Jim Rossignol's Blog, page 4

Coming Soon: The Industrial Biome

We’re hoping to bring your our grim industrial biome – along with a couple more NPCS – in a build next week. Here’s a peak at what we’ve been up to:

You can click for huge versions.

Trombone Action

Preview of some features in next week’s update:

The Sir, You Are Being Hunted Alpha Is Now Open To All

Hello there!

You can buy it on Steam or Humble Store on our front page.

Sir’s alpha build has arrived for all, and Kickstarter (and Paypal) backers can now get their builds of the game over at Humble Store. Steam keys will be available through Humble store just as soon as we can sort that out. (Soon!)

PLEASE NOTE: This is not the final build. We’re aiming for monthly updates from here, until it’s done, but you can jump in and play and let us know what you think.

KS BACKERS: Getting the game is very simple. Go to https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ke... and enter the email you used to back the game, either for your Kickstarter login, or your Paypal account. Login details will then be emailed to you.

Any problems, you can hit the forum: http://www.big-robot.com/forum/

Physical rewards have also started to ship this week, so backers of higher tiers can expect some goodies soon.

The grimoire and soundtrack are going to arrive a bit further into this alpha, as we generate more material for the game.

Love you!

Why Can’t I Enter The Buildings In Sir?

This is the question we get asked most frequently, so we thought we’d answer it in some detail.

Firstly, many people seem to imagine that it’s some kind of trivial oversight, as if we are going to say “gosh, yes, we hadn’t thought about that”, and then fix it. We have thought about it, of course. We think that it would be great for the player – and the robots – to be able to enter buildings. We’ve spent a lot of time examining how they might do that, and concluded that, some open and ruined structures aside, they cannot.

Here’s why.

There are two main solutions to being able to enter buildings:

- Skyrim-style instanced buildings, where the interior is essentially another space. Enter through the door and explore that space independently. This is clearly a compromise, and not ideal for an open world game. What happens to the robots chasing you? Do they just wait outside? Do you get an outdoor camera? Do they come inside? It rapidly moves away from the kind of game we were trying to produce, as well as producing a cascade of additional design issues.

- Buildings that are entered within the world space, as in Arma II or Stalker. These can be explore seamlessly and allow you to look out into the world through the windows and doors. This is the ideal solution, and they one we would have to go for.

So we immediately discounted the instanced buildings, because they are not part of the world. They don’t allow you to hide inside and peek outside at your antagonists. They would require interiors to built, either statically, which would increase our art time and budget, or procedurally, which would increase our art time and budget as well as programming time (proc gen solutions are extremely intensive for the programmer and testers). Doing it procedurally would mean increasing the generation time for any given world enormously, too, which makes doing it like this a drag for the player. Do you increase the generation time at the start of the game by several minutes? Or create a lag on entering any building? Clearly, neither is ideal for creating a streamlined experience. If you do go for static interiors, then you have to create a large number of them so that you don’t appear to be entering the same building all the time, which again increases our art time and cost, and implementation, and testing.

The points above about creating the building procedurally also count towards the second more ideal solution, with necessary increases to procedural generation complexity and art budget. There are other questions too: do the interiors then have furniture? Where is the loot? Do we create additional 3D objects for the items, or do we create secondary loot containers inside the buildings, rather than the doors as per the current system? Solutions like those in Arma 2 are great, but they add several large burdens to development, not least of which is cost.

If we did decide we had the time and budget to go with that second system – and let me be very clear when I say that we do not have the resources, we are a three-man team with a small Kickstarter budget, and I still had to work another job for the whole of development – there’s another problem, too, which is that we’d have to introduce another complex level of detail structuring system to deal with the increased geometry load from the villages. These areas are already very intensive, even with a bunch of low poly models, and when we’re throwing this many polygons at the screen we start to lose slower machines entirely. The performance hit would be significant, and the polycounts of the buildings would skyrocket. Given that this was supposed to be a lo-fi game about British countryside we’re suddenly spending huge amounts of resources – computational and developmental – on one problem that is solved by saying “you can’t enter the buildings”.

So that’s what we said.

Oh, and then there’s the issue of having to build every model in such a way as to allow the robots to enter the buildings – or redesigning pathfinding entirely. The system that procedurally places a navmesh onto the world can’t cope with interiors, so we’d be looking at yet another solution that needs to be designed and programmed. More time. More resources, and another hit to the game’s performance.

It can be done. Yes, it can be done – other games have done it. But we, Big Robot, the guys making Sir, You Are Being Hunted before the money runs out, cannot do it.

Of course there are structures you can still enter in Sir – ruins, pole barns, and so on – but the interiors of the intact, British-style houses we would need to sell the “British” ideal were simply out of reach. And this is really important: we could have removed buildings entirely. We could have made it so that there was just forest and countryside, but part of the high concept of the game was Britishness, and we couldn’t get that across in the way that we wanted without British villages. And granted, we do lose something by not solving this issue – the capacity to explore and hide inside buildings – but since the point of the game was running across open countryside, rather than poking about in urban spaces, we were happy with that concessions. Lots of games do building interiors and urban environments well, but we do open, thematically-coherent countryside well. That was our goal, and we totally nailed it.

Yeah, I am bound to be a bit out of sorts when addressing this problem, so I apologise for that. It’s somewhat exasperating for us to create a procedurally-generation engine unlike anything else ever made, to have made Herculean efforts to produce a first-person stealth game with a huge range of weapons and equipment, to implement an AI system more complex than what generally appears in first-person games, and still be told that we’re lacking because the player has to use the buildings as loot stashes rather than Wendy houses.

We’re gamers too, of course. We can see the ideal game you all have in your minds. We’d love to have been able to deliver it, but the part about entering buildings is missing.

I hope you can understand why.

Most importantly: once you play the game, that concern will drop away. The game works, and players get along with the systems we’ve created just fine. Trust us, and wait for August 19th.

Behold! Some Fresh Images From Sir

Our early access tier backs (£30+) on Kickstarter should be getting their test builds this week. To celebrate, we made some screenshots. Click for full size!

Victory! Rezzed Was Pretty Great

The Sir, You Are Being Hunted stand at Rezzed was swamped with people for the entire weekend, and we spoke to hundreds of keen gamers about what we were up to. We even won game of the show, so that was fortuitous.

Tom and James also gave a presentation, which you can see below.

We’re focusing on the early access build for the higher tier Kickstarter backers next, then after that the alpha test begins properly. It’s nearly here!

Behold: The Mountain Biome!

We’re currently adding some new environments to the world, this is the first one: mountains!

And Another Gameplay Video! Tea And Biscuits All Round, I Say

A New Video Series For Sir, You Are Being Hunted

This one’s an intro, so some of what it covers will be familiar. But some of it won’t be. You should watch it.

Big Robot Is Pleased To Announced Pre-Orders Of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, Via Humble Store! Also: Rezzed Appearances.

Lots to come in the next few weeks, but we’re starting with the pre-order, thanks to those lovely folk at Humble. Pre-order folk will get early access in our second round of testing prior to release, along with the base Kickstarter tiers. This will come about a month after the Kickstarter early access tiers get their access. This will all kick off at some point in the summer. It’s so close we can taste it!

In the meantime, please pass this link on to anyone who missed the Kickstarter and who might want to support the development of Sir in the next couple of months.

We are also enormously excited to announce that Sir will be playable at Rezzed 2013 in Birmingham, UK, on 22nd and 23rd of June. Please come along! Not only will the game be there, but Tom is going to be talking about the game’s development and his procedural generation experiments in Unity.