Visitors: First Contact multiplayer now available.

[LoLJester]

 

A detailed breakdown of the major features can be read on the game's official website https://www.visitorsthegame.com/ or its Steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/1643700/Visitors_First_Contact/

Edited March 15, 2023 by LoLJester

[LoLJester]

Removed. Steam Spring sale has expired...

Edited March 23, 2023 by LoLJester

[LoLJester]

WIP: Transport vehicles seat selection GUI.

[Duion]

Congrats on staying motivated with game development, but considering the hard times for indies I would suggest spending more time on researching on marketing and how to reach potential customers, since the default visibility platforms like Steam now give you is close to zero.

Maybe try reaching people you personally know to get a few matches going and then try find people on social media like Streamers who might be interested and send them a free key or so for testing it.

Only after thousands of people played my game I could properly develop my game further, because that way you can see how people act, what issues there are with the game, what is fun and what not etc this is especially important for multiplayer games. Most games now on the multiplayer market evolved over years often decades of people playing them and Torque3D never really had that so games made with it feel a bit awkward in general, because there was no real FPS made with it that has been played over years by many people. Developing too many features without proper feedback and testing is a lot of wasted effort, like I have a lot of features build in that were never used much and partly destroy the balancing of the old much simpler game.

[LoLJester]

I hear you. Thanks for your feedback.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

this is a vehicle for visitors multi-player ? Is it or vehicles like it already in the game ? thats very cool for multi play . I know it says WIP but do you have further plans for the GUI or will it be totally plain like in the picture ? btw TY for sharing this development , it is interesting and educational and fun to interact when possible .

[Duion]

@fLUnKnhaXYU

The game engine comes with a vehicle class and a default vehicle, the rest is up to you, I also have vehicles in my game and a spawning menu, but since there is only the default vehicle and I have no idea how to balance it it is disabled for now, so if you want it you can look at the code.

[LoLJester]

@fLUnKnhaXYUYes, this vehicle and other are part of the game build that I currently have. I should very soon have a small video showcasing the overall control of the transport vehicles. There are currently flying vehicles for both factions that you can control in the public build of the game available on Steam. There is also an old Demo of the game available on my website: Downloads - Visitors (visitorsthegame.com) The game's more polished now, but the demo is there if you want to try it out. Also, there is a Discord server for the game if you're interested. Cheers.

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

Duion , Thank you for reminding me again . your Ubergame code is a tremendous asset for learning how to use T3D .

LoLJester , Looking forward to the video , thanks a lot for the demo , kinda looking forward to it , your videos and things are rather compelling .

good evening . Gentlepersons .

 

[LoLJester]

After many iterations, I've narrowed the new cover art for the game to these two.

Working on other variations to fit with Steam's aspect ratios.

 

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by LoLJester
Updated design.

[Duion]

Looks professional, how long you spend on those? For mine I just sat down a few hours and called it done.

[LoLJester]

The work itself took about a couple of days. The process to get to this final idea took me quite a while, about a couple of weeks. A lot of research and trial and error. I have created and deleted about ten projects. It ended up being one simple reference image that I'd had on my hard drive for a long time that gave me the final inspiration. Then it was smooth sailing from there. This is the finished 2:1 steam capsules ratio.

Edited June 17, 2023 by LoLJester

[Duion]

From what I learned I can tell you that your time is now best spend on marketing, especially since the market has become much harder than when I released, to be honest marketing should be number one priority at all times, then if you have players you can push updates. From my stats doing updates when I lost most of my playerbase did change the playerbase significantly.

[LoLJester]

I agree. Marketing is what I'm focused on now going forward. Much of the hard work is now finally done. I believe the game is now fun to play and offers most of the features I planned out to do. Getting people to play the game is my main priority now. Thanks for your suggestions. Cheers!

[LoLJester]

 

[Duion]

Finally a new playermodel, I think the default soldier is one of the biggest design flaws of the Torque3D engine, it should have been a more generic default model that you build up on. Did you make the model yourself or got it from somewhere?

I also like the Minigun, but the Grenade Launcher looks ineffective with that bouncing around.

Regarding the Terrain you should make use of the Macro texture layer for terrain materials it will probably improve the looks by a lot and also turn down texture intensity of the ground texture, the dry cracked ground looks a bit cartoonish with the dark black outlines.

[LoLJester]

I didn't create this model, but I did create all the first person arms and weapons animations, as well as some the third person animations by hand in Blender.

The Soldier was supposed to be temporary, but then I've grown to like it over time. I think this character design is better than what many games have out there. I may replace it in the future if need be. I am aware of the stigma that goes with purchased assets, but a self funded game of this scope that I'm making on my own would not be possible without outsourced material. It has taken me many years to get the game in the state it's in right now; I can't even imagine how much longer it would have taken me to do this if I had to create all the art myself. I have, however did create about 35% of the art, and I may continue to add some more. 

Quote

 the Grenade Launcher looks ineffective with that bouncing around.

The Grenade launcher is really cool to use in closed environments when you want to shoot around the corners. If you know how to use it and time it correctly, it can yield some fun moments. I may adjust the bouncing a little bit though.

Quote

Regarding the Terrain you should make use of the Macro texture layer for terrain materials it will probably improve the looks by a lot and also turn down texture intensity of the ground texture, the dry cracked ground looks a bit cartoonish with the dark black outlines.

I'm using T3D 1.2. No Macro texture layers in this version of the engine.

Thanks for your feedback.

Edited July 4, 2023 by LoLJester

[Duion]

Ironically most of the "criticism" I received on my game was specifically on the soldier model, the weapons and animations, even though the soldier model is made by professional artists according to industriy standards, otherwise close to 100% of the assets were selfmade. People seem to have some weird confirmation bias, they see an indie game and immediately go "oh unity asset flip" even when hardly any asset was flipped and the engine is not even Unity, they just don't care.

I procrastinated making my own player model for very long as well, but when I finally did it, it just took me 2 weeks at my first try, I used a makehuman basemesh and then modeled around it and removed the excess polygons and I ended keeping the hands. feet and a little bit of the head. I streamlinede the process by not having a first person model with arms, saved me a lot of work having to do every animation for every weapon again in first person plus the first person view is more realistic with feet and the whole body, the only downside is iron sights do not work properly, since its almost impossible to align the animations perfectly.

I think you can relatively easy upgrade to the latest version before Torque3D 4.0 it was 3.10 or so, or just only update the macro texture feature by hand into your codebase. Otherwise no idea if you really need the updates of the new version except maybe Linux support, which was a major factor for me.

[LoLJester]

Visitors: First Contact's human ground transport vehicle in action.

Game available on Steam here.

Enjoy and please comment if you like the video!

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by LoLJester

[fLUnKnhaXYU]

I found that (vehicle vid) to be quite entertaining . quite entertaining indeed .

[LoLJester]

I'm glad you enjoyed it. This is just a small sample of what can be done with vehicles in the upcoming update for the game.

It took some time to make it work in multiplayer, but the end result is quite fun.

[Duion]

Looks like quite a lot of work, I remember a guy on the forum trying to figure out how to make a rotating turret, you not only have that but drivers seat, passenger seats and multiple turrets and even the bots know how to use it.

Btw the art in that scene is quite bad, I mean there is no way birch trees are growing in such a desert especially while nothing else grows there except this one generic bush. The ground texture is too low res, the players look like ants, I would scale it down a lot and lower the intensity a bit, so that its not straight dark at some spots. I would just fill the terrain with a lot of groundcover objects like dry gras, small stones, bushes and then eventually some dead trees, it will make the scene much more believable. The engine can handle that much stuff I usually completely fill out my levels with stuff and it runs at 60+ FPS at max settings on my 10 year old semi decent gaming PC, so I think you can easily increase the density of objects in your levels by a lot, it will make it look more realistic, just go crazy with groundcovers and the forest brush.

[LoLJester]

Thank you again for your feedback. It is very much appreciated. It's good to have another perspective on the look and feel of the game. But, I will most likely keep everything the way it is, as I have already spent a lot of time working on this mission. I am not really going for a realistic look. I chose to make a sci-fi game so that I can have the freedom to experiment with level design. I will workshop your suggestions, though, and see how adding more grass and rocks will help with the esthetics. The thing is that the terrain in this mission is already quite large and detailed with mesas, canyons and many buildings that also have interiors. There are 1.5 to 2 million of polygons being rendered at any given time. In this mission, the player will be able to fly, walk and drive. So, I have to keep the detail to a minimum in order to have the game run smoothly in multiplayer.

1 hour ago, Duion said:

The ground texture is too low res, the players look like ants, I would scale it down a lot and lower the intensity a bit, so that its not straight dark at some spots.

I didn't really understand this part. What makes the players look like ants? You mean that the size of the ground texture is too large, making it disproportionate to the size of the players?

[Duion]

You know the part in the terrain texture where you can change the scaling? That is what is far too big for a few textures. Regarding the other stuff, you do not have to take my advice, but those were things I obviously noticed, I usually instantly notice if an artist is good or bad, its actually pretty easy once you know the tricks, but you often see mainstream games produced by big corporations that have talent free artists basically doing every mistake in the book. Here look at a comparison shot between H1Z1 vs DayZ and it should become obvious:

Bad artists usually place assets on the ground more or less random, but in reality you usually have zones like field zone, tree zone, urban zone etc and every one is different in style. I would argue the Chernarus level in Arma2 is the best video game level ever designed, it looks totally realistic, because it is a copy of a real world location and people found it and made comparison videos on Youtube. Realistic style or not, you have to stick to the rules, realistic means it is believable. For example take my first level for Uebergame, which is a destroyed desert town where there is basically nothing in the level, but if you look closely you can see like 5 different plants growing there, mostly dry and they grow different on each terrain layer, which is easy to setup in the Torque3D ground cover tool and there are actually a few bushes but only on the dark spots that look like they could be dried out lakes. Also notice in the image how there is plants covering everything, which is key to having a realistic look, you cannot have empty terrain textures, it looks weird, in Torque3D you can easily fill it with thousands of rocks, dirt, grass, plants whatever using the ground cover tool in a few clicks, it does not matter for performance, since it is proceduarlly generated, you only change the viewdistance. 1.5-2 mil polygons is not much, I went by 3 million and now it is probably outdated again, actually Torque3D stats do not count the real polygons, since they are dublicated for shadows or so I think, so the number is much higher than it actually is. Just placing a terrain already gives you like a million, so you can easily add a million for vegetation and then another million for player stuff and buildings.

[LoLJester]

Thanks for clarifying what you meant by what was making the players look like ants. That can be adjusted of course. I'll tinker with it and see where it goes.

50 minutes ago, Duion said:

...you do not have to take my advice...

It's not that I don't want to take your advise. I really do appreciate the feedback. It's just a matter of time and resources. I can only devote so much time to one aspect of the game such as art. Although important, I tend to find good gameplay and smooth frame rate more important. That's where all my focus lies. But, after seeing those pictures in comparison, I now see what you mean. They're good reference point going forward.