Devlog 01 - Fire-Extinguishing Minigame

Hello everybody, welcome to the first devlog of ICFTD Remake.

I'm very excited to be finally publishing these updates, I hope you enjoy them and they help you to understand a bit more about the amount of work and effort behind a project like this.

The way I will progress on these videos and on the game is focusing my efforts on the content of the first day of the game with the aim of getting a playable demo at some point of 2019. Just as a reminder, in the original game you had around 14 days to complete your investigation starting the 1st of June.

Even with this scope in mind. this is gonna be a LOT OF WORK. In order to keep you updated, I have added to this blog page called "Roadmap" which I'll be updating as I finish the first pass on some tasks that will be part of the demo.

This roadmap and demo content is likely to change but I think it is really cool to have this kind of transparency with anyone interested in the project.

This week I have been working on the fire-extinguishing minigame. For those of you who haven't played or don't remember from the original game, (I mean, it was 30 years ago, doesn't it make you feel old?), this is the first minigame you can find in the game if you make the wrong decisions during your investigation.

I already had a playable version of this minigame before starting this week, so I had a starting point which had winning and failing conditions implemented, (very ugly) particle systems in place and so on, but playable after all. 

The first thing I did was to improve the camera movement so the player could look slightly at his surroundings, which is not much, but it is an improvement from the original game, and it will really play an important role when I start working on the 3D UI system. The game already has a working UI similar to the original game but I'll save that for the next post.

At some point I started working on a proper model of the fire extinguisher that our hero is going hold during the minigame. For this model, I used references from Randolph fire extinguishers from the 50s. I think the result is pretty decent, it could definitely be more faithful to the reference but since this is just the first pass it'll do for now.

Having the camera movement in place and the fire extinguisher, I started working on the movement and animation of the hands.

At this point, I started to consider to buy get a pair of hands from the asset store considering they just cost around £15-£25. I didn't know if I was going to be able to get a decent result by myself since  I'm not an artist and just wanted to get this up and running quickly. I certainly didn't want to spend 3 or 4 days modeling this.

In the end, I decided to give it a go. I reused some untextured hands that I did for another game and created a base high-poly mesh to bake from. After a couple of hours, I had a nice hand that looks, in my opinion, as good as the ones I was considering to get from the AssetStore. I will probably keep working on this in the future, since I want the main character to have sleeves, but as a first pass.... I think it's cool enough.

With the hand texturing sorted, I started creating some poses and animation in Blender that would allow me to point the character hands in the direction the player is pointing with the mouse.

I could have avoided all this using Inverse Kinematics, but this was actually faster than implementing an entire IK system that might or might not look good. I didn't want to take the risk so I just animated the hands in Blender in 9 different poses to fake the effect.

Having the animations, I created a bidimensional blend tree in a Unity animator using 2 parameters which represent the position of the mouse on the screen going from -1 to 1.

With all that in place, I simply added the extinguisher model to the armature hierarchy and created some additional animation for the hands and the extinguisher for when the player shoots the water.

Additionally, I have put some work on the particle systems, improving the visuals a bit and also put some work on the scene post-processing effects.

All these effects are from a Unity free project (Unity Particle Pack) and will probably be replaced later on.

In terms of code, apart of some camera movement enhancement, I made some performance improvements. I already had a very basic attack system in place I made when I prototyped the ant minigame, which I'm not showing just yet. So I simply reused that system for the extinguisher collisions, which are small spheres fired from the extinguisher that match the trajectory of the particle system. Those collisions attack the fire when they enter the fire collider, reducing the scale of the fire. That way I don't have to check for each individual particle from the particle system, which is what I was doing in the prototype (shhhh don't tell anyone) :).

As you can see the game rules are pretty much like in the original game, I could probably add something else, I have been thinking about a pressure meter that will reduce the frequency the player is allowed to shoot but again, this is just first pass, it'll be reviewed based on player's feedback, so let me know your thoughts!.

I wanted to thank all of you who have registered to my newsletter, those who have followed me on Twitter or participated on my reddit post, it has been an intense week. If you haven't registered yet but you're interested in the project, you can follow me on Twitter or Youtube, or simply subscribe to my newsletter here on my blog.

Thanks for reading and until the next time!
Josue