Portal:Wasteland 2
Wasteland 2 contents
 Character development |
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About Wasteland 2
In February 2012, Brian Fargo announced that Wasteland 2 would be founded via Kickstarter. The game's official website was launched on March 5, 2012, while on March 13 the Kickstarter project was launched.
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Wasteland 2 Facebook page has been updated with a new piece of concept art.
The image came with an interesting description:
Here is another portrait piece by another of the very talented concept artists.
These mad little guys wear bandoliers of mini-nuke grenades and if provoked, will charge shouting "To Titan!" before self-detonating.
”
The very first gameplay video from Wasteland 2, showing the Agricultural Center, can now be watched on Youtube!
Wasteland 2 designer Chris Keenan has posted on Kickstarter an update #20 about attributes and skills that will be in game:
First, here is the list of attributes you can expect to find in Wasteland 2. Attributes are the starting values for your character traits. These are established when you create your character and can be different for each member of your party. Attributes are all passive, meaning that they won't be actively used in the world to solve issues.
You might immediately spot a few differences between this list and the original Wasteland. Perception has been turned into an attribute. We felt that perception tied into many other skills and played such an important role that it earned its position as an attribute. Also, there is this weird skill called Expertise on the list. Where the hell did that come from? Expertise is essentially agility and dexterity combined together into one package. We have defined it as the level of mastery of motions with your body and hands.
The following is the list of skills that can be used by the various party members.
- Alarm Disarm
- Animal Whisperer
- AT Weapons
- Backer Skill
- Bartering
- Bladed Weapons
- Blunt Weapons
- Brawling
- Brute Force
- Bullet Swagging
- Coin Crafting
- Cyborg Tech
- Demolitions
- Doctor
- Energy Weapon
- Evasion
- Examine
- Field Medic
- Handgun
- Intimidate
- Leadership
- Outdoorsman
- Pick Lock
- Rifle
- Silent Move
- Safecrack
- Salvaging
- Shotgun
- SMG
- Sniper Rifle
- Spot Lie
- Toaster Repair
- Weaponsmith
And to close out the update, here is a sweet little portrait to whet your appetite. I'd like to introduce you to one of the Wasteland raiders, a nasty resident of Los Angeles.
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Wasteland 2 lead animator Josh Jertberg has posted an update to the official blog about the game's animation system.
Animation in Wasteland 2 was an unknown for me, never having worked with the Unity engine before. I did know one thing in my mind though when we started: I wanted to hand-key the animations. It’s an ambitious goal of mine and one I hope fans appreciate in the end. It’s my feeling that I can bring more personality and flexibility to the animation, as opposed to using motion capture. Plus, let’s face it; as an Animator I will be more artistically invested in my hand-keyed animations. Even with the best motion capture actors you are many times stuck using what you have recorded. The unique aspects and camera of this game do present some good opportunity and challenge for me as an Animator.
One of the struggles as an animator in games is the animation system. A good system can make or break the look of the animations. The animation is broken into so many different pieces that if you don’t have some decent way of controlling that, the entire flow of the animation can feel off. Animation systems have evolved a LOT in the past few years. Wasteland 2 is not a controller driven game and many of these systems are designed for analogue input. I needed a simpler solution and I think I’ve found one.
Browsing the Unity store for animation solutions I found exactly what I needed. I am familiar with the use of an animation tree to drive in game animation states. Sage: Anim Graph Editor is a tool that allows me to intuitively build animation trees that drive the different states of the characters. This is all accomplished without me writing a single line of script. I have no talent for that, but Sage helps me overcome my inability to write script in Unity. I have built up one heck of an animation tree for our rangers so far, and I love the level of control I have over the flow of the animation. The Rangers have a lot of “states” they can be in, so being able to manage and build those states myself is liberating.
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InXile Entertainment posted Wasteland 2 Kickstarter update #19 which includes a new 5-minute music sample by Mark Morgan and some interesting info from both Brian Fargo and technical director John Alvarado on how the development is going and what the dialog system will look like:
We have been very focused on getting the writing wrapped up by end of October so that we can do a table read of the entire game. Things are on track for about 95% of it which will allow all of us to get in a room for days on end to step through the game play. We look for flaws in logic, world consistency, keyword consistency, adding personality, adding ways to solve problems, creating visual cues, extra word descriptions, etc. It is quite a bit of work but it is a process that creates cohesion so that it feels like one world. There is so much content that the only way to grasp it all is to sit in a room for days for everyone to absorb. And quite often the best moments will come from the random ideas that spring forth from it all.
[...]
As we weigh different approaches to a challenge, we attempt to gaze into the future and discern how the consequences of different decisions will play out with respect to design requirements (known and potential), content pipeline, run-time performance, and development time/cost. Fortunately, our engineering team has decades of experience over dozens of successful projects that help us make most of these decisions with confidence. So far we have made engineering strides on the following systems:
- World Map System
- Movement and Turn-Based Combat System
- Saved Game System
- Character Animation System
- Inventory system
- World State Tracking system
- Story Scripting System
- Localization System
We now have a player-controlled Ranger character moving with animation in a game-level and interacting with NPCs, triggering conversations and changing world states that affect future interactions. This is where we wanted to be at this time and we are right on schedule. Brian stressed to the engineering team the importance of having this ready by the time the writers are finishing up their level designs and story so we can begin implementing, testing and iterating. That priority and the desired iteration process informed some important engineering decisions.
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