After a few weeks without updates, here are some screenshots of our current project!
Work on the graphical part of the game has advanced, as well as the room editor, but gameplay-wise the game is still in a very early stage.
We think the atmosphere and sensation of playing a board game is there, and the game looks great! We hope to improve gameplay by next week and see what we can get.
Meanwhile, next week we’ll start work on the long awaited White Noise Online indoor map!
Tags: SoulStone, White Noise Online
Hey guys, some updates on our current projects, and new screenshots!
We’ve continued development on our next project, codename SoulStone (until we find a better name!)
The goal of this project is to emulate the fun of dungeon exploring board games, such as Heroquest, Descent, etc. to a PC game, focusing on exploration and combat over character customization or complex inventory management that other games usually feature.
All these with nifty 3D graphics, aiming to look like you were playing an actual board game with miniatures!
Think of a mix between Final Fantasy Tactics, FTL and Diablo, and you might be close to what we want to achieve :).
As for our progress so far, we’ve more or less finished the first enemy, a small Ghoul. These ghouls will be equipped with an assorment of weapons, but they will be mostly harmless and easy to kill.
We’ve also put together a room editor that will help us creating interesting layouts featuring different combat situations, traps, etc. It’s still on an early phase, but here is a sample of what we can do with it:
As for other projects:
- We’ve spent some time trying to add Split Screen support to White Noise Online, but sadly we’ve decided to discard it, the feature proved to be way more troubling than expected (specially the sound), and taking too much from the horror experience. We’ll submit an update next week with small bugfixes though. After that, we’ll start work on a new scenario.
- We’ve received a few bug reports for Avatar Farm Online, but we’ve not been able to reproduce them yet, so not sure of when we’ll be able to submit an update.
Tags: Avatar Farm Online, SoulStone, White Noise Online
Check them out!
As you might have guessed from our April’s Fools, we’re currently working on a new project. We’re not entering into details yet, but it’s a larger project than we’re used to, and the game will be more focused on PC distribution than Xbox, although we’ll try to mantain gamepad compatibility.
We’ll be sharing more info as development continues, we’re still very early in development so they will be mostly characters and scenario pictures.
We’ll start work soon on new updates for Avatar Farm Online (minor bugfixes mostly) and White Noise Online (new scenario and some bugfixes), don’t worry!
Tags: SoulStone
These past days we’ve kept working on White Noise Online, which is already showing great results in the character area!
- We’ve got some working animations for the character. They’re not final yet, but we’ve put them in the game and they look great!
- We spent quite some time testing and fixing some issues when importing these animations, so code-wise there’s not much new features: We’ve improved network prediction so players didn’t float as much as they did before.
- We’ve kept working on the snowy scenario, the main structure is mostly complete and we’ve started adding decoration items.
Looks like next week we’ll finally reach the “feature complete” stage! There’s still a lot of work ahead (specially on the menu GUI), but at least we’ll have a fully working game :).
Tags: White Noise Online
We’ve continued work on White Noise Online mostly:
- Still working on the networking code. The players and the enemy data is now synchronized: Everybody can see each other, walk, pick pages, spot the monster… and the monster correctly walks around, pursuits players, teleports, etc. The two most important things not coded yet are player deaths, and the lost soul mode after a player dies. Anyway, nothing has been tested yet so lots of bugs may appear later.
- After finishing some landmarks, we’ve started working on a new, bigger scenario layout, with a bigger river and a proper bridge, etc.
- We’ve continued work on the main characters, modelling is almost finished and we’ll start texturing / animation soon.
Tags: White Noise Online
We’re currentlty working on several patches and updates for our latest games, so we thought that it was a great time to do a big revamp of the Milkstone website!
Our game list has been growing bigger and bigger and the good ol’ game list needed a design change. We’ve opted for a more visual style, because most of the time, visitors just want to see how out games look (and I think they look pretty damn good :D).
The old forum has been completely scrapped and replaced with a brand new one. Apart from being simpler and easier to use, it should get rid of the tons of spam posts we got, so we’re really pleased with the change.
We’re still tinkering with some little issues here and there, but the site is mostly finished. We hope you like it and find it easier on the eyes! And if that’s not the case, just tell us! Now is the perfect time so make changes.
Oh! and Merry Christmas!
Following the Character design post, our fellow artist Santi has written another post, this time detailing the design decisions for the enemies. Check it out!
Tags: Johnny Carnage
Santiago Orozco, the graphic designer for Johnny Carnage, has written a blog post detailing some the creative process for the main game character. Check it out!
(It’s in both English and Spanish)
Tags: Johnny Carnage
We’ve been asked by a few users how the boss evolution system works, so we’ve decided to make a detailed post about it.
As the game description says, the boss evolves based on your behavior and performance during the game. So even when starting from the same point, it’s unlikely you’ll have exactly the same evolution pattern.
Boss evolution parameters
The boss has three sets of parameters that evolve over time:
- Main stats: There are four main stats that are shown at the start of each wave. When a wave ends, one of them increases in 1 point.
- Mobility: This stat increases the boss general maneuverability (speed and rotation). A boss with high mobility will move and rotate faster. This makes a little more difficult to concentrate fire on certain points, and long arms are more dangerous because of the increase rotation.
Each mobility point increases boss speed around 5%.
- Armor: This stat reduces the damage caused to the boss pieces (only the pieces, not turrets), making them harder to destroy.
Each armor point reduces damage by around 5% (Don’t worry, 20 armor points doesn’t equal to 0% damage).
- Turret: Maybe the most dangerous stat, the turret level increases turret protection and increases turret rotation speed, so they can aim faster at you.
Each turret point reduces damage by around 5% , and increases rotation speed by 5%.
- Shot: Also a dangerous stat, it just increases turrets fire rate.
Although not exact (the time spent between shots is a bit random), each shot point decreases the wait between shots by 5%.
- Piece evolution: On each wave, a new piece appears on each of the 4 boss “arms”. Both rear and front sides are simmetrical, so left and right sides are treated equally.
This new piece always removes a turret from the body, but adds new turrets attached to the piece itself, so the firepower is always increasing by around 4-6 new turrets on each wave.
- Weapon evolution: On each wave, new turrets appear (attached to the new piece), and there’s a chance previous turrets can evolve to fit a turret type that’s proven to be more strong against the player.
Evolution details
So, now we know what things evolve on each wave, but how they do them? Well, it’s simple:
- Main stats: The stat that evolves depends on the first thing that the player destroys at the beginning of each wave:
- Turret on the front: Increases mobility stat
- Piece on the front: Increases shot stat
- Turret on the rear: Increases turret stat
- Piece on the rear: Increases armor stat
- Anything else (Main Core): Increases mobility stat
- Pieces: Both on front and rear, a new piece appears. The piece shape is random and doesn’t depend on player behavior.
The point where the piece appears varies with the following rules:
- If the first thing destroyed on the front / rear part is a turret, a new piece appears on that point.
- If the first thing destroyed on the front / rear part is a piece:
- If the piece still has some turrets directly attached to it, a new piece appears in place of a randomly selected turret.
- If the piece has only other pieces attached to it, a random child piece is selected, and the process continues until a turret is found (and replaced).
- If the front rear is not destroyed (direct core hits), it’s treated as if the first piece was destroyed.
- Weapons: During the whole game, we keep a table where we count the amount of turrets destroyed and the number of player kills of each turret type.
When the wave ends,a random type based on this data is selected for the new turrets that will appear.
The weight of each type is based on a rather complicated formula, but it can vary between 50% and 300% depending on the proportions of kills and destroys.
The new turrets will all have this selected type, and existing turrets have a 20% chance of changing its type to the new one as well.
And that’s all the magic behind the Infinity Danger boss evolution system. As you can see, it allows to do some tricks to force evolution in the way you prefer, such as shooting at certain points to force evolution on that side, or to increase certain boss stats in detriment of others, even getting yourself killed by weak weapons.
Let us know your thoughts on this :).
Tags: Infinity Danger
We’ve set up a forum on the website, so you can provide feedback on our games on a better place than the comments section of the blog posts. Check it out and let us know your thoughts: http://www.milkstonestudios.com/forum
