Dark Inside Me, psychological horror adventure game - Trailer & Gameplays

Hi guys, here is the trailer of the Dark Inside Me, psychological horror adventure game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pS_YwZ6ycc

Looks great! But character's turning movement is huge huge distraction, it's like punch in the face. I mean straight-walking movement is smooth and then - BANG - from one frame to another, character turns. I think this could work in some hand drawn-cartoonish adventure game like Broken Sword - there you don't really need that smoothed transitions, you actually don't really need so much frames for your animations in general. But if it is 2.5D with realistic look like yours is, it just don't work...

It is kind of shame - not yours but more of VS devs - that Syberia from 2002 which runs in 800x600 still have better animation output and 2.5D feature then 2014's specialized AG engine. Well, it's only 12 years, right? So keep on dreaming I guess.

This is not the final version mate. I know that character turnings are annoying. But thats because I couldnt still solve how to make it in Vis. In Vis we can just assign the animation for the directions. Dont know how to apply the 3d animation transitions data:\

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Looks great! But character's turning movement is huge huge distraction, it's like punch in the face. I mean straight-walking movement is smooth and then - BANG - from one frame to another, character turns. I think this could work in some hand drawn-cartoonish adventure game like Broken Sword - there you don't really need that smoothed transitions, you actually don't really need so much frames for your animations in general. But if it is 2.5D with realistic look like yours is, it just don't work...

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Actually Broken Swords walk animation system was really good. It featured both rotation of the character before walking off in a new direction & it also featured a ground to contact walk cycle & also begin & end walk animation frames as well as walk prevention radius if character clicked too close to character to take a step. What I observed while playing the game. I think Broken Sword 1 is the sort of walk cycles most of us should be striving to achieve in point & click games instead of the snappy moon walk looking things most of us end up making. I believe that it is entirely possible to create workarounds for these features using a combination of action parts, loop & lua script. Although I guess it's all pretty complex, especially for anyone with little to no scripting/programming experience.

Now, about the trailer. It looks pretty disturbing & I like the fact that you are using different perspective angles for scenes & I believe you have created custom interaction animations for a lot of the interactions which is nice. I'm not a big fan of generic interaction animations that get used for just about everything in a game as they are boring & lazy - far as I'm concerned...

I do however agree that the walk animation could really do with a bit of work as it's not as smooth as it could be. You are using 3D characters so, you should be able to create non-slide walk cycles without too much trouble I think, which will make your walk cycles look more realistic to suit your graphic style. Will require a bit of work from you to get the movement offset for each frame correct though.

Hi Lee, I did all the character animations in 3d program which works smootly. For example; 0-20 frames (walking loop), 20-40 (translation for rotation). I've exported as .x file. And in Vis, char animation I import 0-20 frames for walking into the walk input. So where and how I can use/import the tranlation animation which is the frames 20-40?

I would create the rotation as different animations. All you really need for rotation animation is one frame for each direction. The ideal frame to use would be your initial walk animation frame then you play animation for current direction then after that the next direction & the next until you reach the target direction. It's more complicated than that though. I've written a script which utilizes the method I just described but it's not finished yet.

For character init walk animation I would probably include it in the same script as the rotation script I've been working on & have it trigger an animation after rotation animation or if rotation animation is not triggered for current character direction. The walk end animation is a bit more complicated & I'm not sure how to go about creating a solution for that just yet. It's complicated because you need to listen out for character position in relation to end position, save target actions, get current walk frame for current direction & then work out which animation you need to play & from which frame & then afterwards you need to restore the destination actions. & so on...

P.S: I have no idea about how the 3D side of the engine works, or how to use it. Not something I really plan on using.

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where and how I can use/import the tranlation animation which is the frames 20-40?

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Well you can't, that is the point! You can be a master animator of the world but you can't really show it when you're using VS engine.


AFRLme: Yes, Broken Sword has really great walking feature. It was a pleasure to just walk with your character. I mean I played lately Still Life (from 2005 with 800x600 I believe) and this character's turning is SO BEAUTIFUL, you don't really have to solve puzzles or going through the story, you can just clicking around the scene with your mouse and watching this character going back and forth, and only this is really pleasant for your eyes, it looks really really good. The way he/she turns, man that is just beautiful. I don't understand why we couldn't have this. This engine is presented as for "artist and designers with no programming skills", right? I mean it is not something impossible or godly-hard to implement solid feature of character's animation performance to custom engine, or is it? I don't know, I'm not programmer but I think that graphics performance and animation output should be number one on VS devs' "to do list" because that what adventures are about, right? Beautiful art and original story. You can't do much as engine developer about game's story, but you can develop and implement some neat and technically strong feature that allows artists and animators to really push themselves in order to make audiovisually beautiful product. It is really great that we have noise filters and camera-shakes and new action parts, but I would rather have possibility to show character in my game who doesn't look retarded when he/she turns or do some more sophisticated movements.

Yes technically additional character animation sections could probably be implemented into the engine. Whether Alex would be willing to do that is another matter entirely. Simon is currently working on creating a custom GUI without the limited wxwidgets, so he might be more willing to add features like that, but that probably won't be ready for quite some time as he's rewriting a lot of stuff.

I do think that if animation sections for init, rotate & end were included that they could be handled by the system. If anim exists use else skip or something along those lines.

I've not played "still life".

I played a little around with the old script. That can be easily targeted onto 3D.



Side effect is that it also works for 2D. Problem is just that the character is stopping for turning. Can't work around that yet. The waysystem is not really built for that, so it can't be scripted. Maybe I'll look into it more when the GUI is finished.

Ufff Simon ) How we could use this script, it complicated bro ..?