Exam game - Realm of the Lamb

[Dragonfreak]

So, after weeks of the promise i would create a post regarding my exam game that i fully created in lua Leadwerks engine.

I divided this post a bit up in sections, so feel free to wander around and see how much you wish to read

Realm of the Lamb:

This game is based on the League of Legends champion named Kindred. The idea was together with the customer (my teacher that acted as a customer) to promote Kindred a bit more next to the trailer teaser with a small game that shows the essence of kindred a bit more.

I achieved this with mostly focusing on the sound part of the game, the environmental feeling and a tiny puzzle / small spooky factor and tricking you.

Below you can see the cover picture that my wife has proudly made for me (She also made most of the Hud / Gui / Menu)

Sorry for the fact that it's dutch tho ^^ I needed it for my exam hehe.

You can download the game from this dropbox link and play it on your device. (I doubt anyone will get this error, considering everyone here will most likely have leadwerks on their device, but i included an openAL install just in case )

It's also possible too play it from the workshop! Check it out!

Make sure to listen closely!

Gameplay:

This game has little pieces of all kind of things. Puzzles, jump scare, running for your life and all that sort of things

Now more about the game(play)!

The story goes that you're a human that just got into an accident which resulted you being on the brink of life and death. While being a soul, normally kindred would give you an easy choice, but not this time. Sometimes they get so bored of their work and feel like playing a little "game".. They'll give you a reward for it too, if you can beat them you are worthy enough to get your life back. If you can't beat them.. Your soul will forever linger in the Realm of the Lamb.. Are you up for the challenge?

The controls are pretty simple, you use WASD to walk around and use the mouse to look around. the "E" button is an interactive button which you will only use once actually..

Some screenshots of the game:

Kindred lore:

"Tell me again, little Lamb, which things are ours to take?"

"All things, dear Wolf."

Separate, but never parted, Kindred represents the twin essences of death. Lamb's bow offers a swift release from the mortal realm for those who accept their fate. Wolf hunts down those who run from their end, delivering violent finality within his crushing jaws.

Copied from the league of legends wiki site here you can find the full background lore instead of the small snippet i placed above.

A little look more into my exam period:

First of all, i learned ALOT during this period. Even tho it isn't technically allowed during the exams since you needed to master this. (funny story tho, my "study" rather focused on web stuff instead of game while my paper clearly states game-developer lol, learned 80% of all i know in the exam period and before with 70% being Leadwerks)

But yeah, i learned a crazy lot and i loved the whole process of it. It was quite stressful aswell to be honest, normally you work together with atleast 1 person so you would split up the things you required to do. Since i was a special case, i worked alone. So i was all alone with all these paperworks aswell lol, very delightful.

I also had quite a lot of help from good friends (One of em is also a Leadwerks *cough* nerd *cough* <3 ), from my wife and from this community.

Mentally i also had a lot of support from my wife and friends ^^ Staying sane was the hardest of it all but i managed in a sense haha.

And now! A little more in depth on the whole process!

It was terrible (O_O") the end.

Just kidding haha, the process of actually recording voices was very awesome and scary at the same time, me and my wife both felt like little school girls and laughing all the time in between recordings xD

Truly, i never thought the recording would came out this good. (To clarify a bit, we only did the NPC's, the kindred voices are all from LoL it self, the game is full of copyright lol)

Next to that, finding out how i can finally get animated models from cinema 4D was a truly surprising accidental discovery. (i have tried before to do it, without any success which was frustrating)

For anyone struggling with this matter, you need a skin on your model and that's pretty much it! It was that easy all along.

Tho, finding this amazing discovery i of course wanted to abuse this matter. I messed with the animation a bit in cinema 4D, trying to merge 2 animations on 1 exported model. This however, was a terrible mistake as for some reason the second animation screw up for no particular reason and i ended up needed to rotate each frame (over 40 frames) a few bones just to correct it all. Ofcourse i could've done this easier by exporting 2 models, exporting the animation and merge it into another model. But then again, i'm not always the brightest especially when sanity isn't in the same room ^^ but it was fun to do anyways and i learned new things in that process aswell

I think i'll round up the post a bit here haha, if anyone really wants to know more of my progress then i'll add it and update this post

Thanks for reading if you did read this far! You're truly awesome ^^

Have a great day and let me know what you think of my game!

A few more screenshots i made during development ^^

Here you can see my first attempt to create lanterns based on pivot locations from 1 master pivot ^^ (so 1 script for them all, my purpose here was to make the "wave" effect without editing enormous amount of lanterns each time)

Also funny if you can read it, i included the "brightness" value of each lantern, i later used this to define if it should be 1 lantern or 2. I also hooked up the other brightness channel later on to define if the distance should be larger or smaller! So this was easy for corners or just solo lanterns by editing only that specific pivot

Adding the lights, nothing too special here

My first attempt with messing around with the NPC looks and feels (I used a purple pillar nearby to see the difference in height and also to actual get the "depth" due the plain white terrain haha)

Adding in the first trees! Found my first beta NPC looks aswell and trying to show the general idea of what i had to my customer so he would have an visual example of how the game will look in general (without the fancy textures that my wife edited for me later)

Funny example of how i'm creating a ring with runes on it with trials and errors hehe, but it turned out just great in the end!

First time messing around with the flowgraph! I was pretty proud of my little creation here actually. (i improved it a lot later on ofcourse and added a lot more items, i won't show how messy it looked in the end haha)

I was also very glad that i managed to use 1 script on both rings, use the script settings to change the important values and make it all hook up just right!

My tiny example of how i did the lantern controller, i eventually added a few more controllers because the list became waaaaay to huge!

Here is my attempt to create the end portal, this ofcourse changed quite some due the textures and the weird "gem" also got it's proper "update" to make it all look solid as one

I can't add too much more without spoilers! Because from this point on, all the screenshots i got pretty much gives away the game to some extend. The last thing i can show you, is my animated sprite which i used to animate the soul essence icon. It isn't really anything in your face, i wouldn't be surprised if people didn't even notice it in the first place, but tiny details are always cool in my opinion.

https://puu.sh/pD5Bc/8314553bbe.png

[gamecreator]

Congrats! Any gameplay info/screenshots/video?

[Dragonfreak]

Thanks!

Good one about the gameplay info & screenshots hehe, i'll make a section for that tomorrow

 

Tho, i won't really do a video considering the game is rather short.. It would spoiler everything within seconds hehe

Same thing applies slightly a bit for the screenshots.. But those are less harmful then a video haha

[Dragonfreak]

Updated the original post with a bit of gameplay and some screenshots! I also added a tiny bit more about my development progress together with screenshots

 

Enjoy!

[Dragonfreak]

Tiny update: Changed the development screenshot title so it's more clear they're the screenshot section.

Also added a workshop link of my game!

 

Now i'll stop updating this post and give people some space to check it out

[f13rce]

Very cool! The amount of immersion is overwhelming, didn't expect it to be that much. You can definitely see the amount of effort and passion into this project. Also glad to hear that you've passed your exam.

[Dragonfreak]

Very cool! The amount of immersion is overwhelming, didn't expect it to be that much. You can definitely see the amount of effort and passion into this project. Also glad to hear that you've passed your exam.

 

Thanks a lot for your awesome words

 

You really helped me a lot with plenty obstacles and those informative tips how to improve some performance ^^ Thanks to that i could keep awesome things like the lights in the lanterns (i was really bumped out that they started to lag with my settings and really took away some of the feelings in the game) and overal the tips you gave me / answers on my questions regarding trees haha.

 

Cookies for you /o/

[Angelwolf]

It doesn't seem to launch for me

[Dragonfreak]

It doesn't seem to launch for me

 

That's odd, got perhaps any extra information?

[Angelwolf]

Its probably an issue with the launcher. Failed to download workshop item. But i tried again and it downloaded successfuly, but just doesnt launch.

[Dragonfreak]

That's odd, there is possible 1 thing you can try (which i did use for my private game once) is the follow:

 

Create a shortcut on your desktop (or anywhere you feel comfortable with) and set the URL to the following:

steam://run/355500//+game 735323135

 

This will launch the leadwerks game launcher and tells it to use this game. If this doesn't work then i'm all out of ideas :3

 

Hope it helps!