Cyrus Byrd

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Ladders and Mantling

Hey guys! While a lot of recent work has been on things behind the scenes, we have started to develop some new traversal mechanics. Compound Fracture has and always will be a game about moving slowly and with intent. This means no jumping, sprinting, wall running, or anything of that nature. However, our commitment to this idea has led to rather dull level design, especially as we make maps more complex. You walk into a room, kill the enemies, take the items, and leave. Sometimes the rooms lead to other rooms through doors, but that's about...

Sploinkable Objects

I want to talk about some of the minor interactions that are available to the player. As a word of warning, many of the effects that follow are work in progress placeholders.The most basic type is the SHOOTABLE THING. These are often just for flavour, where we just want to acknowledge that the player is a vector of destruction, which isn't always precisely directed towards a dinosaur.A good example is the humble Chrono Cola vending machine.Some SHOOTABLE THINGS actually have a tangible effect when blasted- fire extinguishers create a jet of...

Gameplay

Hey everyone!We've been really busy as has become usual for us, but as you've probably noticed we've been neglecting our beautiful patrons. We want to share some of what we've been working on, but be aware that this is only an internal test demo, and most of this won't appear in the final game in this form. Austin's recording setup adds some stutters for some reason, probably because he has like 300mb spare on his C: drive. He also thinks the sound is fucked. Thanks, Austin!!!In the coming week or so, we're going to ...

A Post About Writing Compound Fracture

Hey everyone, Cyrus here. Lately we’ve been working on some less exciting things. We moved over to a new version control system, Austin has been blocking out levels and Pete has been knocking out some of the less glamorous systems like saving and loading, menus, and world states persisting across loading screens. I have been working on music, fleshing out some of the story, writing flavor text, and polishing some of the older raptor animations.This update will be about the story of the game. I’ll be avoiding specific details because I don�...

Toolin' Around

Happy new year! I'm Pete and I handle the majority of the programming on Compound Fracture.This month I'm going to show some of our editor tooling, and talk about why being able to make our own little editor tools has been really useful. This is going to touch on a lot of different parts of the game behind the scenes.As some of you already know, Compound Fracture is being made in Unity. One of the best features in Unity is the ability to extend the editor, with new tools, views, and hotkeys. The gif above is showing a really simple hotk...

The Journey to the New SMG Model

Hey guys, Austin here again; this time with a deep dive into how the weapons of Compound Fracture are designed/chosen and how/why we ended up completely changing the SMG.PART_1: THE SHOTGUNIt all started with the SPAS-12 shotgun model, created in May 2020.This shotgun model is so old, it essentially predates Compound Fracture. It was made for a PS1 style FPS of some kind, but it wasn't until a month later that it was decided that the FPS should be about dinosaurs.The model looked fine for the time, but as we developed our render pipeline an...

New Screenshots + Feature

Hi guys, Austin here.Sorry for such a long delay. We've been hard at work on mostly invisible improvements/reworks which makes it hard to find something worth doing a Patreon post about. The dinosaur AI and pathfinding system has needed a complete rework which has eaten a lot of time but will be far more reliable down the road. Turns out there may be a reason why you don't see more games using dinosaurs as their only enemy, ha.Anyways, the video above shows off a new WIP feature we recently implemented that allows practically any static...

Trailer Music Start to Finish

Hi everyone, this is Cyrus. This is coming a bit late, but I wanted to give you all a behind the scenes look at the trailer music. Click the links for the versions I'm talking about and I’ll have download links at the end for the final track and the version I decided not to go with.The song is named “Load Bearing Drywall”, and I made the first version of it on May 24th. This was mainly just me riffing trying to play with futuristic synth ideas that were more popular in the 90s and early 2000s. There’s also a beat over it for some re...

Update #1

Hi everyone!For the past few weeks we've been busy working on a new trailer that will premiere at Realms Deep 2021. It will feature some of the mechanics and areas that have not been previously shown off and we're excited for everyone to see a glimpse of them.With the trailer complete we are happy to get back to working on the game as a whole again. We hope that you enjoy this early look at the upcoming trailer and we thank you again for your continued support.