Vespers3D: Adventuring Onward

Vespers3D: Adventuring Onward

Recap:
Vespers3D is our attempt to bring old-school text adventure games (interactive fiction) into the world of real-time first-person 3D -- a new genre we are calling 3D/if (3D interactive fiction). It is based on Vespers, Jason Devlin's excellent text IF game that won numerous awards from the IF community, including Best Game at the IFComp'05 and the 2006 XYZZY awards.

Despite my notable absence from the GG blogosphere the past few months, development on Vespers continues in typically torrid fashion. Ah, but just when you thought Vespers blogs were ready to pop out at you every few weeks back in late summer, covering the fascinating development of all six NPCs in the game, suddenly Rubes pulls the rug out from under you. Ah well, such is life, as they say.

Or, at least it would seem, such is life with character animators. Fall saw us lose our third animator on the project, abandoned yet again for promises of wealth and fame from more lucrative work elsewhere. So instead of cranking through the animations for each of our NPCs, we're instead back to the drawing board, trying to bring someone new up to speed. I swear, at this pace, I probably should just quit my job, go to animation school, learn the art, and do it all myself.

Someday, we'll pick up the series again with the next piece on Ignatius. In the meantime, here's a snapshot showing how far we got with him before progress came to a halt.



Time (and Development) Marches On

Since we've been down that road before, we knew this would be only a temporary setback, and of course with so much else left to work on we could hardly stop.

I knew I'd be attending my first IGC this year, and I wanted to show off what we had. But that meant we'd have to spend time polishing things up and making it look like, you know, a real product. And that meant annoying little details like main menus, sound, being able to quit on purpose rather than by crashing, and so on and so forth.

Because Vespers was still at an early stage, and I knew there wasn't a lot to actually do in the demo at IGC, I wanted to at least give the game a decent face. So I spent some time working with an excellent musician I found online, Daniel Godsil, to come up with some dramatic pieces to use for the intro/main menu and the in-game ambient track. Daniel ended up modifying a piece he had made for an independent film that never got released, and which fit perfectly with the mood and pace of the game, a piece he had previously called "Soul of a Man." Not bad, really, given that the game is about the battle over the soul of the Abbot, the main character.

I then pieced together an introduction for the game to go with the music, something that would lead into the main menu. Since Vespers is a decidedly cinematic game, I wanted something to match that. Originally I had wanted to do a camera path overlooking the monastery, but then I decided instead to try a different approach, more like an animated slideshow. So I put together a system that utilized multiple camera positions, camera fades (oh, what I'd give for a crossfade), and my fading transparent GuiTextCtrl resource to produce a sequence of different views of the monastery as a way of introducing it.

Not sure why, but if you want you can see a brief snippet from the intro, with some music, here. The picture quality isn't great, to say the least, but you should get the idea.

Of course, if you were at IGC you might have seen it. Then again, after I was there I realized that we didn't have the benefit of sound. Very cool, a boring demo without even any good music to distract people. Yay me!

There was also this pesky issue of crashing. I work primarily on the Mac side, but with no Macs around for demos at IGC, I had to pull out my rarely-used Windows build. Strangely (wait, it's not strange), the Windows build had an exciting tendency to crash spectacularly at random, unpredictable times. I've also discovered that TGE's animation routines differ slightly between Macs and PCs, at least as far as blending is concerned. I'm not sure why that's the case, since there shouldn't be any platform-specific code there, but it's pretty reproducible. Nothing a little hack can't overcome, though.

Ah well. There's always the Utah Indie Game Developers night!

The Bridge Between Heaven and Earth

Our attention next turned to the church. The church is an especially cool part of Vespers. The way it was originally designed in the text game, the church is almost like a living structure, and as the monastery spirals into darkness as the game progresses, the church (unlike other structures in the game) shifts and morphs to reflect this. This includes many of the items inside the church as well, including the main cross, the images on the stained glass windows, the lectern and Bible, the candles, the font and its holy water, and the frescoes painted on the walls.

The game itself takes place over five Acts, and in each subsequent Act each of these objects changes -- either significantly or subtly -- to reflect the growing evil surrounding the monastery. One nice example is the font, with its descriptions from the text game at each stage:




It's a pretty cool effect during the text game, and it's one I'm looking forward to reproducing. It means we'll probably need multiple models and textures for each of the objects, but it shouldn't be too much trouble. Here's how the font above was designed by our all-star modeler, N.R. Bharathae (we decided to go with a stone font rather than a bronze one):



Here are a couple of other church objects as N.R. has designed them, each with their initial (Act I) description from the text game. I think N.R. did some really fantastic work.











Another one of these items in the church is the body of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of the plague and the namesake of the monastery. His body is displayed in a glass case near the chancel, his body untouched by the years that have passed. One of the interesting things in the game is that you are able to break open the glass case by smashing it, so we had to design (a) separate models, one with an intact case and one with a broken case, and (b) an explosion consisting of glass shards to mimic the shattering of the glass. Then when I create the explosion, I just switch the datablocks on the object from the intact case to the smashed case. The effect, I think, is pretty decent.

Here's N.R.'s model of Cuthbert in the smashed glass case -- another wonderful modeling and texturing job:






Finally, there are the frescoes. That turns out to be a tough one. The main issue is that medieval Italian church frescoes represent a fairly specific style, and we would want our frescoes to be pretty convincing. So this means seeking out someone with considerable artistic experience. But since the frescoes also change as the game progresses, that means we would need an experienced artist to create multiple frescoes from scratch. That means one thing: $$$.

So right now we're in the process of evaluating some artists from all over to see who has the talent to produce these frescoes within our stated budget. I think we'll be able to find the right person, which would be great since the frescoes will really provide a great mood and setting for the game.

Facing Forward

With the church mostly done, we'll turn our attention to the kitchen next, at least until we can get the character animations going again.

One of the first kitchen items we have is the cupboard. It's not easy to know what medieval cupboards are supposed to look like, but N.R. came up with some good images to work from and he created this fantastic piece:



With four independent doors, we had to replicate what we did with our regular doors: create separate door models, each with its own open and close animation, and provide collision with an invisible collision mesh overlying each one, which I manually rotate when the door is animated open or closed. It took a little work to get it all running properly, but the result is a fine cupboard with four doors that open and close with proper collision checking.

Soon we'll tackle the mysterious hatch to the cellar, where surely the answers to the questions at the monastery lie...