Working on our game 'Disinfection'

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Here's some screenshots of our upcoming multiplayer sci-fi horror game 'Disinfection'. I'm working on this together with my girlfriend

It features a fully procedural (random) level generator which is being eaten away in real-time by an infection. I also wrote lots of custom shaders from scratch for thi.s Such as a better PBR implementation that works well with the GI nodes in LeadWerks, as well as post FX such as anamorphic bloom and lens effects. Also effects for the infection and the monster.

Most of it is still very early WIP, but the game is playable and we're hoping to release the game in Steam Early-Access sometime in April.

[reepblue]

Nice. We'll be here if you need anything. Good luck!

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Another model done: the large computer core. Computer cores allow players to make data dumps, for bonus money, and perhaps more in the future.

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Some more in-game screenshots, the interiors are starting to take shape. Hopefully we'll be able to make a short trailer for the game soon

[Alienhead]

That looks 100% fantastic.  Can't wait to play it.

 

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Making a new player model and it's coming along great. We're getting some fancy mocap animations for it too.

Struggling a little bit with the animations in LeadWerks. Turns out EndAnimation() doesn't trigger when you play animations on an entities children, or any other part of the hierarchy that doesn't have the actor attached to it.

Maybe there's a better solution for this?

I'm going to need to have multiple animations playing on the model i.e. the lower half of the body playing a walking animation, while the right arm is holding up a scanning device and the left arm plays interaction animations.

Otherwise I'm just going to write my own animation manager with my own version of EndAnimation

 

[Alienhead]

You may think about loading the second and third animations as seperate models ?

 

Not sure of your set, but the game looks outstanding.

[EvilTurtleProductions]

9 hours ago, Alienhead said:

You may think about loading the second and third animations as seperate models ?

 

Not sure of your set, but the game looks outstanding.

Nah, you can just play the animation on one of the bones i.e. if you play an animation on the "right shoulder" bone the animation will only play on the right arm bones and not on the rest of the skeleton. So combining various animations this way, optionally with some blending, seems to work perfectly fine. It's just changing logic states when animations finish etc that is the problem right now

Thanks for the kind words

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Animations solved with a custom animation manager. It turned out to be a good idea regardless since it gives a lot more control for case-specific things in our case.

So, I turned my attention to the monster(s) in our game. The idea is that there's not so much a single monster, rather the entire environment and even other players can turn into your worst nightmare.

One important effect I wanted to implement is making it look like the environment itself changes shape, into clawing hands, horrific faces and all that good stuff. For this I wrote a custom shader. The object itself is a simple plane which gets deformed in the shader using a texture that I baked in Blender. This texture contains vertex position information of a claw or face I sculpted in Blender.
This has two major advantages:
- I can make very detailed sculpts without loading player hardware with a bazillion vertices, since it gets baked to a texture and applied to a much less detailed plane.
- It becomes very easy to animate the deformations since I can just blend textures to my desire, making it look like the claw/face actually grows out of the environment.

Now I just need to make a system for the monster so that when it hunts it starts placing these deformation planes nearby on the environment, while it chases players so that it looks like the environment itself is coming after you, basically

Also the Steam store will be live next week, keep an eye out for 'Disinfection'.

[EvilTurtleProductions]

The game is now on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1921130/Disinfection/

Wishlist that puppy

[Josh]

How did you do the computer panel that turns into a hand?

[EvilTurtleProductions]

19 minutes ago, Josh said:

How did you do the computer panel that turns into a hand?

it's a combination of vertex-shader mesh deform and using the render buffer that's available for z-buffered materials.

In Blender I made a simple plane, subdivided to 8k vertices, which I exported to the game. I then made another copy of the plane that has a very high amount of vertices, I use this plane to sculpt whatever shape I like (in this case that claw).
Since the UV map for both planes is the same  (Blender automatically interpolates when subdividing) I can simply bake the vertex positions to a small texture (I used 128x128 in above screenshots) which is then used by the vertex-shader to offset the plane's vertices into the shape of the thing I sculpted.

The reason I use a plane is because I want to fetch the screen fragments whatever is behind the plane and draw these fragments onto the plane itself, using the UV coordinates of the plane.
When the plane is undeformed you see no difference, but as soon as the plane deforms the fragments deform with it et voila you have yourself something creepy growing out of the walls, ceiling etc

Only drawback is that this is a screen-space effect, so much like SSR it has a visual glitch/needs a fadeout at screen edges. Another drawback is the lack of shading, since the material needs to be drawn last and thus z-buffered needs to be checked.
Given the creepy nature of the effect this isn't a big issue, though I'm open to suggestions on alternatives

[EvilTurtleProductions]

I've been experimenting with the lighting and GI probe shaders and done some minor tweaks that have had a huge impact for the visuals.
Especially metal surfaces look a lot more... metal. The specular reflection intensity and size is now more correct to the surface roughness and metallic values.
GI probe reflections are more balanced too now.

Been working hard on the new lobby map too, since it's the place players will meet up and accept missions. Loads of new models in place and I also updated the mission- and player screens to make them much more clear and comprehensive.
CRT screen shader has reflections now too

[aiaf]

This looks epic, and just confirms that i have no skills at modeling, texturing. So i will stick to puzzle and programmer games Cant wait to play this

[EvilTurtleProductions]

2 hours ago, aiaf said:

This looks epic, and just confirms that i have no skills at modeling, texturing. So i will stick to puzzle and programmer games Cant wait to play this

Aw thank you. And hey everyone is different, everyone has their weaknesses... and more importantly: their strengths
Play on yours

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Here's some screens from a recent testing session:

 

[EvilTurtleProductions]

Valve has given the go-ahead, so the game's now scheduled to release June 1st 2022!

 

[DooMAGE]

Impressive work, congrats!

What netcode system are you using? ENET?

[EvilTurtleProductions]

On 9/7/2022 at 5:02 PM, DoomSlayer said:

Impressive work, congrats!

What netcode system are you using? ENET?

I'm using Steam API, since it's incredibly convenient and the game's on Steam anyways

[EvilTurtleProductions]

I haven't posted here in ages, but don't worry the game has been released as planned and has seen many updates since my last post and we're starting to grow a small community on Discord too

Feel free to pop in if you're looking for players to play with: https://discord.gg/vV7KDVMBZz