We’re happy to announce that we’re bringing Decay of Logos to gamescom 2018, together with our publisher Rising Star Games! The event will be hosted in Cologne, Germany, more specifically at the Koelnmesse exhibition center, from the 22nd to the 25th of August.
Meet us there!
We would love to meet you and have you check out our game, we’ve added a whole lot of polish and content to the Decay of Logos show build that was showcased in Unite Berlin so, even if you already had a chance to play the game before, we’re confident that you’ll be surprised with how much things have changed!
You can find us at the Rising Star Games room 10-11, Koch/Deep Silver, Halle 4.2, Stand D021-B020, Messeplatz 1.
The Blacksmith’s workshop.
Regarding this week’s progress, the focus was mostly on the console ports, together with some further polishing and QA for the aforementioned build. A lot of progress was made in the Nintendo Switch and PS4 versions, and the XBOX One version will definitely be focused later on.
The mysterious bard.
We’re also sharing some screenshots from the latest build, enjoy!
Water you doing there?
Thank you for reading, we hope that you can visit our booth and have the opportunity to check out our game, have a great weekend!
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.
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:
This week we’re starting you off with a little treat, a comparison of the old version of the game with the new one!
Let the old be new again!
We’ve also been having a whole lot of fun with the new combat animations, both in their conceptualization and in the in-game testing!
They truly add a whole different feel to combat, putting additional emphasis on the weight of the weapons and the effort put into each specific attack, also allowing for better feedback when it comes to executing the combos. Also, we’re about half-way done with them!
Together with the combat animations, the logic for the Knuckle and Spear weapon classes has been implemented, both being new weapon types that have been discussed before and will definitely provide more options and variety on how to keep baddies at bay.
The canyons sure seem inviting!
The cutscenes are also continuously being refined, we really want them to convey all the emotions and personalities of our NPCs and scenarios, so we’ll keep on tweaking them until we believe they’re perfect.
Always mind your surroundings!
Last but not least, additional props have been created to embellish our world, as the new windows and shrubberies were a good starting point but not nearly enough, so here are some of the latest additions that are specific for caves and the likes, spider webs and roots!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this post, see you next friday!
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!
…the team that went to Unite Berlin 2018, that is! And we have some photos and information to share regarding the event, our booths and all the feedback and love we’ve got from the community!
A panoramic view of the event area, where hundreds of visitors and developers gathered!
The event area was HUGE, with so many people attending that our booths were busy at nearly all times, which was amazing! As we’ve stated in a previous post, we had two booths in the event, one for the Amplify Creations tech, and another one for Decay of Logos which, as some of you already know, uses all of our assets.
The Amplify Creations booth revealing the new Impostor Editor, featuring our talented Developers Paulo and Ricardo!
In the tech booth, we had Paulo and Ricardo, two of our developers, showcasing our upcoming asset Amplify Impostor Editor, while also providing information regarding the award winning Amplify Shader Editor to all those who were also interested. We were overwhelmed with the excitement of the many attendees and developers who were interested in our new tool, and it was also a pleasure meeting so many people whom we’ve already been in touch with through forums and email!
The Decay of Logos booth, featuring charismatic Hugo from Support and QA!
In the Decay of Logos booth, we had Hugo from Support and QA and the other Ricardo, Producer and Developer Relations at Amplify Creations, spreading the good word about our passion project! We were extremely pleased to see how solid the show build performed, and gathered plenty of useful data that will be invaluable for the polish and balancing phase, that we’re currently on.
The showbuild consisted of two areas from the main game, where we’ve tried to fit as much variation as possible, the first one with the initial enemies that you will fight in the initial areas of the game, and the second one with advanced enemies that you only meet about 4 hours in.
Dozens of gamers and developers played the game, and most were kind enough to share their opinion regarding the experience they’ve had!
Thankfully, most enjoyed the visuals, the world and the character design. While many also enjoyed our simple approach to character progression and combat system, it came to our attention that we still need to tweak how the difficulty scales in the show build, and we will definitely be making it more balanced for the upcoming Gamescom event!
All in all, it was a very positive experience and we were delighted to meet so many people throughout the three days of the event and to have gathered so much valuable feedback!
Also, it was also a pleasure to be next to our publisher, Rising Star Games, that was there to showcase Trailblazers, check them out!
See you next friday for another blog post, and thank you for reading!
While our teammates from the tech side of Amplify were busy showcasing our products at Unite Berlin, the rest of us kept working on the game… So we do have some goodies to show!
To start things off, here are some shots from the last area of the game. The Palace is still work in progress, but we feel like we can already offer some sneak peeks.
Imponent King Statue !
The calm before the storm…
The process of revamping the terrain meshes is pretty much complete. Below you can see a “before/after” comparison – we added more geometry to help with both the silhouette and the vertex painting.
Terrain mesh revamp!
Meanwhile, the last cutscene is finally in game, featuring perfect integration with gameplay. Also, the intro of the game is going very well – it’s a mix of a cutscene and gameplay.
Next week we will recap the Unite Berlin experience, have a great week everyone!
This year we’re going to be present in Unite Berlin with two booths, one for Decay of Logos and another one for our Amplify Creations gamedev tech, so you’ll have a chance of trying out the game AND also to know more about our products!
Visit us there!
If you have the opportunity, come and visit us to meet the developers and play our game, we will definitely love to meet some more of our community members and fans!
Regarding this week’s progress, we have started working on using our newest asset within our game – Amplify Impostor Editor, which has already been submitted and is going to hit the Asset Store VERY soon.
We’re going to be using it in great scale in objects like bushes, trees and other small props, in order to achieve a considerable performance boost without compromising the user experience – you won’t even know they’re there!
New Bushes and Impostors LODs!
In addition, this is also extremely powerful for further optimizing our console ports, so we’re very excited to test the results.
We’ve also continued polishing textures and animations, doing Q&A runs and fixing bugs, so every day that passes the game matures into our vision!
To those who are visiting us at Unite Berlin, looking forward to meeting you soon!
We’re here for another weekly devblog post, this time with some fresh, new screenshots to share, and some additional information regarding our progress!
Hoarders, rejoice!
We’ve finished adding some additional content and logic to the village, such as the bottomless well, that you can see in the screenshot above, which allows you to stash all the goods you find without any limits.
Perfect for anyone who, like us, loves to hoard stuff!
Look how cozy he is now!
The NPCs’ positioning has been adjusted, and they will show up as you meet and interact with them during your adventure, and the village’s mood will be changing as you progress in your quest for the truth.
We’ve also continued to work on polishing the game, adding some further detail to the characters’ textures and animations while also reworking the terrain for certain areas, as we’ve mentioned in a previous post.
And now for something completely different!
We’re sharing a sample of the music that’s being worked on for the village, which will also change dynamically throughout the game, let us know how you feel about it, all feedback is welcome!
Next week, we’ll do another extensive bug fixing run with all the issues and nitpicks we’ve found during out daily QA sessions, which have been both fun and gratifying as we see the game shape up to our expectations!
We’re back from the Euro Gamer – Portugal Summer Fest, and we brought something back with us!
We won our first award!
And even though we’re really happy and humbled to have won the Best Portuguese Game award, what really made our day was both the warm reception and all the wonderful feedback we’ve got from all the gamers that stopped by our booth! Our show build had some further polish and tweaks since the Pax East show, and we were really pleased with the results.
Here’s a panoramic picture from the Arena where the event took place:
Are you not entertained!?
And another one, this time from our booth:
The booth where magic happened!
Regarding this week’s development progress, the final cutscene has been completed but, unfortunately, we can’t really share any footage as it would… you know, spoil the ending! The item descriptions that were missing are also being written, taking place of all the placeholder text that we had, and the old ones are being overhauled as well.
Soon we’ll be tackling the new combat animations, resulting into more animated gifs and gameplay that we’ll definitely share with all of you, so stay tuned!
