In the game description we have mentioned this feature, but have never specified what it is exactly. Time to change that. So, here goes...
We hold the belief that everyone is familiar with the games where the plot development depends on the player's choices. In our game, however, we want to try a different approach. D'LIRIUM is not an RPG, it's a shooter. Thus, the plot in it is rather linear, and that's the way it's going to be, the player's choices won't affect it drastically. However, what will give the player the unique experience is the random events.
The random events have been present in the games before, but didn't seriously affect the plot. In D'LIRIUM, however, the plot itself is going to be partially based on them. There will be the key scenes, but almost everything that's going to happen between them will be random.
Here is an example: the character appears on the level and must go from point A to point B. While at it, they might meet a crowd of monsters, or might find themselves in an auxiliary plot branch with the puzzles to solve, or might even have to deal with a meteorite falling down on them. A good example of a random event is the level with the Lanterns. Perhaps, those events will even have consequences for the entire futher playthrough, which will make it unique.
We don't really know if the random events will really be the way they are described above, because PLANNING them through is really hard. Maybe they won't appear in the game at all, but we just don't want to leave that concept alone.
There will be no random events in Beta-1. We'll tell you about what to expect from Beta-1 later. Meanwhile, we would really like to hear your opinion on this topic, so, leave your comments and offer us your ideas below!
Also, we would really like to thank our Patrons! Thanks to all of you for your support, your donations won't be for nothing!
You can support this project on our Patreon page!
Support us on Patreon!
We want to say at first that this announcement isn't an April joke. It's really important for us and we are really asking you for help.
The development of Beta-1 is going, but it’s not going well. The problem is that the work is very expensive. No one will work for you for free, you should pay for your team. But D’LIRIUM sales don’t make enough profit that I can pay for my team, and also feed myself.
It's not a pleasant to pay from your pocket and then eating ramen noodles at the end of a month. Especially when you have another project in development.
So I’ve decided to make a page on Patreon in hope that there will be those who wants to support the development. All the money that we will earn on Patreon (and maybe other services), will be used to fund D’LIRIUM development and our other projects. Check out the list of things that we need to pay for:
Cinematics. The serious and big CG cutscenes with a good directing and voice acting instead of script. They should be responsible for filing a story and to replace the screensaver after the death of the player. One of those cinematics you can see by starting dev_build.
Tiles and sprites. Graphics are mostly drawn alone. My friends helped me with this. However, it's a lot of work. To come up with the design, then to realize it and to compile every detail to a full-fledged level, after all. I’m tired and I'd love to give the opportunity of drawing textures to someone else.
Translating the game to the other languages. There are some enthusiasts who are ready to translate the game to their native language, but not everywhere. We want to embed as much languages as possible.
Then goes a list of not important things, but still quite good:
Software. It can help us work faster and better, also to port the game to other platforms etc.
Equipment. For example, synthesizers for huge vastness of sound and music experiments.
Our patrons can watch the work in progress content and also they will be included in the credits. We hope you like our idea so we can have some cash. Thank you so much for playing D’!
The last Early Beta!
So, it is time to release Early Beta-4. Finally, the basis of the game is fully built and ready to become the base for the future scenario.
There's not much to talk about: with the help of the players we've found some critical bugs and fixed them. Also, we have applied a lot of features we planned.
So, what is this all about?
Fixed some mistakes of the battle system in the 'classic' control scheme.
Added new 'simplified' HUD.
The old 'simplified' HUD is now 'abstract'.
Added 2 new spells: shaft and plasma.
Fixed some mistakes in 'soptions', also added new settings for those new spells.
Some minor fixes and changes.
Added a few interactive objects.
The only thing we haven't managed to finish in this update is the wounds on the monsters. In the future, perhaps, they'll show up, if needed.
This is the last big update among the Early Betas. So, before the release of Beta-1, we shall only be publishing the minor updates.
Thanks to everyone who's been with us all that time, we're truly thankful for all of your help! And we hope you're about to have a lot of fun!
Early Beta-3 and more achievements.
After quite some time and a lot of delays, we, however, are ready to please all of you with a new major update. Once again, there are many fixes and improvements waiting for you, but also a lot of new things! This time we'll try to refrain from a wall of text and just list what it is we've done.
Added an information about a save file. Now you can view the information about your saved progress and statistics on a level before saving again or loading the file.
The Personal Hell has become more balanced.
The Pandemonium level has been made brighter.
The "shooter" control scheme has becaome the default one.
The "accurate" HUD has been improved. There physical health bar has been added, and every other bar now has it's name instead of just saying "status".
The "Help" menu has been updated: it now contains a Personal Hell info.
Added new achievements and given a visual uptade to the old ones. However, not all of them has been fully tested. If you find a problem, we're looking forward to your feedback!
Fixed the bug that caused some monsters to keep moving even after death.
A few changes has been made to the design of the Wandering. They are the demons, not zombies, so we've changed their blood to a black liquid.
The AI of the Lanterns has been reworked.
The new AI of the Lanterns deserves a full explanation. Before this update, they've been just walking around the level, chosing the random waypoints. Quite often it lead to them getting into a corner and beginning to spin in one place. Now, their behaviour is going to be different.
So, what's new about it? Now, the Lanters have their zones in which they walk randomly, but the radius of those zones can change according to the siutation on the level. The system of path finding and moving is also new: it's a lot like the path-finding system for the playable character.
How does it all work? The center of the "patrol" zone of each Lantern is a place where it has spawned. If the player hasn't collected any of the keys yet, the "patrol" radius will be 1024px. The "hotter" the key in the player's inventory is, the smaller shall that radius becomes. Blue key - 512px, Yellow key - 256px, Red key - 128px. That means the radius is going to change each time the character collects or uses the keys. However, it all is going to change if the character is in Maniac Mode, because in that case, the center of the "patrol" zone for every Lantern will be the same - the character itself. Now, think for yourself.
Well, that concludes the news about our update. This is the penultimate of large Early Betas, and there'll be a lot of interesting things waiting for you in the next one, but we'll need time for that. We're eagerly awaiting your bug reports and we hope you'll have lots of fun experimenting with our game! Thank you for all of your feedback and support!
New Year holidays EarlyBeta-2.
I wish Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! It has been quite a while since the last update and it is time to change it. We watched all the video about games, that we managed to find, analyzed them and searched for bugs. Most of those bugs have been fixed. One of the remaining small problems is the periodical flicker of objects. However, we included a lot of interesting, new things! Most of those, of course, is just visual, they also play a certain role. Lets begin…
Now the game visually tells us, when it is saved.
Minor Balance changes in maniac state.
Menu soundtrack and intro were changed to Christmas ones.
A lot of major errors corrections.
Certain in-game information was changed (WARNING! The main directory was changed, so old saves and settings would not be found!)
New, good ending (As a prize to those, who don’t kill anyone).
Sanity (for example, death from fear) concept has been improved
Lets explain more about this concept:
Idea for it was created just after the TGA2017, when Hideo Kojima presented third trailer of the Death Stranding. The discussions caused by his game in our team were much hotter than even those about our own game. When the details were still unknown, many players guessed, that the underwater world, where the Reedus’ character appeared is the afterlife one. It's funny, but later it turned out right. We had an idea «What if we also try to develop some other mechanic of death?». We discussed about our new game concept for a very long time. We needed to decrease the amount of Game Overs when the player failed. As a result, we took death concept from the Prey(2006) and started to experiment with it. So...
Everytime Ada «dies» from fear, she would appear in a little location - her personal hell. It will have a big heart stricken with Darkness with a new runes (personality shards) scattered through the level. If you bring those shards to heart - they will heal it. Player can go back to life anytime, you just need to approach the heart and press button, banishing the darkness from within. Upon the return player would get as much sanity points as the amount of shards that player brought to heart.
This concept is currently on testing stage. Many features have not been added and are not finalized yet. However, we don’t have much time anymore and our Christmas gift can’t be delayed. In our opinion, we did well. Game balance was changed significantly though it still needs further development. We will continue working on fixing bugs found by the community.
Overall, update is quite big and we are satisfied with the result despite not achieving most of the previous goals. Nevertheless, it is not important now as the everything is much better than before, so I wish you a pleasant game and searching for bugs. At the end, I want to congratulate all of you again with coming holidays.
Early Beta is live now!
Finally, we have come out of the early stage of production! All of the basic mechanics have been put in the game and there will be no more significant changes about them! In the previous article we have told you about what's to expect from the beta version of the game. However, some changes have been made, thanks to the players, of course, and some more bugs have been fixed. But let us point out that the game is still in testing and might still be a bit unstable. If you find some critical error - we'll be waiting for you in discussion.
And now, to the main piece of news: the game has finally got the achievements! As in, the real achievements, not the test ones! And there'll be more in time!
As soon as we, teamed up with you, the players, find and fix all of the critical errors, that crash the game - we shall immediately resume working on improving the main story line that will take the game to the final release, and also give a so much better in-game experience than the stump we have now!
Early Beat-1 and many other interesting things!
Finally, I’ve got myself an absolutely new and really powerful PC. And that means I can resume the work on D’LIRIUM! And guess who’s to thank for that! It’s all of you, because it’s you who bought this game, stuffing my purse with money! Thank you so much for that! The new PC is a true miracle! If you’re curious, I’ll write down the configuration of my old and new PCs in the comment section, because it means little here. What means a lot is the fact that we finally have finished porting the game to the new engine! So, let’s talk about that…
What is the Early Beta-1? That’s porting the game to the new engine with some improvements. Remembering all that has been changed will require more than an entire hour, so, let’s mention the most important changes in comparison to alpha-12, and all that we can remember:
New engine, unlike the old one, is written in C++, not in Delphi. It affects the process and result of building the code and compiling it into exe. Moreover, despite still being a bit unstable, it’s way more optimized. D’LIRIUM’s performance has grown multiple times. The game is able to work even on the old Pentiums (but that’s not verified)! And the most important thing is being able to support cross-platform!
Steam overlay and screenshots have been fixed. No more black frames or cut-out menu.
Volume settings. No more mixers!
New sprites for the spells. Now you can easily tell what spells they represent.
Walkthrough timer no longer counts the time of cutscenes.
Chinese language! Both traditional and simplified.
Waypoints. Now, the character is quite good at choosing the way to the destination.
A complete rework of the save-and-load system. Save files will no longer break after another update!
New design of the main character. For those who like old Ada more – don’t worry, she’ll appear too, but later.
The background of the main menu and game over screens have been reworked. Not completely, but mostly.
Achievements! Finally, we have linked the game to Steam. There’s only one achievement for now, for the test, but there’ll be more by the time of Early Beta-1 release.
Activating panic mode has become much easier.
Many of you complained about the game being too dark. With the new videocard I was able to notice that too. The game has become two times brighter.
The levels have been optimized.
And that’s far from being the full list, only a few things that we were able to remember while writing this article.
A lot of the things we’ve described earlier are yet to be done, but some of them will appear in the future builds of the game. We’re still discussing what’s worth adding and what’s not.
Expect the Early Beta in two days, but the pre-release build is able for playing already, if you chose it in the game’s properties. If there are bugs and glitches (excluding the doors and the character that is visible through them) – create a discussion and describe the bug, we’ll be fixing the problem.
And one more thing. A request to all of the letsplayers and reviewers. Please, edit your video, put an exact version of the game in it. The final game will be quite different from what’s been in alpha. In the future, perhaps, it’ll get it’s own extra title, because the sequel’s name will be D’LIRIUM as well. The viewers might get lost in the versions, observing the different things with the same name. Oh, and do more videos! Thank you. :fhappy:
Why there's been no Halloween update...
Some people ask me why there's been no Halloween update for D'LIRIUM. The things is, a couple of days ago my hard drive had crushed, and the motherboard had started to follow it shortly after. So, I'm now busy with assembling a new computer, in which I'll put a highly productive hardware. And then I'll continue working. I'll release an alpha-13, but it won't be about any specific holiday. I'll be aiming for an Early Beta.
Can anyone please advise me a good hardware that's not more expensive than 700$?
HORRIFYING news
Halloween surely isn't the kind of holiday that the characters from D'LIRIUM would care to celebrate. But who cares? The game of this visual design is perfect for Halloween. Moreover, the story was originally planned around that theme, but it came out differently. Be it as it may, but in the honour of such a holiday, why not make a generous discount? We won't be holding it back, neither trick nor a treat!
In order not to make this piece of news only about the discount, we'll now tell you a bit about what's been going on. We've actually written a new system of saves and loads. It was needed in order to keep them stable and working after the game update. That's really important. Moreover, due to the layer-by-layer system of level construction in GMS2, loading of the save file could have mixed the textures located on the same layer of the level. The new system will prevent that.
But our new system has not been tested yet, so, we still don't know if it works correctly. Besides, some bugs are still present and need to get fixed. We don't make any promises regarding doing that update by Halloween.
What to expect from Early Beta – 1?
It’s been a while since we had updated last time and it’s time to fix that. So…
We’re happy to announce that the money we raised was enough for us to buy a new software. Now we have completely moved our game from Game Maker 8 to Game Maker Studio 2. As the result, the game has started to work muck faster, and we were able to correct some important things unavailable to us earlier, such as volume settings and screen resolution (not tested yet). Also, we can now adapt our game for the Operating Systems like Linux Ubuntu or Mac OS, and also add achievements! But it’s a bit too early to talk about that.
And all of those things and possibilities have become available to us only thanks to all of you! We thank you for helping us take another step to making our game the way we planned it to be.
Now, we want to tell you about what to expect of the next update. As you can see from the title, the game is going to be an “Early Beta”, because all of the key mechanics that we wanted to add will be included and we’ll just need to polish them and adding new ones. That being said, let us present you the list of what we have planned for the next update:
Wounds on monsters – that will help the player to understand how much HP the monster has left.
Reworked icons – the dialogs should be animated. Perhaps, that feature will not appear right away, but will be added for sure.
Adding new scheme and customization for the controls – many players were asking for the chance to customize the controls the way they like. That’s what we’re going to give them, ‘cause why not?
Freezing the timer during the cutscenes [DONE] – speedrunners would definitely not like it if the time spent during the cutscene would count as a time spent on playing the game.
General playthrough statistics – that surely will have meaning.
The sound of character’s steps – we’re not sure about that one yet and if we should do it. What do you think?
Volume control [DONE] – now there’s an option for changing the in-game volume without using the mixer in Windows.
Optimized game code – moving to the new engine involves reworking a lot of game code, but using those new features will allow the game to really increase it’s performance.
Improved deathcameras – that means the cutscenes after death. The current ones are boring, so they‘ll be improved in more ways than one.
Chinese language [DONE] – yes. The game has been translated to traditional and simplified Chinese. Already. Thanks,
Twisunshine*!
Reworked backgrounds – as in, the background of the main menu, pause, game over and a lot of other things, improving their detalization.
Added waypoints – currently, the character calculates the way to their destination to the closest wall, if we try to go beyond the level borders. That’s wrong. That’s why we’ll be adding the waypoints.
Added “Shaft” – a new spell for slaughtering the monsters. Fans of Quake are going to love it. However, we’d like to hear your comments regarding it before actually adding it to the game.
Некоторые из этих нововведений могут появиться не сразу, но мы стараемся принести как можно больше вкусностей к новому обновлению. Однако пока нам стоит поговорить о том, что надо исправить перед какими-либо нововведениями – возникшие багги после переноса игры на новый движок. О них ниже:
Some of those features might not be added right away, though we do try to bring as many of those delicious things to the next update as we can. However, we should also talk about the things that we must fix before adding anything – the new bugs after moving the game to the new engine. So, about them…
Particles are not drawn after loading a save file – we’ve written a completely new particle system and keep developing it, but it’s not looking good yet.
Non-working system of pathfinder due to non-working tile checking. [DONE]
Clipping of the character’s sprite if the vertical synchronization is off. [DONE]
Flashing gibs at the fireball hit on the enemy [DONE] – if someone is unaware, gibs are those meat pieces left from the enemies.
Flashing of the player [DONE] and the monsters on the tiles’ borders.
Flashing of the objects with static depth at the fireball hit on the enemy – the same as with the gibs.
Mixing of the tiles located on the same layer – the levels will require a full reworks due to the new system of level rendering in GMS2.
As soon as we make it work smoothly, we’ll get to the most important thing – the story. What is there to be expected from it? The game shall be split to 2 parts – the peaceful prequel and what we have now. There’ll be more of the plot, more details, more endings. And also… more levels. But do not expect any “good endings”. They’ll be different, depending on your play style and one important decision, but they all will lead to the same result. That is needed for every ending to be considered canon for the sequel that will come later (the current game was originally planned as a demo-prologue).
So, yeah… we have told you a lot today. And we’re eager to read your comments, interested in your opinion about all of that! If you have any ideas about the new mechanics, monsters and other things – don’t be shy, join the discussion and create new topic, because why not? And thanks to all of you!
