Author: Salireths
With more and more systems being gradually completed, a path forward reveals. The next build is not behind the mountains any more, but there is still a descent towards the valley ahead. This valley is all about making gameplay-related content and 3D-artwork, and finalizing everything we've been hard at work for all this time.
Take a look at the roadmap graph (
Author: Salireths
Born underground, hatched from an egg of stone
Raised in the dark, the safety of our Dragon home
Scales made of iron, steel in our bones
To dig and dig makes us free
Come on brothers sing with me!
Some things have changed since the last time I wrote about Second Life.
In short: the Sergal avatar did not turn out quite how I'd want it to be - it needs a rework before I can release it. Turns out, SL avatar models have different expectations after al...
2019-12-30 16:02:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, it’s Hopfel again!
It’s been a while since my last post, but we’ve been steadily working on exciting new features we’ll be able to show you soon. For now I will go over one of our core implementations, the content system.
Similar to RPG games, we have to deal with a lot of different content types, prominent examples being items, weapons and actions(skills) but also less obvious ones like animation modules, movement modes and body parts.
All of these content types have the followi...
2019-11-29 20:45:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths
In this post I'm sharing some fresh new concept art, though if it was just images alone, I feel it wouldn't paint the whole picture... That's why I also prepared a bunch of text explaining some key points in the lore!
I know it's a lot to read, but it will give you a better understanding of the unusual setting TGOR is set in.
I started the world of The Gateway of Realities from the moment when I created my "sona", long time ago, before the game.
It develop...
2019-11-04 19:12:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths
We're very grateful to everyone supporting the development of TGOR!
This month's focus has been on bringing the features to a more polished and playable level, as well as enabling them to work in multiplayer. Inventory, weapons, character customization (and other features) work with multiple clients.
Sadly we didn't prepare anything special for Halloween, because the work on the game is our priori...
2019-10-30 23:13:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths
The progress steadily goes towards finalizing all systems we wanted to pack for the next build, approaching the exciting moment when we can start adding actual game content!
In the last post we talked about save/load system and changes to hub level, that is still being unchanged and works (and looks) very well! Think we finally found our Hub that we will stick with!
While all that works well, Hopfel continued to work on implementing all things related to the tab-menu. If you remember...
2019-09-29 22:47:29 +0000 UTC View Post
As I described in the previous post, the majority of the work on TGOR has lately been very programming-heavy, which is Hopfel's department, and because of that I got a bit of "free time" if you can call it that...
So, logically, I've decided to spend that "free time" by loading even more work onto myself and pursuing yet another old dream of mine - making avatars for Second Life.
If you're not familiar what SL...
2019-08-30 16:37:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Post by Salireths.
Our work is gradually moving towards finalizing the build - it involves a lot of technical "behind the scenes" programming-related work, while it doesn't have a lot of pretty visuals, this is the foundation of the game responsible for its core experience.
Finishing up the saving and level loading systems are our big highlights for this month! It's very important to have those in order to make the game playable again, because prior to that the game could only be run through the editor.
... 2019-08-29 19:22:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths.
This is a blockmesh of the level, plan for which I presented in the previous post, all the ideas that I have already talked about are now laid-out in-engine.
The Gateway in the middle closed by a shield, so the player nee...
2019-07-19 20:51:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths.
There is more work being done on the level design - I'm currently drawing some concepts and blocking out an updated variant of the hub world, iteration over iteration, it is shaping into a pretty interesting place! A place that is not just here to introduce the player into the game, but also a meeting place later on, a home. When it's time to add NPCs, it should become a proper town.
We've also been working on a little side project that might be a welcoming addition to TGOR, but it's not ready ...
2019-06-30 03:02:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths.
I've spent a lot of time working on new graphical assets, but it's not just about making models - that would be much easier....
There is many ways you can go about making models, many styles and workflows. But in our case it is about making them very fast and still have them decent looking, because so far I'm the only one who works on all the graphics, models, world design, and animation. I need to be extremely efficient.
So far I've added around 15 new textures, countless rocks, re-made ...
2019-05-29 01:38:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Author: Salireths
Since the previous post, I've worked more on the story, realizing that "you're being sent away to build a world" is a weak premise - we can do better. After talking to friends and patrons, new ideas arisen which will, while not completely changing the direction, definitely improve overall worldbuilding and setting.
I'm not sure if I should be talking about it now, because it still might change many times, and even if it doesn't - wouldn't you want to learn about the world in game? It is spoilers...
2019-05-01 17:35:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi, it’s Hopfel writing for a change! I will try to also contribute to this Patreon page from now on, giving an insight into our base systems implemented in C++.
Our game needs to accommodate for multiple species of different sizes, body makeup and movement capabilities. We’ve opted to implement our own physics based movement to fit the resulting requirements. In this series of articles I will give a technical overview over what we ended up implementing for our game.
The Unreal Engine comes with a powerful, highl...
2019-04-10 21:59:18 +0000 UTC View Post
One of questions I've been asking myself for a long time: what exactly happens when the game starts for the first time?
Over time different ideas popped up how to introduce a new player to the game, you might remember me talking about some of them from the previous posts about this subject. All decent on their own, but none just felt "right". Thus I keep thinking and designing - I never rejected any of the previous ideas, instead they all just keep morphing and evolving, simplifying and improving.
The ideas I'm going to present i...
2019-03-28 17:18:39 +0000 UTC View Post
There is a lot of things under active work currently, but instead of waiting until we'd be done with all of them, I decided it would be smarter to do a bunch smaller posts as things get ready to be shown!
The picture above is a mock-up of the new full-screen inventory design that is optimized for our re-written (but still not finished) inventory system. Let's take a look at each element individually:
Tabs:
Ou...
2019-03-10 05:37:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Its time to share what we've been working on! We expanded upon the interactions by introducing base emote poses, which give the player control over their character's body in the intuitive way, and we also brought some cool gravity systems into the game :}
Like how it's done in other games that feature emotes, player can open a menu and be presented with a selection of various animations... However! They are not just one-...
2019-02-22 04:05:46 +0000 UTC View Post
I present you with this month's work! We've worked on making the Gateway activate and spin as it should, levels load in and out, player's characters travelling between realities, hub world where the Gateway itself stands (and where the houses and dragon NPCs will be living eventually), and some more work on the lewd interactions.
Starting off with the hub reality progress, you can see it is quite different from the concept I drew before. Now it's a bit overgrown and has an overall warmer feel to it, rather ...
2019-01-29 21:28:02 +0000 UTC View Post
First of all, thank you for all your continuous support of our project, this year has been extremely busy, and the busyness still goes on, as we're still working on the new
game build, which, hopefully, will soon be available (we're working hard on it!).
I'll definitely do a retrospective of our progress later (looked at my ShareX folder of all work progress screenshots for the entire year, its huge!), just need to make more time to compile it all together, for now I wanted to show you this picture I made for you, using our i...
2019-01-03 04:31:08 +0000 UTC View Post
I've already posted multiple variants how the hub world could look like, but such is the life of any designer - always keep iterating and improving.
With our new mission-based approach to reality exploration, we need a hub area, where friends can meet up and spend some time relaxing after an adventure and preparing for the next one: heal up injuries, eat some delicious things, customize the character, craft provisions, interact with NPCs, etc...
Initially I planned to make the hub area by ripping a chunk of land off Intersp...
2018-12-20 01:49:24 +0000 UTC View Post
First of all, thanks for all your great support this month! I've been busy preparing the Interspace map for the playable build, adding a short tutorial section and interactive elements, as well as making the Consciousness be a controllable "character". Its all still very far from completion, but its a great start.
Next I'm going to work on a desert asset test map again (just to play around with reality changing mechanics), some character animation improvements, and maybe even will get to make a sergal model playable.
Here are so...
2018-12-10 02:42:20 +0000 UTC View Post
This Dragoness you will meet at the start of the game, on that map discussed in the previous post, and she will lay an egg for you! Which you use to choose the starting species and the game goes on from there. She will also help you if your body has died and you don't have any spare bodies to use.
But aside from laying eggs, she is planned to be an NPC in the main hub area (Interspace) who you can always interact with. Despite that she is an ancien...
2018-11-25 05:57:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Hard at work on the new build, as usual! There is quite a few things we've done and doing I'd love to share with you with this small status update.
The way we're programming the game is we first created a lot of essential game-supporting systems that work semi-independently from each other (I talked about them in one of the previous posts) .
When we work on those systems, we only ...
2018-11-20 21:52:29 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't have anything spooky prepared for today's occasion, simply didn't have time left to do anything for Halloween... But instead time was spent on working on more long-term things this month, despite many obstacles... All getting closer to making the new pre-alpha build, it just requires a lot of things to be done before we can finally hit "package game" and upload it for everyone to try.
My computer broke down earlier this month (PC is back up and running now by the way), and while I was waiting for replacement parts to arrive, I couldn'...
2018-10-31 18:41:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Due to elusive "save draft" button I accidentally posted it too early, this is the new updated version with screenshots and gifs added. Text is still the same, aside from screenshot annotations.
Thanks to everyone joining in and patrons continuing their support!
I'm sorry that didn't make this post sooner, it's just my PC broke down and became unusable (BSOD every 5 minutes), so I've spent quite some time researching the PC component market, looking for what to buy. I'm already ordering new parts and they should b...
2018-10-09 21:58:59 +0000 UTC View PostAs you know, from the very beginning TGOR was set to be a simulation of life, without hiding anything "behind the camera". Many games, which have breeding of creatures, do it in a "family-friendly" way, without showing anything at all (like Spore), hiding it behind the scenes (like Pokemon,) or making some weird disturbing multiplication behavior (like Minecraft).
As expected by everyone, In TGOR there are creatures of different genders, and despite the stylized artstyle, they have all their genitalia and other essential bodily features...
2018-09-29 18:38:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The term "interaction" is extremely wide...
Most games make it that your "gun" or "sword" is the way you "interact" with the world... Which in their example is kind of true, but games should not be only about violence, and there should be other ways you can "Interact" with these amazing, full of opportunities, virtual worlds...
The Gateway of Realities is a systemic game. It doesn't have a lot in terms of narrative planned, but it makes up in systems we've been building and constantly iterating on...
2018-09-15 03:41:45 +0000 UTC View Post
First of all big thanks for the support this month! I'm sorry that I haven't been able to write a lot of posts lately, but it's all because I'm spending all my time working on the game, as we're trying to finish the next build faster.
More new content is being made, however to show it, I'll need to do some changes to Patreon page first...
From the very beginning TGOR was set to become a game about simulation of life, without hiding anything "behind the camera", meaning that all aspects of life, even "touchy" subjects, will...
2018-09-06 05:21:11 +0000 UTC View Post
First of all, thank you for supporting our project this month! With this fuel we're able to make yet a next step towards the big upcoming pre-alpha release. Just can't wait till you, dear patrons, can play it and see for yourself how far we've come from the last version!
The current interface and HUD for the game isn't great... (I don't even want to show a screenshot of the old version D: )
Reason is that stuff was just added as need arised, elements and code piled on top of each other...
2018-08-13 06:01:58 +0000 UTC View Post
The first weapon model and the shader is almost done, and I just wanted to show you how awesome it looks as soon as possible!
All underlying systems for combat are programmed, so its about time to put some nice looking models for the next build.
I will be sharing more info about the weapon and what it does in the near future, this post is just a preview of the model's first iteration, so please enjoy this 4k screenshot of the first properly made weapon model for our game and some gifs of it :}
2018-07-20 18:23:58 +0000 UTC
View Post
I worked quite hard on sketching out a ton of different ideas, starting with somewhat random scribbles and a vague idea, and ending up with a unique design language!
Usually games produce weapons by the same principle as producing characters: first making concept art for each specific weapon, then modelling it, texturing, animating, and putting it into the game...
However, for us doing it this way would require a lot of time on something that is not exactly the central focus of the game, its not a first person shooter after all wh...
2018-07-01 05:38:57 +0000 UTC View Post
