Monthly Archives: April 2016

DevBlog 06 / Interactable Objects

Hi there!

While Pichel and Tomé are finishing the ancient ruins modules and the wooden assets, André is taking up the ones already finished and preparing them for in-game interaction. For example, we now have a breakable wooden fence and a crane!

Old view on the left, current view on the right

You can break planks of wood to reach some hidden zones.

Old view on the left, current view on the right

WIP model of the wood crane, that can be used to lift up or down objects.

Now, talking about the overall state of the game, all the mechanics logic are done (although we’re mostly still using placeholder objects) and we already did balancing tests with enemies and bosses. The level design of various areas are also done, ready to be populated with the new props. We are working hard to replace the placeholder props and characters, fix bugs and polish the visuals. With more playthroughs we will keep tweaking the gameplay and balance of the game.

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DevBlog 05 / Bow behavior, Ancient Ruins and Sound

Hi everyone!

In this week of work, Andre changed some things in the bow behavior. A trail prediction was added and the view when shooting was flipped. We’re also considering removing the Crosshair. In Decay of Logos the range of your bow depends on your Strength Stat.

Old view on the left, current view on the right

Old view on the left, current view on the right.

Now the camera goes to the right side instead of left . When locked onto a target the behavior is different (no camera change) and the arrow always hits (if in range and providing the enemy is not defending).

In this screenshot the player has a strength of 11

In this screenshot the player has a strength of 11 for example.

Andre started improving the sound in the game and changing some things in how it is handled overall. Audio mixer, duck audio, snapshots and reverb zones were added for a more immersive experience.

On the other side of the trenches, Pichel and Tomé have been developing our own modular set for the ancient ruins. They’ve been pretty much playing with Lego.

In this screenshot the player have a strength of 11 for example

The modular set for the ancient ruins.

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DevBlog 04 / Act 1 Enemies

Hi there!

This week we have some character concepts and models to show. It’s the most predominant enemy in the first area of the game.

An ancient ruin.

Concept exploration and orthographic views.

For reasons we won’t spoil, some inhabitants of this world are mysteriously turning into wooden aberrations. The goal of the concept above was to visually establish two phases of this process. In the first iteration, the flesh turning into bark is supposed to be very apparent, while in the second one the body of the villager is already fully transformed. We really wanted it to be clear that these individuals were not always like this, hollow wooden creatures – they used to lead normal lives.

It’s pretty hard not to draw comparisons to the character Groot while designing treelike humanoids, but the way we tried to distance ourselves from that was to stick as close to the human silhouette and anatomy as possible. In essence, the transformation is material, and most of the human form is maintained.

We are a very small team, so we developed a strategy for the enemies to appear and feel different each time the player encounters them.
Most enemies have adaptive AI, and when the enemy is instantiated a Behavior Tree is assigned randomly.

For example, if a Defensive BT (Behavior Tree) is assigned, the enemy will have a shield and act more defensively, going around you and only attacking sometimes. If an aggressive BT is assigned, the enemy will not have a shield and will attack more, and so on.

It terms of visual presentation, randomly instantiated parts will be added to the enemy giving diversity to his silhouette. One interesting thing is that the more attached parts the enemy has, the higher his defense is.

giphy

In the past week André was freeing some work for Pichel and Tomé by 3D modeling an area and populating it with props already created. Next step will be texturing the terrain.

An ancient ruin.

High poly and Low poly models.

Pichel was working on the enemy we showed above. UV mapping and low poly is done, and he’s close to finishing the additional parts.

Tomé is working on the 3D modules of the Ancient Ruins we showed in the previous blog post.

 

 

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DevBlog 03 / Buildings and new areas studies

Hi!

Time for some architectural concepts and new area studies – the game has more than colorful woods! We want to showcase a few additional environments that will be in the game, from very bright and vibrant (like you have seen in previous blog entries) to dark dungeons or windy barren landscapes. The scenery will mirror the player’s mood and experience as they explore our game world.

Tomé, with his architect background has been a great help designing and constructing the ancient ruins that populate part of the world.

An ancient ruin.

Forsaken ruins of an ancient civilization.

We are currently working on other areas like the swamp below while trying to maintain the same stylized look. During their journey players will smoothly transition between different areas, we are going to use the mood as a storytelling device, each area will be unique in it’s own way. It might even be a way to tell the players what kind of challenge they should expect, we are still experimenting and it has been great!

Swamp concept area.

Swamp concept area.

 

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DevBlog 02 / Concept and 3D Art

Hi there!

Today we’ll show some concept art and 3D models of the game, most of them are already in-game.

In the beginning of the game you are most likely to found this set of weapons.

In the beginning of the game you are most likely to find this set of weapons.

The high poly of the main character.

The high poly of the main character.

This week, Tomé did some architectural 3D and concept studies for the ancient ruins which populated the world and in past were once the home of an ancient civilization.

Pichel among other things has been revamping the first enemy you face in the game. We will post some concepts and high poly models in the next devblog post.

André made a small pause in game development and joined the system management dark side. He transferred our cloud solution for project management to our local linux server with Bitbucket Server (VCS), JIRA (project management) and Bamboo (auto-builds) cross integration, plus a robust backup system for our projects. During Pre-production we used Github and Trello.

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