New Year Same Us

Nebbed:

Hi everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve last done a post on the Guinea Pig Labs blog, or really, on any of the Guinea Pig Labs socials. We wrapped up our holiday break in mid-January, and work has continued on both Ordinance and ROLUS once again to kick off 2025. (I’ve mainly been overseeing ROLUS’ development, whilst providing feedback and assisting with ideas and some testing for Ordinance.)

I want to spend some time talking about ROLUS, the ball-racer that I pitched to Guinea Pig Labs in early 2024, as we’ve made some major progress on what will become our first Steam release. That’s right, Steam release! We’re aiming to get the full game out on Steam in Q2 2025. With online multiplayer, new tracks, gamemodes, and a ton more! And as time goes on, we’ll have more updates for you all.

So what’s been going on? Well, after an unsuccessful attempt at getting ROLUS’ demo onto the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc, we’ve: 

• Ported ROLUS to Godot 4 from Godot 3
• Started development on the full game, which will now be releasing on Steam!
• And we’ve changed direction in terms of the game’s visual look from being inspired by classic PlayStation 1 games, to being more like mid-late 90s to early 2000s PC games in terms of graphics. Think Quake 3 or Serious Sam 1.

The reason for this change of direction was because of the intense constraints the PS1 aesthetic left us with, on both a creative and technical level. I’m of the mindset that it’s either all or nothing in terms of aesthetics, with very little leniency. I struggle to comprehend how pixelated textures and low poly models really count as ‘PS1 graphics’ in the eyes of many. To me, it’s more than that, it’s the dithering, the render distance, the vertex / texture warping, due to how the graphics were rendered on the console, the audio compression, etc. I really lock in on details, and it’s something I always remembered about the PS1, even as a kid. Even if I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly it was back then.  

Given the ever-growing scope of the game, we felt it was best to move away from the PS1 aesthetics to give us more freedom. And naturally, I came to the conclusion that we lean more towards mid-late 90s PC game graphics. And just barely crossing through to the early 2000s pre Half-Life 2. This gives us more freedom with the visuals of the game, whilst still lining up with the overall retro aesthetic I want to create with ROLUS. 

We made this decision around December last year, and so far, apart from some challenges in developing an efficient workflow in designing maps and tracks. Things have been a lot smoother than before.

During the holidays, myself and Dogman did some research on how tracks were done in a variety of racing games at the time. Particularly games like Crash Team Racing, the early Wipeout games, and POD (Planet of Death). Also played some Sanicball as that game, along with the Wipeout games, served as the main inspiration for ROLUS. If you don’t know what Sanicball is… well, go play it!

It gave us much needed insight and understanding as to how we could go about designing tracks. And after some work, we’ve finally completed our first track for ROLUS’ full game, a fully revamped version of Poseidon’s Hold (the track featured in the original demo). With that laid down, we have the basis of creating tracks for the game. Now we just need a means of automating aspects of the process to improve the workflow a bit.

Anywho, that’s all the updates from me for now. We’ve made some steady progress on ROLUS, and we’ll have more details on the game soon! But for now, peace!

Dogman:

(ITT more modeling shit)

Over the past few months since the last clogpost, I’ve been investing a lot of time on experimenting with level design. Both in Ordinance and Rolus.

Mainly, I was trying to find a good workflow both in Blender and in Godot that felt fluid and didn’t stall me out. ADHD shit means harsh roadblocks can screw me up for a good week or two, so I want things to go as smoothly as possible and be able to paint ideas out as quickly as they come to me.

Part of that, I think, is unlearning some of my habits with individual item modelling. Generally trying to be less of a perfectionist.

I get caught up on making clean geometry and grids, but ultimately with level design, it doesn’t really matter. Part of this process I guess is just learning to stop overthinking things.

With Rolus in particular, since it’s already a very abstract vaporwave-y theme, I’m leaning into that to experiment with simple shapes and structures for detailing.

With Rolus, I’ve found that I can just scatter individual props, arches, buildings, and mountain bits and get something that actually looks pretty cool. The little imperfections and annoying stuff that trips me up sort of just… fades away when you blend it into the bigger picture.

Finding ways to texture/UV map faster, as well as using tricks like array curves to make easily modifiable non-destructive map segments, helps with that as well.

With Ordinance, I’ve been less productive. We haven’t touched it in a hot minute since our focus is on getting Rolus done quickly as a Steam release.

But I’ve been thinking about doing individual buildings in their own blend files, and instancing them later in Godot. Trying to do it all Hammer style in a single huge map file is probably more trouble than it’s worth.

We’ve also experimented with the Terrain3D addon for Godot, but we’ve only glanced at it really. It’s definitely fun to work with, but terrain modelling feels like its own beast. It’s something to think about later when we get back to it.

Overall though, I feel a lot more confident. I haven’t let my general modelling skills get rusty, and I feel like level design has gotten me to learn a few more Blender tools I hadn’t gotten around to checking out yet. (Vector snapping is a godsend.)

I think I’m pretty happy with my progress so far..

Zealot:

Zealot & Rolus: What Do?

I have joined the track designing process with the others. Getting in on level design is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and I had a bit of that experience with the Hellfair map, but it wasn’t very good so I’d rather not count it. What I’ve done so far is much more substantive and makes me feel like an actual game developer, so I’m counting it as a win.

I don’t want to show off any pictures or videos of tracks until they are actually in a testing phase. That’s just me. We should have some more stuff to show next month though. (Also; the Steam page might be up by then…)

Despite the challenge, we are continuing to work on Rolus. We are determined to do this and get our names on steam. It’s going to take some more time, and we have possibly a little too much ambition, but we have gotten this far and there’s no turning back now.

Zealot & Ordinance: What Do?

Ordinance is taking a break. To be truthful, the problem is that we are in the level design phase, and it turns out that none of us are very good at making complex levels. We’re picking that up with the Rolus tracks though. Other than that, what happened these last few months?

We:

• Started the inventory system
• Set up terrain
• Began building a basic layout for “The City”
• Started designing how weapons and items should work; same with entities
• And started creating extra in-game systems, such as this touch screen vending machine.

It was generally a hectic mess. When we get back to it eventually, there will need to be a bit of Spring cleaning. I’m going to try not to think about that too much though.

Meesa jar jar binks im pissing and shitting all over the place