Hello there!
It's been a while since I last talked in long form about our plans for game development. Kalaban is still on sale on Steam, Humble Store, itch.io and Gamejolt, as I mentioned in the previous blog post.
I started working on this tech demo of a topdown horror game in March 2019, called Hybrid Children. The idea was to apply for a grant to keep on developing the prototype. I did, and my submission was not succesful. So in the beginning of June I decided to dust off the tech demo, created in the Unity engine, and see what I got. My plan is to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the game, either at Halloween 2019 or at the end of this year.
I've been testing out with Arnold renderer for 3dsMax during the last few weeks. The gif above is one animatic that I did with the protagonist, an unnamed boy who wields a baseball bat for bashing monsters. The story of the game is still in its early stages, and all I can say is that there is a small town involved, and also some monsters, and possibly friends you have to rescue from the clutches of evil creatures.
The tech demo already had a good base for the gameplay, but I decided to try out multiple things that I already had in mind for Kalaban. A lot of people complained about the crammed interiors and houses that you visit. The movement and AI programming was less than optimal in Kalaban, although being pretty much the best we could achieve with Clickteam Fusion at the time.
But now, in Unity, most of those 2.5D problems are fixed. Any true 3D engine can draw the interiors right, and handles collision-detection way better than faking "threedee" environments in a 2D game engine. When we made Kalaban, we wanted to simulate 3D gameplay and perspective camera, but it came with a lot of problems. Even the Y-layering was a little bit buggy at times, when there were loads of monsters and stuff on screen. The problem was that at lower frame rates Fusion just started skipping events, and one of those being aligning the layers properly.
Another huge leap that I've done in recent days has been putting in couch coop. Yes, you read that right! I've been dreaming of creating a game to be played with your buddy for such a long time. It was one of the first feedback things I heard after Kalaban's launch, that people wanted to "explore the mutant-infested town with a friend".
Well now it's finally happening. First I spent couple days coding the movement and making sure the health system worked in game, and having the 2 Player Game option in the menu. Next I re-coded the camera script to follow both players, or switch to one of them, if the other one has died.
Currently, I have the enemy AI chasing after either one of the players, depending on which one is closer to them. The enemies now can also damage the other player, as they can damage player one. All of this has been really new and exciting for me.
We'll see what future brings for Hybrid Children, but we'll keep on developing it. When we have a working test demo for people to try out, we can finally launch our crowdfunding campaign. It took us two and a half years to get to this point with 3D game development and Unity skills, but it has all been worth it so far.
Like mentioned, Kalaban is still on Steam Summer Sale up until June 9th, so go grab yours, if you already haven't done so!
-Harri J.
