Category Archives: Level Design

DevBlog 52 / House in the woods

Hello, everyone!

The new environments for Chapter 2 are evolving smoothly, and the art team has been hard at work producing all the required content to really develop unique locations for the players to explore. One of the current challenges has been to come up with a different kind of architecture to contrast with the stern Ancestor-built ruins of the previous areas. This time we went for a more “rural look”, loosely based on the Portuguese Traditional/Popular construction.

Using the Amplify Shader Editor and Vertex Painting, we’re able to quickly put together houses like the one shown below, while making them feel different from each other by making texture variations.

House in the woods.

Meanwhile, our master puppeteer has improved upon the existing running animation by tweaking the position of the arms and spine of the Girl while she is equipped with any type of weapon available. This way, the particular weights of both short and long swords, as well as maces, hammers or bows, really come through as the animation contextually adapts.

Upper torso bow base animation – blended with walking and running animations in real-time.

Run cycle variation.

DevBlog 48 / A new chapter

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Hi there!

Since PAX East, our art team has been working on the new chapter. Hopefully, just by looking at the first enemy concept you can tell it’s going to be very different from the previous one. A more medieval approach, with epic battles and battlefields. We already have this area blocked out for quite some time, but both the look and feel of the enemies are still in the works. Also, some level design refinement will be done. As previously mentioned, the story and mood will get darker as the adventure progresses, and the upcoming environments will reflect that change.

Cursed soldier – Under-armor concept.

We are working hard polishing some aspects pointed out by some players during PAX (thank you for playing and giving us honest feedback!). A lot has been done in combat fine-tuning and camera behavior. Parries now work much better and are fun to use, and defending with shields now works properly, taking into consideration the direction of the attack (this applies to the player and the enemies alike). We also added some more visual feedback when an attack lands on bigger enemies (for example, if you hit their legs, they react to it subtly by twitching).

Like we’ve mentioned in previous updates, every time the player gets killed in the game, the Girl will awaken from a “nightmare” in the last checkpoint. That specific animation has already been implemented, as you can see below.

Waking up from a nightmare.

DevBlog 45 / PAX East here we go

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Hi everyone!

We are extremely excited to announce our game will be played at PAX East on 10-12 March in the IndieMEGABOOTH space. Our first overseas adventure to showcase Decay of Logos. Here’s the lineup: http://indiemegabooth.com/indie-megabooth-pax-east-2017-line/

This week the team was polishing and finishing the art and the gameplay for the area prior to the end of Chapter One.

Exploring sometimes is worth it.

We decided to design banners that bear the Coat of Arms of one of the Princes, and we placed them on specific locations. By doing this we wanted to convey the feeling that the Ancestor ruins you find throughout this part of the Realm have been occupied and repurposed by the Prince’s men. Additionally, the banners allow us to really show how windy the area we’ve been working on really is.

Path to dangerous encounters.

There’s a trailer in the works, and we aim to show off some of these new areas in full glory and display a dramatic and accurate feeling of this game!

Keep smashing till you have stamina!

DevBlog 44 / Closing a chapter

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Hi there!

This week we’ve done a bit of enemy balancing for the Windmills’ area. Some ranged enemies were placed here in order to keep things challenging, but in a way that won’t make it too frustrating. The Woodified Enemies have been completely revamped with new animations, so the feeling of the first part of the game is getting close to what we had envisioned in the beginning.

Also, the Wanderer has more proper animations, while he is interacting with the player. As stated before, he will make frequent appearances throughout your whole adventure. And, in time, the Girl will learn more about him and his motivations.

This guy can’t play.

The final part of Chapter One approaches, development-wise. We are all working on this very last scene pretty hard, and we will show plenty of it further down the road but, for now, here are two ominous teasers!

Science, batch!

Let’s see where this leads to.

DevBlog 40 / The Rift Windmills

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Hi there!

This is our 40th devblog entry! We want to thank everyone who has been following us in this journey.

During this week of work, a boss battle was born. There is still a lot of balancing and small tweaks to be done in each combat phase, but it’s getting there. We are targeting for an intense battle with various phases, different attacks and transformations. Some of us are hardcore Dark Souls players, so the difficulty is being calibrated in favor of everyone.

We will show some parts of this boss battle in the upcoming trailer we are also working on.

The Rift Windmills

Meanwhile, the work on the new Canyon area continues to keep our artists busy. Most of the props have already been laid out, and the big Windmill that punctuates the landscape is also practically finished.

We are currently focusing on the task of texturing very wide surfaces, and to make that process easier, we asked our colleagues from the R&D team to lend us a hand. After some discussion, we decided to add the Amplify Shader Editor to our toolkit, so now we have a much easier time blending maps.

DevBlog 39 / Improved companion controls

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Hi everyone!

This week we were working on the intro scene of the game, where we explain how the Girl and the Elk start their journey. It’s a small new area with short cutscenes and playable zones where the player and the companion meet for the first time.

Some AI balancing and behavior was also done, and the Elk now has two types of control (changeable in options). One is the first version, heavily inspired by the Shadow of the Colossus’ control scheme, and the other is more similar to how The Witcher or Dragon Age handle mounting and steering. We feel that adding gameplay options like this turns out to be appealing for various types of players.

Running from the swamp slugs.

The art team is making progress in the new Canyon-esque area, populating the scene with a few new stone and vegetation props. Developing the surrounding landscape is the current challenge we’re facing, blending 3d elements with 2d planes in order to produce a convincing and immersive atmosphere.

In-game view of the Canyon area, still work in progress.

The boss battle and arena is on the works too.

DevBlog 33 / Straight outta the Lumberyard

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Hi everyone!

It has been a very tough work week for everyone. We are closing a new area of the game that will be shown in Lisboa Games Week in 17-20 of November. A lot was added or improved, from characters, props to polished code. We are also doing some playtesting.

The swamp area is practically complete, and now we are tweaking the overall colors and exploring ways of adding details that enhance the mood, like thick fog and small water puddles. Here is a shot showing how the whole thing is coming together.

Unknown lands.

In the previous blog update we’ve shown the concept for the Lumberjack’s twin brother, and now that we’ve wrapped up the production for that character we can show how it turned out.
We also added a few minor details to the UV maps of the first Lumberjack, including a placeholder “hand-painted” fur texture to his shoulder pad which we plan to eventually change into “hair cards” further down the road (similar to the system we’ve used for the Elk model).
You can see in the image below the Lumberjack siblings chilling together.

You walked into the wrong neighborhood.

Here’s a sneak peak of the Wanderer’s idle animation. Remember to go talk to him!

The Wanderer, idle animation WIP.

DevBlog 31 / The Wanderer and Elk treat mechanic

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Hi everyone!

This week Pichel finished the first version of the Wanderer, the next version will include a cape and additional details. This is a very important NPC that will appear several times through your journey and will keep you informed about lore if you talk to him. He is also currently working on new enemy variations.

The Wanderer model next to you for scale.

André and Iuri continued their work on the treat mechanic. In order to mount the elk, players will have to gain its trust by feeding it a particular type of berries. The player can then mount it for some time, provided that there are no enemies around. The elk is not meant to be a simple mount, but more of a journey companion. Tomé did a berries prop plant that will be available in some zones (larger zones). You can pick them up and feed them to the elk at any time in order to mount it and travel through the world faster. Be very careful when approaching enemies, the elk will likely force a dismount and run away!

Revisiting a calm zone.

Raw run animation clip.

Berries Plant prop.

André also did a complete rewrite of the elk mount control code, it had a lot of prototype junk, a total revamp was due. This piece of gameplay is heavily inspired by Shadow of the Colossus control and feel. He improved the elk turn control, the object avoidance and the enemy reaction threshold system.

DevBlog 30 / The cave of NOPE!

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Hi there!

This week André was working with Iuri on the treat mechanic. This is a mechanic where the player needs to gain the confidence of the Elk by feeding it. Then the player can mount it for some time if no enemy is near. Since the beginning, the Elk is not meant to be a simple mount, but more of a journey companion. André also improved the deferred decals and started polishing/fixing the action of riding the Elk and its control logic with the new animations.

On the environment art side of things, we’ve been experimenting with the mood of the sprawling underground tunnels below the swamp area. They are meant to be pretty dark, filled with stalactites and stalagmites that create interesting shadows when adventuring with a torch in hand.

In some places a torch is mandatory.

Pichel has already finished the high poly model of the Wanderer (we’ve shown the concept in the previous blog entry) and is almost done with the low poly version. Similarly, Tomé wrapped up the high poly model for the Wanderer’s guitar. We’ve decided to change its design a bit so it would be reminiscent of the traditional portuguese guitar, with a fantasy touch. You can check both the character and his musical instrument below.

The Wanderer high poly.

DevBlog 25 / Hard Rock

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Hi everyone!

This week André worked on improving the streaming system of the game. Some shortcuts and hacks were made for hiccup-free loadings, most of the loading is made in a background thread but the activation of the game objects is made in the main thread. So that forced us to make a frame by frame loading system only for the activation of some chunks of zones. André also finished the localization logic so now it is easy to translate the game.

Iuri is back to work after a deserved vacation, he’s working on the mount animations of the companion and player movement while mounted. Riding the Elk is a very important part of the game; we removed it temporarily because we only had placeholder animations.

One of our challenges this week consisted in producing low poly assets that would allow us to improve the look of the rocky cliffs that limit the first areas of the game. Tomé developed a few modules that can be bashed together inside the engine in order to create the steep rock faces you can see below. For the moss on top, we chose to duplicate the geometry from the upper part of each asset, and then we used a grassy material with the Cutout Rendering Mode selected.

Our rocky cliffs building kit.

Here is an example of what we can come up with inside Unity using the kit.

Meanwhile, Pichel is hard at work sculpting a new character model that we will show a sneak peak in a future devblog.