Timelapse Vertigo - Dev Log

Hi guys,

I'm the developer of Timelapse Vertigo, an isometric indie roleplaying game inspired by classics such as System Shock 2, Fallout, Neverwinter Night and Arcanum.

The game has been in development for about 15 months now (not counting the base engine development). When exactly it'll be out I cannot say, but it's not going to be this year for sure.

In the mean time you can follow my development log on my website or by subscribing to the RSS feed. I'll also be mirroring it here in this thread from now on.

If you guys have any questions or feedback feel free to post it here.

Again, big thanks to Scavenhorde for setting this forum up.

Best of luck to you, but I didn't set up the forum. I just asked the big guy if we could open up a forum for indies

Still love those skills.

One question, I saw in the video some social skills. How relevant are those going to be? Like in Bloodlines they had a few social skills and they were great in the beginning, but became almost useless towards the end of the game.

Best of luck.
I'll be watching your project/game.

Best of luck, from me too. Looking forward to your game and hope you can get it finished some day. Being an indie dev isn't easy, but keep on keeping on, bro!

Also, care to tell us why you chose to use real-time combat in the game (instead of turn-based, like in Fallout 1-2)?

Just wanted to say your game and Dead State are the two top indie RPGs on my radar. Keep working at it, can't wait to play!

Thanks guys.

Originally Posted by skavenhorde
One question, I saw in the video some social skills. How relevant are those going to be? Like in Bloodlines they had a few social skills and they were great in the beginning, but became almost useless towards the end of the game.

Originally there were more social skills, but I merged some of them together as I didn't want the character to have to over-invest in them, because they are the only skills that have no direct impact in combat (even though they can affect the terms of engagement) and the dialog trees will be more manageable this way.

Regarding how useful they will be. My design philosophy for every skill is that, ideally, it should provide you with alternative ways of reaching the same goals in as many situations as it makes sense, and also provide you with some exclusive stuff (like a couple of interesting quest branchings you can only achieve by using persuasion).

Originally Posted by Lurking Grue
Also, care to tell us why you chose to use real-time combat in the game (instead of turn-based, like in Fallout 1-2)?

This comes up so often that I'll probably end up writing a dev log post with the long answer about this once I get more content in the game and it becomes more apparent, but here's a short version.

I personally enjoy all types of perspectives and mechanics in RPG games. When you take a look at what games I mentioned as being the inspiration for Timelapse Vertigo, you'll notice that they have very varied gameplay. So I'm not biased in that regard.

The idea in TLV is that actions, both combat and environmental, should happen simultaneously and that timing should be key. Here's an example combat wise that I wrote a while back on another forum, answering to the same question:

Originally Posted by Styg
The main reason I decided to go RT is because I want things to happen simultaneously and I wanted characters to have to react to multiple events on the flight.

For example, you have to interrupt your enemy's psi invocation, but you still have to worry about turning on your shield emitter in time to avoid taking high damage from a grenade impact; or maybe you can avoid it, but you are rooted in place and have to break free first.

While this sort of stuff can arguably be implement in TB as well, I find it functioning much more fluidly in RT.

The pause is there to emphasize tactical aspect as opposed to who can click faster and more precisely (it's sometimes hard to invoke a character-targeted ability if your target is moving very fast).

As to what it actually means environment wise I'll talk in a future dev log once I got more things to showcase it with.

It's been a while since the last dev log. Unfortunately, some day job stuff caught up with me and I didn't have as much time to work on this game as I would like to. But that's been taken care of now and things should be returning to normal.

The good news is I've taken certain steps that should allow me to devote even more time to this game in not so distant future.


Rechargeable Items



I've changed some devices to require energy in order to be used. You can restore item's energy by expending energy cells, but you can do this only when out of combat.

So this change introduces a twofold resource management concern for the player. First, they will have to ensure their combat devices are charged up before combat as well as use them more rationally now that they can actually run out of juice mid combat. And secondly, they must be sure to pack up enough energy cells when going out on an expedition.

Most energy cells are single use consumables, so they also act as commodity money in the TLV economy I talked about a while back.

I might allow alternative ways of recharging items, but I haven't decided yet. One thought I'm having is adding power stations at certain locations in the world that you can use to instantly recharge all your items (like in System Shock 2 for example). I'll have to take into consideration the resource management I mentioned above first, however, as I wouldn't want to encourage constant backtracking in order to save money. Perhaps these power stations could have a long cooldown (1-2 hours).

Mushroom Cove

Some screenshots of an area I've been working on recently. This place is called Mushroom Cove and it's one of the starting areas.

It's still work in progress, but I'm happy how it's turning out so far. As I might have mentioned before, I do this sort of work iteratively, adding more graphics to a tileset over time and coming back to spice up old areas.







Next on the agenda is working on getting rid of those ugly character and creature models, as well as getting some music into the game.