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[TorgeirFjereide]

Hi there, I’ve been registered on this forum since 2009, but I got a new account now with my real name, since it’s more convenient.
I've only been lurking for the past few years anyways, so it doesn't matter.

I needed a place to log the development of this project, so I don’t keep it all to myself in a dungeon somewhere forever, and this forum
has always been a pretty pleasant place for these kinds of interactions in my experience.

For the past year or so I’ve been working away at a project that I just call Yugopunk. I don’t know when or if it will be released,
or what will happen to it, but it might be fun to share with you here in anyhow.   
    It’s set in an alternate future inspired by mainly socialist Yugoslav  aesthetics, something I found to be a rather interesting subject not
portrayed often in western media. It is also a huge excuse for me to learn more about the cultures of the former yugoslavia, and learn a bit of
the serbo-croatian language.

It is a bit like a smashing Mount & Blade and Jagged Alliance together into a weird cocktail, but with a heavy focus on exploration and character interaction.
It is "open-world", but think more about how Fallout 1 is open world, maybe.
There's no crafting or quests, or deep conversation-trees, but plenty of places to explore, and people to meet.

A lot of the inspirations behind this project are games like Fallout, Stalker, Jagged Alliance, Mount & Blade, Battle Brothers etc.

Setting:

Hundreds of years after the cold war started, in a far away region of the galaxy, lies an ancient, mysterious, and largely unexplored planet.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia claims the planet as their own but lack the means to fully harness its secrets, for the planet is
treacherous and inhospitable; Dust, anomalies and trapped structures make traversing the abandoned world dangerous and unpredictable,
but in the sands, hidden by time, there are remnants long forgotten.

Survive in this world through sheer determination, and grow stronger by exploring dark tech-vaults, old bunkers and
quarries of rare materials -- scavenge everything that isn’t bolted down! Make friends and enemies through your own actions,
but make sure you don’t antagonize the wrong factions…

Features:

- Dynamic characters who do a lot of the same tasks that you do, exploring, scavenging etc. Some will be your enemies and some will be your friends
- Handcrafted locations to explore; Ancient tech-vaults, abandoned buildings and old caves, as well as human settlements in some of these locations.
- Lots of strange Items, weapons and artifacts to buy, sell and otherwise procure.
- Tactical, mostly real-time combat featuring ranged and melee weapons.
- Light RPG mechanics, with some relevant skills and traits.
- Travel system a bit like Mount&Blade/Battle Brothers, with a similar sense of who’s the “big and small fish in the pond.”
- Hand-pixelled world, environments and items
- A unique sci-fi Yugoslav inspired setting.

The game's systems are currently only partially implemented so I will try to keep this log updated with further developments. I don't post anything anywhere else, really.

I would absolutely love for people who are interested to ask any questions they have, or any suggestions.
If you're from the former yugoslavia, I would also be very happy to hear about anything cultural that needs to be included!



If you want more frequent, smaller updates(and see my artwork I guess) then you can follow me on Twitter

[TorgeirFjereide]

Just thought I should say a bit about where the project is now and what I've been doing all this time.

For the past few years I've been developing a few smaller projects that were never meant to be games. Mostly procedural generation stuff, with names
and landscapes. I was heavily inspired by a devlog that was posted here, years back, for a project called Iron Testament(if you haven't seen it yet, you should. It was nuts.).

I ended up starting this project almost by accident, just seeing how the Godot engine was like working with, and since then I ended up adding and adding things. I constantly wanted to see how good I could make the game look, and ended up becoming more and more familiar with the engine in the process.
After some serious refactoring/restructuring of the project earlier this year it seems to be in a good place, where many of the systems have fallen into place.  This is mostly where I am at at the moment, shoving more of these systems into place.
Current game features:

- Simple melee and ranged combat
- Items and equipment that you can use and equip in various capacities.
- Working drag n'drop inventory system
- simple Branching dialogue system
- World map and travel system, which loads and saves the current state of each visited location.
- simple Relationship/faction system
- Quite flexible utility-based AI
- Character Creator

At the moment I'm working on improving the combat, especially the melee aspect. The ranged part actually feels pretty good to use right now, but the melee aspect  doesn't feel especially good, and has many different bugs to solve.
I'll see what I can do with it until next time I post.

Here's a lil' gif at the end:

[Yolan]

Love this kind of 2D art-work. ;-) Really curious to see where you'll take this!

[EuchreJack]

Have you played Twilight 2000?  It might be a source of inspiration, as the background seems similar.  It was a fun character creation system, if nothing else.

[JimboM12]

you should include Tito's classic white admiral's uniform as a rare artifact that maxes out your charisma or something. politics aside, Tito really cut a figure in it.

also, if it's feasible, you should add a player's headquarters and maybe a settlement mechanic around it. if you've played it, im thinking something along the lines of Red Fighter from ATOM rpg. its this abandoned town you clear out and rebuild a bit, inviting people you've met and helped to settle it. they help you with various tasks and just the atmosphere in general, giving you a place to come drop your truckloads of loot for sorting and future selling.

[Mephansteras]

Digging the art style of this.

Have you tried out Caves of Qud? I feel like you might get some inspiration from that, in the 'explore a post apocalyptic world' sort of way.

[King Zultan]

This looks really interesting, so I'll be watching this as it progresses.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Color me interested! Gorgeous pixel art? Yugoslavia? RPG? Big interessante.

[TorgeirFjereide]

Have you played Twilight 2000?  It might be a source of inspiration, as the background seems similar.  It was a fun character creation system, if nothing else.

I've never heard of it, and I might have to look into it more, because that seemed pretty interesting. Though it isn't necessarily similar to this game --
The current setting for the game is on another planet. I'll try to elaborate on that in the future.

Digging the art style of this.

Have you tried out Caves of Qud? I feel like you might get some inspiration from that, in the 'explore a post apocalyptic world' sort of way.

Glad you like the art style!
I have tried it, and it's great. It was initially much more of an inspiration for the setting than it is currently. That and A Canticle For Liebowitz has such an interesting
idea of layered history that would be cool to put into more games.
As I stated above it's not post-apocalyptic, but it should have a little bit of that feeling to it.

Thanks, everybody, for the interest in the project! I never really thought anyone would care unless it was much closer to finished.


Since last time I have been working on many sporadic things. Looking through my checklist of what I've done it's clear I've avoided doing work on the melee system. I guess there's some more stuff to figure out until then, design-wise.

I've squashed a bunch of bugs with inventories, and revised the design of a couple of UI elements. You can see here an example of the character creation screen, and the inventory screen. One thing I've focused on with the ui elements in the game so far is to make them feel tactile, and diagetic? Is that the term for this even? But At leas to have them feel like tangible machines, even if they're a bit silly.

Spoiler:  UI examples (click to show/hide)

I've added magazines/ammunition functions to the ranged weapons. There's an assortments of clicks when you're out of ammo, an animation when you're reloading etc. Pretty standard stuff.

As for something more interesting there's now a few variations of rifles in the game, a bolt-action and a carbine. I kind of wish I could licence a bunch of Zastava weaponry, but that's a little bit out of my league. I've instead opted to invent my own couple of manufacturers and companies that I can use, like "Putokaz".

And I also added old-school "gibs" ,or bouncy effects, which is excellent for dropping items, cartridges etc.
They are absurdly satisfying.



Thanks for reading!

edit:

you should include Tito's classic white admiral's uniform as a rare artifact that maxes out your charisma or something. politics aside, Tito really cut a figure in it.

also, if it's feasible, you should add a player's headquarters and maybe a settlement mechanic around it. if you've played it, im thinking something along the lines of Red Fighter from ATOM rpg. its this abandoned town you clear out and rebuild a bit, inviting people you've met and helped to settle it. they help you with various tasks and just the atmosphere in general, giving you a place to come drop your truckloads of loot for sorting and future selling.

Forgot to respond to this. I was wondering if Tito would make an appearance or something like that. It would be pretty funny, so I definitely have it in the back of my mind.
I however don't think there will be any significant base-building or settlement mechanics. It's a massive time-sink, and other games do it better. I want you to be able to have a house  or two though, even if it's something simple. Somehow it makes it feel like you have a place in a world if you could have somewhere to live.

[Reyn]

Looks wonderful so far. If you could, please make the screen shaking a toggle. Never liked it in FPS, would probably like it even less in an ISO view.

[TorgeirFjereide]

Looks wonderful so far. If you could, please make the screen shaking a toggle. Never liked it in FPS, would probably like it even less in an ISO view.

Thank you, and don't worry, I'll make it toggleable. In the gifs there's an absurd amount of it anyways, which is mostly for debugging reasons right now.
It's tied to the power of the weapon you're using, and none of that makes any sense right now in terms of balancing.

[TorgeirFjereide]

For the past few weeks a combination of work and a fever cut development time by quite a bit. But the past day or so I've been feeling up to the task again.
I'm also moving to Serbia in a few weeks, so there's still stuff to prepare for that event.

There hasn't been much *visible* progress; most of my work has been towards really nailing down pathfinding for the AI, and support for giving
different AIs different behaviours. Now different areas in the game can serve different purposes for various NPCs, and they can have different
behaviours like working as a guard at a certain post, patrolling, or tending to their own shop if they're stationed in a town/settlement. If they're out
in the wild there are other behaviours like scavenging and hunting to be done for example.

Here's a guy in a stand, selling stuff. A bit strangely placed, maybe, but it'll do for now.


I'm pretty excited about what this means for making believable towns and interactions, as now I can edit NPCs roles through a tag system, where I can
describe their roles easily. When there's a person with a tag like "shopkeeper", and a behaviour that matches that tag, as well as somewhere to
perform that behaviour, they can do so.

It's interesting how much the AI system has evolved from the beginning to where it is right now; it's now declared clearly and simply, and is also easy to tweak.
It's quite moddable too, so you can concoct all sorts of behaviours from simple building blocks. It's also easier to debug. Maybe this is nothing new to
some more experienced coders(or maybe it's stupid), but it's pretty cool to me.

Most simple behaviours are defined like this:

"pick_up_item" : {    

      "priority" : 2.0,
   
      "sequence_data": {       
         "move_to_target": {},
         "bark" : { "type" : "accepting_item" },
         "pick_up_item" : {}
      },

      "requirements": {"inventory_full": false, "items_nearby": true},

      "considerations": {
         "distance_to_items" : {"startvalue": 0.8 , "endvalue" : 1.0}

      }

Next time might be a little bit more interesting. It's either a trade and barter system, or really putting people to work in a settlement. Either way it will help make the game more complete.

[A Thing]

Spoiler:  UI examples (click to show/hide)

I'm a bit curious about the nationality and religion options there as well as the "Special Requests" thing. Are nationality and religion actually a factor or just flavor? What is the special requests thing for and how does it work ( or might work?)

[George_Chickens]

This looks awesome. PTW.

[Yolan]

Hows the project going? ;-)