New Last Bastion screenshots/video

Well, QuakeCon is finally over. I was there with another member of our team to demo the latest version of Last Bastion (formerly Project Vega). Not only did we want to show it off and get the word out, but also wanted to get some feedback on it. It was overwhelmingly positive, which was quite nice! :D

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you all what we showed off there and see what you all think. I have several new screenshots, and ConflagratedCanine (formerly Firewolf) created a YouTube video of LB gameplay footage. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

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YouTube video:

I was impressed with the earlier video but HOLY SHIT the new gameplay footage just totally blew me away like it was OVER 9000!!!!!!...or some other unoriginal joke that escapes me. Anyway, cool beans Carn :D

Awesome. Looks much better than the last video.

No, you can fuck yourself.

That looks fantastic. But can you tone down all the talking. I know I got the SHELLS!

Thanks guys! :D

Yeah, some of the sounds are placeholder. I think those voice over sounds like "Armor: light!" are done with the Microsoft Kate text-to-speech thingy, so we wouldn't be able to legally use that anyway. I'm not a fan of the voiced pickup sounds, so I doubt they will remain that way.

Obviously there's a ways to go on a lot of this, but this should give you a really good idea of what Last Bastion will be like when it's done.

Question; the art styling for the view models/those spider things/etc--is that the way the final game will look overall?

If so, I think this may possibly be one of the best FPS games ever made.

The game play itself looks fun, exciting, run and gun... god damn it looks like it may be more fun than Doom!

Anyways, excellent work so far guys!

The gameplay and art-style look awesome! Looking forward to this, for sure! Just one thing I don't like... the music. I just never was a fan of that style of music in gaming. This game looks like if a shooter platformer and a 3D FPS game had a child, looks pretty sweet.

eargosedown said:

god damn it looks like it may be more fun than Doom!

BLASPHEMY I TELL YOU BLASPHEMY!

PRIMEVAL said:

The gameplay and art-style look awesome! Looking forward to this, for sure! Just one thing I don't like... the music. I just never was a fan of that style of music in gaming. This game looks like if a shooter platformer and a 3D FPS game had a child, looks pretty sweet.

The music is most likely just placeholder stuff seeing as how it's from Mega Man X4 and Mega Man X5 and Mega Man 9.

I realize that there's a foot-thick shellac of disclaimers pasted all over this video, but still, as soon as I saw the horizontally-bobbing monsters I groaned. Monsters in a game should be dangerous and menacing, not just hard to click on.

The art style is definitely progressing though.

It looks fun, but I wouldn't pay money for it

Carnevil said:

Yeah, some of the sounds are placeholder. I think those voice over sounds like "Armor: light!" are done with the Microsoft Kate text-to-speech thingy, so we wouldn't be able to legally use that anyway. I'm not a fan of the voiced pickup sounds, so I doubt they will remain that way.

Why wouldn't you be able to legally use the output of the text-to-speech? Microsoft isn't in the habit of putting restrictions on the output of tools that aren't programming environments. Not that you want those sounds anyway of course.

It really does look like Megaman and Quake had a child. It looks cool. :D

Aliotroph? said:

Not that you want those sounds anyway of course.

Yeah, I'd say that's more of what's stopping us ;)

eargosedown: Yeah, that art style is here to stay :) It took a lot of work to get it looking this good. I had to go through a couple different methods of cel-shading to finally get it the way I wanted it, and I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

Creaphis: There are tricks that one will pick up to killing the sentries much more easily. Since they move in a pattern, you can basically just sit there and let them come to your crosshair. It's also less frustrating when you have a weapon with some spread like the shotgun ;) In any case, as your accuracy/knowledge/arsenal increases, they become easier to deal with, which I think is a good thing.

Fun fact for all you math enthusiasts out there: The sentries' movement is all based on parametric equations. So, you can have them move in all sorts of crazy ways. I have some on the next map that follow a figure 8 pattern.

I think Creaphis' point is the horizontally flying monsters don't seem all that threatening. They sort of float around like they're just hanging out, and while occasionally shoot at you, don't seem all that threatening.

Creaphis said:

I realize that there's a foot-thick shellac of disclaimers pasted all over this video, but still, as soon as I saw the horizontally-bobbing monsters I groaned. Monsters in a game should be dangerous and menacing, not just hard to click on.

HERESY!

Pretty promising stuff

Gez said:

HERESY!

Arcade games are fun, but first person shooters need more complicated A.I. to be interesting. The monsters should at least react to the player instead of floating back and forth aimlessly.

That would be a good point if this was the only kind of AI in the game, but it's apparently not, so where's the problem?

The art style looks promising and I like it. But the anatomy of the hands needs to be fixed (or at least how they are holding the weapons), instead of gripping the weapons, it's like his hands are completely relaxed and they are simply placed into his palm. Also some of the world textures don't quite go together style wise and the layouts and encounters shown in the video doesn't excite. But I'm looking forward to seeing how this progress.

I'm hoping to see a lot more combinations of different pathed monsters making it a kin to games like Xenon2 and ikaruga, only with the Z plane added.

Also, again the art. Mostly gray and tan blues in this demo. But I hope you get more daring with your colors. The game is hopefully aiming to be over the top arcade action. And it'd be a terrible waste of opportunity to not make the games colorscheme as vibrant as the gameplay hopefully will be. (same goes for animations.)

Phml said:

I think Creaphis' point is the horizontally flying monsters don't seem all that threatening. They sort of float around like they're just hanging out, and while occasionally shoot at you, don't seem all that threatening.

That's part of it, but not all of it. Here's the thing: When I see a monster that's not dangerous, doesn't approach me, and is hard to click on, I'm not going to want to fight it at all. It'll feel like an easy but tedious chore. Yes, many games have monsters like that, but those monsters are often the subject of much disdain on the games' message boards. Now, what Carn has done is populate a game almost entirely with Goddamned Bats.

Gez said:

HERESY!

Oh please. That's an entirely different gameplay situation. The enemies in that game are easy to hit with your oversized bullets, and leaving the enemies alive is actually more dangerous than fighting them. Now, let's pretend that there was another plane, above this game's current 2-D plane, that was 100% safe, and you could enter it whenever you wanted. Let's also pretend that, to attack an enemy, you had to move back into the dangerous plane, and click precisely on your opponent. Are we still having fun?

Gez said:

That would be a good point if this was the only kind of AI in the game, but it's apparently not, so where's the problem?

That would be a good point if it was okay to put only a little bit of cyanide in your Kool-aid, but it's apparently not, so there's the problem.

Carnevil said:

Fun fact for all you math enthusiasts out there: The sentries' movement is all based on parametric equations. So, you can have them move in all sorts of crazy ways. I have some on the next map that follow a figure 8 pattern.

Carn, listen to yourself. Do you really believe that when the player comes across your implementations of tenth-grade trigonometry he'll think, "Wow, this new hovering pattern really adds an exciting new dynamic to my experience!" Do you really believe it?

Creaphis makes a valid point. Players are bound to not kill any monsters they don't have to. And since many monsters in this game don't crowd, follow or even aim at the player. They will mostly be ignored.

But I think that if done right, this could be offering good game play. Just be prepared to cut back on them largely, because building an entire FPS around them will likely be too much.

It's worth to mention that these predictable monsters also makes the game less interesting from a replayability point of view.

I think you should consider making them able to move around more freely. You could simply make their movement through space have interesting patterns. Just not have them bound to specific points.

kristus: All of your points (mainly referring to your earlier post) are well-taken and issues we're working on. The hands/weapon animations need work, the sentries will get more interesting, and the levels will get more colorful. We're working on getting the color so that it's not too much or too little (right now it's too little).

Creaphis said:

Now, what Carn has done is populate a game almost entirely with Goddamned Bats.

The sentries make up a pretty small percentage of the monsters (I think there's about 4 of them on E1M1, which has about 100 monsters). They hardly populate the game "almost entirely". So, hooray apparently.

And I assure you - they're not "goddamned bats". I'm pretty familiar with this trope, and they don't fit. Why? a). They're large. b). They don't swarm you and annoy you to death. c). Their movement is predictable, so they can actually be shot and killed *very easily*. I'm sure if Firewolf made another video after having a little more time with the game, you'd see him taking them down pretty masterfully. They're much easier if you don't try to aim at them, as strange as it sounds.

Finally, if you think they're so hard to hit... try shooting them with the shotgun. They're actually quite a bit easier in that case. The only sentries who should be at all frustrating are the first ones you see in the game, so maybe it's a bad job by me for putting them there. <shrugs> No one complained or seemed to have difficulty at QuakeCon.

Creaphis said:

Carn, listen to yourself. Do you really believe that when the player comes across your implementations of tenth-grade trigonometry he'll think, "Wow, this new hovering pattern really adds an exciting new dynamic to my experience!" Do you really believe it?

My statement was to math enthusiasts - not the average player. The average player would just enjoy the neat patterns they fly in and don't necessarily care about how they work. I think people in general will be more entertained by some cool loopy pattern instead of simply moving back and forth, yes.

kristus said:

But I think that if done right, this could be offering good game play. Just be prepared to cut back on them largely, because building an entire FPS around them will likely be too much.

Yep. Like I mentioned before, they make up a pretty small percentage of the monsters. Crawlers and arcturans (those standing untextured things that shoot a projectile) make up most of the bestiary right now.

My statement was to math enthusiasts - not the average player. The average player would just enjoy the neat patterns they fly in and don't necessarily care about how they work.

They might find it a little cool the first time they see it, but after that they'll probably lose what little interest they had in it. Chances are they might even just find them boring after they notice that they can just run past the sentries without having to worry about them chasing them. If you used these different patterns as patrol routes that they fly in until they see the player, then have them chase after him it could probably work a little better.

Looks a lot better, still a bit uninspired but I understand the above is more of a tech-demo than anything else. You might consider hiring on a concept artist (such as Colin "Bank" Kelly) to help you flesh out a "look" for your game.

Craigs said:

They might find it a little cool the first time they see it, but after that they'll probably lose what little interest they had in it. Chances are they might even just find them boring after they notice that they can just run past the sentries without having to worry about them chasing them. If you used these different patterns as patrol routes that they fly in until they see the player, then have them chase after him it could probably work a little better.

They're still a threat to the player's health since they can whip off a bunch of pretty fast missiles (on bullshit anyway) any time the player is in view. Since they are a threat, the player is better off killing them generally. Running past them doesn't always work.

Besides, who says every monster needs to be uber-threatening any time it's placed on a map? There's plenty of imps in cages and pinkies across chasms that pose little threat and I don't hear any complaints about those. I think it's fun to sometimes be at a ridiculous advantage (either through map design or finding a weakness) and exploit that. You feel invincible/smart, and it's a good feeling. As long as there's not too much of that (and there's not here), you're not going to get bored. I don't think any of you guys are bored with Doom, are you? :S

Glad you're still working on this Carn, it looks really cool, you should be proud.

Carnevil said:

My statement was to math enthusiasts - not the average player.

You'll still have to do better than 8th grade math.

Burn!

I approve of that video.

exp(x) said:

You'll still have to do better than 8th grade math.

Burn!

Yeah, but for a lot of Americans, basic trigonometry qualifies as college math.

Burn! (not on you - on America ;_;)

And thanks guys! :D