Frameshift - Post Apocalyptic Sci-fi Survival

[goonter]

Frameshift is a multiplayer open world survival game set in a post apocalyptic sci-fi world. You’ll survive the elements, battle genetically engineered mutants using weapons and technology, enhance yourself with cybernetics, build underground bunkers, and much much more. Inspired by games like DayZ and Ultima Online, Frameshift will be full of great content and innovative features, and be an awesome sandbox experience where you can be whoever you want to be.
Story

In the near future, a large company called Frameshift Technologies bioengineers a life form whose blood can be used as a power source. It is many times more efficient than any existing power source, and within five years ninety-nine percent of households run on Framefuel, the branded biofuel created by Frameshift. In-home power cells, branded Framecells, contain live genetically engineered life forms, their blood continuously harvested to provide power to the home.

Through a series of mistakes, the engineered Framecell organism is mutated to create powerful, genetically engineered mutant life forms that destroy ninety-nine percent of human life on earth, causing the end of mankind as we know it. The survivors, now at the bottom of the food chain, must band together to fight against this unstoppable new force.

Read more story

Features
Summary
Frameshift will have a strong core experience of survival against the elements, battle versus mutants, and cybernetic augmentation. We also strive to have a number of secondary features to give you the freedom to live how you want in the world.

Enemies
The mutant predators in the world are bred by an out of control artificial intelligence that dwells in the data centers of Frameshift Technologies headquarters. It connects wirelessly to in-home Framecells, directing them to incubate these aggressive life forms in every home, business, and industrial facility across the world.
Mutants are genetically engineered and cybernetically augmented to be powerful predators, specifically designed to kill or maim their human prey.
Combat
Inexperienced survivors will fight with makeshift melee weapons, but as they progress they will be able to upgrade to more powerful and durable ones. A deep primary/offhand weapon system allows for a large number of choices and cool combos. Discover and master the Framefuel you scavenge to create powerful weapons and traps.
The detailed damage system allows for various damage types to be applied to individual body parts, causing limb dismemberment and other equally gory outcomes.
Cybernetics
Scavenge and repair technology found in the world to create cybernetic augmentations for yourself and your friends. Perform amateur surgery on fellow survivors to install cybernetics. Enhance movement, strength, vision, hearing, and endurance.
Once you are augmented with an Ocular Implant, you have access to a vision overlay to provide more data about the world and your surroundings. Salvage data from systems you encounter when scavenging and from bodies of victims who were augmented pre-apocalypse. You’ll find GPS coordinates of valuable stashes, applications to further enhance yourself, schematics for technology, and more.
Open World
The world of frameshift is a gigantic 576km², with tons of variety. Stay off the grid and survive like a bearded wild man in the wilderness, creating meals from plants you gather to barter with other players or keep for yourself. Or venture into cities to battle mutants and scavenge for food, water, and technology to advance yourself and your weapons.
Progression
Your progression and specialization is determined by which loot you choose to carry. There is no level system or grinding in Frameshift. Your skills and power are entirely based on the loot you find in the world. Physical power and endurance enhancements come from cybernetic augmentations and implants. Find schematics and other literature to gain knowledge and enhance your ability to build and repair items.

Read more about features

Devblogs

Devblog 1 - State of Frameshift

Devblog 2 - Buildings Visual Upgrade

Devblog 3 - Terrain Intro

Devblog 4 - Progress Report March 2016

Devblog 5 - Progress Report June 2017

Concept Art

Team & Status

The core team for Frameshift is Nick Owens ( @goonter ), Mark Amiot, and Jeremy Severinsen.

We are currently in early Alpha, hoping to hit closed Beta in Summer 2016 and release in 2017.

Read more at www.frameshiftgame.com

Feedback

We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback about the game so far! Feel free to take a look at the website for more detailed information and additional screenshots. I’ll continue to do regular devblogs and post updates here to keep you informed of our progress. Thanks for taking the time to check out our work!

[spryx]

Nice job on the art…that is scary stuff. My first thought was of the characters from “The Descent”

[Terminator75]

You guys have really put a lot of time into the story and its quite unique and very interesting as a backstory for the game, thumbs up for that. An open world of 576^2km? My mind is blown, to even think of making such a huge world its just amazing . I have a few questions, Is the game going to be released on steam? if so how much would you expect for 1 copy of the game. Its still early so i dont mind these question not being answered. Anyways the game looks really awesome in all aspects and this might be the game all the people who love open world survival games have been waiting for .
Good luck to you all and thanks for sharing info about this game.

[goonter]

@Terminator75 Thank you for the kind words! The world is starting to turn out really cool, I’ll try to put up a video of a fly-through in the next few months.

We’re going to attempt the Steam Greenlight and Early Access route, but we don’t want to put an unfinished game on Early Access, we just want to use it for finding bugs and polishing the game. The price will probably be comparable to other similar titles out now ($25-$35), but nothing is for sure so that might change.

Anyways the game looks really awesome in all aspects and this might be the game all the people who love open world survival games have been waiting for

I hope so! We’re working really hard and I hope it will end up being something that players love.

[Huknar]

Absolutely astonishing. This is a very inspired premise, and those art pieces are fantastic. The best of luck! I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

[Wacky-Moose]

The ingame art and Concept does not look like it was made from the same person is this correct ?

[DrakkarDev]

The concepts look really cool.
Keep on the good work!

[goonter]

@Wacky-Moose Most of the in-game art you seen in screenshots now is placeholder, so the visual quality isn’t quite where it needs to be yet. Also, you are correct, the concept art is created by a dedicated Concept Artist who does not create production art. We have a Production Artist and an Environmental Artist for the in-game stuff.

@DrakkarDev thanks for the encouragement!

[goonter]

I’m super excited about this new concept art for the Framecell. You can check out all the images here.

[goonter]

Some new concept art for one of the many devices that can be crafted from scrap parts and electronics. Since the enemy creatures are mutations of the original Frameshift organism, their blood remains Framefuel which can be extracted to provide power to vehicles, tools, and other equipment. It can also be refined and processed in different ways for various uses.

[XCO]

EPIC!!

[DxStd_IgnatPribylov]

When I went here, I did not expect to see such a … it’s Lawful WOW!
I worked for many years with realism in game development, you really go with this?
Reminiscent of Half-Life.

[goonter]

@DxStd_IgnatPribylov thanks, I think

[goonter]

So far we’ve mostly been focusing on getting features in the game, delaying super polished visuals until we were closer to launch. Our first draft houses were visually on-par with DayZ mod I’d say, maybe slightly worse.

However, recently we decided to revamp our residential house visuals as part of our push to get low level portions of the game into a really polished and fun state, both visually and mechanically. This includes gameplay in the wilderness and light residential areas (like farms and suburbs).

I wanted to share with you some of our process and the results we’ve achieved so far. Here is a screenshot of the living room of a version 1 house:

Our houses at this point were highly optimized, using only 2 draw calls and very low poly furniture. The rooms shared UV space to allow high enough texture resolution in a single 8k texture.

Here is the same living room, with version 2 revamp in-progress:

Here I’ve made a few changes:

• More, and more detailed decorations. We’ve added additional geometry while keeping performance under control with aggressive LODing. It could be further optimized with object pooling for all the small decorations.
• Individual 4k textures for each room in the house. This allows us to add a lot of small detail and varying grunge to each room, which adds a ton of realism. It raises texture memory and draw calls when inside the house, but the house is combined and atlased into a single object and a single texture at higher LODs, so overall performance isn’t too much worse.
• Custom-made speedtree vine to add an overgrown feel.

In the previous screenshot, you can see that shelves and furniture still have that “floaty” feel. SSAO post-processing helps a little bit, but objects still don’t feel grounded. In the shot below, I’ve added baked AO so the decorations now feel like they are really part of the house. I used the awesome tool Export2Maya by @Fishypants to bring the whole scene back into an FBX that could then be used to re-bake AO in Substance Designer.

Something still wasn’t right with how objects were appearing in the scene, and after playing with Unity’s ambient light settings, I realized that everything being lit by ambient light is completely flat looking, because ambient light has no direction. So I needed to find a solution to light interiors better. Unity 5 global illumination was not an option because we don’t use the built in scene loading methods, and since our world is streamed as you travel across it, Unity’s GI bakes tied to scenes really doesn’t work at all for us.

Finished version 2 living room:

In the shot above, you can see that we found a solution. We’re using the GI Proxy asset by @nasos_333 , which is a great asset and is really the only “Global Illumination” solution for projects where the world is loaded dynamically. It makes a HUGE difference, as you can see objects have a ton more depth now. Since various sides of objects are lit differently from each other, they no longer blend into one monotone blob.

Here are a few more before and after shots:

Bedroom before

Bedroom after

One general design goal we have is that locations in the game should tell a story about what happened during the Frameshift apocalypse. A player should be able to walk into a house or encounter a wreck on the road, and be able to imagine the brutal ending of lives that occurred there. It should make them a little upset

So, as you can see above, the implementation of that philosophy within the house revamp was to add a little more personality to the rooms so the player can imagine who lived there.

Bedroom 2, before.

Bedroom 2, after. Without GI Proxy.

Bedroom 2, after. With GI Proxy. You can see this makes a huge difference with metallic objects like the garbage can.

After I got the workflow for the revamped houses hammered out, our Environmental Artist, Jeremy, took it to the next level, adding tons of detail and personality to the next house he created:

We’re really excited about the level of quality we’ve achieved with this update. Feel free to leave comments or feedback on the new visuals! You can read more about Frameshift on our website.

[AcidArrow]

Congrats on the improvements, but that AO looks overdone. It looks less like AO and more like some sort of very clean and uniform mold.

[goonter]

@AcidArrow Yes, I agree. I think in this case it’s okay because it’s half AO and half grunge/mold/dust/leaks since these are meant to be aged quite a bit. But we are still adjusting the levels of grunge vs AO so thanks for the feedback!

[Whiteleaf]

Looks good!

[Stomped]

I have finished the house, and am moving on to upgrade another.
I made a fly through video of what I just finished.

Frameshift Game (alpha) - House 17 Tour

Here is a quick gallery I put together of where I’m at with the next upgrade.

Old version:
It has no interior other than the garage. The entire house is just one 2k texture. So it looks pretty bad up close. I am pretty much starting from scratch with it, and making it look as good as the house above. Also taking advice from above post about too much AO. I agree and I will try to tone it down on this one.

New version:
It’s getting a full interior. The front door is right in front of the stairs.

Downstairs layout:

Upstairs layout:

[Rombie]

Wow. This game is looking great.
The concept work is absolutely stunning and the repolished homes are looking great as well.

Keep up the great work, can’t wait to see more

[brute]

I am a programmer for Frameshift. I have a lot of fun creating this game and love making things in Unity.
I’m really excited to show off our terrain. Frameshift is set in an open world with a total area of 528km². The player can’t get everywhere so the total walkable area is 409km² :). Everything is based on real satellite imagery and height data. This data is then customized by hand to add intricate details and blending. Satellite images don’t have the best resolution when viewed close up, so at close distances those images fade into high resolution terrain textures.

There are multiple biomes with different sets of vegetation and textures, including the Coast, “Low Fields”, Mountains, Sierras, and Desert. There is too much area to show in a single post so this introduction will only be about the Low Fields.

Low Fields biome is the most complete so far. Its green farmlands, rolling foothills, oak trees, small bushes, and plentiful edible plants. Trees and bushes are generated based on real data too. Very neat.

Spring time in the Low Fields

Scenic view from the Twin Gates area

High resolution terrain textures blended into the distant satellite images

Frameshift Game (alpha) - "Low Fields" terrain fly-by

Things to improve: atmospheric & weather effects, grass density, and add more vegetation assets for each biome.
The Frameshift world is a major part of the game experience so look forward to more updates!
Make sure to leave replies if you like what you see

-Mark