Hi everyone !

Here I will talk of my new project "Catyph: The Kunci Experiment", a 1st person adventure game, created with Visionaire Studio of course.
Catyph will take place in my series of projects called "Black Cube", in which you can also find my previous game ASA: A Space Adventure, release on Desura on January, 7th 2013.

Catyph, Short film

http://catyph.fr

You're an astronaut with no specific identity, sent in mission by the people of your planet, Terra. You're all alone and you need to use your brain to progress in the game. The gameplay is close to what you can find in most 1st person adventures. But the similarities end here.

- Discover a new story in the Black Cube series (ASA, The Black Tower)
- Visit new and varied areas with realistic graphics
- Developed with Visionaire Studio
- Different difficulty levels
- And of course, all new puzzles !


I will use this thread to give you some info about the development, and also ask all of my questions related to VS. It will be a kind of development book.

The development of Catyph the game officially started at the beginning of January 2014.

(link to HD pics)



More to come !



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original message, 11. September 2013
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Hello, I recently purchased the full version of Visionaire and tried it on a test project. It seems very good and complete, and I'm enthusiastic at the idea of making a full game with it someday.
My previous game was ASA: A Space Adventure (http://www.desura.com/games/asa-a-space-adventure) created with Adventure Maker. It was quite the perfect software for a 1st person adventure, but it's starting to be quite old and outdated. Because of that, I had many issues with it, including low resolution and errors, so I'm glad to see that Visionaire supports up to 1920 and is quite stable !

Actually, I'm seriously thinking of creating a new 1st person adventure with Visionaire, and it doesn't seem to be a problem, even if I see only 3rd person adventures made with it. Though I have some questions on some specific points :

- I have bought the current version of Visionaire, and I just read that a version 4.0 will release soon, and that it won't be available for free if I have the 3.x. Is it true ? I feel a bit stupid now, not buying version 4 ^^ Also, do you think the improvements of version 4 will be recommended ?

- In Adventure Maker, there was a system of plugins. People good in development could make their own plugs and share them with the others. This way, I could implement various features in my game that don't seem to be available basically in Visionaire. I think, for example, of :
* a way to add an "animated wave" effect on static water pictures, to make it move like in Riven.
* a plugin for 360° panorama views, which allows a better immersion.
Do you think there's a possibility to implement these features in Vis. without scripting them all by myself ?
If not, I can get rid of the 360s, and use PNG sequences for the water, but having the previous features would be so great !

- During my tests, I could export my project to an exe for PC. Somewhere, I read that Visionaire can build Mac games : how can you do this ?

- I had some issues while making an inventory and a save menu. I followed the tutos by GlenFx, that are great to begin with Visionaire, but some of his features don't 100% work. For example, in the save menu, when you select a slot to save your game into, the game is usually saved in another slot. It's not only in my test-game, it's also in the demo provided with the tutorials. Is there another place to find good tutorials ?

Thanks for your help !

it's not been decided which version number is to be releases yet; not definitively, at least. yes the next stable build whichever it may be will be recommended as it's been rewritten practically from the ground up (based on what I've been told) to reduce cpu/ram/vram usage & also to add cross platform support. audio/video support has also been improved amongst many other things & better stability in both the editor & player.

currently only the dev & beta builds have option to build/compile to mac, so you have to wait for next release.

In regards to the wave thing you mentioned... I believe they are working on adding some filter/overlay type effects into VS with shader, but I'm not 100% sure, just something that was mentioned during a conversation I had with one of the devs a little while back.

the 360 thing I have no clue about... NigeC would be person to talk to when it comes to first person games in VS.

finally: the save system is a little strange - I know...
if you click on an empty slot, then it saves to the first available empty slot but it works as it should for overwriting/loading & erasing the selected slot providing a save exists inside of it. check out my advanced menu template for a complex/professional style game menu example complete with correct way to make a save menu & various other things such as new game, resume game, bonus content etc & reading/writing from/to the config.ini file.

Thanks for the quick reply AFRLme !

OK for the next release of VS then. I'll be waiting for it before starting anything serious.

- wave/water rippling effect : to make things clear (in case it wasn't), the effect I want to achieve is this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPPJAZ6up2U
Watch it at 4:47, where it's obvious.
In fact, it's a static picture with a Mask, and within this Mask, there's an effect that makes the water move in waves. It saves more memory than the png sequence.

- 360 : NigeC, I hope you will have good news !

- Save system : thanks for the template, i'll have a look. If I use your template, I suppose I should add your name in the game credits, right ? Well, I mean, if there's a game released someday...

haha, can't really drag & drop in VS...
templates are mostly for reference, just to show one or more methods on how to achieve something.

yes I was talking about a kind of masking effect in regards to the wave effect. openGL shader has various filters etc I think? David showed me some examples a little while back; one of which kind of distorted the background image.

I don't have a clue when the next version will be released, but hopefully it will be ready sometime this year, but anything you work on in the current version will work in the next release anyway, so feel free to start working on your project whenever you like!

The nearest I got to 360 was more a slide show like in the early Myst, I think Scratches would do it too
This is what I mean.. its done with VS:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26539256/Zep_VS2.zip

First person is very easy in VS although in GlenFX tut it has Commands and set cursor events.. these don't work, you don't really need the command system, setting the cursor on enter and leave is enough for 1st person

There will be away to do a 360 turn similar to AM's basic panoramic not the cubic, I think it has been done in one of the commercial games but as yet they haven't spilled the beans on how to do it! but it would require some lua knowhow

Thanks to both of you. Your answers really help. I've been playing a little more with VS and I don't have many issues with it. Yet I've been doing simple things lol

I tried the Zep demo. I had achieved almost the same kind of result with my test project, but it was interesting to see the inventory.
1st person games seem indeed quite easy to make with VS, but there's always more challenge than what comes to mind first. Usually because of the puzzles.

I'll keep looking for a way to make a 360. I'm not familiar with lua at all, but it might be the time to learn !

Hi there, I had stopped working on my project during the last months, but I'm back on it.
I have created enough graphics to make some tests in VS. There are many things that work like a charm, but I still have various issues. I'll come back here to ask when I'm stuck.

One of these problems is screen resolution. My first game ASA used to have a very wide screen ratio. I want to do the same in my new project and I chose 1920x800 - I like the cinematographic feeling.
So I set VS to run in 1920x1080, import my backgrounds and run the game... to realise that the pictures are displayed at the very top of the screen and not centered. I mean there's no black bar at the top, but a very large bar at the bottom. Not very aesthetic. Do you have an idea to fix this, maybe with a bit of coding ? (I don't want to add manually the black bars on each picture in photoshop to create a false 16/9 pic).
Thanks !

set your screen resolution to 1920x800. go to tools -> explorer -> eGame -> GameWindowResolution to set your own resolution.

when you compile your game make sure that the setting Resolution is set to Desktop in your .ini file (this will be default in the next release). Otherwise the game will be initialized with 1920x800 resolution in full screen mode which is probably not supported on some graphics cards.

Ah ! This is perfect Alex, thanks ! I had never opened this Explorer menu
It seems to be very useful.

By the way, do you think there is a way to add a video in a background, not a PNG sequence ? I had done that in my previous game : the Main Menu was a looping video with buttons (New game, Load, Quit...) at the top.

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By the way, do you think there is a way to add a video in a background, not a PNG sequence ?

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not possible, sorry.

uh oh Very problematic for a 1st person adventure... There are a lot of situations where adding videos in the backgrounds helps a lot.

You're formal that there's no way to add a video in (or instead of) a background ?
It is already possible to play a video before and after a scene, so why not during the scene ?