sa-game-remake

[sa-game-remake]

Progress Update: Other things that move

See this update on the forum

To create the player demo, I had to figure out a process to export 3D models with their animations. My next step is to export all the other animated entities, starting with the animals.

The spirit animals were very easy to export. The enemies: not so much. The glowing Bile effect that covers enemies comes from a shader that's broken in my current old game extraction files, and so cannot be exported nicely. I'm investigating solutions to fix or replace that shader.

Anyway, take a look at what happens when I export all of the bosses (even though they're missing their textures for now). The people working on the old game lined all their default positions up in a row, to see them all beside each other. Well, nearly all.

(The human silhouette at the far back is Low Resolution Drina. She's normal size and resolution for a character in this game, she's only low resolution compared to cutscene Drina.)

[sa-game-remake]

so excited to see the char demo working tytyty!!! been following u for a while and i always love to see updates :D

Great to hear you're enjoying it!

[sa-game-remake]

I was so happy to see the character creator page up and running, I had to try and recreate my main character from way back when! I belive her name was something along the lines of Harmony Windsong.

I dodnt look through all of the options but the one thing I noticed was that the van boots appear in the wrong place. Other than that it's great to have a bit of nostalgia to play with this morning, thank you for doing this :)

Glad I was able to make this happen for you! Love to see people's characters.

Thanks for checking everything was working, too, and letting me know. Those boots should now appear in the right spot.

[sa-game-remake]

Three small improvements have now been made:

Ram boots are fixed.

Added a loading screen and progress bar.

Reduced loading time anyway (by turning on compression for the file transfers).

It's Live: Player Model Demo

-> https://keeperofgreenhaven.net/demo/player/ <-

Loading may take a couple of seconds, in which you'll only see a blank green square. I'll investigate putting in a loading bar.

Tips for controls (touch):

One finger drag to rotate the camera

Two finger drag to pan the camera

Pinch to zoom

Tips for controls (keyboard+mouse):

Left click drag to rotate the camera

Right click drag to pan the camera

Scroll up/down on the character or its background to zoom in/out

[sa-game-remake]

It's Live: Player Model Demo

-> https://keeperofgreenhaven.net/demo/player/ <-

Loading may take a couple of seconds, in which you'll only see a blank green square. I'll investigate putting in a loading bar.

Tips for controls (touch):

One finger drag to rotate the camera

Two finger drag to pan the camera

Pinch to zoom

Tips for controls (keyboard+mouse):

Left click drag to rotate the camera

Right click drag to pan the camera

Scroll up/down on the character or its background to zoom in/out

[sa-game-remake]

Progress Update: Demo Default Player

See this update on the forum

Among other improvements to the player demo, the default character now looks different. I found "John Doefault" here in the code, and in the spirit of keeping with the old game, John Doefault survives in this demo.

Funnily enough, as well as being a play on "John Doe" and "default", you can argue the name "John Doefault" does fit the Spirit Animals game character naming format. You're only prevented from naming your Keeper John Doefault by the fact that none of the three components "John", "Doe", or "fault" are available in the multiple-choice naming menu. Sorry.

In other work:

Been working on code to let me easily read and use the "game database": a set of files that contain all of the information about the buffs, item drop chances, display names, and corresponding file names of every single item in the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to include the "ArmourLength" of every piece of armour, which is what I need to know to know which parts of the arms/legs to hide for this current demo. I'm debating whether to guess the "ArmourLength" of every armour piece based on its appearance, or keep digging to find the "true" lengths.

[sa-game-remake]

Progress Update: Player Character Demo in development

See this update on the forum

Alright, let's get back into a routine of giving you guys status updates. If all goes well, by the time you see this, I'll have a small buffer of update posts.

What you see above is a screenshot of the interactive player demo I'm working on. It'll let you design your Keeper and give them any colour variant of any available armour. I have managed to export every player animation, so it isn't even a static mannequin - you can make it move!

This player demo will go up on the website for you to play around with, once it's ready. What parts aren't ready yet? Well, in the screenshot you can see the player's skin hands clipping through the gloves. Different pieces of armour need different parts of the hands/arms/legs to be hidden when that armour's being worn, but I haven't implemented the logic for hiding those yet. The text labels could also do with some improvement: "eyes dye" sounds like a concerning substance!

[sa-game-remake]

Hi, I don't you I've you've still got access to the discord server but a user has been hacked and put spam messages in all of the channels

Ah yeah, I've been neglecting that server. Thanks very much for spotting that. Those messages have now been cleaned up.

[sa-game-remake]

Are you still doin’ this or… Because I would love to see it!

Still working on it!

At the moment, though, I can give no predictions about when anything will be ready/playable.

[sa-game-remake]

This is a really awesome project!! I remember being obsessed with this game when I was younger, and really upset when it died. Kudos to you for the sheer amount of effort it must have taken just to get this far, damn.

I'd love to help with this project in any way I can, though I'm not sure what that could be. I do somewhere have saved a large amount of screenshots (possibly screen recordings? I don't think I knew how to do those back then) of the game, so if there are any specific details that your recovered assets aren't showing (info on the 2v2 game mode, etc) I can dig those out and see if they or my memory can clear anything up!

(It's been a few months since your last posts, so feel free to ignore this if things have ground to a halt! Honestly it's just nice to see that other people remember this game at all, it felt a little like it dropped off the face of the earth at the time haha ^^)

Yep, apologies for the multi-month gap. Over this last month, I've been exporting all the 3D models and animations from Unity into a file format that other programs are actually able to open. It's a bit of a manual process, because there's lots of variations in terms of how they're being stored in Unity, and because the decompilation process didn't 100% work so there's a few corruptions and broken linkages that I have to spot and fix up one by one.

The player character (and all its armour sets and hairstyle customisations) is nearly done. I have just 8 armour pieces left still refusing to export, so if all goes well, it'll be done by the end of the week. But I've probably forgotten something, so it'll probably be done sometime next week. (Convenient timing, you sending this message now, when I'm close to actually finishing something!)

Screenshots are always useful! Especially of anything that requires an account to use (that's both multiplayer modes, and stuff like the character select screen), because the guest mode that's still playable if you have an old enough device can't use those.

[sa-game-remake]

I've got a decompiled version of the Android version of the game, feel free to take a look here. The audio files that get played in the game are in Spirit Animals Game/Assets/AudioClip (soundtracks have file names that start with Music_), but they're not nicely faded in and out for casual listening the way ends-of-the-wayward-storm's recordings are.

No one else has gotten the songs from here so I did it myself.

Other tracks: Eura, Amaya, Zhong, Training Session

[sa-game-remake]

HOLY SHIT!!!!!! the spirit animals game was such a huge part of my childhood and i managed to get it on my laptop so im still able to play it. are you making it as close to the original as possible or are you using the original as a base and updating certain aspects of it? also can you ping me on any updates?

"As close to the original as possible" is the shape of the main plan, but I am taking note of quality-of-life improvements people suggest.

A status update for everyone: I'm working on getting this project back up and running. Keep an eye out for updates resuming soon.

Is manually pinging on updates a thing people want? I'd be willing to do it if there were a fair few of you interested, but otherwise I'm inclined to just let people use the follow system. Let me know in these comments or send me a message.

[sa-game-remake]

If I may ask, do you think you could scale down the difficulty of the first Sadre boss (the Ice Badger guy)? I remember him being almost as tough as the newer bosses, meaning the dyes were locked behind a boss that I could basically only beat through cheese tactics.

I'll make a note of that request in my list! I do remember those early cavern quests being a big jump in difficulty.

[sa-game-remake]

Are you concerned about potential problems with Scholastic because they own the Spirit Animals IP?

I mean, there's always a chance they'll take offence. My hopes are that since they're not currently doing anything with the Spirit Animals IP, they have less reason to be super militant about enforcing things. We wouldn't be stealing traffic from the original game or the official Spirit Animals forum, since neither exist any more, or even stealing the time people could be using to buy and read a new Spirit Animals book.

The remake being under a different name to the original game, so it's not so easily confused with something Scholastic's sponsoring, and clearly announcing itself as a fan project that's not taking any money, should also make it less of a threat/infringement. On the other hand, they might feel they have more of a responsibility to be sharp-eyed because it's a kid's franchise, and they want to protect kids from fan servers for their potentially inadequate moderation standards.

Basically, can't guarantee anything. Some fan-servers of dead online games have a good run, others get taken offline in a snap when the original owners spot them. Maybe both.

[sa-game-remake]

what was ur fav thing to do in spirit animals

I was a big fan of the multiplayer (not 2v2) mode, with four players against an increasingly overwhelming tide of enemies. Had a real poor-quality internet connection at the time (insert jokes about Australian internet here), would keep dropping out of the match. Probably wasn't much fun to be my teammate, oops.

What's everyone else's favourite parts of the game?

[sa-game-remake]

happy new years :]

Cheers, and happy new year to you all!

[sa-game-remake]

Heyo! Will you ever make enemy-only animals (Like the orb weavers and vine snakes) possible spirit animals for the player? I know it’s a bit of an endeavor.

Could even alter some of the guardian models to make normal versions, if rhinos, elephants or scorpions are more your type

Yep, that'd be possible.

Two options: 1. Plonk 'em in the spirit animals select screen with a disclaimer: "This animal may not have full animations, and equipped animal armour will be invisible." Already, there are some spirit animals that have smaller and more generic animation sets than others (eg all of the newer/non-komodo-dragon lizards sharing the same animations). Never on a character I played, but I remember that for a long time the horse(? I believe.) armour just didn't show up. You got the armour bonuses but the horse just looked the same.

2. Make an animation set and animal armour models for those enemy animal types before allowing them as spirit animals. Obviously this is the more-intensive option!