Devlog #5 The Re-Imagining

Hello there,

So it's been two weeks since my last devlog. Basically I got pneumonia again and a lot of house stuff came up with pipes freezing, bursting, breaking other things from the pressure…it's been fun lol. But alongside this, I began work on an inventory system and also had another decisive change to the game design as a whole which affects pretty much all aspects of development.

Inventory

https://kappa.lol/yPXlV

Inventory setup has been fairly straight forward. Right now it's not connected to the database and doesn't save beyond the play session. It simply allows you to pick up, stack, move and join stacks together. The basics of what I need. You can also pick up items as well. The progress on this was cut short by my sickness.

https://kappa.lol/UlNLv

The change

So basically I was going through another art spelunking period, not quite putting my finger on what wasn't satisfying me in the art I had selected to work with. I'm a pretty art motivated guy when it comes to development, seeing the fruits of my labor helps keep me driven, so I get hung up on what's most likely going to end up being placeholder art in the end anyway.

Well along this road I came to the conclusion that while I am learning, I'm spending all this time working in 2d when what I've always wanted to do was build 3d games. It's been a thought creeping in the back of my mind since the beginning of all of this because I would lower my standards to meet what I felt I was going to be capable of accomplishing myself.

But in the end, I'm going to need someone to world build and do art for me no matter which way I put it, I'm just not driven to do that kind of stuff myself. So why hold the rest of my development to an art form that's going to end up getting replaced by someone anyway in the end, when I can start coding for 3d now with placeholder stuff and bring someone on who can greybox and build out the art world with me later on.

So I made the call and I am basically rebuilding the game into a 3D 3rd person shooter mmo in your pocket.

What's this mean?

Well, generally it opens up more freedom to the mechanics I want to code into the game because I won't be limited by my art, just my imagination. It also means that I can refocus on my original dream of creating a “reimagining” of Face of Mankind directly. It's something I've wanted to do since I started fiddling with game development years ago.

This means our with 2D, out with turn based combat and all that stuff. I will be rewriting the game description on the itch page here soon. I'm refocusing my efforts on transitioning my current systems to support the new 3d environment which shouldn't be terribly hard. I've been working on putting together the new 3d character controller with a newly designed state machine using resources as states.

My plan is to basically rebuild the core interactive mechanics of Face of Mankind starting with movement, shooting, inventory, storage, crafting and markets.

These will be my general priority to accomplish first with the new goal in mind. Also helps to give something playable sooner rather than later.

The downside of working in 3D in Godot is the tutorials for coding use cases are far fewer in existence as Godot in the past has generally been used as a 2D engine. So the learning process will be a bit more of a slog than what I've been handling.

But I have high hopes, I have a vision for what I'm going for, a template to design it around and expand from, it's all just about learning how to accomplish each task ahead.

So what is the game now?

Similar in concept to the 2D goal, it will be an open pvp 3rd person roleplay shooter. Think something more akin to FiveM roleplay servers. Original Face of Mankind was designed around a singular MMO design with one community. I'm building this to be hosted by any community with their own roleplay rules and policies.

All items in the game will be player crafted from scratch, so the economy will be completely player run.

Combat at least starting out will resemble most likely to original “fombat” where players dance around each other trying to dodge shots at them while firing back at their enemies. Guns will fire slowly or slow pulses in a controlled semi automatic fashion. This is just the premise I will start with, not an end goal design as of yet.

Mining and production will start as similar systems to original fom, mostly set it and forget it running in the background while players carry out their other activities in the world.

Communication I am undecided on. Original FoM did really well with text based communication for roleplay. But voice communication was also extremely hard to moderate in a singular MMO. With my community hosted concept, it may be more realistic to allow for voice roleplay like in fivem communities. However the anonymity of text based roleplay still provides something voice can not so I may still lean on the direction of text roleplay communication. Communities can always set up discord servers for faction internal voice chat if they want.

Faction gameplay will be just as important in this design, the factions being accountability to individual player actions.

A prison world will come into play just like in FoM for the police faction to send criminals to.

Now with all of this said, as I said this will be a reimagining of FoM, not a remake, no copyright infringement, art theft, anything of that nature. It will be what I had hoped FoM could become as a child growing up. It will have its own lore rewritten to create it's own style of dystopian future. There will be a more active race of xeno that I plan to develop hopefully based on the takeover style of aliens in the RTS/fps game, natural selection 2.

But I do hope to bring back nostalgia for those who miss the original FoM just in the similarity of gameplay.

This is my dream and I'll see where it takes me. I very much look forward to the next steps. I'll leave you with a quick clip of my very basic work on the new character controller.

https://kappa.lol/MkXQr

Until next time.