Author Archives: Andre Constantino

DevBlog 51 / Performance, Performance, Performance

Hi everyone!

A short devlog this week, ’cause the team is away during Easter. Chapter 2 is going great in terms of art, in the next devblog we will show you some cool screenshots and a glimpse of what the central hub village could look like.
Meanwhile, Andre did a complete revamp of the logic AI system. We were aware of some performance issues that were aggravated with the constant additional complexity growth of the AI. Sometimes, the best way to fix something is to scratch what you have and start again. Obviously a lot of states were recycled, but it’s a different approach in AI handling. In the gif below, using the old AI logic, we could hit an outrageous 25ms time of processing time, now it’s around 1ms. The problem used to happen if the build ran for long periods of time with various AI agents active.

Overcrowded combat – DEBUG MODE not actual gameplay.

Until next week, have a great Easter!

DevBlog 50 / Our 50th blog post!

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Hi there!

Once again, we are working hard on polishing a lot of aspects of the gameplay and fixing bugs. The camera collision was improved when in small spaces, mounting and unmounting was also tuned and the transitions are much more fluid. Like we’ve shown in the previous post, our animator is replacing all the placeholder animations, and this week it was time to replace the ladder climbing animations.

We are also working on a Lore driven collectible which we are calling “Echoes”. They basically consist of recorded memories of certain characters. As the player finds them throughout the world, these Echoes will be made available in a specific tab within the inventory.

The cursed soldier model is “game-ready”, and this is the version you can see in case the enemy has no armor equipped. Like in the first chapter, we have a dynamic armor placement which makes the enemies feel different in every encounter. This time around we will also add a destroyable armor mechanic – each piece will be destroyed as the player keeps striking.

Cursed soldier In-Game model (No armor).

Here is the concept of the fully armored cursed soldier. This armor set can be looted from the enemies and equipped by the Girl.

The full armor version of the cursed soldier.

Climbing ladders new animations.

DevBlog 49 / Here comes a new challenger!

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Hi everyone!

This week a lot of small tweaks, balancing and gameplay polishing was done: the stamina behavior was improved (now it takes a while before the stamina is regained after it was completely drained), the parry detection is more efficient, as well as the hit detection on enemies. Changing targets when locked is now more intuitive and the player can choose easily what target they want to attack.

Since it was clear that being immediately expelled from the Elk’s back while near enemies was frustrating for the players, a small change was made in the Elk’s stress behavior so that now the stress simply increases much faster instead, making the experience of riding more manageable.

Direct swap items on the Elk’s inventory is now possible, so there’s no need for the poor design decision of dropping the item and then picking it up again.

In the art department, the work on the new enemy is advancing smoothly. Here is HighPoly model:

Cursed soldier Highpoly.

We are also coming up with a new foe for the Girl to fight with, a big armored Ancestor that will require careful planning in order to be brought down.

Ancestor Soldier.

Meanwhile, we also continue to replace old animations with fresh ones, such as this:

Pushing unlocked doors.

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 46 / Road to PAX

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Hi there!

We’ve been having a very busy week – preparing everything for PAX, making posters, testing, bug fixing and adding new improved material.
New fresh sounds were introduced, and we hope the american audience will be able to notice them 😛

Final look of the current buildings.

Mostly it has been all about polishing what we’ve got. Small additions like flag vertex animation and candles’ behavior, or the placement of simple props laid out strategically allow us to enhance the mood and fine tune the visual storytelling.

Cool illumination effects with particles.

This is a small devblog post, there are way too many last minute things to do right now!

The flag says it all.

Wish us luck! Next week we’ll write about our experience at PAX.

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 43 / Animation improvements

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Hi everyone!

This week various changes were made in the AI department, from simple enemies to mini bosses, and their behaviors have been polished. Also, some bugs that still persisted since our last showcase at Comic Con were finally fixed. Plus, we’ve added a simple stress meter that shows up while riding so players can tell for how much longer they can mount the Elk before needing to feed it some berries.

Our animator did a lot of new animations for our enemy models and gave them the appropriate mood and feeling. He’s constantly working on custom ones to replace the old placeholder animations that we still have in the project. Additionally, different weights are now assigned to each foe as they are instantiated, so that every enemy acquires a stronger sense of individuality. Here are the various forms of transformation of this type of enemies.

Hey! I’m walking here!

We’ve also been working on an important event that takes place in the final area of Chapter One – the meeting with the Kid. The player will be able to help him escape from the cage he is trapped in, eventually learning more about his origin as the journey continues.

Please save me.

Can I axe you a question?

DevBlog 42 / Opening new paths

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Hi there!

Since the beginning, one of our goals has been to intuitively make the player realize it is best to keep his four-legged companion by his side, without leaving it behind. In that sense, opening paths to make sure both the Girl and the Elk can travel together on this long journey is always an achievement!
Development wise, we are approaching the end of Chapter One (the first Act has two Chapters) and a big battle draws near, as well as some story reveals.

Lowering the bridge.

We have been working hard in this final zone, even though we haven’t shown much of it yet. We wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun. Nevertheless, here is a sneak peak of a very special weapon that foreshadows an epic encounter the player will have.

A strange sword.

The end of the first Chapter will conclude the “wood theme”, which has been predominant up to this point. The following Chapter will be very different, with a more “medieval-esque” feeling. Stay tuned for the next devblogs!

DevBlog 41 / I can see my house from here!

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Hi everyone!

Once again, part of the team was working on the first Prince’s boss battle, polishing moves, balancing and adding more animations so the battle feels epic.
Although magic and elemental effects were only supposed to be introduced at a later stage of the game (once the player learns the appropriate skills from an NPC) one of the attacks of this boss required the implementation of the “paralyze” stat. We opted to use this nomenclature because it can be used in every situation in which the player temporarily loses control of the character (such as “petrify”, “woodify”, etc).
Similarly, a placeholder radial bar (around the weapon icon), indicating the current equipped weapon’s durability was added. Before, this very important info was buried in the inventory stat tab.

Paralyze and Durability bar.

That’s a big fall.

We really wanted the Rift Windmills’ area to have its own particular mood and identity, and in that regard the skybox plays a big role. With this in mind, we came up with a brand new sky with some dramatic clouds, as well as silhouetted mountains in the distance. Now the scene looks a lot more unique and consistent.

The swamp castle view from the rift windmills.