River City Ransom: Underground

Happy Thanksgiving, eh!
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:37:31 PM

We can hardly believe it's been a year since the last time we posted during Canadian Thanksgiving. As the majority of our team gets ready to ingest copious amounts of pumpkin pie along with its accompanying flatware, we thought we'd give everyone another update on how things are going.

First, the box replicas are on their way to the warehouse, where shipping will finally begin on all physical rewards! We still have a way to go before we can start offering the box extras many of you are waiting to hear about. We'll post another update as we start to see these items leave the warehouse, and we'll all celebrate getting something into your hands that we think you're going to love. 

On the technical side we're continuing to move gameplay content from the old to the new engine, as you saw recently in Andrew Russell's very first DevLog. One major component of that effort is our new engine editor.

Inspired by Valve's Dynamic Dialog system, RCRU's animation design uses a lookup system that allows us to loosely associate animations with multiple states. This screen grab shows real time work on the select screen, and the tagging of various mannequin animations in preparation for their debut on the screen.

Those animations in the sequence ("idle,alex", "card,ryan", and so on) are queried in the engine, based on, for example, your character save slots in the game, providing us with a flexible way to stack assets.

We hope you have a great holiday if you're celebrating with us this weekend, and we're looking forward to sharing more next week and beyond.

Update + Unboxing
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:37:12 PM

Hi folks,

We've been hard at work on the alpha/preview. For those following along, our goal is to release a prototype to backers in the near future so we can collect feedback and data on the game that will help us iron out networking and graphics card issues, improve quality, and set specific schedules and milestones, including a target release date. We have made a lot of recent progress that we plan to get in your hands as soon as possible.

We'll also use the preview to get our Steam campaign underway, which we hope to use as an alpha/beta distribution channel (to make it much easier for everyone to grab the latest build and to have a dialogue with folks as they play the game)--this won't be "Early Access", but a beta-backer only private distribution.

In the meantime, we thought it would be fun to take a short break from development to shoot an unboxing video of the replica game we created for the "Crate Expectations" rewards, and hope you enjoy the video (and the box) as much as we did putting it together.

Logistics and fists
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:37:06 PM

Hello!

We are all very much in the tank working on the alpha preview. On that front, we've made big strides in our tooling which is now more or less complete, and integration is ramping up fast. Andrew continues to work on major components that are unlocking our progress as we go, including some very complex work in input mapping (but we won't give it away here in case he wants to do a DevLog about it later).

On the rewards front, most of the physical rewards went out the door, with the obvious exception of game disks and OST disks, which we will hold off on until the game is ready to print. We are a bit behind with getting our "second wave" together: this is for backers who ordered quite late past the cut-off. Unfortunately we are still trying to separate who we shipped from who has yet to ship, in order to put in a new order with our lovely warehouse team, so if you filled in your survey late and haven't received anything, we're working on that as fast as we can.

For those who are anxiously awaiting the Build-A-Box kits, we have good news: they are complete, and are on their way to the warehouse where they will be shipped out shortly thereafter.

While we are all quite busy, our resident artistic visioneer and combat designer, Bannon Rudis, put together a fun and informative video going deeper into his process for designing the combat of RCRU.

Below is the video and his write-up on how it all comes together. Enjoy!

"Hey, this is Bannon. I do art and other things. I get asked how I do animation a lot. At least two or three times a year. And usually by my own mother, who is still trying to figure out how to upload a photo onto Bookface. I put up a video before showing the process of making a move for one of the characters of RCRU and slightly commented on the video of me executing some of the sweetest moves ever caught on and digital media. With this video, I went into a little more detail of my "motion capture" method. I use the quotes (aka finger pull-ups) because it's not really motion capture as much as it is reference material for me. I find that the human body moves in ways we don't really notice until we capture it on film. Look at any of those twisted baseball pitcher photos online, and you'll see what I mean. None of this seems to make sense and you wouldn't even think about these as frames of animation that need to be made. They don't make sense on their own. It seems almost impossible that a human body could even do this. But there it is, captured on film in the middle of the pitcher's projectile special move.

When people think of a punch, they might think it's the arm and upper body doing all the work. Which is true if you are a Rock em' Sock em' robot, but with the human body, the whole body works in conjunction to propel the fist forwards with enough impact to turn enemies into coins. I've seen some animations where the character kicks but the hands stay absolutely frozen. This is not a dynamic way of showing motion. In real life, the whole body twists from the hip and the hands help with the swinging or thrusting of the leg. So, I figured this video would help people looking into doing animation and also to see an inside process of how I help myself make animation. I recommend filming yourself or a friend and really examine the video step by step. Don't just look at the hands during a punch, watch what happens to the feet also. So with that said, enjoy the video. Use the video for your own reference. Make fun of my awesome moves. Blow up a single frame of the video, mount it on your wall and use it for Airsoft practice. Have at it."

Storms, songs, swag, and... wrestling?
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:36:43 PM

Swag

This is quick update from the team, we are just about ready to get the second round of swag out the door, and so for those eagerly waiting yours, it's coming soon! The second shirt printing is under way, Build-A-Box kits have left the station.

Storms

We are a bit off the mark for our preview build, so we've been grinding long hours to catch up. We won't make excuses, but we lost several days to the terrible Brisbane storm. Andrew is thankfully safe and sound, but the power failure and intermittent outages have put a dent in our crunch plans. But, our engine is humming and the tools are running and we're integrating the game like our lives depend on it! Here's a spoiler-free look at the editor in action.

Songs

We're quite surprised nobody has noticed that we haven't shared any of RCRU's OST since our Kickstarter wrapped, especially when the soundtrack is created by none other than Disasterpeace and Alex Mauer! It's time to end the silence right now, with a preview track from RCRU.

Wrestling

And to wrap, here's Bannon throwing someone around. All in the name of research, of course. No rotoscopes were harmed in the making of this video.

January Roll-up
almost 9 years ago – Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:36:22 PM

Hi folks,

It's been a tough one this past month. We've shook off the holiday carb fog and are back to work. This is what we wrapped up in January!

• Making audio work correctly in networked games (harder than it sounds!)
• A sweet ambient sound system, so objects make noise as you get closer
• NES-style palette based fading, and some funky retro easter eggs
• More UI - select characters, change your name, set options, exit the game!
• Bigger UI - it literally gets bigger so it fits your ginormous monitor!
• Improvements to object sorting, crash fixes, more character animations, better AI, all of which are of course ongoing as we push for a release

As you can see there has been a focus on the experience spectrum lately, to complete and polish a lot of the interface you'll use to play the game. 

What's next?

We're working on finishing up the multiplayer lobby so that players don't have to invoke developer voodoo or the command-line to host or join networked games. We're also pushing on completing object sorting and getting "attachment" gameplay moving forward (picking things up, grabbing enemies), and generally polishing how combat feels. 

A quick note about swag

We are working through some outstanding shipping issues on an individual basis, but other than these special cases, we believe we've shipped everything we can ship at this stage (everything except the physical game and OST disks). If you've ordered something and expected to see it by now, please get in touch so we can sort it out. We have inventory, which means we know people are out there who pledged and never filled in their surveys. We've got your stuff, send us an email so we can get it to you!