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[JamesBroderick]

Hello everyone! <3

A bit of an introduction...

This is my first post on this site after lurking for quite a while and I wanted to dive straight in! Me and my friend Amber Jamieson have been working on this new project for a short while that we plan to keep working on in the long term in our spare time. Currently we are doing a Masters Degree after studying Game Art for 3 years at De Montfort University in Leicester.

We have worked on a fair few projects with each other in the past, our largest so far being our final major project at uni called 'Guiding Sprites', which was intended as a small art-focused playable demo.

In terms of roles, I mostly deal with the technical half of what we make, which at the moment is mainly gameplay scripting using blueprints inside Unreal Engine. Amber is responsible for the artistic side of the project, and handles most of the direction  over that as well as creating all the 3d models and the main character model.

“The real world filtered by our sensory input (sight, hearing, touch, etc.). The term is used not as a filter, but as the mental construct of the world as it is believed to be by an individual, apart from actual reality.”

PHANERON is a narrative-focused, exploration based puzzle game. As the player your goal is to piece together your broken memories by journeying through a surreal dream land.

PHANERON explores the idea of perception; how one person might see the world in a completely different way. The term “Phaneron” itself means the reality we can perceive through our senses; how can we know the reality we perceive to be truly real?

You play as Phe, a young curious teen who has suddenly woken up inside this world, with nowhere else to go apart from through the one significant landmark in the landscape: An ominous, gigantic tower.



The tower itself represents the different 5 stages of grief: each stage is represented by a new section of the tower that has a different theme and new types of gameplay obstacles. Phe progresses up the tower to overcome their grief over the loss of their friend.

To reach a new act the player must solve the environment puzzles in the current area to gain entry to special magical doors, through these doors are glimpses into Phe's past, focusing around memories of their friend. This will aid to progress the story as well as hint at subtle connections between this dream world and the real world that Phe lived in.

A lot of the narrative details are far from being fleshed out yet, will update this more as we have it, once gameplay the gameplay is a lot more solid!


Core gameplay


The gameplay is a third person puzzle game, upon entering the tower Phe gains the ability to start shifting the dreamscape to their liking by using a beam of light projecting from their hands, this involves interacting with the sliding tile mechanisms, solving them in order to gain access to new areas of the tower.

The puzzle mechanics are very simple at the moment, barely scratched the surface of putting all the fun brainbending stuff in that we want to do. Currently the core mechanic of sliding tiles around is implemented, including basic logic and rules which the player must figure out. Tiles can slide one tile at time, across certain other types of surface that you will figure out during the game. To activate the next puzzle you must slide the movable tile onto an end tile of matching colour or shape.



Gradually I am implementing more rules like multiple output tiles that lead to different puzzles or do different functions, surface types that block tiles of certain colour or shape and moving entire board sections around.

I watched a video of Jonathan Blow talking about he tries to create a situation whilst designing his games that the rules come more naturally after iterating on a base mechanical idea, to create an environment where the game seems to design itself to a degree. This basically means exploring every possible way to use a singular mechanic, so I want to look into how the third person camera could help in creating some unusual puzzle designs, how gravity could affect the tile movements, maybe if you turn the surface the tiles are on gravity acts on the tiles and they drop off the bottom? Or maybe at some point there would be surface types or tiles that would ignore the grid movement completely. These are all things we will explore while designing each section.


The tower and art style


The art style of Phaneron comes from a range of inspirations including Surrealist art like those by artist Jacek Yerka and Jim Warren as well as real life inspirations; for example, locations like Brean Down in Somerset.
A major theme of Phaneron is contrast between what is real and what isn’t and where the lines between the two can blur. Because of this the dream world in this game will represent a mish-mash of locations, similar to how dreams feel when you walk around a corner and end up at somewhere completely different.

The focal point of the game is the tower itself, the tower has 5 layers for each stage of grief, each with it's own different look and feel. The tower is an impossible structure, dream-like in it's construction. Essentially an Eldritch location: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EldritchLocation

Currently the exterior of the tower is less designed as we want to focus on getting the layout of interior level design as figured out as possible first, so Amber is working on some basic art stuff there. Here is a basic moodboard detailing what we are going for in each key section of the game (better off looking at it full res so I posted a link instead.)

• Brean Down, Somerset
• Victorian Architecture
• Ornate Tiles (Especially those of Arabian or Victorian stylings.)
• Geometry (Including sacred geometry, geometry puzzles and impossible geometry.)
• Juxtaposition
• Natural vs Manmade
• Dark vs Light
• Mundane vs Fantastical

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B16OO0ieS9vwQXhuY210dWt2Nlk/view?usp=sharing

Amber has been doing some basic paintovers of some 3d stuff as well as some initial mockups of how we want the tiles to animate.








Stuff and things!


Some random pieces of design work, will remove these as we begin to post more, this is just to show what we have done so far.  









Everything so far is the result of us experimenting, so a lot this is subject to change drastically! I mean, I guess that is the nature of Devblogs...

There should be a lot more in-engine stuff over the next couple of weeks, also we post onto Twitter and our own personal website if you want to follow us over there. On our website we have some posts detailing early development going back a couple of months if you want to read into some more of the details. <3

Twitter: https://twitter.com/I_DO_TRI_GAMES
Website/Main Blog:http://idotrigames.wixsite.com/blog

Thanks for taking your time to read, I hope you will enjoy what we have to show! Any comments, questions, criticisms, etc are more than welcome! Have a nice day!

[rj]

very witnessy. i dig it

[JamesBroderick]

very witnessy. i dig it

Thanks dude! Nice to hear the inspirations are channeling through.


Devblog Update Number 2!

These last couple of days myself and Amber have been in London on a business course, in order to better understand some of the things we would have to prepare for if we want to successfully launch an indie studio and game. As a result production slowed a little last week, but I was mostly fixing stuff anyway before I moved on.

Amber was at home in London for the past couple of weeks as a bit of a break so it's mainly just been me working on stuff: I have been continuing progress on trying to get the tile puzzle mechanics to work and feel right.

I have implemented a couple of features: I have added the ability to have some puzzles deactivated, so the player can't interact with them. I also created a way puzzles can be linked together, so that if one puzzle is solved it can activate the next puzzle in the chain so the player can interact with a newly opened puzzle.

Because I had the completion effect already done I thought it would be cool to add a similar effect if a new puzzle became accessible, so I added a new branch in the material with a scalar parameter that I can control in script. This allows me to animate the material when a puzzle is switched on/off.

If that just sounds like words to you then here is a handy GIF   :



(I'm not sure if this is just my PC or not but the GIF appears to be playing really slow, here is a link to the original hosted file that looks correct. http://i.imgur.com/sYgumOp.gif)

The look of this might change a lot yet, but it made the initial mechanic feel a lot better, which is what we're aiming for.

Level Building Stuff

The game will be set inside a giant circular tower, which presents a challenge when it comes to creating assets. Where do we draw the line between modular assets and unique ones? Because the game-making process so far is quite loose and experimental we wanted to have a set of tools that we could just mess about with, without having to commit ourselves to a rigid level design at the moment.

The bigger reason for this is that we need some quick level of the game before we finish the end of our Masters Degree, we know we won't have anything near a finished game but we are a little under-pressure to come up with something interesting in a relatively short space of time.

Amber initially created a modular kit but we realized that the pieces didn't really work too well for the circular tower we needed, so after doing a little bit of research we decided to focus on using Unreal Engine's blueprint system to create a set of dynamic assets. The first thing we set up was a trim asset for the edges of walls that follows a spline, allowing us to control the exact shape.

But then we started to expand on this to include walls, this allowed us to create the round shape we needed whilst avoiding any massive unique meshes. I spent a bit of time trying to make a (very) basic layout of the bottom of the tower just to get an idea on how the tools might work.



After we had this we came up with some other things we could use this for, and other possible extensions to the construction script blueprint. We already have the ability to swap in the meshes and we have meshes for the start and ends of the spline. The next thing to add to this will probably include a way to swap out meshes at different sections of the spline or completely hide them in order to insert unique meshes if needed.

For now though that's all on the level building stuff, the remainder of my time last week has been spent making interacting with the tiles more fun.

Now you can walk up directly to a puzzle and interact with it without aiming at it, makes it a bit more user friendly. The aiming at a puzzle will be designed with distant interactions in mind, helps keep some variation in the gameplay. This might require another puzzle element perhaps that blocks distant interaction with puzzles in certain areas, maybe like some special glass or something in the way that stops the light beam. Needs more work!

Any feedback, comments, suggestions are welcome.

[Alce]

Art style is looking really nice, and I love the narrative and world you're creating. It does feel Witnessy, but the other non-puzzle aspects of the game will sets it apart.

[JamesBroderick]

Hello! Time for devblog update number 3, this one is a bit of quick one.

We have been trying to get used to the animation systems inside Unreal Engine a little bit more, as typically in the past we usually encountered all sorts of issues whilst trying to get a character model working. This time we wanted to get into animation as early as possible in the process so we can plan what we eventually need.

For now this just consists of getting in a basic model that matches close the final proportions or the character, using basic animations from Mixamo for now. This was done to figure out the retargeting tools and how they work inside the engine, it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be. (We had to redo the process a lot because of weird horrible animation glitches.) But for now it seems to be fine.



This isn't the final character model by the way! A lot more work will be done on it yet, this is just a base to test out.

More soon!  

[JamesBroderick]

Another quick post, about the grass this time.

In the last post you may have noticed the grass moves when the player walks over it, I really wanted this effect in the game and it turned out it was a lot easier to implement that I thought it was going to be.

The material uses a Material Parameter Collection asset, which is a file that can store vector and scalar assets, these can be changed by blueprints. Any material can reference them and the values stay consistent throughout the level.

This means I can use a blueprint to update the MPC with the character location and then use that location in the material to displace the grass.


Here is the part of the material that deals with the displacement (plugged into World Displacement Offset in the main material node.)



Here is the little bit of blueprint script that feeds the player location to the MPC, just runs of tick to it updates every frame:

[TonyManfredonia]

Wow. This has wonderful potential. The design of the puzzles alone makes it clear you're putting in full-force effort to keep them interesting.

Can't wait to see the improved character model, as well! It's looking great so far. A lovely start!

[sbeast]

Looks like a really interesting game concept, gonna be tracking this one.

Also, have you made any considerations about the music yet? If so I would love to contribute.

[JamesBroderick]

Wow. This has wonderful potential. The design of the puzzles alone makes it clear you're putting in full-force effort to keep them interesting.

Can't wait to see the improved character model, as well! It's looking great so far. A lovely start!

Thank you! Yea that's the main thing we are trying to put effort into, it might look like a long time before loads of visual progress is made but at least the logic of the gameplay will (hopefully) hold up and have a lot of depth. This game has to be more than just a game where you move tiles around.

Looks like a really interesting game concept, gonna be tracking this one.

Also, have you made any considerations about the music yet? If so I would love to contribute.

Oh thank you! Thanks for the interest.

We have had some thoughts on the music but not loads as we want to see how the game feels first without it. My gut-feeling is that the music in the game should be used like an accent, just to highlight occasional bits, where most of the sound should come from the environment itself. Closest example I can think of is a game like Ico. I do imagine it picking up a bit of momentum, like what Journey does towards the end where the Orchestra comes in and the feels get you. XD

We will begin to look at composers later on, although before we decide on anything we need to acquire some form of funding from somewhere, as we currently don't have any money to pay any one else.  

[sbeast]

Oh thank you! Thanks for the interest.

We have had some thoughts on the music but not loads as we want to see how the game feels first without it. My gut-feeling is that the music in the game should be used like an accent, just to highlight occasional bits, where most of the sound should come from the environment itself. Closest example I can think of is a game like Ico. I do imagine it picking up a bit of momentum, like what Journey does towards the end where the Orchestra comes in and the feels get you. XD

We will begin to look at composers later on, although before we decide on anything we need to acquire some form of funding from somewhere, as we currently don't have any money to pay any one else.  

Thanks for replying. I'm not too familiar with Ico, I'll go and have a listen to it now. Ok that's cool, I'll subscribe to the thread and follow up later on I suppose. Good luck in the mean time!

[JamesBroderick]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I have made an update about the status of this project but work is progressing, albeit quite slowly, this is for a number of reasons: Myself and Amber have officially finished our Master's Degree and now we have moved back to our own homes, so getting used to working from home is proving quite the challenge. Additionally, on top this I have recently just started a new job teaching a games design course in Bristol so a lot of my time has been spent preparing work for that and getting used to things.

A lot of the work recently has involved going back and planning stuff in a lot more detail. For the work we have produced so far we have been under pressure by the requirements of the MA course to fit within certain guidelines, now those restrictions have been lifted we can focus on creating the game we want to create.

One of those restrictions was having additional people join the project who weren't doing the Master's Degree. Now we have gotten our friend Dom to join the project as technical wizard person. (He is really good at ue4.) Getting Dom on board frees up my time to design puzzle mechanics and the gameplay more freely whilst he focuses mostly on the implementation.

There will be hopefully a lot more stuff trickling out soon, I will try to find time to post a bit more frequently as things change. 

MA Level Screenshots

For now though here is work that I forgot to post here before we finished our Master's, this was the level we submitted for our hand-in, with a rudimentary version of the gameplay. Our next goal is to rework this part of the game, build on it even more to use as our art benchmark whilst the rest of the game is blocked out.

Stuff I'm thinking about at the moment

At the moment I am grappling with how the player interacts with the environment and making it feel really nice. I have gotten a lot of inspiration from Mario Odyssey recently in terms of how great it feels to move the player around and just interact with the scenery, so from a design perspective it might be a lot better to go back and focus on making sure the tile interaction is as tight as it possibly could be without going massively into designing complex puzzles yet.

One thing Dom implemented for us was a free movement area for the camera, which means the player can move around in a certain space without moving the camera position, making the camera control more naturally. He also added in a nice smooth transition to a different field of view when looking at extreme angles (This effect can be seen in third person games like Journey and Final Fantasy XV) He also removed the auto camera follow. All of this had added up to make pointing and aiming at the puzzles with your light beam a lot easier to do, whereas before it was a tiny bit tedious for my tastes.

I have also increased the camera sensitivity a bit and increased the speed of the tile movement slightly. Another quick addition I added in was the ability to change the tile movement speed in game if you hold the button down that you normally use for sprinting whilst interacting with puzzles. This will just allow you to play the tile movement even quicker, so they effectively snap into the next slot, this doesn't affect any gameplay either which is nice, and it means people with a lower attention span can speed up the more complex puzzles. :D

Here is a quick recap of other stuff that has been added/thought about since the last update here:

-Pushable blocks. Can hide other puzzles as well as be climbed on, which moves us onto..
-Climbing. Phe can climb certain ledges in the level that are currently marked uncharted-style with a white paint. Will go over the visuals of this later along with everything else.
-Game screen framework. I implement a pre-built menu system into UE4, this includes a main menu, a pause menu and an options screen. I have tailored this to fit our project and I have added a splash and some debug options that have been quite useful to me.
-We tried testing out foliage. This is a big part of our game world. Unfortunately this led to a lot of framerate issues in our first demo, even with LOD versions. We are still figuring out how we are going to get the foliage exactly how we want it whilst running the game in 60 frames. This will probably require more work later on as we solidify our art style even more
-Currently reconsidering the structure of the tower. We are debating with the team whether the big structure which contains all of the game should be a tower or a giant wall that seems to stretch out infinitely in each direction. The former will be easier to develop visually as it stands out more but a wall will give us a bit more horizontal level design and freedom.
-Tile locks. These are symbols on doors in the game if puzzles with output tiles of their respective colour have been activated in the near vicinity. We refine the logic of these later on, but for the initial puzzles these are simple and effective.

Anyway, thanks for reading guys. See you in the next update

[TonyManfredonia]

Your art direction has improved immensely! I love the way it's headed.

The color scheme, especially, alongside the texturing has a lovely atmosphere.

It's good to know you're prioritizing climbing. I can't tell you how frustrating games can be from climbing alone. Can't wait to give it a go!

[JamesBroderick]

Hi,

it has been a while since I have updated this. Unfortunately I don't have any more work to show on Phaneron, as I am sad to announce that development has ceased on the game.

I'm posting this update as a little closure post on this project, as recently there has just been too much stuff going on and this project keeps getting put on the backburner.


There are a few contributing reasons to not continuing on the work on Phaneron:

The first reason I touched upon in the previous post, essentially life is just getting in the way of making this game work at the moment. I have the new job at the college and I am in the process of trying to move out and get my own space. Currently I don't feel like I can produce my best work where I'm living at the moment, trying to get myself into any game development stuff is quite taxing currently and this is doubled whilst working on a larger project.

For me, it was getting to a point on the project where it felt more like a chore, which means my heart and soul isn't in this game as much as I would like it to be. The other members of the team have their own things going on too, leaving not a lot of time to focus on something big.

Another reason is that I am finding this an incredibly difficult game to design. What I mean is that this kind of game with it's interconnected puzzles and world design makes it very hard get everything to fit together properly. Making this game is like a massive puzzle in itself! Currently, I don't think I have the skills to develop a game of this complexity, aspects of it I can do , but not in it's entirety. Because of my issues trying to put this thing together it has meant other people in the team have been waiting on me which isn't fair.

When we come up with Phaneron it was off the back of another idea we liked for a point and click game, it turned out that our game idea accidentally copied Night In The Woods! (None of us even played it at that point) so we decided to alter it and we had some other ideas we wanted to try out instead. Elements of the old game design were recycled into this one, and we then had the concept for Phaneron.

However, we were under pressure to come up with something solid as we entered the Deutsche Bank Award for Creative Enterprises a month earlier, and it just so happened that we got shortlisted for the competition! That was cool! Although, this came with the challenge of preparing a pitch for the game in a week, whilst we had barely come up with a game concept at that point.

We initially got shortlisted on the idea of our I_DO_TRI indie game business and our experiences, not a product. For the final, there put an enormous amount of pressure on us to solidify what we had idea wise and create a business plan for a game that has barely been put together.

It sort of meant that since the competition, our game concept was forced into existence and we have been trying to make it work since. I hope this all makes sense. :S


I believe myself, Amber and Dom are capable of producing a game together. But I don't think Phaneron is necessarily the right game for us right now.

WHAT NOW?

Development on the game is officially over at this point, there may be a chance we revisit it in the future, but there is a change it might be in a different form, or ideas from this game might be folded into others we work on. Any future collaborations between myself, Amber or Dom will still use the I_DO_TRI name.

For myself, past this project I have decided to focus more on myself before I work on another big project. I want to build some smaller games, make some art and improve my games engine skills. I'm in the mindset now that if me, Amber and Dom work on stuff together in the future that it happens a little bit more naturally as a result of sharing each other work and inspiring each other, then seeing if a game comes of it. If I focus on developing my own artwork then it means that I could contribute more as a member of the team, and each other's work could serve as a catalyst down the road for working on a really awesome collaboration.

If we work on another game, it will be a much smaller in scope idea at first, and if we find it really interesting THEN we can expand it. Rather than designing a potentially complicated game from the start.

My attention has swivelled to improving my art first and foremost, so I can have a stronger foundation to develop an IP. I can then use my technical skills to then produce games in a consistent style. I am focusing a lot on documenting my work more, and I also plan on developing game development tutorial content for Youtube. The Youtube tutorials will be going out over the next couple of months.


If you wish to follow my continued development you can follow me in these places, I will also try to be around TIG more frequently though.

Design Blog: http://www.jmbroderick.design/

Portfolio (New Website!): https://jamesbroderick.portfoliobox.net/

Youtube (Will see a lot more content here soon, including Unreal Engine tutorials and videos of my own artwork/game development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXh_4ywP0sn04NpETiP_UMw

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JamesMBroderick


- Amber continues to develop her own artwork, you can find her portfolio here:

Portfolio: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/portfolio

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmberEJJamieson


- Dom does game jams from time to time, his portfolio has some cool stuff if you wanted to have a gander.

Portfolio: http://dmathuse.wixsite.com/portfolio

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lonerider543


Thanks for everybody that has showed interest in this thread, I know it hasn't had a lot of updates but it has been nice to see the responses we have had. If you are still interested in our work then have a bit of fun and take a look at our portfolios and follow us on our social links, then you can keep track of us in case we make anything else.

I am happy to answer any questions you may have had about the project or any of the above. Just to close things up.

Thanks again,
James

[Le Slo]

It's a shame that this project stops, I was really intrigued with it. Islands and puzzles are always a perfect match. Good work!