The Amplify Creations’ team hopes everyone had a blast during the winter break! This week we are back at full power, picking up where we left off. The “Rift Windmills” area is shaping up, and currently André is working on the tutorial/intro scene, where the player is introduced to a small background of the story and the first meeting between the Girl and the Elk. Like we have mentioned before, the game will feature more visual storytelling rather than an exposition narrative, so expect this tutorial/intro to have some small cutscenes but also gameplay.
Windmill materiality concept exploration.
Rocky shapes sketch for the “Rift Windmills” area.
The Kid is currently being animated, and we really want his carefree attitude to come through. This is a simple animation test to show of the cloth dynamics.
The Kid Test Animation.
Next week we will be working on the final chapter boss battle and event.
Remember the concept art for the Kid we have shown a few posts ago? We have finally wrapped up the model and textures for that character, and he is ready to be brought to life by our animator!
In-game model of the Kid.
On the environment art side of things, we have started to work on a new zone of the game, which is a canyon-esque area with lots of windmills. Here is a mood and shape concept piece that is meant to guide us while we produce and put together all the various new elements that will compose the scene.
Concept art for the new canyon area.
Comic Con Portugal was a blast! Lots of feedback and people testing and enjoying the game. We will definitely be back next year. For those who did not get a chance to play, be sure to keep an eye out for future updates.
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.
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.
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.
This week André returned from vacation and is back in action, so we got some cool things to show besides new art and props!
He made some changes in how healthbars behave on screen (something he wanted to do for some time), they are now screen dependent instead of world dependent. Also, he improved the idle combat animations and behavior when the player has no weapons equipped. Only kicks and punches can save you in this situation.
Working alongside Iuri, they gave more life to the Elk. With some spine IKs system, ground adaptation makes the animal feel more real.
It’s still in WIP state (still doesn’t have the new Fur), we need more animations to make it like we want, but for now we are really liking the feel.
Some Elk action over here
Ricardo lent us a hand and did some awesome shader work to “fire up” the look of the wooden enemies we’ve shown in previous posts.
How’d it get burned?!
Instead of baking the burnt effect directly into textures, the shader allows for countless dynamic and randomized burnt variations. It’s a great way to empower artist and reduce production times.
Burnt variations.
Picking up where he left off last week, Tomé worked on visually improving a huge temple ruin that players will get to explore in the first area of the game. Here’s how it’s currently looking:
Hey, guys, Tomé here! Since André and Pichel are currently enjoying some well-deserved vacation time, only Iuri and I got some stuff to show you this week.
I worked on another stone built prop, a “Tempietto”. Like in previous assets we developed, this monument is composed of separate parts that can be hidden or relocated in order to organize different ruin compositions.
The Tempietto.
Remember the Lumberjack fellow we’ve shown before? I started exploring how his house could look like in the game. It’s pretty big. Inside there will be a few surprises for curious adventurers!
An early concept for the Lumberjack’s house
Finally, I spent some time doing an overhaul of the modular stone building kit we have. I wasn’t too happy about the tileable textures I had developed before, so I made new ones, and added a couple of new props that hopefully help these structures start to feel like ancient ruins. You can see how the whole thing’s progressing below.
Before and after the visual upgrade.
From our animation specialist, we got the polished version of the walk cycle featured in the last post, and a brand new trot animation for the Elk!
This week André helped the art team by doing some improved scenery meshes from the blocking mesh for the underground passage in the swamp zone (a new area we are working on). André also worked in something he wanted to do for some time, foliage dithering fading.
Dithering per vertex when the camera is too close .
André also did the same effect but per object when characters get too close to the camera.
A reworked streaming logic is in the works, more fluid and efficient logic that can’t be noticed even if the player has a HDD disc drive (or for consoles).
The new model of the Elk is starting to come alive! Iuri began skinning and animating the Elk, and we hope to show gameplay with the new model in a near future. For now we have a very dynamic walk cycle:
The new WIP walk cycle.
Tomé has been producing some more tree models to spread around the game environments, specially dead trees for the swamp area we are working on. He also developed a few modular stone pavement groups that can be combined together to form roads.
New trees for various new zones.
Pichel made a lot of progress with the Elk model, and he has been investing a lot of time into making the fur work with our visual style. You can see how it’s coming along in the image below.
Last weekend we showcased the game to some developers and players and some new bugs were found as expected. Some we already knew about and others were simply created when André was doing the combat demo scene we’ve shown. First thing Andre did in the beginning of the week was to fix these bugs and tweak the combat (feedback was very important). Seeing players playing and looking at what they do with the controller is very enlightening for improving small nuances in gameplay and making things more intuitive. This is a process that we intend to repeat in ever showcase we’ll do.
Tomé worked on some props this week. One of them is a very important prop – it’s basically a resting spot where one of our mechanics takes place. When the player uses it in order to recover, an ambush can randomly occur during the night while sleeping.
The various parts of this prop can be rotated or hidden to achieve different compositions and avoid repetition.
Meanwhile, Pichel is hard at work handcrafting the mystical Elk’s textures and experimenting with fur. He already finished the maps for the saddle, as you can see in the image below.
He also finished the High Poly of one of the NPCs that can be encountered in the beginning of the game. We will talk about him and the others NPC’s soon in a dedicated devblog.
We apologize for not posting an update last Friday, we were away for the entire weekend showcasing our game at ISMAI Legends, an event organized by the fine folks at ISMAI, a technology centric Portuguese University. The event hosted an E-Sports and a small GameDev gathering with varied talks and interesting guests. Not only did we have the chance to play some awesome games we also set up our own playtest area with a fully playable combat showcase area.
Feedback is awesome!
It was a great experience, we received loads of feedback that will definitely allow us to improve the final game. We are very happy with the results, the game was stable, the players had fun playing it and were mostly comfortable with the intuitive controls; those that were not provided valuable feedback on how to improve it. We took note of the issues found, as with any game in development there were a couple of animation and input problems regarding interactive objects, although the combat and navigation is already pretty cool we will definitely improve it in the next couple of builds.
Sprint like you mean it.
Some issues were pretty weird, the kind of problems that only show up when you are showing your game to a large crowd such as the sudden mini-boss multiplication bug seen bellow. We never encountered anything quite like i but it was pretty fun seeing players trying to fight them.
This was also the first time we showed off our game without restrictions, we are not quite ready to start posting gameplay videos here but we are getting very close. We also had the chance to give a talk about our game development process, it was a short but colorful talk about the game and the products made by Amplify Creations.
Andre describing how little we have shown of the game world.
Thank you for reading, don’t forget to check out our new blog post on Friday, we have some new cool stuff to show you.
