New Ghost, Procedural Generation, and Twitch Integration

Introduction

Hey everyone, firstly I want to apologize for the lack of updates on the game recently, this year university has been extremely full-on, and I haven’t had much time to do anything outside of it. I promise I am still extremely passionate about working on Obsideo, and with all the stuff I have planned in the future only makes me more excited, although I do need to point out that I’m still at uni this year until at least November so please don’t expect a massive amount of updates, they’ll 100% be more updates before then, but they’re likely to just be bug fixes and tweaks until then, but like last year I’ll then be able to go full-time on Obsideo again for a few months.

I’d also like to add that the fact that you all are still playing the game, and enjoying it honestly means the world to me and is a huge driving factor in putting out updates and trying to give you guys the absolute best experience that I can create, and I really hope that this update is a big step in that direction.

Procedural Map Generation

This is probably by far the most anticipated feature to come to Obsideo ever since Nuzzgard first demoed the game back in 2021, and it has been something I’ve been chipping away at ever since. Before we take a look into procedural generation, I can’t stress enough how this is still an extremely early example of it, and certainly isn’t representative of what I’m going for with procedural map generation within Obsideo, this is merely to gauge where it’s at performance-wise, and any visual/technical bugs we may encounter so I can start to work them out, and we can get a more refined and enjoyable experience, which I don’t currently think it is.

All this being said, where is it currently at? As of right now we only have one option if you want to try it out, and that’s “Catacombs”, which has a few changes to make it work with Obsideo’s gameplay mechanics the major ones are: “Unlimited Sprint”, you’ll notice you no longer have a sprint bar, that’s not because you can’t sprint inside the catacombs its because your default movement speed has been upped to the default sprinting speed, so it’s pointless putting the extra UI on your screen, another one is how you “regain” heart rate, as you can’t just go outside, the equipment room is now where you go to reduce your heart rate, the final addition is a map, pressing “M” on your keyboard will bring up your map, which is currently just a very basic skeleton blocked out map, of the catacombs that was generated for you, as you can see here:

Another issue is interactions, to start with, as some of the interactions require you to be outside to see them, they now have interior variations, but ones like “Turns On Kettle” or “Turns On Stove” felt too far-fetched for the environment, and was more immersion breaking than anything else, so I’ve decided to keep them out, for now, let me know what you think and if they’re absolutely needed I’ll put them back in. The breaker has also been changed to a generator that you can find sitting somewhere in the Catacombs, this is what powers the flood lights seen throughout the Catacombs. Lastly, since a fireplace didn’t really make sense in there either, I’ve changed it to be a campfire, so if you get ghostwriting, make sure you find the campfire, turn it on (same way as the fireplace), and throw the book onto it.

Also, when loading in you may get bounced around for a few seconds, or end up on “the grey planes”, just give it a few seconds to generate the equipment room and it should teleport you there, typically it happens instantly and you won’t notice it, but don’t freak out if you’re zipping around the map for a few seconds!

Regardless I hope you’re all able to still enjoy giving the new Catacombs map a few play-throughs, but I can’t stress enough that it is just a steppingstone, leading us to significantly more exciting locations such as: prisons, asylums/hospitals, offices and hopefully in the distant future, completely procedurally generated houses. Here's a few photos of the Catacombs to show off where it's currently at:

Twitch Integration

Another feature that I’ve been teasing within my content creators is Twitch integration, now if you’re streaming, and have connected your Twitch account by pressing “F10” in either the main menu, or lobby, your chat will be able to interact with your game in a very basic form, while you’re playing a message box will appear in the bottom right corner, and chat can vote on what they want to happen, this can range from increasing your heart rate slightly, to starting a hunt instantly.
To vote on an option, all they need to do is type either:

• !a - for the top option
• !b - for the middle option
• !c - for the bottom option

Right now, like everything else its extremely barebones, but it’s a step in the right direction, in the near future I hope to expand on it by giving streamers the ability to set what they want to enable/disable (for example if they didn’t like the instantly start a hunt, they could just remove it), I also want to give streamers the ability to set special actions for donations, raids or subscriptions.

I would heavily advise hiding the twitch panel from your stream as it does contain/display your streamer ID, so it’s best to keep that hidden if you’re setting it up live. This is also currently single-player only, I may expand on it in the future to open it up to multiplayer if it feels right, but as of right now while its still in testing, I've kept it single-player only!

Pontianak

From my experience with launching the last ghost, it appeared that you guys preferred it when I didn’t just give all the information on the ghost away, and just let you find it in the game, although I will give a bit of a clue, make sure to check the basement often!

Until Next Time

Lastly, I want to thank all of you that have stuck around and supported Obsideo even when it looked like I’d “given up” on the game, I promise there’s a lot more to come in the future, but until then, thank you!

- Kyle