TERRA MELIOR - Sci Fi ARPG Shooter. The hero is dead. You're next!

Community Showcases
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Hey everyone!

Here’s a game I’ve been working on for a while called TERRA MELIOR. It’s a 3rd person action RPG shooter where you fight lots of boss battles, and dodge and use shields instead of taking cover. It takes place on a frozen, hostile planet where you search for a famous researcher who disappeared.

I’m in “fast content creation” mode, so there’s not a lot of polish. Many enemies still just have a terrain texture, rather than a painted UV texture. I’m working hard to get the 1st draft of the entire game done before polishing too much.

Overview:

  • Solve a galactic mystery by shooting giant monsters in the face!
  • Fight with guns, magic, melee, and martial arts (if you think kicking huge monsters is a good idea…)
  • Dragons! Laser halberds! Vodka! Rocket-Powered Bows!
  • Die over and over again because you are not worthy

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Links:

Some Awesome Features:

  • Combat System - stamina, poise, directional staggering, equipment burden, elemental damage, buff/debuff system, and more!
  • Giant bosses can step on you!
  • Button combos for different magic and martial arts attacks
  • Semi-procedural animation for player and some bosses
  • Character Creation - includes everything from adjusting upper and lower eyelash lengths (separately) to adding flaming jewelry
  • Choose the colors for your armor and (eventually) weapons
  • Custom skin shader with fake depth-mapped Subsurface Scattering
  • Custom hair shader - still needs work
  • Custom hair physics using bones - it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s optimized, and really fast!
  • Fast and sweet looking ice shader :smile:
  • Modified version of A* pathfinding
  • Simple dragon flight - I’ll make it better in the future!
  • Fire System - still needs work, but certain levels have fire that can spread. There are fire extinguishers and floating fire drones that can put it out.
  • Tactical AI - nothing fancy, as they’re just monsters. It’s more of a “team composition” manager that switches their roles around according to who’s alive, what tags they have (ie. melee, ranged, support, tank, assassin…), and their distribution.
  • Danger Area Registry - Lets human AI detect danger areas (mostly fire, and incoming enemy spells) and avoid / dodge accordingly. Haven’t enabled it for monsters yet.
  • Temperature System - find warm areas like caves and structures with heaters to keep from freezing!

I’m planning to do a Kickstarter at some point and start begging for money. Anyways, I figured I’d start a thread here and start posting dev videos and stuff. Thanks for checking it out, and let me know what ya think! :smile:

Just remember: You are not the hero. The hero is dead. You’re next.

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Reserved

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Reserved again

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Very nice for pre-alpha. I’d say rework your textures around once you’ve got a good standing on what your game will be. But aside from that, it looks great.

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Looks pretty cool. Graphics definitely feel more old school but the game play looks like it makes up for it.

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Thank you! I agree, the textures definitely need some work. Thanks for the feedback! :slight_smile:

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Thank you! :slight_smile: The gameplay is definitely ahead of the graphics, but I’ve been working on that lately :stuck_out_tongue:

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What will be the challenge level of the game? Your making it sound like it’s going to be as hard as dark souls. Also what will be your pricetag because it looks ready for early alpha!

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Dark Souls is an amazing game, and it’s a huge inspiration for the combat, so I certainly hope it will be of comparable difficulty. The gameplay is different, but I’m going for a lot of the same ideas (lots of bosses, critical thinking in combat, gear matters a lot, those key moments when you make a bad decision and know you’re doomed). To oversimplify it, I’d say it has faster combat, but more instruction on how to play.

It’s hard for me to compare them because Dark Souls doesn’t feel very difficult to me anymore unless I’m speedrunning. And having guns changes things a lot.

My favorite “difficulty” thing so far (and the most time-consuming!) is adding in ways for boss arenas to change, like adding semi-procedural fire in a grid. Quelaag is one of my favorite DkS bosses due to her lava attacks.

Here’s an example of my design philosophy:

You used to be able to cheese the tutorial boss by hiding in a place he can’t fit. So I made him detect if he can’t reach you with melee attacks. If so, he goes into hyper mode early (rather than at 60% HP), and starts spamming his devastating fire blast attack. :smile:

Price point… I’m still not sure. But not expensive, and it’ll be cheaper when I do a Kickstarter! :slight_smile:

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I made a blog post showing screenshots of the 10 steps I took to make this image, and explaining some of the more important ones.

HERE’S THE BLOG POST

And here are some of the steps:

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All of it comes together to make this:

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Thanks for checking it out!! I’m super excited to finally have terrain that I’m not ashamed of, haha. :smile:

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Well, you can count me as a backer. I will back around 50 bucks for you because it looks amazing and I loved dark souls.

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That’s awesome, thank you so much!! :smile: If you want to try it out, I have a (kinda rough) demo up, and I’ll be updating it soon.

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PENGUINS!! :smile:

I wanted a neutral creature to wander around, and I figured penguins would be fun. They’re an invasive species to TERRA MELIOR, and just about the only earth creatures that enjoy the planet.

Here’s a video:

They wander around randomly, and have 3 actions: Jump, belly slide, and squawking. I might be able to use some of the neutral AI to make monsters act more natural before they see the player.

Some screenshots:

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Here’s how I made them:

Thanks for checking it out! :smile:

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Here’s an update video showing early work on a new boss, new grab mechanics, and some improved bullet effects! :smile:

I’m trying to make the game more intense and over-the-top. Flying sparks help a lot :smile:

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The Eviscerator still needs a lot of work, but I updated his upper materials. His feet still have temporary materials, and are completely messed up.

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Here’s how the Eviscerator looks with hitboxes:

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The grab is a simple idea, but I spent some time making a new system for it so I can easily add grab moves to enemies and bosses. I just attach this script to enemies, and get the settings right. Most of the complicated stuff is handled internally, or by the animations.

Here I am creating some animation events that call the AnimDamage() function. Thanks to Unity’s new animation system, I can do this visually. This is also what I do now to detect regular melee hits.

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And here are the new melee detection boxes. The green boxes on the monster are hitboxes, but the ones in front of him are for regular melee, and the impaling grab attack. This lets me tweak them visually, and I can even pause the game as the monster attacks and line them up perfectly.

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If the player is colliding with one of these boxes when the monster attacks, they either get damaged or grabbed, depending on the attack. Usually for bosses, I detect hits using raytraces, but for enemies that aren’t so much bigger than you, this system is easier and doesn’t slow the game down nearly as much.

And here’s how easy it is to set up in the code!

There’s a TON of behind the scenes stuff going on there. The ActionState class takes care of most of the complexity, allowing me to add new attacks efficiently.

Eventually I want to make it so monsters can throw you. I also need to make different player animations depending on whether you’re being grabbed or impaled, and maybe some reaction animations for taking damage.

The idea is to let the player get really beat up. I’ve been noticing more and more how many “getting hurt” animations there are in Dark Souls. It reinforces the idea that you’re just a small human in a terrible, hostile world, and makes victory over huge bosses all the sweeter.

Have a great week!! :smile: