1000 followers in total. 2 weeks later, we had 2000 followers. Less than a month later we had 3000. It just kept going. A few websites even began talking about us and people were genuinely excited according to the reactions. I was extremely grateful and happy with how well things were going for the project. We celebrated, but it did not take long before something else came knocking.
Stress started to introduce itself. While being the lead developer of Selaco, I am also on an internship for university and had important exams coming up. Selaco had to keep moving forward, but my internship and exams were giving me a lot of additional pressure. I fought through it. I did both things fulltime and worked till 4am on multiple occasions and got back up at 9am to work non-stop. My days literally involved around nothing but work. I even skipped dinner on multiple occasions and haven't opened Whatsapp, an app that I use to stay in contact with friends, for multiple days.
Now, it has reached the point where it is started to eat away at me. Ever since our reveal on December 14, I have been working non-stop on this game. My body is giving me signs that it is time to slow down and take a breather, because I feel that anxiety is starting to kick in. Waking up is especially troublesome at times, where negativity will not escape my mind. I am usually a very positive guy, but lately I feel like that side of me is slipping away.
I have decided to slow things down. I won’t stop working on Selaco completely, but the hours have gotten inhuman and they cannot go on any longer. It is important to know that I never involved my team into this crunch. They have a list of things they can work on and everything on there is reasonable and very do-able on top of a full-time job. I took it upon myself to work this hard because I was (at the time) the only programmer on board and things simply had to keep moving.
For the weeks to come, I’ll spend time fixing bugs and apply some general polish to the game, but the intensive stuff is going to be put on hold. Around august, when my internship is over, I’ll get back to full-time development on Selaco again. But with reasonable hours. Which is easy, because I won't have exams and an internship to deal with then.
A while back someone in the Discord Server asked what important lesson I had learned during the development of Selaco. "I don't have anything noteworthy", was my answer. I have trouble being honest about how I feel, especially publicly. The one thing I have learned from Selaco is one that applies to life in general:
If you ever feel anxious; know that there is no shame in slowing down and that is okay to take a break.
I hope you can understand this decision. I am grateful that Patron allows the project to keep moving forward even when I am not around. We have plenty of awesome stuff coming, and as usual, I will share most of the things as they come. I am thankful that you decided to stick around with us!
Now, on to the good stuff!
REMEMBER: GIFS DO NOT LOAD ON MOBILE!
Proximity Mines
Selaco is meant to give the player a choice in how they approach their encounters. Up until now, we have put a lot of focus on tools for the player to fight more offensively (Grenades, Ice Bombs, Gas), but didn’t put nearly enough focus into more defensive playstyles. We have a few fun tools in mind that we will absolutely get back to later on. For now, lets talk about our new toy: Proximity Bombs.
This was a fun one. Back in the Project Ominous (Selaco's old project name) days I added functional proximity mines but scrapped it because it did not fit with the pace of the game. Ominous was about pushing as much as you can, while Selaco is a bit more tactical where playing defensively is often the best approach. This lead to the decision to add more defensive options to the player.
Proximity Mine ammo can be found in the later levels of the game and come in packs of 3. After throwing, the Proximity Mine will arm itself after 2 seconds. A beeping sound will signal the player that the mine is activated, along with a blue pulsing light. The EXON label on the mine ensures that the mines are of high quality, and therefore will not explode when the user gets near it. Rather, it only detonates when a non-civilian / ACE Security Guard happens to get near the mine.
Thrown the mine but changed you mind? You can pick them back up again by pressing USE.
Mines *can* be used offensively, but due to the limited throwing range and the 2 second arming time, it is not often encouraged. This is where enemy Voice Over comes into play. If you hear that the enemy is pushing, start tossing mines around. Thank me later!
Light Switches
Most rooms in Selaco will have light switches. What is the point? Nothing. But with Selaco's rule to make everything as interactive as possible, light switches were a must. In some office area's, you can even close the shutters to hide from the enemy. Good fun! The demo level will have a few of those.
Destructible Voxels
Because who doesn’t love breaking things? I often boot up Selaco just to shoot at props before heading back to work. It’s great!
That's it for this week. We have some fun things planned over the coming week! Including Jerry's approach to Texture creation, Borion's voxel workflow and...Music! We finally got around to adding Safe Rooms to the world of Selaco and it comes with a very pleasing tune. Can't wait to share more.
Like I mentioned above, thank you so much for supporting us! You have no idea how much of a positive effect Patreon has on the quality of this game.
- Wesley de Waart
2021-06-28 23:52:49 +0000 UTC
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Lets dive right into it!
The nailgun has been added! The animations have been made, the code is written and most of the sounds have been created. Watch the video here! *some* audio effects are still missing, like a sound for nails being impaled into the wall or a sound effects for nails that bounce around on the floor.
Nailgun Demonstration
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW8HOFvFGLE
Without any applied upgrades, the Nailgun's drum magazine holds 60 nails. Its stopping power is high, but has the drawback of having travelling projectiles. Given how mobile our enemies are, it is going to be hard to accurately nail those shots, but if you do, they will be impactful. Watch the video above and let us know your thoughts.
It's secondary fire is a Nailbomb. The Nailbomb itself does relatively low splash damage (the range is indicated by a red flickering ring before it explodes), but shoots out 30 nails over a full 360 radius inflicting a good amount of damage to larger groups of enemies.
I have also added a system to detect whether or not an enemy is near a wall after being killed with the nailgun, causing them to get pinned onto the wall. The pose below is not final, it is created as a reference to see what it would look like. So please ignore how this guy looks like a floating ghost!
Upgrade Screen
The Upgrade Screen is going to be all sorts of awesome! After the third level, Save Rooms are introduced to the player. Save Rooms are basically a ''central hub'' that can be found in each level from level 3 onwards. Here, you can upgrade your weapons, buy ammo, enter Incursion Mode (more on that in a later blog post), and save your progress if you are playing Hardcore Mode. You can also fast travel back to previous save houses which are located in past levels, and add / remove Gameplay mutators. Here is what the screen is going to look like. For now, at least. We are still refining things and making it better.
[All upgrade names are a placeholder. No Cock Blaster in this game, sorry!]
Destructible Cover
We're still adding tons of destructibility to the game, and it's shaping up great! Take a look.
That's it for this week! We have begun working on a logo which we can *hopefully* show within the next week or two. We have been using a placeholder for far too long now and it's time to get something better.
Once again, thank you all so much for sticking with us and backing this project!
Kind Regards,
- Team Selaco
2021-06-14 01:09:20 +0000 UTC
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Quick update. The model is finished and has been added into the game. Our new non-scammer 3D-artist completely killed it and prepared this model in a matter of days with amazing results. Now it's all hands on deck to create visual effects, audio, animations and properly make code for the weapon.
We will show an update when it's more presentable and, obviously, show some pinned corpses onto walls.
Here is a GIF I put together where the weapon is morphing through the Concept Art and 3D model stages.
Concept art by our very own Silvia Merconchini. 3D model created by John Lloyd Claro.
2021-06-01 10:20:14 +0000 UTC
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Short little update about what we have been working on!
Nailgun - Troubled development
The 3D model of the Nailgun is currently in its final phase and it's final few details are being added! Hopefully I can show the full model later this upcoming week! Apologies that it's taking a little longer than intended. We've had some issues finding the right artist to get it done. We rely entirely on freelancers to get 3D models done and one of the most impressive portfolio's we have received, turned out to be fake portfolio with stolen work from another artist. After receiving a lackluster low-poly from said artist, we felt like something wasn't right, so we started digging into the artist's portfolio to figure out what was wrong. As it turns out, none of the work was his. Thankfully, no money was paid upfront so our budget did not take a hit. We managed to continue our search and managed to find an artist who was capable of even more impressive things. Eager to show more later on! So far, it's shaping up great!
For now, here is the concept art of the nailgun. Just like all guns in Selaco, the aftermath of this weapon is going to be absolutely devastating. While its Rate of Fire may not be as fast as the UC-36 Assault Rifle, a single shot of the nailgun is capable of leaving a massive trail of destruction behind and pin its targets against the wall along with a gigantic crater around the nail's point of impact. The 80-rounds Drum Magazine ensures that Dawn can wreck havoc for a long duration of time! Want to fire faster? No worries, with enough Weapon Parts you can upgrade the rate of fire and increase your damage output significantly!
Speaking of upgrades...
Upgrade System
Cockatrice is currently working on a UI for Selaco's upgrade system! I've seen the entire menu in action and - bias aside - the look and feel of the UI is not something I have ever seen before in GZDoom. In a future demonstration video we will absolutely be showing this off!
Selaco highly encourages exploration, as levels are often quite big and the amount of rooms you can explore are high. Some area's contain resources called ''Weapon Parts'', which can be used to improve the power of your weapons, among other things. On top of Passive Weapon Upgrades, there is also the option to customize the behaviour of your weapons Alternative Fire. Dont like how the default ALternative Fire of the shotgun fires both barrels at once? Why not replace it with a Flak Upgrade and instead shoot shards that ricochet off of walls?
But be careful, Dawn is not the only one who gets more powerful. The enemy will gain new tricks and abilities as you progress throughout the campaign. Don't fall behind by ignoring those precious Weapon Parts or they will give you a hard time in the late-game!
New animations
We haven given our soldiers an additional animation pass. We've adding a Stumble Animation that triggers when you shoot a soldier during their strafing state, as well as interactive Death Animations. For example, if a soldier is dying and on it's knees, they will fall over forward. However, shoot them during this animation and they will drop backwards. Cool touches like these make the shooting so much more satisfying! Below are two animations. One where I shot the target, one where I did nothing. We are adding a whole bunch of those and it feels absolutely amazing. I'm so stoked for people to finally get to play this!
Cabinet Cards
One of Selaco's features are the so called ''Storage Cabinets''. It is basically like Doom 3's Storage Lockers except instead of a code you have to remember, you carry around their personal card to unlock their storage lockers. For the longest time these were just placeholder checkerboard boxes, but we finally got around to giving them a proper texture and sound effect. The 'elevator animation' is still a bit buggy, so please try to ignore how the (placeholder) Armor pickup is already in position before the elevator gets up there.
Weapon Icons
Picking up a new gun in a first person shooter is a big deal. It's a new toy to play with, a new companion that stays with you throughout the entire campaign. To ensure maximum satisfaction, we've added glorious Weapon Icons that display on the HUD when Dawn acquires a new weapon (there's a glorious sound effect too but we'll show that off later in a gameplay video!).
A lot of gifs this week! Looking forward to show off the nailgun model in the next blog.
As usual, thank you all so much for funding this project of ours. I'm confident that there will be something to enjoy for everyone!
See you all next week.
Wesley de Waart
2021-05-24 02:27:52 +0000 UTC
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We are still in our polishing phase, so not a lot of time is spend on adding brand new stuff. Cleaner code and bug fixes are not exactly showcase material. We are preparing to send a small amount of Preview keys out soon, so we are hard at work making sure that things are top notch!
The nailgun is still in development (and it's going to be awesome!), Lawrence made 2 new tracks, a whole load of new sound effects, the artists have been hard at work creating textures and artwork and more and more levels are slowly moving to completion. Everything is going smoothly! I'll share some bits and pieces here.
Artwork
We posted a lovely picture of Dawn and her mother on Twitter for Mother's Day, but did you know... The original picture had a bit of blood on it!? We wanted to keep Mother's Day light-hearted so we got rid of the blood splatter. here is the Directors Cut of the artwork!
New effects!
Feast your eyes on the gifs below that feature some of our new special effects. Still a lot to do here, but we think the current results are fantastic. Please keep in mind that some of these area's are highly unfinished and are simple block-outs.
Sparks!
Explosion!
Smoke effects!
Shadows and lighting (and a bullet ricochet)!
Animations!
Bloody feet after stepping on blood decals
Wrist Codex
We are spending a lot of time flashing out this world as much as we can and a large part of that is achieved through the help of Data Pads. Not every civilian has been able to take all of their stuff when they were forced to evacuate. Bad news for them but good news Dawn, as it allows her to gain more insight on her surroundings by downloading Data Pad contents to her Wrist Codex. Data pads provide additional lore, secret hints, code combinations and more. Cockatrice is our UI programmer and will guide you through the idea.
"HI! I'm Cockatrice, and I've been brought on board to do some UI stuff for Selaco. One such stuff is the Keypad interface that appears when Dawn is trying to open a lock-box or door that requires a key code. It's pretty self explanatory but it looks nice and makes beepy noises when you press the keys! Keyboard controls work as well, so you don't have to move your mouse around too much to enter a code.
The bigger project I'm working on is the Codex interface that is on screen when Dawn is using her wrist mounted codex. We have some interesting plans for different things that will be valuable through the Codex interface. Datapads are collectible items in the world and each one will expose some greater story or provide hints for the level or secrets.
The Codex interface is designed to be like nothing you've seen in a GZDoom mod or standalone game before. It features a smooth flowing tablet like interface that lets you open multiple windows, resize and position items as you see fit, and should be accessible at almost all screen resolutions. While it's currently incomplete I'm already excited at the many things we'll be able to do inside the Codex ."
Bonus: Voxel Burger!
2021-05-11 01:27:07 +0000 UTC
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I had a wonderful blog post written yesterday. As I was nearing competition, Chrome decided it would have been the perfect time to crash on me and erase everything that I had written. No draft saved either. Apologies for the delay with the development blog.
Allow me to share what we have been working on this week!
Nailgun
I've wanted to work on this weapon for a long, long time! When making a F.E.A.R. inspired shooter, there is one weapon you cannot simply cannot leave behind. The nailgun has been on the to-do list since the day I began this project and we finally started working on it. Unlike most other weapons in Selaco, this is a projectile-based weapon capable of pinning enemy sprites against the wall which will, obviously, feature multiple different death animations! Concept art has been created and a 3D artist is about to start turning into a full 3D model. Once we have something to share, I'll post it here on Patreon right away!
Enemy VO Improvements
I finally gave myself some time to completely rework the way enemy VO works. Currently, they have a tendency to talk over each other and portray themselves as a bunch of amateurs. Now, they patiently wait for each other to finish before they speak, unless something of high priority happens (A player who starts playing aggressive, or a nearby hand grenade). I also wrote subtitles for each and every voice line to display them to the player during combat. As usual, these are option and can be turned off. On top of that, 3 new enemy types are now fully voiced!
Accessibility
During playtesting, a few playtesters picked up on some potential issues that need to be addressed regarding the accessibility of the game, mainly in the visual department. Selaco relies heavily on color-coded icons to guide players to items, flickering lights to add atmosphere and screenshake to add some additional 'oompf' to the guns and certain scripted events; All of which could become problems to people with color-blindness or photosensitive epilepsy. I've done some research and started looking into ways to fix it. Colorblind options and the ability to reduce bright muzzle flashes / light flicker will be added in the future. For now though, options to disable (weapon)screenshake, camera sway and dynamic FOV have been added into the game.
Roomba AI
In the past, Roomba's just kind of drove around being nothing but background scenery. At best they would jump with heart eyes when Dawn got close to them, but other than that, they did nothing. A few days ago I finally got the improving the Roomba's and gave them some proper AI. Now, they actively search for trash to get rid of. If you ever drink a can of Arachnacola, expect a Roomba to eventually stop by to clean it up for you. See the video below!
https://imgur.com/a/jJOa4Hw
General polish
Now that we are finally on Steam, sending out test versions have never been easier. We have been actively doing playtesting sessions with a group of people and the feedback has been amazing. However, there is still a lot of work to do. As usual with 'early versions', there's a fair of issues and 'rough edges' that need to be ironed out. This week has seen a lot of that. If you are in our Discord server, take a look at #github-commits to see the things we have working on!
There are also a lot of things done that are not really worth mentioning in blog posts. New audio effects, textures and music are all still in full production! Maybe next week I can share a snippet of a new track that Lawrence is currently working on!
Again, thank you all so much for funding this project and sticking with us!
- Wesley de Waart
2021-04-26 18:33:52 +0000 UTC
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Holy shit we have reached the $1000 p/m milestone! This in incredible and more than we could have ever hoped for. Seriously, thank you all so much for funding this project and sticking with us.
For the past 10 days I haven't been able to be very active on Patreon, apologies for that. While I did share a fair bit of content in our Patreon-exclusive Discord channels, I haven’t been able to get around writing a blog post for a while now. A lot of Selaco related projects had to be put on hold earlier due to a lack of funding, but now that we have a Patreon, things are firing in all cylinders and I need to be there to communicate with the team and make sure things are going into the right direction. But today is Sunday, a perfect time to write a short little blog post!
New talent
Lets begin with the big one: We have a new artist on board! Silvia Merconchini, fresh out of the Nemo Academy of Digital Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, who will help us out with the illustrations and concept art for Selaco. This week was our first week of working together and things are going very well! We mainly focused on getting her familiar with the art style of the game and are slowly easing her in. Silvia already made an ingame asset which I will show here soon, a lovely fictional branding poster! Above you can see some of the work she has done in the past. We are thrilled to her on board and are confident that she will create some amazing things! And yes, backers get to see it first!
What are working on?
Everything. The OST has been put on hold for a few months due to a shitty budget, but now with Patreon we can finally continue. YijArt is working on brand new gore models for the enemies (kind of like Quake 2, where they get riddled with bullet holes when they are nearly dead, except even more awesome), Borion is creating some delicious food voxels, I'm working on polishing up Selaco's gameplay systems while also doing some effects work, the rest of the team are all fully focused on the art assets for Selaco. Its amazing to see how much of a well oiled machine we have come over the last few months. Going public and getting such amazing input from you guys is giving us a massive boost in morale.
Steam
As you might have probably heard by now, Selaco finally has a Steam Store page! Sorry that it took so long, I've been knee-deep in the development of Selaco and that has been top-priority for me. Now that the game is finally is a *very* playable state that could almost be declared as final, I started setting up the Steam page!
After making the public announcement on Twitter I was hoping to reach somewhere around the 1000 Wishlist's, but assumed it would hang around the 500-600 range. We reached 1500 Wishlist's in a single day(!) and are currently sitting at 2000. I have no words, this is incredible and more than any of us could have dreamed of. The release is still relatively far away (August 25, 2255 is still years away after all!) so we have plenty of time to polish things up and make it even better than it already is.
Yesterday I fiddled around with Steamworks and uploaded a Selaco test version which is what we are using to playtest the game. Much better than sending Google Drive links to playtesters containing a ZIP file with the game on it. Speaking of playtests...
Playtests
Now that we slowly approaching a playable preview builds, we started doing some extensive testing sessions. Playing the game back to back over and over to ensure that things are polished, bug free and fun to play. Seeing the reactions in the playtesting channels has put a massive smile on my face, one that I could not contain. Things are looking very well for Selaco and the combat has never been in a better place than it has now. The systems are beginning the click and I'm growing more and more confident as a level designer now that I know how the AI works. The arena design in the last few levels I have worked on have been better than anything I have ever done before because of it. Perfect playgrounds for both Dawn and the AI. I'll dive deeper into Selaco's level design later!
Demo
One of the tier rewards is a Patreon demo and wanted to give a status update on it. While the game is stable, there are still a lot of art assets that need to be replaced or added. Many sprites are literally just squares that say things like [DEAD CIVILIAN], [DEAD GUARD], [ROACH VOXEL HERE] among others things. We remove them for twitter post, but there is supposed to be much more going on in some of the screenshots we have shown, but we simply do not have the art assets yet.
A possibility is to just temporarily remove them all and send the demos out, but I strongly believe that our environmental storytelling takes a hit without those art pieces and that is a big part of Selaco's appeal. On the bright side, at the rate things are going right now, I'm sure the demo is much closer than what our original demo release target was, which was around October for patrons and December for the public. I'll give updates when I can and hopefully we can get the demo's out way sooner.
Conclusion
I established in an early blog post that I will always be completely upfront and honest with you. If you back a project, you deserve nothing more but the truth. With that said, trust me that Selaco is in a fantastic place right now. Over the coming weeks I will share some extensive looks into the things we have been working on. If you have a Discord account, make sure to join us. I share a lot in the #Showcase channel!
I'm excited for the things to come, hopefully you are too. Thanks for being here with us on Patreon!
Wesley de Waart
2021-04-19 02:39:04 +0000 UTC
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We're planning to release another gameplay video this Saturday that is a little more action-packed than the last one; taking place in an Office Complex where we get the opportunity to show off our particle system in combat, and show how Dawn handles herself when the odds against her.
I must admit that I was never quite fond of the gameplay video we showed a while back. Selaco is not an easy game and I felt like we failed to show that in the last combat video. It felt rather one-sided where Dawn was kicking all kinds of ass while the enemy barely got a chance to shine. This is not often the case! Dawn is a fragile character and she can be easily brought down if she's not careful enough. The upcoming gameplay video will do a better job at showing how intense these encounters can get and how often you will survive by the skin of your teeth.
I am really proud of where Selaco is right now. Every time I boot up the game to test something, I end up playing multiple levels because of how much fun I am having. I strongly believe that our love for the genre shines through and that people will love the world that we have created. Selaco is intense and action packed, but is not afraid to hit the brakes to let the environments do the talking. When people get their hands on it, I hope they can appreciate that and take their time exploring.
We are beyond excited to share a playable demo in the near future and are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it.
For now, here is a preview to look at!
2021-04-08 03:03:05 +0000 UTC
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Interview questions written by Ken Coghlan, writer for Selaco.
Q: What's your favorite thing to eat for breakfast that isn't a breakfast food
A: Cake, although that is classed as a breakfast food if you’re in France.
Q: At what age did you start to make to play an instrument/make music? What influenced you to do so?
A: Around 17 I think, my brother and friend Shaun (who went on to become dubstep/EDM artists Flux Pavilion and Doctor P respectively) were in a band and Shaun suggested I tried playing the bass guitar.
I’d never really considered making music before but picked it up and enjoyed it a lot, the 3 of us made a band called ‘The Brotherhood of Funk’ and played dodgy James Brown covers in his shed.
Q:Have you ever had musical training or did you learn by yourself?
A: I basically taught myself, I did a course at uni on Music Production but that was more about the engineering and mixing side than the actual playing and composition side.
After playing bass guitar and doing band stuff we (as in me, my brother and other friends from the small town I grew up in) all started messing around with Reason and making electronic music. We were all massively into Drum’n’Bass and a lot of terrible d’n’b beats were made back then.
I always liked making random weird stuff though, and was heavily into Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and that sort of IDM stuff. Here’s an album of that sort of stuff I made wayyy back in like 2008. It’s a pretty mixed bag quality wise.
Anyway, through doing all that stuff I was learning as I was going about synthesis, EQ, mixing/mastering, music theory, composition etc etc. There’s a lot to learn and it’s a continuous process!
Q: How did Satsuma Audio come to be?
A: So after I finished University I had the idea that I wanted to be a video game composer, it seemed the best fit for my love of just making random and unusual music, plus I have always been into games since I was a kid and in fact before music my ambition was to be a games programmer.
However at the time I finished Uni it seemed a super hard industry to break into (there wasn’t the mobile/app scene and the indie game scene was a lot smaller) and I was kinda burnt out on music and was super into cooking and wanted to be a chef so I worked in restaurants for a couple years.
Then around the time the iPad was released, my brother (who was doing pretty well as a dubstep producer by this point) very generously bought me one for Christmas. Checking out the App Store there were tons of small games all made by small studios and I realised, they all need music! It seemed much more achievable to break into doing video game music this way than approaching studios making PS2 games or whatever.
So I decided to give it a proper shot and quit my restaurant job and took a job working as a breakfast chef in a hotel, I would work 5am - 1pm cooking breakfast and then come home and work on music stuff in the afternoon. At first to build up a showreel I would download games from the App Store and play them on silent and then try and imagine what music they should have and try and make it as a practice exercise. Here’s one of my earliest showreels from 2011 which is mostly just random pieces I made set to clips of existing games.
I try to be as versatile as possible and compose in any style of music as well as doing sound design, a lot of it was learning as I go and my skills have improved a lot over the past 10 years for sure!
After a while I was getting more regular commissions and went down to 4 days a week at my breakfast chef job, then I quit that and found another job 2 days a week and then eventually left altogether to do Satsuma Audio full time and I am thankful for it every day!
For the name ‘Satsuma Audio’ I just thought it sounded cool, no other reason really, except I wanted a name like that instead of just ‘Lawrence Steele - Composer’ as I thought it might help me stand out a bit and seem more professional, not sure if that works or not!
Q: Now, I’ve been making music for seventeen years and play a variety of instruments, self-trained. I’ve never taken the time to learn to read music. So tell us, do you? And if so, do you recommend other budding musicians take the time to learn?
A: I don’t read music no, I did try having piano lessons at one point and part of that was learning to read music but I got too busy and couldn’t keep it up and it never really progressed.
I think it depends on your background and training really, if you learn music the ‘proper’ way then reading music is a big part of it, and to be honest I imagine it is a valuable skill to have. I think to be able to read a piece and play it on piano easily would be useful from a compositional point of view as you could easily analyse what is going on in terms of harmony, theory etc and get ideas you can apply to your own writing.
It’s something I have always wanted to learn more of but never quite got round to it, though I wouldn’t say it’s essential to play or compose music at all, especially not when we have computers that can do a lot of the work for us!
I often load up MIDI files of pieces I want to analyse, if I’m researching a certain style for example and view the music that way to learn from it. Also I am always using online resources to look up chords, scales etc.
Q: What was the first instrument you learned to play and what was the progression from that instrument to the others you play?
A: As I mentioned before it was the bass guitar, but then once I moved on to making music on the computer, a keyboard is a big part of that.
My skills on the keyboard have just kind of naturally grown over the years as it’s the primary way to interface with the computer and virtual instruments, synthesizers etc. though I am by no means a virtuoso and still try to improve and practice as much as I can. When I have time (which unfortunately isn’t too often) I like to try and learn to play pieces that are above my skill level to improve my skills that way.
Also around 10 years or so ago I started playing the Ukulele, just the small soprano one at first but now I prefer the bigger Baritone Ukulele. I actually find it a really great instrument for composing and coming up with chord sequences, as with just 4 strings, pretty much everything you play is *some* kind of chord! Plus the visual style of moving chord shapes around is more intuitive to me than on the piano some times, which probably comes from my guitar background.
Q: Who have been the most influential musicians to you?
A: Frank Zappa is a big one (my dad was a huge fan and we were saturated with his music as kids and it’s definitely had a massive influence). He was a guitar god and all round musical genius and also one to experiment and mix different styles.
Aphex Twin, when I first heard ‘Flim’ it was a mindblowing experience for me and eye opening as to the potential of what electronic music can be.
Of course there are tons more, game wise all the SEGA Genesis stuff is a big influence, I love the sound of that thing!
Q: It’s Friday afternoon. You’ve had a hard week and you’re excited to finally start your weekend. What album do you blast on your car stereo on the way home from work?
A: Well luckily I work at home so no commute! And also after a week of listening to stuff I can often be a bit burnt out on music and don’t necessarily reach for it straight away.
That said it would probably be some old jazz vinyl or something like that :)
Q: What’s your creative process? When you start a new song, which part do you focus on first?
A: It really depends on the context and what the track is for.
For an electronic track, like for Selaco for example I will often start with drums, to get a groove going and then just jam over that until I find something I like.
Although I’ve been using a bunch of my modular synth gear on Selaco so far and for a couple of tracks I’ve started off with a repetitive synth bass line and recorded it while continuously evolving the sound and then used that to build the rest of the track on top of, which has been quite effective.
If it’s like an orchestral piece I will often start with strings and just try and find something, either a melody or little harmonic idea that I feel sums up the mood I’m going for and then just start to build the arrangement out of that, adding various layers and then if often just sort of naturally grows and builds from there.
I think once I find the ‘seed’, that sort of core melody, or sound, or texture, it can be anything really, just something that captures the mood or feeling I’m aiming for (I often have the game visuals on the screen when I’m working on initial ideas to see if it feels right) then the rest grows organically out of that.
Q: How do you know when a piece of music is just missing one little thing to be completed, and how do you find it?
A: I guess it’s if it just feels empty or a bit too boring or repetitive at one point. Though I think I can sometimes be guilty of overcomplicating and adding too many layers and elements when sometimes repetition can actually be a good thing, especially for more background type music.
As for finding what it’s missing, sometimes I’ll just find myself humming or singing a melody over the top or like miming air drum fills or something like that, so I try to recreate that and put it in. Other times I’ll just try messing around with various synth patches or instruments over the top until I hit something that feels right.
Sometimes it flows easily and sometimes it feels like pulling teeth but it usually comes together eventually!
Q:What was the first piece of music you were actually paid for?
A: Yup here it is! - https://soundcloud.com/satsumabitsforsite/magnetz-theme
It was the theme for a mobile puzzle game called ‘MagnetZ’ I did in 2011 where you have to move balls around with magnets to get into a hole or something. It had a sort of electricity theme to the visuals so I tried to mix that with a general fun, casual game feeling.
Q: What piece of music are you most proud of (not including anything you’ve done for Selaco)?
A: This is a hard one! Especially as Selaco’s music so far is definitely shaping up to be some of my best!
I’ve made hundreds of tracks at this point and have loads of different bits and pieces I like scattered throughout them, for example the organ solo at 0:28 in this spooky jazz track for a Halloween slot machine theme I did in 2015 remains one of my favourite things I ever did!
That said some of my proper favourites are:
This IDM/Glitch track I made mostly on my modular synth, feels like the logical conclusion of the Aphexy stuff I was trying to make way back in 2011.
This track called ‘Breezy Day’ from the soundtrack of upcoming Australian farming game ‘Dinkum’, I think it has a real nice peaceful acoustic sound, and I love how the melodica line at 0:37 just flows along so naturally, I just randomly improvised that in one take, no idea how!
Q: How hasthe process of writing Selaco’s soundtrack been for you so far? Or more specifically; how did you approach the main theme for Selaco?
A: For the main theme, there were a lot of things I wanted it to ‘hit’. There’s the retro aesthetic, with the game being built on the Doom engine and everything, and then all the neon lights and stuff in the visuals, the female main character and also the dystopian futuristic setting.
Also at the time the game was called ‘Ominous’, which I was bearing in mind but I focused more on having it match the neon aesthetic.
I started off with the bassline that you hear first in the intro, it’s actually very loosely based on the classic opening riff from E1M1 in the original Doom. That sort of bouncing back and forth from a bass note to a higher note effect, just feels right for that retro FPS game feel. I recorded this bassline on an analogue synth and played with the filter cutoff for that classic evolving squelchy sound.
From there I added the sort of jazzy chord stabs you hear coming in at 0:07. These help to highlight that neon lights aesthetic I wanted to get in there. I knew I wanted a bit of an 80s vibe as well, that mix of sort of shimmery synths and guitars, and the classic 80s electro tom fills you hear between each section.
The main lead melody line just came from messing around on the keyboard over the top, that sort of piercing vibrato synth lead sound mixed with guitars helps to give it both the ’80s neon’ and ‘retro video game’ vibes at once I feel.
Once I had this core base, the rest just sort of wrote itself really!
One thing I’ve been liking doing a lot on this soundtrack is adding lots of evolving synth layers from my modular synth rig, you can hear this in the 0:37 section. This sort of thing features a lot more heavily throughout some of the other tracks which are intended to be a bit more ambient/background.
Q: How did you decide how Selaco was going to sound? What influenced your process?
A: As said above, the neon lights aesthetic as well as the retro Doom engine and Dawn as the main character were all major considerations. I agreed with Wesley early on as well that the soundtrack should be heavily synth based with a bit of guitar mixed in as well.
I think for the theme I focused more on the retro aspect of it but as the soundtrack has progressed I’ve tried to focus more on the story and setting and make it more of it’s own thing rather than being too ‘retro referencey’, if that makes sense.
The game itself, while the GZDoom aesthetic is a big part of it, it also has a lot more going on in terms of story, setting, characters, gameplay etc. and I want the OST to be a part of that as well.
Q: Top 5 all time favorite albums?
A: Sorry gonna pass on this one as it would take me way too long to work out and I’d definitely end up forgetting something! Plus I tend to think more in terms of individual tracks than albums, I think ‘The Stranglers - Black and White’ would almost certainly be in there though.
2021-04-03 15:51:36 +0000 UTC
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Before Dawn was Dawn, the protagonist of Selaco went through several major changes.
Back in the Project Ominous days, our unnamed protagonist, known simply as Ominous Dude, started off very much like Doom Guy. And, considering we were still a Doom mod, that’s to be expected. As the game grew and progressed, we wanted to give him a little more personality and wrote up some test lines for voice actor auditions. We were tossing around the idea of giving the player a choice whether they wanted to play as a male or female (Ominous Dude and Dudette, respectively), so we opened the auditions to both male and female VAs.
The auditions started rolling in. While the male auditions were mostly lackluster, the female auditions were filled with different personalities and potential. This, along with budgeting constraints, led to the decision to just have a female protagonist. Ominous Dudette had won out.
When writing for Ominous Dudette began in earnest, she was originally your typical badass retro FPS character. She had one liners she’d yell at enemies as she slaughtered them, a demonic laugh track that would play over the gore, and other typical clichés. Many of her lines were call backs to old action movies and video games and things like that, but they lacked real substance. This all changed when art development for the character began.
Once we found an artist whose style fit perfectly with what we had in mind, we started working with him on test sketches. We had a pretty good idea of how we wanted her to look, and he filled in anywhere he thought there was room for improvement. Our excitement grew with each new iteration he sent as he brought our character to life. By the time the first artwork was finalized, we knew this character had to be something more than just quips and callbacks.
As the character was changing, both in design and personality, so too did the voice actress playing her. The first VA didn’t quite fit the new character and we went through the casting process again to find someone who better fit what we had in mind. We cast a new VA and got the first round of new lines written and recorded. Unfortunately, however, when we sent over a second batch of lines to be recorded our new VA was very slow to respond and kept pushing back their delivery date. Deadlines came and went without any word from them and it got to the point we decided to cut ties and move on. All of this finally led us to Melissa Medina, a wonderful VA who has really given a proper voice to our character. She’s insanely professional and has been an absolute pleasure to work with.
And so Dawn was born. We got rid of all the retro FPS clichés in her lines and strive to make her feel like a real person and not just some badass that loves killing. Her past (which will be elaborated on in the future) built her into the person you play as in Selaco. She has her own motivations, hopes, and fears. She isn’t some invincible maniac, just a person trying to get by and survive.
Sometime after we went public with Selaco, and in particular with Dawn, we decided to redesign her armor a bit. There were some comparisons floating around between her armor and that of another female FPS character, ones we didn’t notice in our excitement. The changes were for the better in every sense, though, and we’re thankful that we made them.
Selaco has gone through so many changes since the early days and Dawn is definitely one of the things we’re most proud of. A lot of work has gone into making her feel as real a person as possible, something we feel is often lacking in this genre of games. Her personality shines through the tense action of the combat, and we really think you guys are going to love her.
We sure do.
In a later blog post, we will dive deeper into the thought process of her character design and show designs that didn't quite make the cut. Stay tuned!
2021-03-27 18:44:04 +0000 UTC
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I usually prefer to not get too personal in the public. I feel 'safer' speaking on behalf of the team instead of myself. But now that Selaco is gaining traction I want to try and step out of my comfort-zone and get more personal with you by explaining the development history of Selaco and the obstacles we have faced during its development.
First and foremost, let me introduce myself. My name is Wesley de Waart, born and raised in a beautiful city called Amsterdam. From a (too) young age my father pulled me into the world of videogames. Like for many of us, I grew up playing the original doom and it has been my go-to game for years to follow. I started modding it, creating levels for it, and even obsessed over E1M1 speedruns for a very long time. After many years of playing games and creating mods where possible I decided to get back to Doom and create a standalone total conversion, that was 4 years ago.
Back in the day Selaco was called 'Project Ominous', a lovechild that took elements from FEAR and DOOM. The tone of the game was dark and there was a huge emphasis on horror elements. I'll share some fun in-depth looks into Project Ominous later on in this Patreon page. It is too much fun to look back at how much the levels and overall art direction have changed over the years.
I enjoyed working on Project Ominous, it was an absolute blast to finally have something I could call 'my own' instead of a modification of an existing game. But things did not go flawless; It was made in complete isolation - completely by myself for many years and I never bothered to share progress with anyone. Modifying existing games can be tough, but creating something from 'scratch' made me realize that game development is much harder than I could have ever imagined. Self-doubt was starting to show itself.
"Why would anyone care?", "I am nowhere near as good as the other developers out there" were thoughts that endlessly circled around in my head as I was trying to make the best game I could possibly make. I always considered myself creative but was always frightened to share and anxious for the response it might get. We both know how hostile the internet can be when it comes to bad video games. What if Project Ominous would be among those?
(Scrapped: The enemy type of Project Ominous. Textures are placeholder)
As someone who has been doing it alone for far too long, I don't recommend this. Isolated development is terrible. Working on something you are proud of but being far too insecure and frightened to share anything was dreadful. It made me miserable and depressed throughout the early years of development. I was often on the edge of finally making that 'big reveal' on the internet but always backed out when I felt like things could be better.
About a year ago I met a friend named Ken, an amazing writer who eventually grew to become the lead writer of Project Ominous. He gave me the boost in self-esteem that I was desperately looking for and often convinced me that Project Ominous is something special and worth sharing. If it weren't for him this game would not have been what it is today. Given Ken's background, I gave him full control over the game's narrative. The first big step was to ditch the name 'Project Ominous' and go with something else instead, something that fit his story more. We went with 'Selaco', the underground city the game takes place in.
(Scrapped: Probably one of the first proper rooms I have made for this project. Placeholders assets are present in this image.)
This was a huge turning point. The quality standard raised and a truckload of old stuff got scrapped and remade. As months went by, professional artists and voice actors were brought on board to help me achieve my vision and with spectacular results! We are a small team of developers and we operate like a well-oiled machine. The team is so passionate, they take it upon themselves to go the extra mile to make things better. The roomba, for example, was never meant to emote. Fgsdgs (one of our voxel artists) came up with the idea to add an entire emotion system to the voxel which added a pile of additional work on his plate. But that didn't matter, because of the amount of passion involved with this game.
Fast forward to the present day; I finally made the leap and announced the game nearly 3 months ago. Ken turned out to be right all along: Selaco is something special and the response has been more than amazing and probably a highlight of my life. If you have been following our Twitter for a while now, you might notice how thankful I am to all of you. From the bottom of my heart: thank you for making this possible.
I will absolutely share more about Selaco's development history: Project Ominous, lore, early looks at artwork, scrapped content,and much more on this Patreon page. This Patreon page will be updated frequently - you have my word.
2021-03-20 20:33:56 +0000 UTC
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