Category Archives: Programming

DevBlog 146 / The adventurer’s diet

Hello fellow adventurers!

In today’s blog post, we’ll be talking about the adventurer’s diet.

As you may already know, being adventurers yourselves, a dangerous profession such as this one can be very taxing on the body, and at those times where neither magicae nor alchemy are available, sustenance may still be within your grasp if you know where to look!

The adventurer’s diet!

There are, of course, risks involved when seeking nutrition from nature.

Certain sources of nourishment might get you to full strength, while others will surely lead to an upset stomach, or even death.
It’s common knowledge that the berries that are favored by many wild animals are not edible but fungi, on the other hand, can be pretty safe if you know which ones to pick.

What’s your poison? I mean…

There is always reward to the risk involved, even if the result is an undesirable one… * wink wink *

And on the technical side of things, we’ve been performing several optimizations in order for the game to be more stable!

That’ll be all for this week, be sure to stop by again next Friday for more goodies!

Thank you for reading!

DevBlog 132 / Vallis Sanctum decoratus est

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Hello readers!

Another week of QA goodness and bug slaying, a real massacre of all of those pesky issues that we would absolutely hate to let you all deal with. In all due honesty, these things do take a great deal of time and effort, and we’re happy that we have the time and resources to undergo a thorough testing and polishing phase!

As usual, we’re sharing some images of the progress made in the embellishment process that has been keeping our artists busy with hand placed details and final touches. We bring you one of the Ancestral sites that we’re sure everyone will love to explore, the Vallis Sanctum:

Catchy name, huh?

It’s also one of our largest dungeons!

That’s it for this week’s blog post, thank you for reading!

Have a great weekend!

DevBlog 118 / A new hope?

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Hello everyone!

We’ve just finished adding new props to the village, in order to breathe more life into it, as you can see in the image below:

The Song of Drying!

These include clothes drying poles, swings, pottery and more, some of which will appear as you progress through the game. The hamlet will reflect the protagonist’s actions, be it the outcome of a great battle or some other event that took place in a different area, and every time you return you’ll notice that certain changes took place. Could these be signs that life might eventually go back to normal, and that peace will take the place of war?

Cabbage fight!

The pottery is also one of the new destructible items, adding more variety to certain areas of the game, here’s an image on what can happen if they’re not handled properly:

Who knows what may lie inside?

All of the dungeons, or Arx, have been finished and might still undergo a few tweaks in order to make them even more interesting, such as improved enemy placement or even ambushes. Also, some of the new combat animations and movements were polished, and we’ll keep play testing and tweaking them throughout the next week.

On the more technical side, as the time for furthering the development of the console ports draws near, we’ve redone the input system, in order to allow for more flexibility when integrating with other platforms.

That is all for this week, see you next Friday!

DevBlog 117 / Hammer to the Forge, Mace to the Face!

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Hi everyone!

We’re excited to share with you that we’ve finished the combat animation overhaul, they’re all in-game and being tested as we “speak”!

This brought dramatic changes to the combat’s feel and pace, bringing it much closer to our vision. Here’s a taste to brighten up your weekend:

Mace to the Face!

There’s also another noticeable change which should be quite apparent in the above image if you’ve been following our devblogs for a while, and that is the visual polish we’ve been doing. We’ve tweaked the post-processing and illumination of our initial areas, and also took the opportunity to tweak environment sounds, improve loading times between different zones, tweak the enemy placement, add some ambushes and even some additional surprises throughout the game!

Some new assets were added as well, including new item icons and the town blacksmith’s tools:

Hammer to the Forge!

That’s all for this week, thank you for reading!

DevBlog 114 / Fly like an eagle!

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Hello dearest community!

Fly like an eagle!

Don’t let the title fool you, this animal is actually a hawk, and its purpose is for you to find out, not for us to tell…

So, after setting in some mistery, we’re going to make this week’s blog post short and sweet, like the Elk’s favorite meal, Lulaberries!

All of the audio recordings for the characters’ voices are done and already in-game, and the music is coming along nicely and will soon be complete as well.

A new phase of polishing and balancing will also take place in the near future, together with additional work into the console ports.

On the artistic side of things, the cutscenes are all getting a little bit of shine and tweaking before we’re done with them for good, and more progress has been made into the new combat animations, each of them being added into the game almost as soon as its ready!

POW! Right in the kisser!

Oh, and we’ve been designing and adding some new extra props to populate the scenarios, making them feel more rich and detailed, here’s a screenshot of some additional windows we’ve been crafting:

Care for some window shopping?

As you can see, it’s been an extremely busy week, so we hope you’ve enjoyed the content we’ve decided to share with you all today!

See you next Friday!

DevBlog 113 / Polishing like there’s no tomorrow

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Hi there!

This week we’re bringing you some polish-in-progress screenshots and details, so lets get right into the news!

New environments!

Our workflow has improved ever since we’ve started working on the game, and new materials and assets were added and improved throughout development, so we’ve decided to do a major overhaul of the initial areas of the game, as we’ve shared in a previous post.

More new environments!

Alot of work has been put into this but it payed off tremendously, we’re extremely happy with the result, especially considering how consistent the world feels and plays with this improvement!

Taking into account all feedback we’ve received and our own play test sessions, we also continued working on adding new combat animations and tweaking the ones already being used, in order to provide the best feeling and feedback we can to combat, which is one of the pillars of the game.

Take it, it’s yours!

For the next week, we’re going to add a new cutscene into the game that will introduce players to the basic logic on interaction between the Elk and Ada, here’s a sneak peek!

Have a great weekend everyone!

DevBlog 106 / Work, work!

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Hello fellow readers!

This week we’re writing a short post, as our efforts are currently focused on QA and bug fixing. We’re also finishing the implementation of the new UI, with special attention to user experience, and tweaking the FMOD system that has recently been introduced to the game! Here’s a totally unrelated image:

A soothing environment for your enjoyment!

There are not many details that we can share regarding the above, as bug smashing is not as interesting to write or read about as to actually experience the arguable thrill of figuring out what exactly went wrong and how to replicate the trickiest issues, which sometimes requires inhuman perseverance and unbreakable spirit!

At least we’re not stuck with recording and going back and forth in VHS tapes, right?
Thanks to technology, we make use of software that allows for recording through a replay buffer, so all it takes is a key press and we’ve captured that nasty bug on a short video file, proceeding to watch a few times until figuring out how to replicate it consistently and then jot it down step-by-step, which makes it much easier to be tackled by our code wizard.

We also make use of several debug data present on screen, including key press information, which really helps!

That will be all for this week friends, lets see what we can cook up for the next one, see you!

DevBlog 105 / Treats for the eyes and ears!

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Hi!

Remember us mentioning in the previous post that we’re cooking up some new weapons? Some of them are already modeled and ready to be pushed into the game, feel free to let us know what you think:

Pro-tip: poke the baddies with the pointy end!

Also, the small introductory area, that will serve as the starting point for Decay of Logos, has just been completed! It will provide some gameplay and a cutscene, allowing for players to be introduced to the game’s Lore and mechanics just before being set free to roam our world.

Next, we’re going to overhaul the initial terrain and environments, bringing in some of the workflow that we’ve adopted while setting up the more recent areas, since these zones are ancient in terms of their development stage. In practice, they’ll be tweaked to look better, play better and feel better!

The new HUD is also in the game in its entirety, and its a treat to the eyes while also providing an overall better user experience while navigating those menus!

New UI, simple and elegant!

On the more technical side of things, namely audio, we’re done with fully implementing FMOD, a sound engine used by many popular titles, both AAA and Indie, that melds quality with flexibility. Trust us, your ears will love it!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this update, tune-in next week at the same time for more Decay of Logos goodies, and have a great weekend!

DevBlog 104 / More weapons, more fun!

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Hello everyone, hope you’ve all had a pleasant week!

We’ve always intended to develop some new weapons to add even more variety to combat as soon as the major areas of our game were completed, and the team has decided that time has come! Our in-house carpenter has just been shifted to the smithy, where he’s currently tackling the following blueprints:

One of these weapons lets you be one step ahead of your enemies, guess which!

There has also been some further planning and discussion regarding our older animations, while also taking into account all the feedback we’ve received so far from testers, QA and players at PAX, which has lead us to start working on tweaking and improving some of them. Below you can see our old dodge animation first, and then the new one, which is still a work-in-progress, which provides better visual feedback to the action, and provides a better feel to combat:

Guilty feet have got no rhythm!

The new dodge animation, wip!

Last but not least, we kept the QA and bug squashing going, and every week that passes the game feels better and plays better, which is extremely gratifying and motivating!

That’s all for this week, have a pleasant weekend and stay tuned for more!

DevBlog 103 / Statues and visual story telling

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Hey!

This week the team has worked hard on finding and fixing the bugs that have been spotted during PAX. Simultaneously, all of the game’s audio has been converted into FMOD, which grants us greater control over how we want everything to sound like, with a much more flexible workflow.

On the art side, the development of the last area of the game is progressing nicely, with all the final meshes and textures already in place within Unity, awaiting the detail and polish passes.

The statues we have mentioned previously are also pretty much finished, and we can’t wait to start placing them around in the various locations of the game to really strengthen the visual storytelling.

Scary Statues and palace props.