Transmission 3.0

Project Apparition Development Log

We have been extremely busy this month, it’s gone by so quickly. It’s been a bit chaotic too, since our development plan has been shaken up, what with the launch of our Patreon and acceptance to the steamworks partnership program.

Decorator System From the very start we wanted players to be able customize their experience within Project Apparition. One of the systems that we are excited about delivering is the decorator system. We have started work on the system, although it is not a core aspect of the paranormal experience we feel that it was needed early on so that testers can thoroughly get their hands dirty and help us iron out the bugs and issues that arise with it.

So far we are working on its core mechanics, and the server side logic to save and load decorator data with the database. As you can see, visually there is not much to show at the moment, but we thought we would start with being able to paint structural surfaces as they are handled outside of the logic that loads objects within a scene, the UI is still very bare bones and still within the conceptualization stage. (Escape will close all menus)

The aim of the decorator system is to allow players to change the walls and floors of their lobbies, and also swap out furniture for other pieces of furniture of the same type. Some of these will have color options. Players will be able to offset their position and sometimes rotation too.

We have designed a bunch of furniture, wallpaper and flooring for our Patreon supporters, and this also has provided us with insight to our development pipeline for future furniture packs and decorating sets for players to use. (We also made some equipment skins!!)

There will be more regarding the decorator system in the next update.

Ghost Design The pipeline for the ghost models is well on its way, we are starting to get a solid process down for adding clothes, skins and animations. The goal is to have randomly generated ghosts, in stats and appearance. It’s no small task, and we request your patience, but we assure you, it will be well worth the wait.

Ghosts can be children, teenagers, or adults. We have a model for each, with the appropriate blend shapes that can change their appearance during play. We can change their clothes, and skin. The ones you see below have a set of test clothes and hair, just a few items to work with.

One of the things that we have been worried about from the start is animations. It’s still one of our largest concerns in delivering this game. Thankfully though, we have acquired a pro license for a program called Cascadeur using our Patreon pledge funds, this is an extremely powerful animation tool that uses AI to help you quickly, and easily setup natural and high quality animations. We have not had the program long, but already we are making some good inroads into creating our animations.

Haunts We are always working on the haunts, a big thing in Project Apparition is the interactivity of our maps, both for the ghost and the players. Everything will have function in some capacity, and we are building a system that will support adding more easily!!

This month we have been working on lights flickering, electrical objects going pop, and bleeding walls!! Ghosts can affect the haunt in many ways, not just interacting with objects but sometimes changing them too! But be careful, occasionally, things are not always as they seem!

Additionally we have come up with a way to have every client side haunt object be controlled by the server through a single networked object, this means that the server will have a much easier time at handling everything and it increases the object limits on maps!

Core Systems Not much work has been done here on account of everything else that has happened/happening. Our focus has been drawn to other areas. But there is good news, nothing in regards to the server/client/loading architecture is broken or producing bugs. It’s efficient, and the game loads up every time without fail. (Apart from on stream where I forgot to disable testing logic and it crashed. That doesn’t count!!) Trailer & Steam Page Our biggest focus right now is the trailer. We wanted to have one when we launch our steam store page, and the store page is top priority right now because we want to gain access to the community features that steam provides, mainly the announcement and log ones. So we can move development updates and logs over to steam.

The trailer is wildly out of our comfort zone we will admit. There is a lot of work that has to be done to get the right clips and shots. We aim to provide only what can be experienced in the future game but presented in a cinematic way. It is requiring us to move development of certain areas forward so we can include several aspects of the experience we want to deliver. We humbly request your patience on this as we want to get it right!

Moving Forward Going into next month we are going to continue our efforts to get ghosts into the game fully, and then tackle getting the right shots and clips for our trailer. We might need to enlist some help for editing, but we are gonna tackle that bridge when we get there.

Hopefully, we will be able to split our time between that and working on implementing the ghost AI that will control the ghosts and give them automation around the haunt.

There are still a few more steps to go until we are ready for testing. The trailer and steam page were a bit of a surprise but they happened. To give a time frame for testing, before the end of the year is all we can say.