Category Archives: WIP

DevBlog 58 / The Ancestor Soldier

Hi there!

This week we have finished the AI behavior of the Undead Soldier with the new animations, and started testing the group control with various enemies of this type, as well as with the big Ancestor Soldiers. The game model for the latter is already completed, as you can see in the GIF below. While exploring the battlefield area, if the player isn’t aware of the surroundings, several enemies can be triggered to attack. Mind the bodies lying around!

As always, various small bug fixes and small details were added to the code; a feature that was planned a long time ago was finally implemented – the dual weapon logic for the enemies. To put it simply, the enemies equipped with bows will now draw their swords for close combat situations, for example. Lastly, we’ve also added the Ancestor Soldier’s Mace and helmet to the game as wearable player items.

The Ancestor Soldier.

For the larger terrains we’re currently working on, the team has been trying out quick ways to achieve good results. The image below shows our simple pipeline to produce that kind of content, static environment parts. We first come up with a basic blockout of the scene, then we take it to Zbrush and refine the shapes and silhouettes, while keeping the model rough (since most details will be lost in the following step). Afterwards, the resulting mesh gets decimated, using Decimation Master. A little cleanup is often required, but after the UV’s are ready we bring the whole thing into Unity and start giving it life with Vertex Painting.

Workflow example.

DevBlog 56 / Combat improvements

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Hi there!

This week we worked on getting the new undead soldier ready for in-game logic and AI behaviors. Our animator is giving life to this undead soldier (no pun intended) and we can already show off a simple idle animation and the dynamic armor system in the gif below.

Undead Soldier turntable.

With this new enemy comes a new armor set and weapons. The player can farm this armor set by killing only these type of enemies, or by finding hidden chests with core armor pieces and weapons. With each full armor set the player has a small bonus in defense, so keep looking!
Lock-On Camera behavior and improved hit detection is something that we can now say is much better than in the PAX build. Sword/shield logic has been improved, much less bug prone, it’s really starting to feel on point.

Smooth kill.

Parry all the way.

We also added some audio details, for example if Ada has a full helmet armor, her voice is muffled. We love this type of small details, when possible/fast to implement, we add them right away.

DevBlog 55 / The Gate to the Battlefield

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Hi everyone!

In order to make it possible for us to develop interesting environmental puzzles more freely, a simple new feature was added to the Elk. Basically, the player can now command the Elk to stay in a precise location, which will be useful to overcome certain obstacles. After telling the Elk to stay put, it will start following the Girl again if she gets too far.

GET OVER HERE!!!

Meanwhile, another Ancestor Ruin has been placed in the game. This Gate marks the entrance to a very special area in this chapter, but going through it won’t be as straightforward as it might appear.

Alliance Gate.

The high poly model for the Ancestor Warrior is ready, and we’re sure these guys will prove to be quite a challenge. His weapon of choice is very menacing, and we’ll most likely show it in the next update.

High poly Undead Ancestor warrior.

We’ve also added specific idle and running animations that play whenever the Girl is adventuring with lowered stats, something that happens if she gets killed repeatedly. It was our intention to visually convey that the Girl is actually hurt and having more trouble fighting than when she is rested, and we thought a simple message prompt wouldn’t be clear enough. This is meant to work as a reminder of our “stats penalization” mechanic, so players understand why they are taking more damage from enemies and, in turn, dealing less damage to them.

Low stats run behavior.

DevBlog 52 / House in the woods

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Hello, everyone!

The new environments for Chapter 2 are evolving smoothly, and the art team has been hard at work producing all the required content to really develop unique locations for the players to explore. One of the current challenges has been to come up with a different kind of architecture to contrast with the stern Ancestor-built ruins of the previous areas. This time we went for a more “rural look”, loosely based on the Portuguese Traditional/Popular construction.

Using the Amplify Shader Editor and Vertex Painting, we’re able to quickly put together houses like the one shown below, while making them feel different from each other by making texture variations.

House in the woods.

Meanwhile, our master puppeteer has improved upon the existing running animation by tweaking the position of the arms and spine of the Girl while she is equipped with any type of weapon available. This way, the particular weights of both short and long swords, as well as maces, hammers or bows, really come through as the animation contextually adapts.

Upper torso bow base animation – blended with walking and running animations in real-time.

Run cycle variation.

DevBlog 51 / Performance, Performance, Performance

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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 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.