Author Archives: Andre Constantino

DevBlog 30 / The cave of NOPE!

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 29 / Wanderer NPC and companion interaction

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Hi everyone!

This week André was working on some minor improvements regarding the feeling of impact during combat. A pause of 2 frames was added to the attacker animation when a successful hit is landed, as well as HUD vibration whenever the player takes damage. With these two small additions, the feeling of causing/taking damage is even more noticeable. We already have hit animations, particles and gamepad vibration, but we think these small details are super important.

André also merged some sub state machines in the Animator for more fluid transitions and to simplify the Animator tree.

Tomé finished a new concept for an NPC that the player will frequently meet throughout the journey. He is a very enigmatic character that will often inform the player about lore, comment on the state of affairs and even open some shortcuts. Pichel is working right now on the high poly model for this character.

The Wanderer Concept.

Iuri and André are developing interactions between the Elk and the Girl. One of these consists in a “treat mechanic” which is being implemented. Basically, the player needs to feed the Elk some fruit in order to gain its trust and be able to mount it. We have always leaned towards the idea that the Elk is not a simple mount, and we hope that with details like this one we can make that show through.

Idle interaction with the Elk.

We intend to have this mechanic ready in a few weeks. Afterwards we will start populating the various locations with fruit props and control the zones where the player can mount freely.

DevBlog 28 / GDD updates and new zone study

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Hi there!

This week, Amplify Creations moved to a new office, so the Decay of Logos team had the chance to improve and complete the Game Design Document of the game, and do a review of the overall production plan. Some minor plot holes were covered and the history was enriched.

Everyone helped but some other things got done obviously. André fixed some pending bugs and he’s working on improving the elk control when mounted and implementing more of Iuri’s new animations.

Pichel is finishing a very important enemy, a very peculiar boss that will have a special video preview.

Tomé did a concept study for an upcoming new zone that we are preparing.

The Rift Windmills.

DevBlog 27 / Dynamics, NPCs and facial Animations

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Hi everyone!

André was busy adding some dynamic bones for our characters, and save a lot of time in animations. Small portions of the model like pony tails or small bags now don’t need to be animated so the animation pipeline is more straightforward.

Dynamic jiggle physics, exaggerated effect.

He also added a first version of Audio Occlusion. In practice, the sound is occluded by a low pass filter and the volume is decreased when not in sight of the audio listener. This leads to a more immersive experience, since the player will be able to notice when a sound comes from inside a building or from the outside.

Iuri this week improved the main character’s RIG, imbuing her with a lot more feeling and life. Now we feel like we’re able to convey emotions more easily, which helps a lot with storytelling.

New facial animations.

Pichel is currently working on a very important character, which we will show further down the road. He recently finished up an NPC, a prisioner, and you can check below how the model looks in-game.

Prisoner NPC.

Also check it out our newest WIP gameplay trailer:

DevBlog 26 / A Mount and Blade

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Hi there!

Iuri has been working on more animations this week and he’s showing a little bit of the process:

“For this animation I didn’t just want to make a generic mount, I wanted to portray the relationship between the two characters, as well as the agility of the main character and kindness of the elk. I started by exploring some poses that would evoke what I wanted to transmit. I analysed videos as well as images.

My first approach on this stage is trying to get the poses that describe the movement in place, I check if the silhouette of the pose is working for the camera view as well in other perspectives, the line of action, twinings, balance, etc. On a second approach to blocking I start to work on timing and improve on some poses, I also add breakdowns until I have all the necessary poses. Going on through spline after having to make some iterations to the animation, I work on timings, ins and outs of poses, arcs, exaggeration, movement resistance, which part is leading the action and which parts are following, etc.

Having arrived at the polish phase I improve the arcs, spacing, overlapping, animation curves, pops and other minor adjustments.”

In the meantime, Tomé decided to take a break from working on the swamp scene (after weeks of only focusing on that) and started developing new weapons. These will mostly be hidden in chests and are meant to work as rewards for players who carefully explore each location of the game.

New weapons concepts.

At the character art department, Pichel is doing retopology and UVs for the new character we mentioned last time, which will be shown in the next devblog update.

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.

DevBlog 24 / Working on new areas

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Hi there!

Today we are showing you a new area of the game featuring a very different mood from the previous ones. We want the player to experience very diverse atmospheres along the journey, so we are crafting locations with varied terrain topology, distinct architecture and enemies with a different feel.

In this next area the player will be able to explore a sprawling swamp. Mysterious ancient ruins, half sunken into the earth, hide rewarding secrets but also great peril. You can check the screenshots below to see how the work on this location is progressing. Keep aware that they are very WIP with no final lighting nor final textures.

WIP temporary lighting and textures.

Pichel is working on new characters that will be shown later. André had the tedious task of preparing the UI and other text for localization and also implemented a volumetric light effect.

DevBlog 23 / Responsiveness

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Hi everyone!

This week’s devblog will be more technical. We will talk about some tests we made on the subject of responsiveness in Decay of Logos. Although this game is not a hack’n’slash, with very tight controls in favor of gameplay, we do take this component into consideration. It has slow paced attacks, depending on weapon classes, but still we are targeting for a fast responsiveness in the controls. In the test shown below, the frame when the anticipation of the animation kicks in will be the end frame measured, and the first will be the frame after the button is pressed. The game was running at 60fps and the video recorded at 60fps. The monitor has a 6ms (Gray to Gray) response time.

You can see that after the button is pressed it takes about 4 frames for the animation to start, and about 10 frames for the actual damage to be dealt (when the trail is visible, damage can be applied). So it’s about 66ms of input lag and 166ms of delay before damage is applied.

For comparison, we measured and made exactly the same test with Dark Souls, using the same machine, with DsFix (for running at 60fps) recorded at 60fps. The results were: 3 frames for input lag, and about 18 frames for actual damage be done. It’s about 50ms of input lag and 316 ms of delay.

We choose a short sword in Dark Souls and a short sword equivalent (our Carved Sword) in Decay of Logos for a more fair comparison.

We also compared the dodge responsiveness (jump back). Again we used the same principles as above.

On Decay of Logos we get about 4 frames (66ms) again of input lag and about 16 frames (233ms). In Dark Souls we get 4 frames (66ms) of input lag and about 19 frames (316ms) until we’re able to perform the next jump.

Another way of measuring this type of things is by attaching a led light internally in the controller and putting it next to the screen for a more precise moment of the given input.

André also made changes in some transitions and blends in animation, which improved significantly the delay felt during combat.

Slowed down video.

More information about this subject, the influences of CPU Logic, Rendering and Input lag can be found here: Programming Responsiveness

DevBlog 22 / Armor props and screenshots

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Hi there!

This week Tomé used the highpoly model from the wooden enemies to generate a bark armor set which can be looted from their corpses or found randomly in chests. Equipping the whole set gives the player bonus physical or elemental defense points. We aren’t planning to produce a very large number of armor sets due to our current manpower, but nevertheless some combinations are very interesting in terms of gains in stats.

The Bark Armor Set

André recently improved a lot the responsiveness in the animations and feel of the attacks, something he’s been meaning to do for a long time. He has also been tweaking the streaming logic so the player can enjoy a seamless journey.

Pichel was working hard to create an additional layer of detail for the ground textures. This is our first detail pass, and later we intend to pick up where we left off and add even more asset variety, whether it be new props, particles or textures.

Indoor Battles

Forest mood

Showing the discovery

DevBlog 21 / World and HUD Improvements

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Hey everyone!

This week we all invested some time in the first portion of the game, making a lot of tweaks and populating every space with the assets we produced so far. The shots below show how much more alive the game feels now following this collective effort.

Lumberjack hut area and companion.

The old Temple

One of the things that is still in a clear “wip” state is the texture of the hills and cliffs that limit the areas of the game. There was actually an unfortunate setback in our process – Pichel had made a lot of progress in texturing when suddenly Mari crashed and a lot of work was lost, since it somehow corrupted the backup files. But nevertheless we are back on track.

Long journey

André worked on improving a bunch of mechanics, improving the “ambush” feature, the enemies’ awareness system, and updated the HUD alongside Tomé, using new graphic elements they designed together.

New UI elements

We also got a lot of new elk animations from Iuri that really help making it look livelier. Ricardo also jumped in to assist the team with the general lighting of the game.

The Aqueduct