Cryostasis - First Impressions

I saw that my occasional reviews gathered a bunch of interest so I figured I might make my blog about more than just my own game and art development... I want to show you, dear reader, some less known gems in the videogame world.

I recently picked up "Cryostasis" (tagline: sleep of reason) on steam and I would like to give you my first impressions and introduce this title to you:

Plot

Cryostasis takes place in 1981 on an Arktika class nuclear icebreaker called the North Wind near the North Pole. The main character, Alexander Nesterov, is a Russian meteorologist who was supposed to board the ship however he finds it's been shipwrecked since 1968 and its dead crewmen have undergone bizarre metamorphosis. Through the game the player finds fragments of Maxim Gorky's fairy tale The Flaming Heart of Danko, which parallels what happened to the ship and its crew.

The game follows a beautifully presented but confusing narration (at first)

The game can be considered a horror-shooter / adventure crossover even though it does not incorporate all the elements of these 2 genres. I did not come to any gunplay so far only late introduced melee combat which I found was surprisingly good. While playing, you really feel like you are alone in the arctic, nearly freezing to death and wrapped in heavy, uncomfortable gear and clothing. Movement is slow and it impacts the combat a lot. (you can adjust your punches and do combos with the WASD keys which is a nice touch too). In most videogames you are an overly agile "commando/ spec-ops" type character and in some horrorgames you are way too slow or not even able to defend yourself at all. This game finds the perfect middleground therefore you feel a lot more like you are a real person in an extreme situation.

I immediately fell in love with the grim athmosphere and the realistic feeling of this game. The visuals are somewhere in between really good and mediocre. This is an odd combination but not rare in indie/lower budget productions. While the shadereffects and lighting is excellent, a lot of rooms don't feel real and you often wonder what would be the actualy purpose of some locations. A few models have a really low polycount which baffels me because the developers added  so many visual effects that optimisation seemed to be their last thought...more about this in the full review though.

I need to mention right away: The ice effects look fantastic and since finding heatsources and keeping your body warm is a major gameplay element (sometimes a bit hard to take serious but innovative and well thought out) you activate a lot of generators to get lightsources and heatsources running so the frozen walls and objects around you start to defreeze resulting in a wonderful effect of water flowing from objects and dripping down. This shader effect looks stellar (which brings up the question...would being wet not dramatically decrease your possibility to stay alive in the colder areas?)

Lightbulbs don't work that way

In the above screenshot you raise your body temperature to a tremendously high level with nothing but a lightbulb... most of the time, you will find believable heatsources though.

Interactive cutscenes drive the story foreward...here we approach the "Northwind" on a dogslay

Now I'm going to talk about 2 elements I really like in this game.

PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR...

..is the genre which this game is a member of. (according to wikipedia). This game is from the ukraine and has the trademark elements of a game from eastern europe and russia : rust, paranormal themes in a realistic light and gritty athmosphere. You come across many corpses in this game blocking your past in some way (they where really creative here) and you travel in the past to control them and change their fate in order to clear a way for the protagonist in the present. You got that? Think you can handle that? It looks cool too:

 Not only do you jump back and forth in time and control different people you do also shift position and your surroundings fall apart and reassemble into something different aswell. You are in a warm room, suddenly a fucking guy comes in to kick your ass, then everything is frozen and then you are back in the warm room again. You do also have a ton of flashbacks to uncover the ships past. You dont get many explanations for this at first and trust me...its very interesting and seems really complex.

 If you are a western douchebag that has been brainwashed by mainstream science and clings to his 5 sense based, limited reality, you will not like or make much sense of this game... or anything else in life. But thats just jolly old me and my opinion. =:0]

Flashbacks are athmospheric and the voiceacting is good too

So, the game is not clichéed, feels like a videogame in this genre should feel and has an interesting story (so far).

PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR²

Something else I would like to adress are  the horror elements in this game. I already mentioned the combat and the reality-shifting...but the actual way enemies are introduced is great too. The first few creatures are your standart zombie-ish people but they do usually have a reason to be there or a cool build up moment.

This guy is going to shut the fucking door on you

The developers must have spent a lot of time in scripting all these flashbacks, moments and appearances...nothing feels as recycled as it often does in mainstream titels (yet) and enemies dont just spawn and attack you, they appear out of places where they could have dwelled before the player came along, climb up on something, rip apart a door etc. etc.
These do not feel forced and you dont get the fixed camera angles like in a lot of other titles that are having the motto "we scripted this scene so you are going to watch it, fucker!"

I'm on a boat in a boat... and this guy wants to join me!

The close combat system might feel a bit raw though...this game is in no way a perfect title.

Bring it on!

You also do your typical first person adventure routine... find keys, clues and solve valve puzzles...I hate valve puzzles.

I hate valvepuzzles...the pipe is also a good example for the strange lowpoly look....also: what is this room?

now this is a valvepuzzle I can get behind...its also how "valve" got its logo

In conclusion, Cryostasis is the kind of game I would make if I would have more skills, a team and even bigger balls. It does have its problems though...its not optimised at all. You might be wondering why its not as well known as "Amnesia" or the likes... well, you need some fucking alienware to run this thing. I have a high end, custom built machine and I cant run it on full settings without some lagspikes. I can only imagine how bad this game must suck on weaker systems (which the majority of the ... planet has)

Maybe the game will have more success in the future...when the high end of today becomes the garbage of tomorrow...until then, I enjoy this game.

'till next time!  (english is not my native language and feel free to keep every typo you find. no charge)

Outbreak : Review

Time for another Review!! This time its an indie zombie shooting game. Fucking creative, I know! :) Ever wondered why the big studios release so few zombie games while the undead are the maintheme in the indiescene whenever it comes to survival, arcade, action or fps? I really don't get it! I bet a zombiethemed call-of-duty-clone would sell like fucking I-Phones... a lot of the braindead kids already buy it only for the braindead nazizombies mode. Alright, the theme of the game isn't creative at all but the design and execution is intriguing as Data from Star-Trek would put it.

Outbreak is an FPSC based Top Down Shooter by Hockeykid and Kravenwolf. Now, for everyone who came to this webblog without knowing what any of this means...you must be lost. The Porn isn't here, sorry! But here's an explanation: FPSCreator is a tool designed to create first person shooters ergo: egoshooters for fun without coding. Creating a Top Down Shooter with this impressive visuals, an inventory system coherent spawning, ally AI and  more need scripting extras never seen before in an FPSC Game. Its so good, it received next to zero attention by its community... I don't even remotly understand this. Alpha Project, a rather generic Resident Evil inspried shooter... which is fucking impressive in the scripting and execution department but totally eats in the artistic realm gets quoted as one of the best FPSC games ever while this little gem gets completely overlooked. Probably because the gameplay is, at its core, fucking boring. (I get to that later... I'm going to be positive first)

THE GOOD

The effort

This game has been made for the "Defy the odds competition 2011" and I don't think it was intended to be a full length feature project but it turned out to be more than most other FPSC games. The sheer effort and skill put into making this happen is admirable and shows what a well organised team of coder and artist can do if they put some effort in their project. This game is a prime example of FPSC in good use and should be a monument to livingroom gamedevelopment. This game makes actual use of FPSC's scripting system aswell. No kidding! It actually uses it! (If you would play all FPSC games that get released like I do you would understand why I'm surprised... most people just put in stock entities, Jakes guns, Marcs Zombies and click build...if you are in this group. Well screw you!)

The visuals

Its a top down shooter so its a bit hard to judge the visuals but Kravenwolf did another outstanding job on them. Well, I have to point out a minor flaw here...its made by Kravenwolf so everything is held in blueish greytones. I like a coherent visual style but I'm not that crazy about the overly desaturated colorpallette. In fact, the only thing that seems to emit color are the lightsources which are creating a wonderfully believable cityambience btw. Its clearly the work of a skilled artist. I have to mention the use of shaders and effects is nearly perfect in this game. Nothing shines too much, nothing looks fake or too much like plastic. No dynamic object shines too bright and I didn't get annoyed by invisible enemies and the like. It all feels like forged out of one metal (if this metaphor exists in the english-speaking realm). This is a major problem I have with most other FPSC titles, including the more popular ones. They all have this feeling of a lot of incoherent media thrown in one map and done. This one really shines here.

THE BAD

The Gameplay

As creative and fresh the idea of a top down shooter in fpsc is...its not really a lot of fun. You just exterminate wave of zombies after wave of zombies while unlocking goodies in a pretty but confined space. (I'm really not crazy about the design of these greenish barriere planks)  Its the Nazizombies gameplay mechanic. Survive and unlock goodies to survive even more. You start off with some kind of teammate that dies somewhere down the road....and I guess you kill zombies then until you dont want to anymore. Aiming at them is a bit hard to do and I wasted quite some ammo trying to get a zombie from a distance. Some kind of lasersight would be cool. Dead Zombies also tend to block the way and can be an annoyance here and there... My major problem with this game is its simplicity despite all the effort.

More complaints

Lets sum this up in one categorie. While the game at its core is a wave based zombieslasher, its really not supposed to be that much fun. The entire approach has a serious, cold feel to it. The visual style not even included. The story (yes! it has a story) puts you in the shoes of "Kevin Arkely" to clear a city of infected targets. Your usual zombiebaloney but with this kind of game, a more lighthearted touch would be desirable. The dark approach gets underlined by a, what I think is, postgrunge theme that plays along after a while. All of this would have been much greater in a game with a larger scope. I would have liked this better if your charackter would be some homeless dude and your sidekick a hooker trying to survive the zombie apocalypse to a rocking tune. 

Yeah, I guess I got everything down I thought about this so far so now its time for a conclusion:

CONCLUSION

Outbreak is a damn fine, creative game that suffers from its monotony. I rate this thing a zombie out of ten...which is something along the lines of ... 7.5 // 10 on the fpsc scala. 5.0 // 10 on the general scala. I would love to see Hockeywolf and Kravenkid work on something with a larger scope...and maybe in first or third person. They made an awesome team on this and are far too talented for a nazizombies wave based game. Best luck to these two with their future projects!


So if you like wavebased games, zombies or just want to play a fresh indie title...

You can download the game here

You can keep all typos...no charge ;) Also: If you think any of this is offensive to you: blow me ;)

you guys have a great day and see you next time.

-Adrien

FPSC // Catathrenia Mai Update

Evening!

I felt like doing a last reality grounded update on this. The leveldesign from this set on will be a lot more surreal

This is also the place where you receive the intro speech. I want to have an animated character here having a conversation with the protagonist..however, we all know what happens to naive ambitions a developer has at the start. I am very optimistic about this project though so you can expect a few extra goodies from me.

Thats pretty much it for this time.I won't blabber on about my project and bore everybody. He, who has a question shall feel free to ask whatever he wants.

The game has a budget of 85 € now. (I bought some videoeditting software and a few points for the GC store)

Future levels will be strongly inspired by one of my favorite painters: Salvador Dali!!

-Wolf

FPSC// Catathrenia April Update 2

Constant development is the best development because it never stops.

I was jerking around with my entire shader collection to get a good ghost shader for hours...until I realised that the best ghost is done without any shader. Check out this image and see if you can see it creeping through the hallway.

Its not unlikely that this ends up being another hallway shooter. I really don't know.
We will all see once the full version is out there. I think this will be a 1.18 Release. So far I released something in every version since 1.14 (I think) so I don't see why skip 1.18.

You guys probably want to see some more screenshots, so here you go:

FPSC// Catathrenia April Update 1

I've had another full 2 hours this evening for Catathrenia. Well, its save to say that the final game won't blow anyones mind, but it will run solid and deliver some good mood and fun.

I also managed to get a good shader for my Weapons done. However, some firearms will get a different shader later on.

I made some images but I barely got myself around mapdesign. So yes! No big fat imageblocks like in the Shavra-Dead Frequency thread on the TGC Forums. I will get back on Shavra btw. big thanks to Bugsy! He has gotten some gears going in my head that should allow me to get the thing working now in 1.19

There are no more artifacts of the normalmapping or overshaded specular highlights on that book anymore. I spiced up the texture aswell because thats how I roll.

Preview: INTO THE DARK

The basic idea of "Into the dark" has spawned in the austrian mind of Ivan Ertl around 1 year ago in a horror game contest. I made a game for that contest too you can find here.
It only made 2nd place due to incompetent judges. You can either agree with me or I may launch my foot up your rectum.

However! The flawed but fun one level game of Ivan quickly evolved in a full commercial title he develops with his guys from homegrown games. 
The folks that also made "Anderson and the legacy of cthulhu" (another FPSC title that had a larger release)

THE STORY:

"You`re Peter "Pete" O`Brannon, a Private Eye. Sounds faszinating? It isn`t, trust me - unless you find it exciting to hunt down cheating husbands and lost dogs while living of cheap Chinese food in shabby motels. THAT would be what Petes job is all about - but luckily for him, he has a good customer paying his bills. It`s GlobalSecure Inc., one of the biggest insurance companies on the East Coast. More exactely, it`s Samantha "Sam" Miller who runs their investigation departement on insurance fraud. She`s tough, she`s intelligent, she`s better than Pete. By far better. But due to the companies Code of Conduct and some very nasty ethic rules, she`s prevented from taking, erm, "semi-legal" steps to gain essential information and proofs. That`s where Pete steps in - for 500 bucks per day + expenses + a nice 20% share of the money the company saves with whatever Pete finds out.

These 20% could be the winning ticket for a major lottery in the latest case Pete has been assigned to...." 
and later on there will be nazi zombies.





Don't we all want a 500 bucks a day job? If I would be a sociopath, I would be a mercenary or a pornstar or make popmusic for retarded teenagers... you know? Anything that pays well and you can only do if you dont have any moral-conciousness. But that is another story.



Description:

We got boobies. We got hookers. We got Zombies. We got Nazis. We got even Nazi-Zombies! We got puzzles, as this is an adventure. But this is also a shooter. And it is an RPG (at least in some special moments). This is really unique - and crazy like hell.
From the guys that have brought shame to the gaming world with "Anderson & the Legacy of Cthulhu", the next Game is closing in - and it`s an 1st Person Adventure with Shooter elements again. Now with 200% more madness and even more weird and wicked humor.



I know that this sounds a bit like they cram a lot of stuff in there without doing anything right. At least thats a bit what came out of most games that advertised their titles as mixed genres in the past. (just think of rise of the argonauts...wasn't that a piece of crap?) However, I do admire how they create all these concepts in FPSC. You need a shitload of creativity and dedication to even try this.
An insanity...

What? I can say that...they advertise this game like that " Now with 200% more madness and even more weird and wicked humor."

I always think whenever I had a good time watching a cheesy B-Movie: Why dont they make videogames with ideas like that... and I'm fucking glad people finally do it. So far: The result looks promising:

Adventure / RPG Shooter Hybrid Gameplay:

You can play the game as Adventure with RPG and Shooter elements or as Shooter with Adventure and RPG elements. Each level has at least two different ways to be solved, one focused on action, one on tinkering and puzzles. This is also reflected in the mission log.

This game even has magic perks...like this:

But you do probably know all that already... so you are probably here for the interview aren't you?

Well ... here you go:

1. Its been a while since the release of "Anderson and the legacy of cthulhu"... how did it feel to start working with FPSC again the first couple of days? How has it evolved?

I returned to a FPSC a few weeks before starting "Into the Dark", when I made a small promo game for the Colt 1911. The first feeling was similar to "coming home again", but after installing all the new updates and using some of the new effects it was more like "woha, what happened here ?!"

2. I heard that you are working with people who are very close to you on this game, how does that go (workflow, athmosphere, ...discipline :)) and is it a big discipline compared to working with regular team members.

I have some friends for freelancing tasks like video postproduction for cutscenes and sound production, right, the work with them is not that different from the one with the other freelancers. The biggest challenge is the work with my Girlfriend, who toke over the Art direction and 2D Art dept. after Peter Siedl left to Germany. On one hand its a great experience to work together on the game late at night and sharing ideas, the workflow is superb as we share office and flat, however, it gets hard when you have to urge faster work or have to criticize something.

3. You are working in gamedevelopment for a while now... how did that actually get started or better yet when was the point in your life where this really was something you would concider a job instead of a hobby.
I realized it when my father asked why the hell a german game magazine publisher had sent 500 D-Mark into his bank account. I was 11 then and had delivered a self-written C64 game to the Discmag of "64er" magazine.

4. I noticed that you may have another FPSC project up your sleeve, are you guys from Homegrown planning to release a couple of FPSC Based titles? (and...are there titles planned using other engines)
Yeah, I was asked if I want to make an Indie game based on the 2004 RTS "Highland Warriors". I told yes, as long as I can switch the genre and make a really educational Castle / Dungeon slasher evolving aroung the Scottish Independence Wars from 1284 - 1328. This will be a huge challenge as it WILL have huge outdoor battle scenes. You know that`s quite an announcement when it comes to FPSC.
On the other hand, I pay my bills more often by producing, polishing up and expanding games from other companies. So I`m familiar with many proprietary engines as well as Unity, Unreal 3 UDK e.t.c.
For own projects, I can`t tell what I`ll use in the future. As I have done many stuff with UDK, I realized it`s still more of a marketing tool to get you buying Unreal license full (to get the source access). Right now I`m looking curious at Unigine which looks interesting enough. I would leave FPSC temporary to do something cross-plattform.

5. Summing up the advantages of FPSC compared to other engines in 3 sentences?

Extremely fast prototyping possible.
Scalable and very good lightmap renderer.
Millions of tons of custom stuff and community code available.

6. Summing up the disadvantages of FPSC compared to other engines in 3 sentences. Cursing is allowed.

The Polygon limit is a bad, bad joke.
You hit the fucking Memory Cap on almost every level as son you try to make it sexy.
The kick-ass effects that are possible now drain performance like Bill the blood out of Sookie Stackhouse.

7. Will there be any characters in "into the dark" with austrian accents? I found that to be very entertaining in the alpha.

Erm - that`s an interesting question. I told "No Way" when I was asked, and the reaction was more dissapointed then relieved. So I tell that the MAIN chars won`t have austrian accents, but another char might have.
8.  Is "into the dark" a working title or do you plan to release the game under this name?

I have no Intention to change the title right now.

9. I noticed the massive script constructs you are planning to implement. (awesome things like necromancy). Is that running smooth or are you experiencing some lag/ troubles...or a classic FPSC: No response at all? (I admit, this is more personal interest)

To be honest, Necromancy was the easiest of them. Basically, you have an already died char laying as body on the floor. When you have the skill learnt, it will have a switch inside allowing you to perform the ritual. Upon doing so, I call activateused and destroy afterwards, the activated entity is the same char but alive and being an ally with a limited lifespan. Pretty obvious, isn`t it?
The scriptpipeline to LEARN necromancy is by far mroe complex, as the player will have to learn basic Latin ingame to understand the unholy books, which have to be obtained by...

...oh, wait, I`m spoilering!

However, on most levels, the memory allocated to script calls and their sound effects is ~ 200 MB

10. If you would have to sum up "into the dark" on the back of a dvd box... what would it be like?
"Into the Dark" is an innovative Trash-Comedy-Survivalhorror merging elements of shooters, adventure and RPG gameplay into something unique that is best played at night with lights out and sound turned on loudly. The deep storyline evolves in 12 different, challenging levels accompanied by several cutscenes and an always-present B-Movie charme in the tradition of "Evil Dead".


Groovy!


You can also play an alpha cut version which you can download here


so long, folks!

FPSC // Catathrenia First Post

FPSC Version: eX Nine

This is my mini-project following me through my six months of extreme working hours

Plot-Summary

Jacob Craven is trying to keep his frayed life from unraveling. His days are increasingly being invaded by his nightmares which manifest into the dark corners of his existence. Beings incarnating nothing but his fears. Although he tried to escape for years, a strange outlandish being finds and contacts him every night in his dreams showing him uncomprehensible images and messages. Although a new clue about the remains of his long-lost equally troubled sister allows him to hold on to a last beacon of sanity, the line between reality and delusion is steadily growing more and more uncertain.

Read this letter to get a grip of the games storyline and tone:

Quote: "

My dearest sister,

It has been too long since I ever saw you for me to remember your face...time left nothing more
than a ghostly shadow of your face on the only photograph I have... maybe I'm just too old now to remember.
I'snt that what being old is all about? Slowly fading out like your memories.

I used to deny it for years... run from it as it grew stronger. The dreams.
It is save to say that I saw every single part of the world. Russia, China, the states...
All of them drenched in the dark shadows of my nightmares. Our Nightmares.
You see... Samantha... typing down your name almost made be burst out in tears. Strange... I felt so empty for
so many years. You where strong enough to admit your nightmares...to talk about them as they started to slowly
manifest in your daily life...as they started to stare at you whenver you looked in a mirror or your reflection in
a puddle of water. Thats why they locked you up...they told me you where dead. Died in a carcrash on a schooltrip I later
found out never happened.

Nobody will ever read this letter... All hope is gone. The only reason for me to take this last step is the sheer fear to face
my dreams without waking up. To be trapped in them forever. I am too old now for running. I ran 30 years. Odd! How the intensity of
my dreams just decreased depending on how much I moved.

I think it has troubles finding me, connecting with me whenever I keep moving. It is getting impatient and more agressive...the dreams get more intense, they start to show up as shadows in the corner, as reflections in the buildings and I am not the only one sensing them. It is getting worse. It keeps talking to me silently showing me these pitchblack images of impossible geometry and I can feel its
terrible loneliness and I can see its eyes... I can see an eternity of waiting. If I only could understand its demands...
You see, my beloved sister, I don't think it wants to harm me... its being is just too powerful for my weak soul... these dreams are just becoming so real because... my head is so full I sometimes can barely understand my own thoughts.

Mother died last year...that is how I found out about your past...your real past. They locked you away in this 3rd class mental hospital. Almost no documents where left, no adresses, no phone numbers. Only a card where all relevant information has been burned away. New Hope Mental Asylum. It took me a few months to find it. Almost no records have been left of this asylum... the only somewhat relevant information was on a hobbyphotographers website.. some clam who takes pictures of abandoned places. He refers to his gallery as "in the mouth of sadness" and claims the "air" in the hospital to be so dreadfully hostile... that there is some unnatural presence there that he only took a few pictures of the entrance hall and didn't dare to venture any further. Oddly enough, the place closed down due to a fire shortly after you died. Oddly enough, there are no traces of firedamage on the pictures on the website.
The author claimed to return to the building at daytime...his webblog hasn't been updated since. At least I got a location now.

All I hope for is to find any sort of clue from you that might help me end this nightmare... how I doubt it. Isn't this just the last resort of a dying man? What is left in such an asylum after 30 years of decay? I hope more than there is left of me.

"

 

 

 Screenshots:

 

 

 

 Current Budget:

(this includes no content I already had, only media strictly bought for catathrenia)

5€

 

 Gameplay:

This isn't a horror game. More of a mystery adventure. I settle more for a dence and dreadful mood than flatout scaring you like in former titles. The gameplay revolves around finding clues about your sister while wandering between dream and reality. I like to call this "bipolar" gameplay as it has 2 completely different sides in the same game. Also the puzzles will work that way later on in the game. 2 choices, you do either get rewareded or badly punished for your action. No in-betweens.

This has slow adventure gameplay in the real world and more fastpaced "condemned" like gameplay in the dreamstates.


Trivia:

The focus of this project lies on how low I can keep the memory cap. Most levels only use 1300 to 1500 Megabyte. I chose an abandoned asylum as those abandoned buildings have little furniture left. So I can do most athmosphere with the textures and the lightmapping instead of cramming it up with stuff. It also features a lot of selfmade models...but not that much, its a miniproject, lets keep it lazy.

Another interesting note is that you can choose between full postprocessing, simplified postprocessing and black and white postprocessing in the final game I think thats a nice touch.

This game has custom characters.

Also, if you ever wanted to see a running tub in FPSC:

 

 

There is also a lot of gruesome stuff in this game so don't let your kids play it if they are under the age of 14 ... if you do you should get your head examined.