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[phi6]

Ah thanks! I guess the whole controversy with D3 was that the series has always been a gritty one with a gothic feel, so it makes sense why so many fans were angered by the disco lighting. Hopefully the cartoony look I'm going for wont be the same :p

[antoniodamala]

neat

[Yngram]

I think your style is consistent and the quality is great. There will be plenty of people who will like the tone of your game.

I was also experiencing some slight performance issues while playing around with real-time shadows on point lights in Unity. This occurred in some fairly simple scenes too. I'll be interested to see how well your workarounds handle this. So far it all looks good.

[phi6]

According to the documentation for deferred rendering path, apparently it has nothing to do with the number of lights in your scene. So you could have 10 lights or 100 lights, it would make no difference. I think you have to look at how many pixels are lit that are rendered on the screen, so larger lights will render more slowly than many tiny lights. The problem appears to be worsened if lights overlap in any way, I guess that would mean multiple passes.

Correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm no expert at this stuff, I just go with what works best for me! But it makes sense, especially when I zoom out the lights become smaller and the framerate suddenly increases...

[Purcy]

This game is looking beautiful and I want it

[phi6]

I got a bit lazy to write about TinyKeep last week so today's post will cover both Week 9 and Week 10.

Manchester Game Jam

Has anyone here ever participated in a real-life game jam before? We have a fairly popular one where I live in Manchester, most of the time they are short 8-hour jams but occasionally they do 24/48 hour ones too that coincide with the Ludum Dare competitions.
 
As a little reward and a break away from the giant project that is TinyKeep (how ironic, it's not Tiny at all...), last Sunday I attended one. It's nice to be able to create and finish a project in the space of a few hours and a great way to meet new people too, which is so important as I spend most of my time at home working by myself. I personally find jams creatively refreshing and I returned home with new motivation to continue working on TinyKeep. Even Jim, our soundtrack composer attended. He and his other student friends came up with a very impressive technical demo.



Jey (an audio designer I teamed up with) hard at work! At a Game Jam it's really important to come fully prepared, you don't want to be spending hours reinventing the wheel. Jey was no exception, he had plenty of sample libraries to hand and easily banged out a whole suite of sound effects and 2 songs on the day. With programming it's the same, make sure you come fully prepared with pre-written frameworks and libraries so you can hit the ground running.

The theme this month was Cows. So of course, we present to you Moo-tation Arena! A 3D local multiplayer battle game, the goal is to ram into the back or side of your opponent's cow. Collect enough glowing green gems and you will moo-tate into a giant green cow and will be invincible for all of 10 seconds!



My first ever 3D model, I'm so proud! Not sure what Matthias would make of this one though... This one was quickly modelled in the GameDraw plugin for Unity, and was UV unwrapped and textured in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. At a Game Jam, speed is the key!

YouTube video:



Udderly bizarre!

Back to TinyKeep...

Oh yeah, this is the game I was supposed to be making right? Well, don't panic! The past couple of weeks I've been very busy finishing off the zoning system by implementing locked doors and keys, as well as adding different room types and furniture. Oh and the automap now reveals corridors and rooms as you explore the dungeon. It's beginning to look and play more like a game now!



Corridors now contain rubble and dead skeletons, requiring a bit of skill to manouveur around them as you flee from impending enemies. It's the details that count...



A low-caste dining "canteen" area



A high-caste banquet hall



Failing to open a door that is protected by a mysterious energy. I experimented a little on different ways of showing how a door is locked, from full-on 3D padlock models to hovering billboard padlock icons. In the end we settled with setting a gemstone in the door, glowing with the colour of the key that opens it. I think it's a nice way to reinforce colour coded zones. And it shows off the nice lighting as well!



Chests containing keys to (yes you guessed it!) open locked doors.



There will be 4 different magical gems for each of the zones in the game (Sapphire, Amethyst, Topaz and Emerald).

Thanks for taking the time to scroll through this huge list of images and screenshots! Here's a video showing very early footage of progress so far. Apologies in advance for the low quality, low framerate and lack of realtime shadows. I had to turn down all the effects to get my recording software to work nicely (my laptop is too slow for FRAPS to run in high quality). All in all this represents about 2 months of full time work on the game, so things are still a little rough around the edges.

YouTube video:

[antoniodamala]

YouTube video:

Loved the physicality of moving around and pushing everything in the environment.

[phi6]

Thanks! I agree that's awesome too, because the Unity engine definitely makes things like that easier to implement

[phi6]

Week 11 out of 52!

This means that I'm finally able to update the DevLog icon to 20%

Controls

This week I implemented sprint, sneak and run controls, and attempted to optimize them for the Xbox360 controller. Seems to work quite well, and it's fun plugging my laptop into the TV and pretend I'm playing TinyKeep on a console

This is the video I'm sending to my backers explaining the controls in a little detail.





The thing I'm excited about the most is being able to use the spare 9 buttons to control our Pocket Inventory system.

Soundtrack

Finally we have our first track for the TinyKeep OST, lovingly crafted by our new composer Will Bedford (aka 2-BYTE). Will is replacing Jim for the most part due to time commitments, but hopefully Jim will still be able to work on some of the minor tracks next year.

https://soundcloud.com/2-byte/tinykeep-main-theme

Milestone Build

On Saturday morning I nervously sent off my first "milestone" build to a small group of backers who pledged to be included in the focus group testing (I'm aiming for 1 build a month until we officially begin alpha testing). Not much gameplay at the moment but this one is mostly for performance testing. Thankfully everyone managed to hit 60FPS from a variety of high-end desktops to low-end laptops. Of course only the beastly machines were able to handle high quality shadows, resolutions above 1680x1050 and post-processing FX like SSAO, Bloom and HDR. So far, I'm pleased with the result!

This week I'll be focusing on combat controls which is going to be a big challenge to implement.

Sorry no lovely screenshots this week, but hopefully the video makes up for it!

[gambrinous]

Looks great so far, good job!

Will be interesting to see how you fare with the set 'release date' vs features etc

[phi6]

Thank you! Right now I'm hitting my weekly deadlines but I suspect it'll get increasingly tight as I add and tweak gameplay. I'm sure it will be fine, if not I'll just have to cut features now rather than later!

[phi6]

Not strictly part of the weekly write up but I had so much fun with implementing the weapons physics system yesterday I had to make this video:





On a more serious note, what you can see here demonstrates that all of our weapons have mass and velocity, and will affect physics enabled items as well as ragdolls. There is potential here for more dynamic physics-based combat, or possibly even localized damage.

[phi6]

Week 12 and Week 13

Another double week again on the old dev log!

I've mainly been focusing on getting our first monster up and running. After all we do need something living to test our powerful swords against. The way I see it, there are a couple of ways combat could work in a game like this:

1. Very simple hack and slash, button mashing style gameplay. Think Dynasty Warriors or something like Pocket RPG which has a very similar art style to TinyKeep. Lots of action, lots of particle effects, and lots of powerful "super" attacks.

2. Traditional Diablo-esque "dungeon crawler" combat mechanics, so point and click, skill cooldowns and the like.

For TinyKeep we definitely wanted to go down a more action oriented route but not in the way that you'd necessarily think. Looking at the "chibi" style characters, one would expect simple mindless controls with lots of colourful particle effects. But we think that given the intelligent behaviours that we have planned, it would make more sense to have equally intelligent combat. We want all of our fights to feel personal, tactile and responsive. And we definitely do not want button mashing. After much deliberation, we ended up going for more twitch based combat, much in the same vein as Skyrim and other similar third person RPGs. Each fight will consist of a quick exchange of slashes and blows, shield blocks and counter attacks.

Here's a video of an early test to show you what I mean.

(Try to ignore the complete lack of environmental awareness, this part of the AI has not yet been implemented so you will notice some mobs will get stuck behind various bits of furniture).





A fight requires skill, timing and sometimes a little bit of luck. It should feel responsive, tight, and above all fun!

On the other hand though, we don't want to build a complete sword fighting simulator. Combat should still feel easy to learn and be completely accessible. As we keep mentioning repeatedly, TinyKeep is all about intelligent emergent behaviours, so once we add multiple monsters of different types to the mix, the more depth we'll begin to see in the game.

[FuzzySlippers]

That looks really cool! I'm pretty tired of Diablo point and click so I'm excited to see a more interesting combat system in an action rpg.

[antoniodamala]

For TinyKeep we definitely wanted to go down a more action oriented route but not in the way that you'd necessarily think. Looking at the "chibi" style characters, one would expect simple mindless controls with lots of colourful particle effects. But we think that given the intelligent behaviours that we have planned, it would make more sense to have equally intelligent combat. We want all of our fights to feel personal, tactile and responsive. And we definitely do not want button mashing. After much deliberation, we ended up going for more twitch based combat, much in the same vein as Skyrim and other similar third person RPGs. Each fight will consist of a quick exchange of slashes and blows, shield blocks and counter attacks.

Yessssss. 

[phi6]

Glad you like! I'm trying really hard to prevent FX fatigue

[antoniodamala]

Glad you like! I'm trying really hard to prevent FX fatigue

I feel you man, FX is a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. 

[diegzumillo]

Not exactly my cup of tea but I'm loving this devlog. Such great progress!

[phi6]

Thank you! Having great fun writing the log and its very useful being able to track progress in terms of weeks

[phi6]

It's been almost 8 weeks since my last post! So much for trying to update you guys once a week! I guess the Christmas festivities and actually developing the game caught up with me...

Instead of writing a massive essay I'll just post a quick digest of what's been going on with TinyKeep, and then next week I can start again properly

Week 14
Porting my old AI code from here so that our Skeletons actually have some environmental awareness (wall/obstacle avoidance, strafing, separation etc... pretty much basic manouveres). There is no path finding used anywhere in the AI, all behaviours are completely reactive.

Week 15
After adding the above I realised performance went right down, so I had to optimize a whole bunch of things. Mainly getting my physics layers in shape so there's no unnecessary collision detection, and also turn the AI framerate right down. Graphics and Input need 60fps, but AI does not. I was able to turn the AI down to 15FPS before it became noticeable. That definitely freed up a whole lot of cycles!

Week 16/17/18
Christmas break! OK, I took quite a long time off but it really helped as I was pretty burned out on the project.

Week 19
Motivation returned! Code sanity check and refactoring time. Very important to do this after a long break, even if it is just to get used to the codebase again. Re-wrote the ragdollification code. I found that I had to instantiate all the individual bone colliders on the fly in order to get the best performance.

Week 20
Improving the chasing/pursuing AI. Implement breadcrumb navigation. Mobs can chase me around the map without direct line of sight now! And again NO path finding required...



Week 21
After some discussion, my friend Jey Kazi has finally agreed to take over TinyKeep's sound design. Work begins on replacing all the sounds in the game. Foley recorded. Armor movement sounds is actually recycling cans on a baking tray with a jumper wrapped around!

Gapless looping music player with playlist management implemented. Milestone #2 build sent out to pre-alpha testers. For fun, I decided to turn this build into a minigame, The Skeleton Slayer. This allows me to test a couple of very specific mechanics (combat + basic AI) without getting distracted by other unfinished features.

Skeletons can now jump over obstacles... this makes the game pretty scary to play now!



Teaser trailer released:




Other News
TinyKeep is confirmed to be exhibiting for the first time to the wider public and media at the brand new Update show (http://updateshow.co.uk), a festival for Indie game developers in the Manchester (UK) area. We're going to be setting up a stall and allowing attendees to play an early version of the game.

TinyKeep submitted to this year's Rezzed Leftfield Collection, fingers crossed!

Finally I am in talks with a publisher... we shall see how this goes!