Hapax OT: Magnificent Desolation

[Legend]

I spent the past week mostly doing world building, and I'll probably spend next week doing the same. The ship is absolutely massive and I need a lot more things to fill it.

Sure is difficult working with realistic aliens. A few years ago I went on a binge watching lots of classic alien movies and so few even try to do something cool. Most just go completely random/weird or stylize regular human stuff.

My favorite concepts come from Alien:

H. R. Giger had an incredible iconic style and the environments have just enough self consistency and logic to really feel believable during the movie.

Doesn't work as well when your brain has time to look for details. Outside of the tense pacing of the movie it's more obvious it's just a set with random greebling.



The alien itself is even cooler. Just a person in a suit yet that head makes it near perfect. No obvious eyes yet a very obvious mouth. Makes it unsettling since humans are so good at finding faces.

No science went in to its design yet it's still one of the most realistic aliens out there. Not too humanoid, yet not too random. Birth cycle makes no sense but it's very alien which is cool.

Arrival's designs are ok:


It's just a boring empty room, but I do like the texture. Kinda stealing that for Hapax  

(actually I was more inspired by The Last Guardian's environments)



Not the biggest fans of the aliens either. I'll praise them since so many other movie aliens are actively bad, but I dislike how monotonous their designs are. Concept art is a bit more interesting so maybe it's just the fog hiding all the details.

The fog is a cool touch. Most movies just handwave alien atmosphere needs.

Lastly I'll mention Avatar:


It's just blue cat humans in a tree. Really uninteresting outside of a few language/culture things, but I couldn't talk about movie aliens and not mention them.



TLDR: knowledge of alien movies isn't that helpful when designing alien ships.

[Legend]

I had to work on other stuff so I didn't make too much progress with rooms this week.

All this type of work is pretty slow even on good days. The main point of the game is exploring and learning more about the ship so I really need to avoid mistakes and boring stuff. My standard strategy is to explore a concept three levels deep and only put one level in the game. That way the player can discover the second layer on their own and still feel like they're only scratching the surface.

It's the same type of thing they did in The Witness, although I don't know a single person that stopped to analysis this stuff in The Witness. Hapax trains players to look for this stuff.

[BananaKing]

Yo when is this releasing? Also what's the art style like?

[Legend]

Yo when is this releasing? Also what's the art style like?

I'm making great progress but there is still a fair amount of work to go.

Game is photorealistic so the alien aesthetic can be the focus. I wasn't super happy with that aesthetic in my old vertical slice though so that's one of the areas I keep reworking.

[Legend]

When using the alien tv remote, the right stick controls a cursor for clicking buttons. Yet now the player can't use the right stick to look around, a pretty big problem if your tv keeps moving.

Been 10 years and this dilemma still keeps me up at night.

[Legend]

It's incredible implementing this new inventory system and getting rid of the old placeholder!!!

(green floor is my debug texture, just ignore visuals in general)

Objects are physically stored on your belt. It's pretty much just a traditional 4 slot inventory except the objects don't magically disappear and reappear. Will maybe make it impact gameplay (like attaching that bulky helmet to a front slot would disable crawling) but primarily it's just fun to see all your objects dangle and flop around as you move.

The MVP of this new inventory system is that unfinished silly mirror on the back of the left hand. It's a real thing that astronauts use.


I've thought about a diegetic inventory system for a long time yet I didn't know how to handle the player's helmet. Putting it on could be accomplished in a million ways but how the heck in first person do you look at the helmet on your head?

Well a simple mirror, of course! Click on your left hand and it's as if you clicked on your head. Also lets you grab your flashlight which goes behind the ear like a pencil. Great for symmetry too since both hands have a function when clicked; clicking the right hand gives you a basic item inspection view.

With this new inventory system I also made a special hand animation system that physically moves everything around. It's still a bit glitchy and artificial looking but it's pretty fun seeing it handle complex combinations. Like if you click to grab an object but are already holding an object, it'll probably grab with the left hand so the right hand can first clip its object to the belt.



What's the Eckn point of all this though? It's cool but why is it a higher priority than other things?

One of the big problems with Hapax at the moment is new player accessibility, aka a brick wall learning curve. Every mechanic is available at the very beginning and previously I couldn't even fit all the actions on a PS5 controller. Everything I can do to streamline the game and make it more intuitive is incredibly beneficial.

Another problem I have is Hapax needs more juice.

[Legend]

Been making so much progress it's insane.

Got the in game note system working at a basic level. You can write on pretty much every surface in the game which is really handy. Pencil and paper notes are great too but that doesn't show well in a trailer

Got the new hexpad working when held in your hand. Feels a billion times better than the old one which was too complicated. Only lets the player write up to 3 alien words at a time. Full alien writing can still be done in the game, but it's now done on "hexwalls." (I use too many hexagons)

Got item inspection kinda working but it's trash visually. Not sure how to transition from an item in your hand to an item free floating in space. Would be too much work atm to animate your fingers as you rotate it around.

Did a lot of code cleanup too. Was a bit hard with my main player script having to check if other actions like inventory were active. Now I just set the state and that sets parts of the main player script active or non active.

I expanded my hand animation system to handle a bunch of stuff. Can throw objects and they land close to where you aimed, but the animation powers the physics so there is some variety. I might move everything over to this hand system since it's crazy expandable. Working on grabing 2 hand objects at the moment.

Going to move back into spoiler stuff soon so might be a while till my next update.

[Legend]

Huh. My "procedural resolution" dream from 2015 is kinda coming true with Hapax. It's a method of making procedural content look great both at the local and global scale.

Hapax is designed by hand, but it just hit me today that my pipeline has a lot in common with my old concept. Feels rewarding to see it producing great results (not that I can share them    ).

[Legend]

After playing Manifold Garden I can't help but think about the older versions of VizionEck and how the puzzle design has shifted since then.



Super early VizionEck was heavily inspired by The Unfinished Swan. Just a very short game with most of its puzzles and platforming inspired by its art style. None of the puzzles were that interesting and back at this time the alien language was just a late game afterthought. I was more focused on a big reveal near the end of the game that needed a lot of setup to work properly, kinda like The Unfinished Swan...

Would have been cool if I released that version, or released the scope creeped version that it ballooned into after VizionEck was publicly revealed. With a stronger commitment to what the game was and was not, I think it would have turned out fairly solid.



2016 VizionEck was a complete overhaul with a big focus on Jonathan Blow style puzzles. I had no idea what my vision was or what I wanted to make so I was really just trying to apply his approaches to my ideas. The game looked nothing like The Witness and played nothing like The Witness, but it sure was The Witness in spirit. On its surface it was more like a 3D FEZ.

Puzzles were split into distinct sections so I could teach players isolated concepts before bringing it all together for the ending. The alien language was at the core of everything and I think I gave up too easily on this one. It had issues but it would have been fine.




I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm super excited about what Hapax is and it'll be so much more successful than old VizionEck could have ever been, but I guess I'm just feeling nostalgic for my old abandoned game.

[Legend]

I guess I can't keep brute forcing things. Just these simple blocky environments are 200 million triangles in this test area.

Crazy how many months/years of work have gone into this new version of the alien ship. I've worked on everything else in parallel so I can't say exactly how large the investment was, but it's so incredibly rewarding to see the math all working as intended.

[Legend]

Been a pretty long time since I posted any updates.

Almost all of my time has gone into fleshing out details for the ship: it's a giant canvas yet I need players to feel like every inch is there for a reason. This work is still ongoing and I sure wouldn't mind shrinking the ship's size, but that's not really possible. The space ship is essentially a skyscraper and it needs to be this wide to not feel like a spiral staircase. It's better to save development time in other ways, like making massive mechanical regions that can't be explored.


I redesigned the appearance of the alien language in the game. It is the thing I care about most in Hapax and I've had mixed feelings on it for a while, so it was about time I polished it up. New design looks great. A bit more like a human language but a lot less like random noodles.

Along with this I improved the gameplay associated with the language. A while ago I came up with the concept of in game note boards and man do they feel awesome! Instead of writing down everything with pen and paper, you can simply walk up to specific walls and organize your thoughts in game. Write alien words, write English notes, and pin pictures all next to each other. Helps make an area feel like your home base too.

I feel really good about prioritizing the language above everything else. I only expect casual players to learn a dozen or so words but it's a fun and unique foundation. For more dedicated players it's really fun to get lost in. I've been using the in game note boards (and a simple quiz system) to teach myself the language and it'll make development go so so so much faster. I can actually decorate the alien ship with alien writing by writing in the alien language instead of weird English transliterations like I used to. Also just nice to finally turn my "VizionEck Word" text editor application into a reality. Took just two days to make yet it's been on my wishlist for many years.

It only really matters for super dedicated players, but I've also improved the alien language's grammar. It's weird and unlike anything on Earth so it's been a challenge ever since I started the language about a decade ago. Describing infinite complexity with finite chunks is hard! I'm really looking forward to seeing how others handle it. Right now I've memorized 85 words and 29 phrases yet my brain can still only handle the grammar analytically. It might be impossible to internalize it like a human language, or it might just take a lot more practice.


I also spent some time improving performance. Game was dropping down to 15fps which made development hard. Now it's back to 60 for the time being.


Last progression point I'll mention is the ship's simulation and AI system. There is still a ton of work to go but I got the basics working. It's a really important thing for SPOILER STUFF and for some of the fast travel modes.



I'm getting excited, Hapax has never been closer to releasing , but there's still a tone of work to go. Maybe in a few months I'll have a real release window to share but not today.

[Legend]

Hmm.

I took off the player's spacesuit so you can see her arms and hands for a promo shot, and it feels a lot more natural. Wonder if it's a problem with my space suit design being too novel. Like the brain sees skin and knows how human arms move so it adds details to the animation, I don't know.

Didn't design for the player to be able to take off their gloves but I might have to go with something like that. The thing that started this was my fear that people wouldn't understand you were a human just by seeing a gloved hand.