Dev-Blog #3: Meet the Prophet

Hello fellow Industrians!

Long time, no talk. In the last weeks we went a bit undercover again, creating a new enemy type for INDUSTRIA, which we are going to reveal to you today!

As you may already know, the enemy we currently have in the game is this old fella, called the „Exile“. He is slow, basically a walking trashcan, rusted over. An old reminiscent of the great war. He lingers around the city, some deep sleeping, some waking up when you get close to them. They make weird organic noises and are able to loose arms when being shot at.

Well, they are a very cool enemy. The problem is, they are not challenging enough. In bigger mobs, they can get pretty dangerous, but otherwise, can be wiped out pretty quick with the given weapons Nora has.

Therefore, we aksed our animator Ben Davis (@neverheardofben on Twitter) if he could come up with a concept for something new. An enemy that is more agile, quicker, scary, unpredictable. And he did. After a few days of feedback and hard work by Ben, this final concept came around. He is called the „Prophet“.

We were very happy with this design. Only the head had to change, as we did not wanted to get too close tome classic Steampunk. I immediately started to blockout the model, to get a feeling for scale and proportions. These are some early blockout meshes in Unreal:

Then I went into more details, and setup the base mesh in Blender. After a few days, it got pretty detailed, here are a few shots from the process:

Then I created the textures in Substance Painter, after baking the normals from a High Poly (high definiton model) onto the game model. Substance is a great software, and the texturing process was over quicker than I wished. In game, he then looked like this:

Ben started to find a good base pose and dived right into animation. As he designed the Prophet with his weird surgical equipment like arms, he quickly came up with very fitting animations. Here are a few WIP shots of them:

Now the model was done. What came then was the AI programing by our Co-founder and Developer Steve Chapman. He jumped right into behaviour trees in Unreal Engine 4, basically creating a new system from scratch, as the Exiles one was a bit too limited for what we had in mind for the Prophet. Steve quickly implemented his ability to see, hear, flee, taunt, side step, alarm other Prophets and more. One of the very special things about the Prophet is his ability to loose limbs. Though challenging to setup for Steve, Ben and me, it definitely pays off when you can shoot his arm off and have him react to it properly, limiting his attack range in the process. Also his legs are detachable, soon we will setup the animations and functions that will make him crawl on the ground once that happens. His limbs will act as physical objects when being detached, making everything even more believable:

And here is the Prophet in action, seeing the player, sprinting towards you and loosing an arm. The particle effects are still WIP, but they already give a pretty good feeling for whats to come:

This was the base stup. What follows now is creating Blendspaces, so that all the animations blend together more fluidly, especially when accelerating, turning and side stepping. We will show more about the Prophet soon, especially when our audio guys will create some scary and unique sounds for him.

Till then, stay save and take care, David & the Bleakmill Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172650