Project Devonia: ‘Manticore‘ [NEW DEMO]

[CCrane]

Weltenberg Entertainment


is happy to announce the development of



a point-and-click sci-fi adventure game

Game Trailer + End Credits


Room 0: Game intro screen
Development blog content

• Story
• Description
• Features
• Progress
• Issues
• 'Making of' & resources
• FAQ
• Demo available on itch.io [Windows/Linux] [English/German]

1. Story
Being only two months on the job Corporal Lucia Torres' first assignment by private security company KBA goes horribly wrong. After her aircraft crashes she finds herself all alone and with almost no memory on a deserted oil rig owned by the powerful Tallywater Oil Corporation.
Strange things seem to have happened but the orders of Lucia's superiors are cold, efficient and ruthless.
Refusing is not an option. Lucia has to use all her wits to navigate the deserted installation and to find a way out.


Room 1: Main Hall (with main GUI and caption)
2. Description
Project Devonia: 'Manticore' (PD:M) is a short sci-fi adventure game. The player has to explore the decks of a mysteriously deserted oil rig and find a way out.
Based on the fictional universe of 'Project Devonia / Das Devonia Projekt' by @ChristophCrane_.


Camera overlay
3. Features

• point-and-click exploration adventure game
• health state and point reward system
• 952 x 536 pixel graphics
• new GUI graphics
• Lucas Arts style-interface
• will be available in English and German and R.U.D.E (rough unladylike derogatory English) [1]
• music by Karl Casey (White Bat Audio) and Nicolas 'Myuu' Gasparini

_{[1] R.U.D.E. can only be enabled in-game in the second room (radio room)}


Options GUI

Difficulty: Easy to medium
Rating: Generally about PG 13 in the standard version but because of a particular scene it would probably still get an R
Developer: @ChristophCrane_ (Twitter)
Publisher: Weltenberg Entertainment (itch.io) / in association with Tomsk Books (Goodreads)
4. Development progress
The final game will have about a dozen rooms. Most of them are more or less ready but need polishing while two need literally some furniture. The dialog is mostly written but will likely be rewritten again (... welcome to writing).


East corridor, with dialog options

The player's path, interactions and tasks are generally scripted although some minor changes will probably still be made.
Player walking animations have been made but will be redone a little smaller and with less frames. Presently a walk cycle has eight frames (plus one talking and an idle frame) which I suspect to be a drag on RAM since every frame is 144x256 pixels at roughly 150 kb each. Having four additional diagonal walk cycles exacerbates that problem even more although the lag is really noticable only with the idle animation. Consequently walking areas and go-to points haven't been optimized as this is more properly done when final player sprite size and animation length have been determined.
Some specialized animations (like pick up or firing) still need to be done as well. This is on hold, however, until aforementioned issues are solved.
There is a point system rewarding interactions/exploring but it's not entirely balanced out as of now.
A rudimentary health bar system exists but there's no consequence so far if health drops to zero. Not that this is easy to achieve anyways in the game but I just thought I should mention.
Finally, the game would likely profit from being proof-read by someone who speaks English as mother language. ...

... and for whatever it's worth, here are some stats:

• two dozen views (game and player animations)
• seventy different quality sounds
• approx. 250 sprites
• three dozen usable items
• development start: late Oct 2022

3D asset to final item sprite pipeline
5. Things I'm not completely happy with
As stated above the player animations need to be redone. In the process the textures, shading and shadows will be improved. Also a small existing asymmetry in the walk cycle needs to be adressed.

Player character PMC Corporal Lucia Torres (walk view/cycle: frame 5)

The animations being based on human motion captures gives real results but a slight natural imbalance in most people while walking makes it difficult to avoid a sliding effect when using extrapolated real data for a walk cycle.
The transition between the intro ambient sound to the first room is a bit too abrupt for my liking. Not sure if this will break immersion, however, so fixing the issue will be a matter of user feedback.
Originally it was planned to feature a highscore list using Rocco's highscore module but it proved to be too troublesome so I removed it altogether. The highscore can be seen to the left of the main GUI now but it won't be saved.
Synchronisation of music. That's actually just an issue with the end credits but one that bothers me.
6. 'Making of' & resources
In the beginning I contemplated a lot what visual style I should (and feasably could) choose. Considering time and skills I decided against the beloved pixel art and on something akin to the classic comic style. Nothing overtly complex or artistic, no pronounced 3D effects and use of only the two dozen basic colors which were used in print as well.
Scenes were to be created from low-poly assets with 3D modeling software for easy pipe-lined production and quick manipulation.

Earlier drafts designs of PD:M's main character Lucia Torres

The puzzles aren't super fancy and, in fact, that's rather intentional. Despite being sci-fi the game should feel kind of real and the aim was to have the player encounter and solve problems like in the real world (if in a MacGyveresque sense, that is). Unfortunately that means that you won't find any wicked puzzles like 'use sea cow spittle with parrot beak-shaped rubber snake' or something like that. My apologies.
Some people might be interested what software and resources were used, so here is the list (yes, all the amazing software below is free and open source).

• AGS 3.5.1, quite obviously ...
  
  • SpeechBubble v0.8.0 module, by Gunnar 'Snarky' Harboe (Big thanks!)
  • Tumbleweed Verbs 1.4 template, by abstauber
  • Tween module, by Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
• Audacity (Sound editing software)
• Blender 3.4 (3D modeling software)
• freesound.org (website with thousands of user-generated free and open source sounds)
• Gimp 2.10.28 (2D image editing software)
• Makehuman 1.2.0 (3D modeling software specifically for human models)
• KDENLive 22.12 (video editing software)
• Character animations are made with freely available motion captures taken from:
  
  • ACCAD, Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Motion Capture Lab
  • Bandai Namco Research Motiondataset
  • CMU, Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database
• Game fonts
  
  • Laffayette Comic Pro, designed by Jaws Laffayette
  • Overpass, designed by Delve Withrington, Dave Bailey & Thomas Jockin
  • LED real, designed by Matthew Welch

7. FAQ
a) Is Project Devonia: 'Manticore' (PD:M) going to be a full-fledged game?
What can a man do when he loves writing and making games? He must do both! But being an author primarily doesn't allow me to devote enough time to develop a (bigger) game.
So while still made with professional aspirations I consider PD:M more as a proof of concept to get acquainted with the game engine and visual story-telling.
All things considered the game should take you about an hour to play through, maybe half of that if you're speed running with no regard to exploring anything. (I haven't actually clocked that, though, so I might be wrong here.)

b) When will PD:M be on sale?
It won't. Making an adventure game is since the days of MI and Indy a longheld dream of me and it's going to be free, though I certainly wouldn't mind if someone were to support me by buying a book of mine.

c) Why is PD:M categorized as sci-fi? There's nothing really obvious going on in that regard, no?
The Devonia book trilogy, the game is based on, has a science fiction / horror setting. So while PD:M follows that world's canon the events there are mostly just alluded to in the game. Game and books are storywise completely separated and you don't need either to understand the other.

d) Is the R.U.D.E. mode NSFW and how is it enabled?
- Please note that R.U.D.E. has been abandoned. -
Regarding graphical violence and sex the game is pretty tame either way (not sure if I should be saying that actually but oh well ... too late). Nonetheless the game would probably be rated R if it were a movie.
The difference between English and R.U.D.E. would've been mostly just stronger language, more cynism and some occasional jokes typical of the adventure game genre. Something which I felt were out of place in a game more in line with the mood of the books.
How you would have activated R.U.D.E.

Spoiler

R.U.D.E. was to be activated by using the knife on the book in the trash basket in the second room (the radio room). Reverting back to either English or German is only possible in the options menu.

[close]

8. DEMO
A demo in English and German for Windows and Linux is available on my new itch.io account.
https://weltenberg.itch.io/project-devonia-manticore

Thanks so much for reading. Hope to see you playing the game one day.

[Rik Vargard]

Well that's impressive. Good luck with the project! 

[CCrane]

Well that's impressive. Good luck with the project! 

Thanks for your words, Rik! It means a lot.
Allow me to combine this post with a little update on the progress that has been made.

• The announced down-sizing of nine character walk and idle animations has been done, and each loop uses less frames now. While this is noticable it's not dramatic and the gain in animation speed for the non-locked animations off-sets that by far in my opinion. Before there were together 93 frames with 144x256 pixels at ~150kb, now it's 75 frames with 122x216 pixels at ~100kb. 14 MB cut down almost in half to eight. (Also by reducing specular lights level the shader has been brought much more in line with the comic-ish look of the game. I still don't really like the shadows, though.)

• Production-wise I'm starting to get better with Blender's GeoNode system. I don't know if it's more memory efficient than Blender's "old" particle systems but generally it's becoming a real time saver.

• I incorporated a (really) small action sequence where the player has to engage a seemingly hostile character.
• In general a lot of design details were improved.

Cheers!
P.S. I have opened a thread over there at the Makehumans forums which will go more into detail of 3D character development.

[CCrane]

I had planned to have this video finished sooner but here it is. My game trailer for PD:M which I hope you'll enjoy.

Game Trailer Video + End credits

[FireFlower]

The comic book style is pretty cool.

[CCrane]

The comic book style is pretty cool.

Thanks a lot for your comment. Free 3D software Blender has a function/tool called freestyle which you can use to draw various kinds of borders and, for example, marked edges. It's not entirely consistent with complex geometries but in most cases works just fine. And Snarky's SpeechBubble module really makes a difference here.
Glad you like it!

[Creamy]

The comic book style is pretty cool.

+1

Only 1 minute of gameplay in the 3:40 trailer. The credits and production companies are overkill. Writing them in the description would have been enough.

Keep up the good work.

[CCrane]

The comic book style is pretty cool.

+1

Only 1 minute of gameplay in the 3:40 trailer. The credits and production companies are overkill. Writing them in the description would have been enough.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks, Creamy! And I kind of agree, actually. Should've left the credits in a separate video (as it was originally). The credits roll at the end of the game anyways, of course, but I really wanted something nice for all the aweseome people who contributed, however little, and maybe never play the game.

[CCrane]

Hi all,

I finally managed to finish the demo. Since PD:M is a short game the demo isn't that big either but you can now explore the first five rooms of the mysteriously abandoned oil rig.

To download the files for Windows or Linux you may visit my new itch.io account.
https://weltenberg.itch.io/project-devonia-manticore

I hope you'll be entertained and I'd be happy to hear back from you. To make that easier I've created a short questionnaire which you can find here:
forms.gle/dUrGWZsQirb1kQr29

It's basically just point'n'click, no registration is required and there's also an option to report bugs or things, well, that bug you ... 

Speaking of issues. I'm using AGS mostly via Wine emulator on Linux, and there both editor and game run just fine. On a really old Windows laptop however performance was abysmal, perhaps a hardware (old OS) issue. I suspect it's CPU rather than RAM related and I'd be curious if others can confirm this since this might indicate some minimum hardware requirement.
I noted also differences in the way the sound is played but that might be just a driver issue.

Concerning the development of the game ...

PD:M was meant to have, besides English and German, another language "variant", the so-called R.U.D.E. mode. Some technical issue within the SpeechBubble module made this rather difficult to realize though and so R.U.D.E. has been abandoned. It was a somewhat silly idea anyways ...

Cheers,
Christoph

[Crimson Wizard]

On a really old Windows laptop however performance was abysmal, perhaps a hardware (old OS) issue. I suspect it's CPU rather than RAM related and I'd be curious if others can confirm this since this might indicate some minimum hardware requirement.

We'd need to have more details in order to have any idea on the reasons, firstly what are the system specs, and then, which version of AGS is your game built with, what is the game's native resolution, which graphics driver do you set in config, and the size of the sprite cache, at least.

It also may depend on what do you do in your game; like lots of raw drawing for example.

The average CPU / RAM usage may be checked using Windows task manager, on the processes tab.

[CCrane]

Hi CW,

thanks for the quick reply. I didn't go into more detail because I think it's a really special case and I don't actually expect others to have a performance problem. The super sluggish laptop I was talking about was really exceptionally old and underpowered to begin with. It's discarded meanwhile but I checked RAM and CPU usage then and the bottleneck was indeed CPU. I just mentioned the whole episode to make people aware that - the game being rather HiRes (952x536) and probably a bit animation heavy - there might be issues on older machines. But unless I get reports from problems on more recent machines I wouldn't worry.

As to my main laptop, it's about ten years old and it has a dual system (Win7 / Lx Mint XXI). Performance is good on Lx, slightly slower on the outdated Win (irrespective of compiling with 3.4x/3.5x/3.6x) but not unduly so IMO. Apart from that I have no possibility of testing the game on a Windows machine. That's why I'm asking for the experience of others.

[Creamy]

Hi Ccrane,

I filled your questionnaire. The presentation is neat. No performance issue.
The repetitive warning in the first room is very irritating  - I don't even understand what she says.
Why use so many verbs if you don't give feedback for most of them?
You ask for our opinion on the story but we barely scratch its surface in this demo, unless I missed something - I stopped playing after reaching the last room.

Keep up the good work.

[CCrane]

Hi Creamy,
thanks so much for your opinion and taking the questionnaire. Appreciate it!

As to your points.

The repetitive warning in the first room is very irritating

I agree that the warning message (and the alarm, too, I think) are irritating. Especially when you are longer in this room than me who knows how to get out fast and disable it. But in fact the sound is supposed to be irritating. I took this from movie theory where the sound/ambient noise is meant to reflect the mood (in this case confusion) the main character is in after the crash.
However there's a thin line not to be crossed here where something becomes more annoying than it helps advancing the game. I will have to think about that. Maybe I'll decrease the volume of the message.

I don't even understand what she says.

It's the American-English Samantha voice somewhat distorted with Audacity's echo and frequency pass filters. Do others have this problem as well? I personally find the other message more difficult to understand. It's a Southern drawl I'm told. Anyways, this is what "Samantha" says.

Spoiler

Warning. A production incident has occured.

[close]

Why use so many verbs if you don't give feedback for most of them?

There's a theoretical and a rather simple technical aspect to that. As for the first, I try to make my games quite realistic (even if it's a sci-fi setting) so the obvious verbs will work mostly. I know that in other adventure games sometimes a verb has to be used which seems to make no sense but that's not the case in PD:M in general. And in the course of the game you will encounter different objects where you have to interact with different verbs. Naturally some verbs/ways of interactions will be used less than others. Just like with a toolbox where some tools are used daily others once a year.
The technical problem here is that the Tumbleweed template, PD:M is based on, gives its automated answers only with the "say"-command not with "saybubble".  Thus I had to disable auto-answers resulting in nothing when some verb-object/hotspot interactions are executed.

I also never liked the verb coin style. I admit that's personal preference but it is what it is. I'm sorry.

You ask for our opinion on the story but we barely scratch its surface in this demo, unless I missed something - I stopped playing after reaching the last room.

The questionnaire is meant to stay for the finished game so some questions don't really apply, yet. No, you didn't miss anything.


best regards and thanks again

[Creamy]

I don't even understand what she says.

It's the American-English Samantha voice somewhat distorted with Audacity's echo and frequency pass filters. Do others have this problem as well? I personally find the other message more difficult to understand. It's a Southern drawl I'm told. Anyways, this is what "Samantha" says.

Spoiler

Warning. A production incident has occured.

[close]

Ah yeah I hear it now.

However there's a thin line not to be crossed here where something becomes more annoying than it helps advancing the game. I will have to think about that. Maybe I'll decrease the volume of the message.

I'd suggest decreasing the volume over time.

Why use so many verbs if you don't give feedback for most of them?

There's a theoretical and a rather simple technical aspect to that. As for the first, I try to make my games quite realistic (even if it's a sci-fi setting) so the obvious verbs will work mostly. I know that in other adventure games sometimes a verb has to be used which seems to make no sense but that's not the case in PD:M in general. And in the course of the game you will encounter different objects where you have to interact with different verbs. Naturally some verbs/ways of interactions will be used less than others. Just like with a toolbox where some tools are used daily others once a year.
The technical problem here is that the Tumbleweed template, PD:M is based on, gives its automated answers only with the "say"-command not with "saybubble".  Thus I had to disable auto-answers resulting in nothing when some verb-object/hotspot interactions are executed.

I also never liked the verb coin style. I admit that's personal preference but it is what it is. I'm sorry.

I prefer the BASS template (left click = interact / right click = look) but it's just a matter of taste.

I'm curious to see where this story will go.

[CCrane]

Small update
When making the demo I deleted a view resulting in a crash to desktop when looking at the knife. The issue has been hotfixed on itch.io.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Also a user reached out to me saying he couldn't play the demo to the end because he wasn't able to patch the leak in room 5.
It's not possible to do this. The necessary items are to be found only later. The demo itself has no particular goal except to explore the first five rooms. There will be a system message if you visited all rooms and another one if you reached the maximum number of exploration points. Besides that no special message will tell when the demo has ended.