Hello everyone !

Welcome to this first devlog of Ex Silentio !

We'll try to put out one per week to show update from our progress !

We are a group of students from the CNAM-Enjmin, a French video game school. Our team is made of Léa Lionis (producer), Faer Souville (Game Designer), Loris Leblond (Art), Mael Heurard (Audio), and yours truly, Louis "Veuch" Vogel (programming). We mostly work on the project on our spare time for now, but we will have a month or so to work on it full time by the end of the project, in late June.

To sum things up really quickly, our game is about a conscience exploring old memories stored in a database. You will first arrive in a pitch black scene, and try to guess what is in it based on sound to make object appears. However, we have a little graphical quirk : the texture of an element will be is the word you used to make it appear!

That is about the gist of it. The game should be available in English and in French when you launch it !

Now, onto the things that will be recurrent from a devlog to the other !

What has been done last week ?

We added commands, and revamped  the console to make it look nicer than what we had before, as well as making it easier to read. Here's a quick comparison :

We also finished implementing audio in Wwise for our first level, and testing what we can do with music in this game. Work was also done on the shaders to normalize them so that we can use them interchangabily in the code (so that the same piece of code can reveal the sun and a building, for instance). We also started organizing playtests, that will take place this week (we will probably write about it next week !)

What do we want to achieve this week ?

Just like you read, playtest will be at the forefront of our mind this week ! Therefore, I'd like to create a "Playtest Mode", that will allow us to get a log of our player's action, so that we can know precisely what they did and when. We would also like to finish integrating audio for our first level, and doing a graphics pass on it as well (right now, it still look pretty placeholder-ish).

Tip of the day

How did we manage to have texture of the word that change depending on your input ?

Well, basically, we have a letter atlas that we parse, and that we add to a dynamically created texture. Since the letter of the atlas are always higher in resolution than the one that we output as a texture, we have to interpolate on wich pixel we parse from the letter. For instance, if we know that in the texture we are trying to create, a character will be 100*100 pixels, and that our letter in the atlas is 400*400 pixels, we will parse a pixel every 4 pixels. The result so far have been satisfying.

However, this is leading to performance issues, where we experience lag spikes when we try to create a texture. This is likely due to the fact that we parse and apply each pixel separately, and not as a group, so this will need to change in the future !

Thank you for reading this post !

We hope you will like Ex Silentio !

Louis "Veuch" Vogel