Hello! A little more than a month has passed and by tradition I hasten to share the progress of our adventure, a series called “Through thorns to the game of dreams”. I want to remind you what is going on here. We are developing the game Another way - Non-linear third-person Action / RPG with interactive movie elements, made in the best traditions of medieval Fantasy, based on our own universe. Development is underway on Unreal Engine 4 with the efforts of a small but very inspired team.
You can find the previous parts of this long, but insanely interesting way in my profile.
If at the time of writing the first post there were only two of us, we were on fire with the idea, but on the whole understood that the amount that we hadn’t swung at was simply not enough, now there are already 20 people in the team from various fields, and I'm extremely glad that we manage to combine efforts in order to do something really cool. In general, welcome to cat.
In this call, many organizational issues were resolved, among others there was the issue of joint work on the project. To store the repository, we use a github with connected Git LFS. Here, for those who at least once used GIT for versioning, there will be no surprises, except for the additional installation of GIT LFS (Large File Storage) . Also, if desired, you can install an additional GIT LFS plugin in the Unreal Engine editor itself. By default, Github is not able to store such large projects (50GB + at the moment), so for every additional 50 gigabytes of traffic or disk space, you need to give an additional $ 5.
That would be all, victory. But questions of joint, one-time work and merge of conflicting cards remained open. For a local team working from the same office, everything would be much simpler, including our own hardware as a server and the use of Multi User by default on the local network.
After a short search and useless attempts to use p2p networks, the only mention of a working option using Softether VPN Server was found . VDS was purchased with very modest characteristics, sufficient to raise Softether, the hero of the occasion, on board Ubuntu, the most detailed configuration instructions can be found here .
We install Softether VPN Client on the client and connect to the remote machine with the details that we configured earlier.
Note: When setting up the client, you need to check the Advanced Settings: No Adjustments of Routing Table checkbox, otherwise the Internet will be lost on the machine and only the local connection to the VPN server will be available.
In Unreal Engine itself, you must first enable the Multi User Editing plugin and reload the editor.
Then in the settings indicate the received local VPN address.
Note: at the end it always goes: 0 to listen on the default port.
The final pipeline looks something like this: the host opens a session, users join it. Upon completion of work, users leave the server, the host commits the changes and uploads. All clients synchronize the state of local repositories (pull / fetch). Together, this allows you to completely get rid of problems with the lack of the ability to adequately merge conflicting changes, reduce the used LFS traffic and allows you to work together on a project. You can read more about the work of Multi-User Editing in the Unreal Engine documentation itself .
Of course, everything described is nothing more than personal experience. The feeling that we are inventing some kind of bicycle does not leave me all the time, and there is probably something more convenient for a similar format for working with remote teams as part of working with UE4, and maybe not, even if there is, unfortunately, they are unknown to me.
As I said earlier, the team has grown significantly both qualitatively and quantitatively, if previously it was enough to transfer documentation through personal messages and communication, then for scaling we needed to bring this into a single format. Jira is convenient for those who have worked with it before, expensive and too voluminous for our purposes. Asana is another monster. Trello - a good and simple kanban board and finally HacknPlan - a discovery that came to hand at the moment when it was really needed.
This is a specialized task tracker for the conditional "game dev." There you can maintain the main design document, attach chapters, break it into categories.
And more interestingly, create tasks directly from each individual element of the document design. And then the standard set of a good issue tracker, time logging, linking tasks, assigning users, attaching files and images, the most convenient kanban board by category and much more.
All progress has become more transparent, but still not all participants use the board and its capabilities, we will fix this in the very near future.
We, as before, pay great attention to details, so we have to look for references for props in various places, since it is not possible to render everything in 2D. But the output is quite interesting.
But sometimes it’s just necessary to draw, and then we get good references for future 3D models
Last time I showed the developments of the concept of the protagonist, since then it has acquired the final look.
After that, he was immediately transferred to the implementation, and now you can admire the 3D model sculpture:
Those who managed to get acquainted with the prologue can recall Rogir's daughter - the little girl Nialu, who is one of the most key characters.
Of course, we are still positioning the universe as something unique. Yes, we have borrowed mythical creatures, but there is an equally fascinating creature that lives only in our lands. Soon, the bestiary will be replenished with several more creatures and their history, and now I propose to get acquainted with some new concepts:
Tenelov - This creature has long pursued its victim, hiding in the shade of tree trunks. When running, it makes a sniffing sound, makes ominous cycles, and then gives way to the oppressive silence of the Forest of a Thousand Shadows.
Sea miracle-yudo - almost no one returned alive after meeting with him, or his puppets - beautiful maidens who attract with their beauty the starving sea wolves.
Our world consists of many different territories , and we treat each of them with special trepidation. Therefore, we began to work out a certain mood of different locations. At the moment, Marmid’s work is the place where our adventure begins, you can observe his color palette in all past and current screenshots. And recently, we began to work out the mood of the forest of a thousand shadows.
In addition to visual, narrative and gameplay perception - the sound is of great importance, now we have a general idea of the picture of the future sound and an operating time on the main topic of Another Way.
I will, as before, be happy with your questions, comments and we are still waiting for you in our Vkontakte community at any time. I want to finish with a view of the lake, somewhere near the sawmill of the village of Marmid. All peace and tranquility.
