[Development] Exon

[Rao Dao Zao]

About eight years ago, I stopped modding WC3 and went stand-alone. (Well, until a recent little side project.) For me, "going stand-alone" is literal in more ways than one: I have been working alone on a single game for all of those eight years, built in Unity (because I may be crazy but I'm not that bad).

It's called Exon and you can now play a demo: download Exon: Fragment at itch.io

Exon is a narrative-driven sci-fi hack 'n' slash RPG, inspired by Westwood's forgotten classic Nox, mixed with a heady dose of Baldur's Gate, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex and, of course, classic WC3 SPRPGs -- because obviously, as a solo developer I had to set my sights on the most complicated genre-busting mash-up I could imagine. Go hard or go home, right?

If you've played any one of my maps, you'll probably recognise most of its elements (I'm still thrashing out a lot of fundamentals, so I'm sticking to the comfort zone -- for now). Big robots, swords and shields, conversations, wild animals and bandits; it might look like a gritty sci-fi but it's a heroic fantasy at heart.

I've been documenting the development process as it's progressed, so if you're interested in game development or Unity in particular you can read about all the trials and tribulations and false starts and dead ends on the Official Website: www.raodaozao.net/exon

The demo is only a very small piece of what I am intending to build, so there's still a long way to go before it's "real" -- but I figured I had a self-contained chunk and it was time to stop dissembling and put my money where my mouth is. Maybe you'll enjoy it? Only one way to find out...

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

New version of the demo is up! Just a first round of bug-fixes at the moment, no sign of the rest of the prologue yet: Exon: Fragment v0.02 - Exon: Fragment by Rao Dao Zao

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Another month, another new version of the demo. More fixes are the order of the day, but I did add weight/encumbrance to round out the proper RPG features... Exon: Fragment v0.03 - Exon: Fragment by Rao Dao Zao

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I'm not dead! It's time for a new version! Not much in the way of new content (if you don't count A CHANCE OF RAIN as big), but there is one major change: the camera is now orthographic. If you don't know what that means, give the latest version a play and feel the difference: Exon: Fragment v0.04 - Exon: Fragment by Rao Dao Zao

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Since releases are a bit few and far between, I'm going to start posting my dev diaries on here too. So!

Today, the upcoming Friendly Arm Waystation will have a blacksmith and -- yep -- crafting!

Blog 851: Crafting the Waystation

Someone left the sword out in the rain, I don’t think that I can take it, cos it took so long to make it, and I’ll never have that recipe again.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I always wanted Exon to be able to run on the oldest possible computers, but then I got caught up in the physics engine and dynamic shadows and... well... Unity won't let me compile against DX9 anymore anyway, so it has to be Windows 7.

You can still get small computers with modern operating systems, though, so I have been trying to find a way to squeeze it right down.

Blog 854: Ultralight

How low can you go?

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I have been working on a direct Milkshape 3D file importer for Unity to help streamline my content development processes and... actually got it working.

Do I now have the skills to make a WC3 MDX importer? Probably! Am I tempted? Absolutely! Will I do it? ... probably not. Unless...

Blog 856: My Milkshape Brings All the Models to the Unity (Part II)

Rao Dao Zao- Casts Animate Model: Milkshape 3D File

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Isn't it lovely when you're trying to work on new content and get massively side-tracked? "The Milkshape importer will let me tidy up some stuff," he said. "It'll be done in a week or two," he said. Well, he's a god damn fool. Here's a tip for free: don't mix your art and your gameplay logic, it never ends well. (The best time to unwind a mistake is yesterday, the second best time is today.)

Blog 859: Past Mistakes

Have I ever actually admitted that I was wrong about something before? I’m growing as a person!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I may be slow but I'm always working, even if it's in the background. Exon: Fragment v0.05 is here at last, and brings a new secret level... if you can find it.

Happy new year!

Blog 867: Fragment v0.05

Game over man, game over!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Sometimes Unity just sucks and you have to do something utterly miserable to avoid falling into one of its traps. This time, it's dynamically loading stuff at runtime -- swapping out the clean and intuitive Resources.Load API for the abject nonsense of Asset Bundles.

Blog 871: Kicking Ass(et Bundles)

I’m here to kick ass and chew bundles, and I’m all out of ass.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Yep, I'm back trying to find any excuse to add procedural generation to Exon. It's fun! Don't worry though, this time it's a very limited application and is not going to (... is unlikely to...) distract me for 2-3 years.

Blog 873: A Little Bit of Procgen (All Night Long)

Exon number fiiive!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

The long march to finally introduce some new content to the demo finally has an end in sight. (Well, the secret level that came out last time is so hard to access that it barely counts.) The Friendly Arm Waystation has loadsa different shops that all needed new systems, but I think -- at long last -- it might be ready to go.

Blog 875: Welcome to the Waystation

Welcome to the waystation, we got fun and games!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Yep, I'm at it again -- I'm getting side tracked. But there's a good reason for it this time! I'm going to be showing Exon off at a real live local game dev event! Which means that I need something a little more eye-catching than traditional RPG meandering. It's time... to add a new game mode.

Blog 879: Instant Action

Welcome… to the Arena (instantly).

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

As if I needed any more distractions, I've obviously decided that now is a good time to... rework my central atlas texture. And about a thousand models that use it. Yes.

Blog 881: Artistic Direction

Texturer? I ‘ardly know ‘er!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Probably a bit of a long shot, but you never know -- I'm going to be exhibitng Exon at the Edinburgh College Games eXpo this week! It's on Wednesday the 31st from 5pm 'til late and it's free to attend, so if anybody's in Edinburgh and fancies popping over for a chat (and to play loadsa cool games), I'd be delighted to see you!

Yep, I've been saying I'm going to take Exon out on show for the last seven years and it's finally happening. Wonders never cease.

Sweet deets: ECGx 2023 - Edinburgh College Games eXpo

 

[Footman16]

Oh wow never thought I'd see another Scot on the Hive, sadly I'm not out Edinburgh way or I'd have popped in

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Oh wow never thought I'd see another Scot on the Hive, sadly I'm not out Edinburgh way or I'd have popped in

D'oh. Well I'm sure there will be other occasions (unless the game goes down really badly).

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Yep, Exon survived first contact with the general public -- people actually seemed to enjoy it! Which means it's now available on itch for the rest of you to play! v0.06 has loadsa new features, from overhauled art to the new Waystation shopping zone. Get it now from itch.io!

Exon: Fragment by Rao Dao Zao

Singleplayer iso-mech-tric action-cRPG

raodaozao.itch.io

Blog 886: Going Public (Fragment v0.06)

Exon at last faces its most dire challenge: the court of public opinion.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

My home-baked terrain editor has always been a source of jank... but it was also bewilderingly complicated to build so I've been reluctant to touch it ever since. Alas, eventually the irritation at jank overwhelms the fear of a new approach and you have to dive in. Looks like it's time to cut that shit up and replace it with Marching Cubes.

Blog 890: 2rragne2furious

Beware the cubes of March.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Every day is another excuse to get distracted. While refining the Milkshape importer I kept bumping up against the spectre of some code for doing ragdoll physics -- used by a single unit, this seemed like a lot of energy for not a lot of benefit (also it didn't even look that great). But if you've pathologically unable to make a "fall over dead" animation, what's the alternative...?

Blog 892: Delicious Meaty Chunks

Rest in pieces.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Game development is hard. For all I like to complain about Unity's various foibles, sometimes -- rarely!! -- it's actually just me being an idiot. This time, my positional audio was broken because... yep... I was just straight up doing it wrong

Blog 895: Sounds Like Trouble

Hear we, hear we, hear we fucking go!

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Have I ever mentioned that Exon is really just a dress-up game? One of its primary features is the ability to paint your mech in a bewildering array of colours and patterns... but I have been slightly annoyed at how patterns overlay for a while now, as they vary in repetition and scale when they really shouldn't. As usual, thinking about a problem for over a year eventually leads to an answer...

Blog 900: Woh-oh, oh-oh, Camouflage

Things are never quite the way they seem.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

As if things weren't exciting enough, I appear to have been accepted to exhibit the latest version of Exon at the Scottish Games Week Industry Conference in Edinburgh! I'll be in the "indie zone" at Dynamic Earth on the 30th and 31st this week if anybody is about! (And probably at the after party on Monday, and definitely the pub quiz on Tuesday.)

Details: Scottish Games Week

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

When I applied to have an Exon demo stall at the Scottish Games Week Industry Conference, I fully expected them to say "who is this clown?" and tell me to get lost. Somehow I got in and had a pretty successful day, where Exon did not crash horribly despite being left running unattended for hours at a time.

The good news is I have uploaded that build for you all to try. It includes a new "easy" stand-alone scenario in Instant Action mode... I say "easy" in scare quotes because only two people actually managed to finish it. Clearly my definition of easy needs some work.

Get the latest version on itch: Exon: Fragment by Rao Dao Zao

And read the obligatory blog post: Blog 902: Going Public (Again)

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Physics engines were a mistake. I hate them and everything they stand for. In unrelated news, I have just rebuilt Exon's character controller system... again. This is apparently round 4, which to be fair, is only a rewrite once every 2.5 years on average. Doesn't sounds so bad when you put it like that...

Blog 904: Keep Moving

“Mooooove over,” said the cow.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

It's true, I am physically incapable of entering game jams -- even ones that give you two weeks. However, one of my pals hosted one recently that got me thinking about quest design. Is Exon actually a puzzle game obfuscated by swords and explosions? Is there space in its design for missions that involve a little more thought than just who to blow up next?

Blog 907: The Case of the Thinky Quest

Elementary, my dear exon.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

New year, new systems. For the past five(ish) weeks I've been banging my head off the perennial problem of getting a character to move reliably and intuitively over arbitrary terrain geometry. This is a Very Hard Problem and I don't really understand why Unity doesn't just come with a built-in solution (the CharacterController is only a small part of the solution). Alas, without movement I don't have a game, so it's once more into the breach dear friends...

Blog 916: She Moves In Mysterious Ways

Here we go again.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I think character movement might genuinely be the hardest problem in game development. I've been hammering away at this unit collision system for at least two months now, and every two steps forward comes with two steps back. I finished implementing moving platforms and conveyor belts only to walk into another problem which revealed something much more rotten at the core...

Blog 923: She Moves In Mysterious Ways (Part 2)

Moving on up.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I don't dare to think how long I've now been working on Exon's new movement system. It might well be coming up for six months (although progress has slowed since I'm now splitting time between it and Shattered By Light). It feels worse because for the last month -- or two? -- I've been stuck behind a problem that did not actually exist... or rather, a problem that existed due to a single stray line of code that was just... wrong. Sigh. Who'd be a game developer? It's not worth it. (It's totally worth it.)

Blog 929: She Moves In Mysterious Ways (Part 3)

The crate escape.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

With the movement system finally over (?!), it's obviously time to move onto the next major system. The knock-on effect of having the movement system dependent on manual collision detection is that my unit navigation logic can go out the window -- it was doing a load of bonus collision detection that's now redundant. Naturally, passing through that data revealed a bucket of other flaws so it's... ah... back to the drawing board...

Blog 932: AI (No, Not That Kind)

I’m never going to get back to level design, am I?

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Programming enemy AI is hard, but it sure helps make the game better when it works. Turns out that new movement system helps to make it work, because bots now have access to much more reliable information about their movements and surroundings. Complex and interesting but adaptive behaviours that are also fairly predictable? God damn, it's finally happening.

Blog 934: Knowledge is Power

Bad behaviour.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I have so many regrets. I knew that making a character movement/collision entirely from scratch using only raycasts would be difficult, but I never thought that at the last moment I'd get hit in the face with the physics engine just... being a bit inaccurate and shit. It's definitely not my fault this time, but that's small consolation in the fact of things not doing what they're supposed to in a few small but irritatingly important edge cases.

Blog 939: She Moves In Mysterious Ways (Part 4)

Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder through the ground.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Have I ever mentioned that Exon is actually just a massive dress-up simulator? Although it has up until now allowed you to select your mech's paintwork from a list of preset colour schemes, that's not good enough -- it's finally time to bring back proper, chunk-by-chunk paintwork. So you can make your mech as cool... or as wacky... as you dare.

Blog 941: True Colours

Life is paint.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

You know how hard it is to get characters to walk around each other? ... actually not that hard, but only if you've already done mountains of prep work. Totally worth it to have enemies that don't bunch up and shoot each other in the back, though.

Blog 943: Round and Round We Go

It’s just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

Turns out if you spend the best part of a year rebuilding movement, navigation and enemy behaviour routines, that tops out a fuckload of code. Apparently I've ripped through a full third of Exon's codebase (5k out of 15k lines of (executable) code). Even more hilariously, all of these reworks are entirely behind the scenes -- while you might feel the improved enemy behaviours, you're not really going to notice that you just don't get stuck in corners anymore. Movement is one of those little things we take for granted in video games that is obscenely complex to do "right", so please be thankful that I care enough not to give you the Skyrim treatment of getting wedged into the ground or sailing away into the sky at the slightest provocation!

Blog 947: The Last System Rebuild (For Now)

You keep what you kill.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

You know when I said I was finally done with the new movement system? I lied.

I am determined to get this done by the end of the year because I am so tired of physics engine bullshit, but knowing my luck, Unity/PhysX will find some more jittery spanners to throw into my works just in time for crimbo.

Blog 951: She Moves In Mysterious Ways (Part 5)

You’re grounded.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

It's been over a year since I last released an update for the demo, and, well, what can I say? I couldn't release the new movement system half-cocked, nor any of the ancillary bot navigation, behaviour, or stealth system upgrades. One thing just kept rolling into another. But better late than never, right? Here's an early crimbo present for ya!

Get it here: https://raodaozao.itch.io/exon-fragment
Obligatory blog post: Blog 953: Fragment v0.08

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I've been wondering for a while if maybe there was more I could do with the sword and shield theme of Exon. Just like my old WC3 RPGs, Shields give a static percentage reduction merely for being equipped in the hand, but Exon isn't an abstract RTS where passive configuration of your character is just how it all works -- Exon is a close-in action game where every movement is precisely controlled by the mouse and every ability is activated exactly on a button press. So it feels a bit weird that your main way of avoiding damage (well, without just moving out of the way) is a bit boring and passive. Time to do something about that, I think.

Blog 958: How Do I Block?

Building blocks.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

So I’m powering ahead with that plan to add Nox‘s blocking mechanic to Exon. If you’re carrying a shield, and you stand still and face somebody while they attack you, your shield will take the damage instead, and some projectiles will even be reflected.

This has necessitated a large-scale rework of how I even deal damage at all, and inspired some further additions… Because obviously I can’t just do the minimum amount of work required for anything. Sigh.

Blog 961: Doing Some Damage

Take a shot.

raodaozao.net

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I am incapable of leaving anything alone. While that's usually code, all those interlocking systems that make a game work, sometimes it's the art too. Yes, I am now 'refactoring'... all of my vehicles. I thought I could get away with just doing one, but no, that would be far too easy.

Blog 963: Art Attack

Refartoring.

raodaozao.net