Scoundrel Studio | Tag Archives: Inir FogInir Fog Archives

Hey Guys,

It’s been a while since my last post on the site, but it’s because we’ve been hard at work on People of Aionos! Enough progress has been made so that I can update this blog more often.

First off, I would like to share this jawbreaking background for the title screen of People of Aionos.

Wow. It shows the city of Inirion, the capital and biggest city on the remote world of Inir Fog. What was once a small mining city under Republic rule has grown into a full metropolis. The city can be separated into three distinct sections:

The rich and influential citizens live in the Upper Rises, far above the dust storms that frequently hit this region of Inir Fog. Up on the mountain, the air is dry and warm, and people wander happily along its sky bridges, enjoying the promenades’ boutiques, restaurants and green areas.
The heart of Inirion, and the source behind for its steady growth, is the Industrial Sector where the precious ores found in the surrounding mountains and canyons are transformed and shipped to every corner of the Empire. The Industrial Sector is relatively well protected from the dust, as it rests at the feet of the Inirion Mountain.
Finally, the rest of the population lives at the base of the skyscrapers, in an area of Inirion that is often hit with dust storms: the Dust Pillars.

Secondly, the AI of People of Aionos has undergone a major overhaul since our last post. We used to have a behavior tree system that runs with RAIN AI and everything was running fine until I tried expanding the system for more complex behaviors. The behavior trees were getting huge, harder to maintain than necessary and some performance issues started to creep up when having multiple NPCs.

So I looked for an alternative and stumbled upon the Utility Theory that made making choices for an AI easy. Decision Flex has a great implementation of it for Unity. But once I had my AI’s choice made, I had to implement those behaviors and decided to code my own Behavior Manager for it. It acts like a State Machine, where the current state is decided by Decision Flex.

Unfortunately, using Decision Flex and dropping RAIN AI still left me without a pathfinding system to guide my NPCs around the map. So I turned to an alternative- that I had dismissed earlier because it used grids instead of navmeshes- Apex Path. Ever since I’ve been working with it, I have found Apex Path to be fast, reliable, easily customizable and it allows for easy Dynamic Avoidance, which I couldn’t get with RAIN AI.

Until next time where I will discuss the different ways of getting People of Aionos Pixel Perfect with multiple resolutions.

Cheers!

Hey guys,

We’ve just finished migrating the website to a new server because the old one had to close unexpectedly. In the transfer, some data and blog posts were lost and so we are starting again with a new site, a new design and new information about our first project, People of Aionos.

Since our last post, a lot of progress has been made with the world building and the game mechanics. We are also excited to have awesome graphics developed by our rocking artist, Edwin Jang.

So here is the jist of it: Mankind has left Earth for the stars. Centuries after its departure, People of Aionos tells of the dawn of the 3rd Aionosian Civil War. The story is seen through the eyes of the citizens of the outlying world of Inir Fog.

The Empire of Aionos has been in existence for close to 300 years and it has become riddled with greed and corruption. All strata of society suffer from some form of abuse. Now a derelict system, the Empire used to take care of its citizens with essential services like education and health care. It has long lost its civil responsibility and fraternity and has tightened its security and control over its people.

As the game begins, a hero appears on the remote world of Inir Fog. You don’t get to play him yet, nor do you get to play the Governor of Inir Fog, the head of the Imperial Government on Inir Fog. Instead, you will live through and try to make sense of this conflict by seeing it through the eyes of several different citizens: hard working miners, aging police officers, scheming politicians…

In the coming weeks, we will present our characters and their stories, driving forces and fighting abilities. Here is a little preview of one of those people:

Victoire, Inirion Police Sergeant

On the gameplay and mechanics side of things, I used to plainly describe PoA as Secret of Mana meets Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But I think that descriptive isn’t as clear and effective as it could be, People of Aionos is more a Sci-Fi Twin-Stick Secret of Mana.

Twin-Stick because the controls work with a dual analog system (or mouse and keyboard).
Secret of Mana because of the Sprite Art, the camera’s point of view and its power selection.

I will also add that People of Aionos will feature a collateral damage system where your actions on and around the population will have a direct effect.

I won’t tell you all of it today, more will come in my next post. See you soon !

Tag Archives: Inir Fog

Title Screen and more AI

Back with more People of Aionos