71

Forensic Friday 71: Security, Ordnance & Speeding through Roadmap

Hey Readers! #

Hey Readers! You may ask, why did Forensic Friday 70 and Forensic Friday 71 release on the same day? Well, I’ve been busy this month, so busy that Forensic Friday had to take a hiatus. However, I have more than made up for the hiatus with a plethora of features bringing our roadmap to the edge of completion. A lot has happened over the past month. We have picked up an accelerated pace, helped by our efforts to reduce the features to their most core form, and also by some of the foundations laid by the new AI system! Other members of our team have also been hard at work, culminating in new music from our composer! This Forensic Friday will be a long one, so best to jump right in!

Trailer Music #

Starting with the best thing first. We finally have the music for the trailer 👀. I’ll pass it on to Can to talk the rest.

Hey everyone this is Can the composer of Contain Corp. I’d like to explain the composing process of the main theme a little bit.

As a media composer who mostly composes video games, having the right amount of references and musical direction is one of the most important aspects of creating a piece that fits the aesthetic, artistic, and narrative style of the game. Being a VGM composer is different in that sense from being a singer/songwriter or author type of composer who just writes music for their artistic expression. I remember listening to an interview by the amazing British drummer Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree and King Crimson, talking about the drum solos. I can’t remember the exact words, but he was talking about how it’s very difficult to come up with an interesting drum solo when you are given zero directions. But when someone tells him to play a solo in 100 bpm tempo, 5/4 time signature using only toms and cymbals, creative juices start flowing in his mind. In some conflicting manner, it’s easier to come up with creative and interesting ideas when you have a certain framework to work with and guard rails to keep your ideas in line, without restricting you as an artist too much.

That’s exactly how this track came about since the music score directions given to me by Dillan and David were everything I needed to come up with an interesting texture. I knew that I wanted to use the piano and have a piano sound that was close and intimate. The damping pedal sound of the piano and the close tone of pressing the keys should be heard. The harmonic structure should be unsettling, suspenseful, restless, and somewhat dark. The score references inspired me to use non-tonal chords, parallel minor chord progressions, unresolved cadences, and an overall dissonance (I know these terms may sound too technical but maybe some of you might be interested in these concepts). Texture-wise, I wanted to mix organic instruments like piano and electric guitar with weird synthesized sounds, glitchy effects, and cinematic sound design elements. Finally, the crescendo section of the track introduces a 7/8 chromatic ostinato on strings, a thick soundscape of alarm sounds, and a descending brass melody to create this sense of all hell letting loose, before tying the form back to the main thematic motive in the piano.

Hope you enjoy listening to this track, and I’m looking forward to composing more.

I enjoyed listening! Amazing stuff from Can.

Now that we have really solid trailer music, all we need to do is make the trailer! Easier said than done, the game still needs a few more weeks of development. Weeks? A bit shorter than you’d expect, but we are in fact, only weeks away from having a playable version of the game! However, this does not factor in game design validation, tweaking and playtesting. But that isn’t a prerequisite to making the trailer! The future is looking pretty bright for Containcorp!

Contextual Right-click Menu #

A feature I worked on over the past few weeks was right right-click contextual menu. It was something the game needed for a good while, and boy am I glad it’s finally here. It’s a lot easier to interact with the systems of the game for the player, and also a lot easier for us to expose these systems, all through the power of a right click! Below is a gallery of examples of the right-click menu in use.

You can make an NPC path to another NPC

   

           

You can mark items as haulable or unavailable (items are unhaulable by default)

   

           

   

           

   

           

Various security guard options

   

           

Rewiring power entities

   

           

This contextual menu was implemented so I could work on making security guards controllable. I would say it’s achieved its goal, and then some. This right-click menu was a desperately needed quality-of-life feature, and is also great for debugging on our end!

NPCs also no longer overlap if you request a group of them to move, which is neat!

Power System Tweaks: Appliance connections #

As we draw closer to the end of the roadmap, we occasionally revisit and touch up old features. We have been doing some polishing for the power system to bring it up to scratch since it was likely the most janky aspect of the game. Originally there was no distinction between appliances and other power tiles. However, since we recently implemented wires, it would make sense to have low-voltage power tiles to connect automatically to nearby wires (instead of having to manually place wires to connect all appliances). This feature just makes it a whole lot easier to work with appliances! The one downside is that these connections cannot go through walls. We’ll likely add an “electrical outlet” object that can be placed on walls and allow tiles to connect! However currently, you’ll have to lead a cable out of a wall to allow it to connect to appliances.

   

           

   

   

Below you can watch a video of it in action. Notice how the appliance connection updates when placing walls!

Cooling Power Generators #

Another feature I took some time to work on was cooling power generators. It’s pretty simple. Some power generators will start to overheat unless cooled. When they overheat they may optionally explode. Terrifying! Right now the only way generators can be cooled is through water pipes. However, there may be other solutions in the future. You can see an image of a water-cooling setup below.

   

           

And just for fun, here is a generator exploding! Generators turn redder the hotter they run, so you get a clear visual cue that something is wrong!

New Doors #

As part of the security measures feature, I had to implement new door types. Introducing, the checkpoint gate, blast door and tesla gate:

   

           

   

           

The Tesla Gate is my personal favourite. I managed to find a use for the lightning effect, which came in handy in making the Tesla gate pop!

The Telsa gate works by zapping any hostile NPCs that walk through it. We will add a chance of it failing in the future, wherein it has to go through an X-second cool-down before it is operational again. Here is a video of it zapping an unfortunate NPC.

Other New Door Features #

Doors additionally have an opening time now, which NPCs have to wait for! Making things a lot more suspenseful when NPCs are running for their lives.

Containment Breaches & Recontainment #

Another feature that me and Jason have been working on is containment breaches. When you get a breach, you won’t be able to miss it!

   

           

Once a breach occurs you can request a re-containment task force deployment from the deployment menu:

   

           

The deployment menu contains many other deployments you can make for other various situations, but the most important is the OSTF. When you request a deployment you have to wait some time in-game. Once the deployment has arrived, you’ll be able to control them and take control of the breach situation. I went ahead and added some basic armour to stop the OSTFs from being nudists!

   

           

OSTF’s gear

Taking control of OSTF

Once on-site, you have 5 minutes (in real-time) to sort out the breach, or the Corporation will send a nuke! During these 5 minutes, timewarp is disabled, so things are very tense! However, we can’t stop people from abusing saves.

   

           

Containment breach timer

Ordnance #

To assist you in your recontainment, you can request ordnance through the service menu. Here you’ll be able to see a list of all the ordnances available to you, which is many! But we haven’t implemented them all yet, other than the Rods from God. But there is a fair bit of polish to be had with making this feature visually pleasing. Right now ordnance amounts to waiting a few minutes and then seeing an explosion. When we polish, there will be sound effects and visual effects; which will help with making the ordnance calls more impactful.

   

           

You may have noticed that at the top of the menu, there is a “Defence budget” value. This is currently implemented, but the way it will work is that every facility under the Corporation invests a certain amount of profit into the defence budget. Then depending on reputation, certain facilities are allowed to spend a certain percentage of the defence budget for… well defence! So in the game, you’ll be able to define a daily contribution to this budget. The more you contribute, the larger bites you can take out of the budget when you need to defend yourself in a pinch. Effectively it’s an insurance scheme. But you can bet there will be a lot of interesting story events around it, for example: events where another facility had an incident that used up a major portion of the insurance or the Corporation decided to cut the defence budget share for all facilities after a period of “non-incident years. Cool stuff!

Process of calling an Ordnance strike

Offices #

Since we were on a roll with implementing features, we finally got onto adding offices. This feature was quite small but gave personnel a place to live instead of wandering the map for eternity. I drew up some new sprites for the office desk, which integrate quite well with this new take on the art style I have been pushing.

   

           

     

           

I also added a new door type. An office door, which is the blue door you see. Office doors are special. If an office is occupied by someone, and the person is not in the office, the door will lock itself. If they are in the office, the door will remain open. So a great place to hide your secrets!

Offices are assigned automatically using the Staff hierarchy we implemented back at the end of Forensic Friday 69. but we’ll eventually provide a way to manually assign offices too.

The Roadmap #

The state of the Roadmap is looking better than ever before. We are closer to the finish line than the start line. So close we can almost touch it. The main point of the game: anomalies, will be implemented in the coming weeks. For now, we are just finishing some small features with Cooks & Lunchtimes and Doctors. Then we will lock the features in and start an intense period of polish, internal play testing and game design. Which is really where the fun begins. Oh wait, I forgot to mention bug fixing! Maybe it won’t be so much fun after all…

We have been scratching our heads at the best way to implement anomalies, and so far we have settled on a pretty good system. Making a system that is very modular and expandible is super important as it means we can prototype, implement and play around with anomalies within hours. And since we want potentially hundreds of anomalies in the game, the system has to hold up well!

Case Closed #

We are close. The game is soon ready. A journey it has been! Till the next forensic Friday!

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios