Blog for Nick Zafiris at GarageGames.com

Inventory System and New Site

Nick Zafiris — 2006-08-01T11:52:03+00:00

Hey everyone, I just want to update you on what I've been working on lately regarding Nuclear Nightmare.

Drag and Drop Inventory System
I'm pretty much done with the Drag and Drop Inventory system. The inventory has been completely rewritten and is mostly done in script while the dragging of items is done using the excellent DragDropGui Control resource from Beffy slightly modified.

I've spent a lot of time making sure that its bug free and robust but I'm sure something will popup in the beta test. I was hesitant to show a screenshot because we have not done any GUI work yet but everyone wants a screenshot and also you'll get a better idea of the functionality. It's all programmers' art as well as some images found on the net.

Since the game is a mix of action and RPG, we were trying to find a balance between making it simple and responsive enough when needed in action scenes and comprehensive enough to fulfill the needs of RPG fans.

Some of the major features are described below. To make the description easier to write, all items, weapons, ammo, armor, etc. will be referred to as "items".

- The inventory consists of a grid in which items are placed when picked up. Items are picked up by simply walking over them. There are two tabs, Weapon tab and Item tab. All weapons, upgrades and ammo go in the Weapons tab while everything else goes into the Items tab. We will most likely implement a Body Suit tab in the near future.

- The amount of items the player can carry is determined by the total carried weight since each item has a specific weight. The player has two weight limits, the overload and the maximum. When the overload limit is surpassed, the player cannot run but can still pick up items until the maximum limit is reached.

- All items can be moved around by dragging them. If you're dragging a weapon upgrade on a weapon that is compatible with that upgrade, it will get upgraded. You will have the ability to downgrade a weapon. The upgrades are then placed back in the inventory.

- There is a Quick Slot bar consisting of 10 slots (this may change) that can be accessed by pressing hotkeys 1 through 10 on the keyboard. The player has the ability to drag a usable item (which can be a weapon, a health kit, etc.) to a Quick Slot. Dragging an item to a slot does not remove it from the inventory grid. Then, hitting the appropriate number on the keyboard when in-game equips or uses that item. Not all items can be dragged to the Quick Slot bar. Items excluded are ammo as well as any non-usable items.

Also, when in-game the Quick Slot bar can be used as a weapon bar. By rotating the mouse wheel up or down, you can switch between any weapons placed in it. For example, if you have a weapon on slot 2, a health kit on slot 5 and another weapon on slot 7, rotating the mouse wheel will switch between slots 2 and 7, automatically equipping the appropriate weapon each time. This is useful when you need to quickly switch weapons like being in the middle of a battle.

- Dragging items from the Quick Slot bar to anywhere in the inventory grid, removes them from the bar.

- The currently equipped weapon can be reloaded after its ammo runs out by pressing the "R" key assuming there is ammo for that weapon in the inventory. Picking up ammo while the equipped weapon is empty and is compatible with that ammo, will cause the weapon to automatically get reloaded.

- Double-clicking on an item, equips/uses it.

- Single-clicking on an item, enables its appropriate buttons. For example, if it's a health kit, the Use/Equip and Drop buttons will get enabled while the Unequip and Downgrade buttons will remain disabled. If it's a weapon that has been upgraded, then the Unequip, Downgrade and Drop buttons will get enabled.

- Weapons have a life attribute. The more the player uses a weapon, the more its life gets depleted. Weapons can be repaired via Maintenance Toolkit items. Each time a toolkit is applied to an item, it restores its life by a certain percentage. Each toolkit can be used up to 5 times.

- Hovering the mouse pointer over items inside the inventory will pop up a window displaying a larger picture of the item as well as its properties (name, weight, etc.) and status (weapon life, loaded ammo, upgrades, etc).

- When picking up 2 or more items of the same type, you still see one image of that type in the inventory with the exception that a quantity number is displayed over it. This keeps things organized but it does not apply to weapons since each weapon is unique by means of the life attribute and loaded ammo.

- Every time a new item is picked up or dropped, a brief text description is displayed on the upper left corner of the screen specifying the action. All text messages scroll up and disappear after a few seconds.
There are items that modify the player's abilities (radiation resistance, oxygen levels) or skills but that falls into a different category and will be discussed in the Player Attributes and Skills section.

- All items display their name when the player moves near them (not implemented yet).

I'd love to hear your comments and ideas on how we can improve this system as well as criticism on features that may have been wrongly implemented or missing. Feel free to post your comments in this forum thread too.

New Web Site Coming Soon
Another thing I've been working on lately is redesigning our site by making it CMS based by installing Joomla. This allows us to provide updates MUCH easier and faster. It should go live in the next few days but you take have a preview here.

Update: New site is up

The menu buttons will be redone and more images will get uploaded before it goes up. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it too.

One last thing, if anyone has experience in making Maya characters work with the default Torque animations please post in this thread. Thanks!

I leave you with a screenshot as promised.

Nick
Element115 Entertainment

Nuclear Nightmare Progress - Save/Load Functionality

Nick Zafiris — 2006-01-18T11:21:49+00:00

Hey everyone, I'd like to give you a brief update on our game Nuclear Nightmare now that I have completed a feature that was bugging me for a while. The Save/Load functionality of the game which is a big portion of Milestone 1 is complete. We now have a framework in which we can start building the inventory system, artificial intelligence and other features around it. Also, the first level, the City is moving along pretty quick. It's about 60% complete. This brings us to about 55% for Milestone 1.

While the features comprising the Save Game functionality are nothing new and nothing special, I'd like to give you a brief description of them. I believe that they are comprehensive and hope to fulfill player expectations.

Auto Save Checkpoints
There are three different reasons why an Auto Save may occur. One of them is through checkpoints. There are numerous checkpoints placed throughout the game's locations. When the player goes through one of them, the game will automatically be saved in an Auto Save file and the checkpoint trigger is deleted. The Auto Save file is replaced each time a player goes through a checkpoint but a separate Auto Save file is used for each location. This means that if there are 5 locations, upon reaching the fifth location, there will be 5 separate Auto Save files.

The second reason an Auto Save may occur is when changing locations. When a player exits from a location, the game is saved automatically using that location's Auto Save file. Then upon entry to the new location, the game is automatically saved again but this time in the new location's separate Auto Save file.

The third reason an Auto Save may occur is after critical and major quests have been completed and is saved in the same way.

QuickSave
Players can Quick Save a game at any time by simply hitting the appropriate function key. Like Auto Save, there is a separate Quick Save file for each location and it gets overwritten each time the game is Quick Saved.

Players can load the most recent Quick Save file by simply hitting the appropriate Quick Load function key.

Manual Saving
Players can select to save a game at any time and giving them any name they wish.

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Regardless of the save type, when a game gets saved, a screenshot is also saved and is displayed whenever a saved game is selected from the Save/Load menu along with the time and date of the save.

All types of saved games can be loaded by using the Load Game menu either from within the game or from the main menu. When a game is loaded, all items and enemies are at the exact same spot they were when the game was saved.

Lastly, players can delete a previously saved game from either the Save or Load menus.

Feel free to comment on the Save/Load functionality in our site's forum thread also.

Screenshot of the Save Menu with TGE's default GUI graphics.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with a more detailed view of our progress:

Nick
Nuclear Nightmare: Rise of the Fallen

Tuesday Dec 6 14:02

Nick Zafiris — 2005-12-06T14:02:33+00:00

World's first Post-Mortem regarding a Post Title Announcement and the importance of content and focus

I'd like to take this opportunity to share my experiences regarding the announcement of our project Nuclear Nightmare: Rise of the Fallen.

Me and my cousin have been working on this project since summer. Actually, we started with Torque in Spring of 2004 but I consider that period a learning process and not productive time spent developing the game.

Now, we're at a point where we have a good portion of our first and second level designed, the soundtrack, and some features like saving and loading a game with mission triggers and autosave.

So we decided to show the GG community our project by submitting a dev shot of the day. After getting some good feedback, I decided to also submit it on a really good post-nuclear gaming site, No Mutants Allowed.

The next day, NMA published our news on their home page and we received many visitors from that site. This is where the fun started.

Publicity. The day after NMA published our news, we started receiving tons of visitors to our site and forums. After looking at the site logs, I realized that they were coming from other gaming sites in many countries in Europe and Asia (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, UK, China, Japan).

It turned out that gaming sites liked the concept and had pulled our news from the NMA site and had posted it on their site including the screenshots and links. During the next 2-3 days, the news spread like a virus in dozens of gaming web sites and forums around the world and we were receiving about 1,000 visitors per day.

It was exciting looking for sites that had posted our news. Some sites decided to add their touch by adding their logo on our screenshot, brightening it, resizing it, re-saving it in a lower quality (to save bandwidth I guess), all of the above(!), splitting it in two, adding the game to their database of games, and one even wrote a preview. As we started to upload some more screenshots and concept art to our site, they were grabbing and posting those too.

Just Google for it and see for yourself.

Amid all this publicity, we also got a publishing/localization offer by a publisher for a certain region of Europe.

Problem. Naturally, we didn't expect all this publicity and we weren't prepared for it. This was originally meant to be a GG snapshot of the day. We only had a couple of screenshots on our site and very little content.

Result. While we did receive some fans that signed up to our forums, 99% of the visitors did not sign up. Sure, many will probably re-visit when we post more news but some might have been turned off by the low content. Their posts on other forums were not so flattering either. So not sure if this was ultimately a good thing or undesired publicity at this time.

Focus. Another thing I'd like to mention is that about a week's worth of game development productivity on my end was lost because of the excitement of going through the logs and finding which gaming web site posted our news and taking screenshots of them, replying to various forums, trying to find translations of posts, etc. It's easy to get caught up in these things and they must be kept to a minimum otherwise you'll never get any work done. You can't possibly read everything that has been written from everyone. Now the dust has settled anyway, and I'm back at developing the game full time using my brand new 17" Fujitsu-Siemens M3438G laptop might I add!

I'd like to know if anyone has had similar experiences. Also, feel free to sign up in our forums to comment on the game or ask any questions you might have.

I leave you with a quote from apocalypsefiction.com and some screenshots from other gaming sites:
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PC Game in Dev - Nuclear Nightmare
SUMMARY -

What? An aspiring team of game developers that aren't interested in making YAFC (Yet Another Fallout Clone)? This time, it appears that they want to develop some sort of "survival horror" based on a post-nuclear holocaust setting. They currently have two screenshots, a website &, according to them, they've been developing this since June 2005. We'll see how far this one actually gets...

LINK
www.nuclearnightmare.com/ (Nuclear Nightmare game website)

SOURCE
No Mutants Allowed

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Tuesday Jul 12 14:05

Nick Zafiris — 2005-07-12T14:05:23+00:00

After spending over a year working on our post-nuclear horror/RPG project (single-player) as some of you may know, it was really more like a period for learning Torque while at the same time working on actual game components. Now that we feel more comfortable with the engine and have a visual sense of how the game will look like through prototyping it, we have decided to stop "playing" with the engine and focus on finishing every aspect of the design before we go announcing it and working on it further.

We can't wait to announce the title, web site, more screenshots, and more details about it but we first need to have a solid design. I'm sure most of you will agree. It's hard to hide the title for a year and not showing a web site to get feedback but we want to do it when the time is right and when the project becomes realistic to avoid sounding like an overly ambitious team without much to show, without a solid design, and without being able to deliver.

The team which currently consists of me and artist/designer John Tesseris will obviously need to expand a bit. We will definitely be in the need for at least another modeler and programmer soon and we are already in the works with contracting a musician. But right now we'll be focusing on finishing off the plot, designing all the challenges that the player will face, create goals, etc. It's not easy creating the goals and challenges but I'm sure we'll tackle them. Anyone that likes this concept and wishes to give any feedback or ideas though, I'd be glad if you drop me an email or comment.

Anyway that's all, just wanted to get this out. The following pic is from an early in-game screenshot.

Nick

Wednesday May 25 1:59

Nick Zafiris — 2005-05-25T01:59:57+00:00

I'd like to inform you about Nuclear (temp title) a horror Action/RPG game me and my cousin/partner John Tesseris have been working on since last summer and show you a couple of screenshots (no peeking yet!). They're from the city level using TGE (haven't ported to TSE yet, waiting for M2). The full title will be revealed soon.

Things seemed to be progressing slowly at first but since this was our first year with Torque, much of the time was spent learning the engine and off course designing the game. While we are still learning and doing some more design along the way, things are starting to pick up fast visually and interactively.

We also now have John Seguin from SeguinSound in the team creating the music for the game which will have a scary sound to it mixed with an industrial beat. Can't wait to see what he comes up with.

The buildings were created by my cousin using Hammer last Fall and "ruined" by me. They will be re-created from scratch though when Torque Constructor comes out tomorrow...I mean when it's done(TM) ;-) The reason is, they're too complex which consume a lot of memory plus we will probably use some better textures.

Features in Progress
Currently the drag and drop inventory system, saving/loading the game, in-game journal (will probably use Matthew's instead though), mission loading, conversation system and GUI functionality are done or almost done.

Current Challenges
Models/Animations - We will need quite a few models and animations (there will be some scripted cut-scenes). My cousin will handle that since he's the artist but he's the only one and he is already doing mapping so that will prolong the project's completion schedule for sure.

Pathfinding - AI pathfinding is required for this game and the AI pack would be perfect assuming it comes out soon. Otherwise, I will have to find other solutions like contract someone.

Melee Combat Haven't had time to look into implementing this yet and don't know if the current resource is suited for a commercial game but I definitely need this feature.

Undecided Features
Flash GUI - I really like the idea of using Flash for the GUIs/interfaces and actually I am in the process of testing it these days. What I'm curious though is if I can use it for the inventory GUI for dragging items around in the various slots while of course keeping track of them. I have done it with Torque's GUI but need to see if it's possible with Flash.

Map - Haven't decided on using a map and what form it will have. Don't think I'll use a radar type though where you can see the enemies cause that would not be realistic in-game (nothing electronic works).

Anyway, now you can see the screenshots!

P.S. Just noticed my single quotes are gone!

Thursday May 5 14:47

Nick Zafiris — 2005-05-05T14:47:29+00:00

I've had Torque for over a year now and in that year, I've messed around with it on a daily basis trying to learn and develop various components. I've gotten pretty far in creating stuff like my own scripted inventory, a save/load feature, a journal/log, although none are at 100%. I also now have a good grasp on things like GUI controls, precipitation, pathedCamera, audio, interior creation etc., as well as making minor engine modifications.

I learned a whole lot in this one year and one thing that helped was that I had a game idea in mind since day one and everything I did to learn revolved around that idea (3rd person, post-nuclear action/RPG). It helped me stay in focus, consistent and dedicated. Off course, my partner helped a lot with all his artwork, and I've had a great help from the community.

Now, I'm planning on starting fresh off of tutorial.base. I believe that this is the best way to go if you're ready to start developing a new game and add to it only the stuff that you'll be using.

Since the game is single player with multiple missions that will allow the player to travel back and forth between them, I need to modify the way current mission loading is handled. I found that it is spread across many files with intermingled functions that were difficult to follow. So I opened up a huge task to create a table and document all the major functions one by one included in every script file starting from common/server in a way that I can understand and refer back to.

In parallel, as functions are documented out, I'm also documenting the flow of the functions. To me this is one of the most important things that will truly help me understand how everything flows. For example, for the mission loading there are functions that call each other within the 3 missionDownload.cs files, clientConnection.cs, missionLoad.cs, missionInfo.cs, mission.cs, /server/scripts/game.cs, etc. Without having a visual representation as shown below, you get lost. At least I do. Planning on doing the same thing with other parts of the script too.

One thing I don't understand yet is that if you look at the difference between the game.cs files in starter.fps and tutorial.base, you'll see that in the starter.fps version there are many extra functions and function calls like startGame(), GameStart(), onGameDurationEnd(), cycleGame(), onCycleExec(), onCyclePauseEnd(), etc. Not sure if those are needed in my case.

Anyway that's the plan for now.

Nick

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