Update #13 - Time flies

Hello Scavengers!

Apologies it's been a while, but since the last update I've been on a short holiday, spent some time on a different prototype, did some final bug fixing on a volunteer team project I've been working on (more on that later), went through an important milestone at my actual work, and on top of all that got a promotion with new responsiblities too!

All of the above took up a lot of mental space, and it's only in the last few weeks that I've had the capacity to go back to Time Scavengers. It's felt nice returning to it with fresh eyes to be honest, and I've made decent progress with a blockout and creating the level logic. So let's get to it:

This is the current blockout stage of the transport wreck the player finds half stuck in a massive frozen-in-time energy blast wave. Get too close to the energy barrier and all electronic equipment starts to malfunction, so this is a risky trip to see if they can power up and access the inventory for the ship. That way, rather than wasting energy and time randomly breaking opening storage crates, they will know exactly which ones contain the most important supplies they need.

The visit to this wreck takes place at one of the key narrative points and I figured this would be a good 'first wreck' to fully block out, with all the logic and dialogue needed. As you can see from the montage below, it took a bit of work to figure out the correct scale and look of the transport, and there's still a lot of work needing doing both outside and in, but the structure is all there now.

And none of this would work if it wasn't for the logic triggers, controlling the dialogue and the doors and computer inside that the player interacts with. The bolted bulkhead door logic is already done, and was working in a test scene some time ago, so that was simple to drop in. The computer will need a lot more work however - an actual usable UI for one thing (not looking forward to that)! And then there's the 'escape sequence' for when everything goes wrong, which is going to need a lot of pre-planning and FX work.

Hopefully when it's finished, this level will be a decent example of a simple wreck (we're still in the 'tutorial' part of the game at this point) to help me figure out the overall feel of the game. I can then use it as a testbed to try out music and audio fx, play around with lighting, as well as the time-unfreezing/freezing elements that the player is starting to encounter.

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As for that volunteer team project I've been working on, it's now been released! Project Borealis: Prologue is a fan-made, snowy version of the start area of Ravenholm from Half-Life 2, made to showcase the Unreal Engine tech the team has put together so far. It's only short, but definitely worth playing if you're a Half-Life fan, and as a flag in the ground to show what the team is preparing for their adaptation of Episode 3.

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Anyways, I should be back to my usual cadance of updates from now on, and will be attempting one more devlog before the end of the year, so now's the time to catch up on all the video updates so far!

Bye!