Good news this week, development proper has begun.. properly?.

We've been working hard on some of the cornerstones of what our game needs to function, this includes most of the systems we'll be using throughout the game such as basic AI architecture, interaction, inventory and of course player related things.

Not only that but we've finally finished our entire GDD so we've got a conclusive list of everything needed to begin development, but the first mission still is still to get our building blocks in order.

Anyway it's probably a good time to introduce someone.

Meet "Beaky"

This is Beaky, Beaky doesn't like sound and she absolutely doesn't tolerate people who disrupt her quite time.

Some of you might remember Beaky from some concept art a while back, while Beaky is our first hostile entity in SIGNAL LOST she's far from the last. I wont go into the nature of Beaky much more because I'd like her quirks to be a surprise for players in game or closer to release, safe to say from what's going on behind the scenes.. She's gonna cause some accidents.

But other than beaky it's the same usual affair, I've been working on mapping and general assets and coder boy has been hard at work on the bones of the project, now that our gdd is completely up to snuff and we have all our tasks laid out things should be progressing fairly smoothly (god I hope so) from here on out.

Anyway, have some mapmaking screens.

Ploo Out.

Also, it's early days but if there's any folio or sound designers who might be interested in future collaboration do please let me know if you yourself or someone you know might be interested in joining up.

Well development is back on, but there's been a little change in how it's being put together.

I've teamed up with an old friend who I've worked with before way back on DepthTreader (our garby little itch.io mechjam game) and he's going to be handling all the coding side of things since quite frankly that's just not something I'm good at in the slighting.

Our main goal right now is getting the foundations set up so we can slap something together, so things like player and entity controllers, actions and the like.

Anyway, other than that I'm continuing where I left off and putting together rigs and map assets that we can use, and it's all going fairly smooth.

I'll get you guys some in engine footage as soon as it's presentable.

the scope of the work has changed a bit so updates wont be regular or frequent but I'll try update when relevant.

We're So Back

Well that's the computer issue completely fixed, I've begun porting over all the old files, thankfully(or unfortunately) the only thing I wasn't able to recover is the big space ship model itself, but that was something I planned on remaking anyway.

Here she is, she's uh...scarily big.

And compared to my old rig the difference is a bit comical

So yeah game is back on, might be a week or two while I get things organised but it's nice to be back at it.

Yeah it’s a bit poo but once I’d narrowed down the supposed computer flaw I thought I was having I discovered it was a fair bit worse than I had assumed.

so new plan, i’ll be repairing my old rig with some cheaper parts and selling it off, I’ll then put that money towards sourcing the kit for an entirely new workstation. I’m going to have to hold off on development until then as I’m also going to be focusing on commissions and part time work to help funding the kit.

anyway sorry it’s not the best bit of news, but it’s only temporary.

Okay so, massive hiccup in progress I can share this week.. because..

yeah she died, but don’t worry I saw this one coming a long way off and I know exactly what’s gone wrong with her, so I’ve got a backup of everything, but it might take a a little bit to get the replacement parts and be back up and running.

i’ll just have to pivot what I do this week.

so in the interest of sharing something I’ll show you guys a few little concept art bits and bobs.

never expected to be sharing these though so they’re not exactly polished.

This is the original concept for Eve, you’ve already seen the player model in my last update (and in my uploads) so there’s not much to go into since it was updated a little later down the line.

What a mysterious growth, I wonder what it could be.

and finally here are some friend sketches, these are mostly super early days sketches so a lot of the information conveyed within has changed so it’s not really spoiler grounds.

sorry I couldn’t share more this week, when I get my computer kicking again I’ll be able to share what I had originally hoped to share this week.

Been a week since the last update, and it's been another fairly busy week.

As I said last time I spent a lot of time focusing on the mapping side of things.

Mapping

I wont go into this one much but there's been a lot of work done map-wise and going into why there's suddenly a Victorian themed tile-set would probably be a bit of a spoiler.

Anyway these all exist now and it's probably worth mentioning that nothing is final, especially the tableware because the resolution of the textures is irking me a little, but it's otherwise fine.

Other

I've made some tiny adjustments to a few character models, but honestly that's not worth sharing.

Oh right, a friend is on the way, but she's far from ready.

Here's a blurry sneak beak (sorry)

All that's left before things really kick off is a few new rigged models and I can get a little something together.

Also I'm going to start doing these things weekly.

Been working on a few things since the last update, the main focus ended up being the mapping and finding a direction I liked with that, but I also gave Eve a bit of a glow up.

When it came to in-engine tests it became apparent that Eve just wasn't fitting in with her current texture, largely because of the way I had been creating the textures for the maps. I know generally it's assumed PSX styles typically don't include mesh maps like roughness, metallic or normal, but I love these texture maps too much to part with them :)

Anyway, say hello to Eve 2

I'm interested in exploring a various resolutions for textures, so I made 3 versions with different maps starting from as high as 512px to 128px.

128x128 256x256 and finally 512x512

Mapping

In the interest of saving time I spend a little while putting together some terrain tiles that I can use freely and layout however I wanted, but to get this stuff rolling I started by putting together a simple tilesheet for the interior.

(anyone who knows me is probably sick of me talking about tilemaps, if you're one of those people..get used to it :)))))

It's nothing fancy and I'll likely change more than a few things, but it's a good starting point for this project.

Plus it tiles way better than I had actually expected, I'm excited to see what more I can make from it. This tile map is actually the main reason I updated Eve, because her texture before just wasn't interacting with the lighting of the scenes as I had hoped, I tried altering the original texture, but in the end I just went and baked from a high poly mesh to a super low resolution, the same way I had done with the tilesheet.

Large map

Super spooky interior lighting.

Anyway, that's that for that little (lots of "that's") update.

Current goal is refine the mapping side of things, and continue to work on getting it stuck in-engine.

(also if you hadn't guessed yet, yes I am a massive fan of Signalis)

I originally planned to do these updates as image posts, as in every time I made a new asset or bit of animation I would upload it and maybe yap a bit in the description about what I've been up to.

What is signal lost?

Signal Lost is a narrative horror/hard sci-fi set aboard a generation ship nearing the ends of it's journey, except societal degradation has reached a point of being unsustainable. Basically everything that could have gone wrong is going wrong. You play as Eve, a short lived synthetic human tasked (among others) with the maintenance and general care of the ship and it's human crew.

Anyway, time for the actual updates!

Writing: A large chunk of the work so far has been getting a bunch of the writing out of the way, a small GDD and general fluff in place means I've been able to start working on the scenes themselves.

Art: From my last few points it's pretty clear the external ship is done, but this version is largely just for cutscenes, I'll still need to make an optimized on theme version for the player to see in game.

It's uh, quite big.

Eve player character and animation

The concept I had behind the idea of having synthetic humans (not robots) is that one of the big issues that comes up with a ship like this is that while in this setting Cryostasis exists, there's so much risk involved in a journey potentially lasting a millennia that having a tailor made lifeform specifically devoted to the care of the ship is a massive benefit.

Anyway I wont spoil too much here, but I've definitely thought about this for too long.

Actual progress

All the major animations for a simple prototype or ready, all that's left is to import into unity, for not I'm just focusing on simple locomotion, so nothing fancy or procedural here, as I'm definitely trying for a ps1-ps2 graphics to the actual gameplay.

Mapping

The mapping portion of the work is going steadily, the main goal right now is to get an early segment of the game in place so that I can simply just get stuck into the harder parts of development, these are the least spoilery scenes so far so this little teaser will have to do.

So yeah that's what I've been upto, going to continue to get stuck in, I've got maybe 2 more scenes to make before I have everything I need to test a simple prototype.

Until next time.