UPDATE: 2019 August 15th - It hasn't been easy and it took nearly a decade but Hardland is finally coming out in a couple of weeks! "His Wooden Majesty will live forever. Even if he dies, he'll grow again. Hardland will live forever too, because our kingdom is our king. It's easier to say than to believe.
When you have an open wound, you stitch it closed. When you're sick, you take your medicine. We can't let Hardland die and hope it grows again. Everything is alive now. Everything is telling us something. We just have to listen, and we have to take action. Even if it's hard. Even if it demands sacrifice.
We might fail, but that's all right. Anyone who dream can be a knight."- Lady Capra, The Hidden Journal
For the past two years we've worked with Chandler Groover on the story.
He's written about a novel's worth of text for the game.
Even the common "enemies" have things to say that tie into the greater story:
The game went through several phases and the final form is a lot closer to heavily story driven games such as Quest for Glory than procedurally generated games like Sword of Fargoal, No Man's Sky or Dwarf Fortress.
----- OLD POST ---------- OLD POST -----Hardland is an upcoming open-world action adventure RPG game. We want to make it a place full of characters and creatures each with their own wants, needs and ways of working. Everything, from the creation of the world to the behavior of animals, operates by their own set of rules. This makes each play experience unique. We don't want to tell the player a story - we want the player to tell their own.
Hardland is sort of a spiritual successor to Minigore and it's a dream project we've wanted to do for a long time!
Hires screenshot:
http://www.mountainsheep.net/tigsource/Hardland-Screenshot-01.pngHires screenshot:
http://www.mountainsheep.net/tigsource/Hardland-Screenshot-02.pngThe fully destructible tile based world is inspired by the likes of Minecraft, XCOM (original) and Voxelstein 3d - I personally feel like games lost plenty of gameplay opportunities when they started doing static environments with everything baked in "Damn, I can't shoot through this candle because otherwise the baked candle shadow will look wrong!". And so you as a developer decide that candles are indestructible
Heck, we're guilty of that with Minigore as well!
Also shouldn't forget Super Mario 3d World for it’s tactile feel and Sword of Fargoal for it’s great use of random generation.
Minecraft inspired the modding support. Modding is a big thing for us and one of the reasons we're targeting the PC platform first. With Bike Baron we’ve had 600 000 user levels created by users and it will be awesome to see what people can manage to create for Hardland.
This is a small glimpse at our design process, we all work in the same room so the most recent design lives in the daily conversations. I don't believe in 1000 page design bibles because it's nearly impossible to keep them up to date. I prefer to do some quick illustrations to communicate the spirit of the game and possibly fun scenarios (can't be 100% sure it's fun until you've implemented it):
Here's a short breakdown of the asset creation process, let's say we want to create a fox character.
1. Pixel art concept is drawn in front view to make the next step easier.
2. Copy and paste the pixel art into Qubicle Constructor and extrude it as a 3d volume.
Then define the main forms and split the model so you've got separate head, legs, body and tail.
3. Import the voxel asset into Blender. Add bevel modifier and cast modifier.
At this point it's good to animate the basic moves: Idle, walk, run, attack, block, take damage, death.
TEST THE MODEL IN THE ACTUAL GAME, IF IT’S FUN AND WORKS PROCEED TO THE NEXT STEP.
4. You now have a better idea what worked well and what didn't on that particular character.
It's time to paint the concept art for the final version.
5. This is how the final model looks like in the game.
It was modeled in Blender and Zbrush and textured in Photoshop.
To improve iteration times the game has two types of content: prototype content and final content.
Prototype content lets us test radically different gameplay with minimum effort.
Hires render:
http://www.mountainsheep.net/tigsource/Workflow-Render-01.pngTextures, models, gameplay data and shaders can be changed while the game is running.
We have our own data format which is a bit like JSON with less syntax and support for comments.
Hires screenshot:
http://www.mountainsheep.net/tigsource/Modding-Screenshot-01.pngShouldn't be too hard to make a modern warfare mod
There's lots of graphics technology in this game which make even simple low res assets look cool, that Harrier fighter jet model is from our 2008 PSP game.
Screen-space reflections, Screen-space shadows, SSAO just to name a few of the techniques. Our graphics programmer wizard Kalle can explain these in more detail if anyone wants to know how they're implemented.
We'll soon start looking for testers for the first playable technology preview.