Preview Release

The game preview is now available for all to see at https://lazylllama.itch.io/fallen-scout

After long nights, tears, blood and sweat, the game is actually playable and you are able to get a good feel of what the game is, though its far from done. But here’s a list of some of the things that was done since last time!

• Enemies have had a massive upgrade in many ways
  • New pathfinding
  • Feedback (camerashake, SFX)
  • Only takes damage from flashlight
  • Other QoL stuff!
• WebGL build profiles
  • Sadly diminishes sound quality </3
  • Load FMOD banks before loading main scene when in WebGL
• Climb boxes with the most satisfying animation known to man (clout to art team)
• Flashlight cranking has been improved and has better QoL
• Enemies walk past boxes so that you cant use them as a blockade
• Debug features in the config to skip stuff (conversations, camera cuts etc)
• UI has had multiple fixes like not being able to spam conversations

This doesn’t mention all but what I feel is most important, we also have the new level layout that makes it easier and faster for new players to understand with tutorials etc. This will be the last from me here on Flavortown, cya on stardance!

Llama out.

In the last devlog I was very enthusiastic in saying that I hope to have a testable gamebuild within a day or two. Let’s just say it’s been 12 days since then and alot has happen, lets go through that in order (kind of).

• Updated unity version cause the version we were using before (6000.3) had some real issues with the shadow caster and sprites that just crashed unity, bad bad time.
• New UI that works SO much better and locks you into the settings ui on controller and lets you back after closing the menu.
• Player now cant aim too far up/down on each side to make it more realistic and not give the player full 360 degree rotation cause of clipping and other wierd artifacts.
• Loads of rendering stuff and Post FX to make the game look alot better visually.
• The prettiest title screen ever with particlles for shooting stars and shining stars aswelll as glare/fireflies.
• Polished conversations loads and added many different options.
• Added the ability to first pickup the flashlight and added animations + skin for when the player doesnt have his flashlight yet. Triggers a conversation on pickup.
• The flashlight now have accompanying levers (with sprites) that can move them between positions. Mirrors also have better hitboxes to prevent visual artifacts.
• Controller haptics/vibrations for cranking, toggling flashlight etc.
• Walls to prevent the player from proceeding without completing a puzzle.
• Interactive tutorial for the beginning
• New and slitghly improved enemy types
• Started using LeanTween to MASSIVLY improve optimization with lerps etc
• Some kind of “ending” that gives you a final conversation then reloads the scene

I’m very sorry for the long waits in between devlogs but when your working on such a big project, time runs like usain bolt and thats not an exaggeration 🥲

Thank you for reading!

*the 16:10 artifacts in the video have been fixed after the recording

Hey guys and welcome back to todays episode of overdue devlogs. In todays episode we will be looking at a dialogue system, improved sound effects and some puzzle stuff 👀👀

The most major change since last time is without a doubt the new dialogue script that will guide the player through the game and make the whole playing experience feel a thousand times more enjoyable. In the beginning you are introduced to an unknown creature which later is revealed as the boss in a very cool way, see video below!!

Second most notable change are the new mirrors with “levers” to change their position until you get the correct combination and is able to break the object in your way (coming in next devlog). You use your laser pointer mode to reflect on them. The mirrors also sway so focus is key.

Alot of rendering, light and camera stuff has been done since, configured a volume with loads (but not too many) different settings just to make the experience just a tiny but better. Gotta make a different volume for the main menu cam though since the whitebalance should be default there and not modified since it throws stuff off.

Normal maps have been placed on a few different sprites like the tree bark and the player just to add a slight touch of 3d-ness or whatever you want to call it. As for SFX you now have a clicky button noise when toggling flashlight, sounds for the dialogue for when new letter appear and when theres a pause. More is in the works and will be available soon 🙏🙏🙏

Last but not least animations now look alot smoother for the player after adding transitions, movement and flashlight has deadzones on controller to make user experience better. New unity version and added ann ingame console package for dev builds.

Next up is finishing a playtest build which I hope to be done today or tomorrow or something 💔

cya✌️

So uhm, you probably just had a look at my hours logged and instantly though I’m frauding (spoiler: im not). Turns out Unity wanted to log my hours as “Fallen Scout” rather than the repo name “FlashlightGame”… Here I am thinking I’m just working effectively, while actually just counting half my hours. But enough with that, lets get to it, ALOT has happened since last time let me tell you, I wish i could log more but creating straight fire is time consuming 😥

I just saw the sun for the first time in 6 hours after implementing FMOD into my game, It’s a very popular sound engine for games and extremely overkill for any project without a budget over 100k$ tbh. But, FMOD is insanely awesome so who cares, we’ve not got ambience sounds, checkpoint light swining sounds with spatial features, we’ve got footstep sounds with surfaces and all that good stuff.

Almost forgot, we’re on Steam! Go and wishlist the game and sign up for playtesting at https://lazyllama.xyz/fallen or just search “Fallen Scout” on Steam! Took a while to get accepted and for me to make some capsule art but we got there, now just the endless wait until we can release 🎊🎊🎊

Alot of UI stuff has changed since, it now looks actually presentable. Combine that with the fact that we have now have dirt and a more lively character and its actually starting to look like something. I’ve missed alot of stuff but don’t want to bore you with the details, check commits if you dare hahaha. Check out some gameplay below 👀👀👀👀

A devlog that’s not made in panic for once! 4 hours on the clock and it seems appropriate to share an update since a lot has changed. Mainly stuff that has with animations and graphics to do. There’s now a 17 layer parallax background in the game with a very sorted script to take care of it. We also have animations on our character now like him shaking and blinking when idle or walking backwards when you are aiming the opposite way, stuff like that. Can’t take credit for the graphics or animations themselves though since those aren’t made by me and rather someone in the group that is miles ahead of me on that stuff, although the parallax script and animation related stuff is done by me or i wouldn’t bring it up haha. I think debugging the parallax took 3/4 of all time logged and probably even more just debugging, it seemed easy at first but shit it wasn’t. Outcome is fantastic though, now go look at the video i attached already…

Loads of focus on cameras and sounds since the last, the game now has 2 different actual cameras, one for the main menu and one for the player. Will be adding another that can show ahead of the player for puzzles that will be coming soon. Pressing play now drops the player into the map and uses my very exellent transition thats made using a cinemachine cam with a storyboard of a random white image. The player now also emits footstep sounds based on the surface their walking on, will also add landing sounds for when you fall. I’ve mapped out the beginning of the game on an excalidraw storyboard isch. See link or image below for that. Some work has been done on the neemies although they still require alotta work for like colliders and wallchecks and loads of other stuff, but the enemy can fly, animate and make sounds atleast. Loads of boring script work aswell that noone but me actually cares about :)

https://excalidraw.com/#json=oGS1eveOwp05hAOrTItU5,Qqp2Eecb62QcYfXytnUu-A

I’ve primarily focused on cleaning the code and making some more sustainable code. I’ve added a really damn good debug handler and a decent script to handler InputActions like turning the flashlight on/off or changing the flashlight mode, though this is only implemented in states so far. Added the player from the graphics designers which looks awesome. Player preferences has also been implemented with the FBPP package, AKA File Based Player Prefs (https://github.com/richardelms/FileBasedPlayerPrefs). You can now set your target frame rate and save it aswell as filtering out specific keywords in the logs and changing what debug level you are using to avoid spam in the log file.

I created a FlashlightGame namespace with a library that handles some features that will be in multiple scripts (LedgeCheck, GroundCheck, CanClimbWall, GetWallClimbPoint tbc…).

I mashed together a project wide debug handler with loglevels and automatic handling for context (need to remake the KV function i know…)

Also made some major changes to the player by adding a PlayerController and PlayerData script to keep things organized.

Created the base of the Player Movement script as well as some enemies and an enemy spawner for testing. Next on the list of stuff to tackle is the flashlight for defense and smoothify the movement massively.