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[OneCoin]

EXEMPLAR

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Exemplar has undergone a fairly large redesign. The first page and a half of this devlog refers to the original design, however the art style and the technology shown in the demo for generating heroes remains in the new design, so please feel free to explore the posts from the start. Enjoy!

New tech demo now available! V3! Agents!

This small demo allows you to generate the hero cards yourself. As we extend the system with more hero classifications, costumes, hair styles, capes and wings we'll update the demo. Post screenshots of your favourite heroes!

--> Download link for Card Generator Demo <--

Hi. We're OneCoin, a two man team from Brisbane, Australia. We'd like to show you Exemplar. Exemplar is a procedural card and comic game set in a pseudo 50s era of super heroes and government organisations that recruit them.

The Basics

In Exemplar, the player takes the role of the head of a government organisation established after an unexplained surge in the number of people being found with extraordinary abilities. Many of these present a threat to those around them and in some cases, the planet as a whole. Others are willing to join the agencies to help keep the world safe. Gameplay itself is broken into two parts. The procedural card game, and the procedural comic.

What's a procedural card game?

That's a fair question. In Exemplar, you don't build a deck of Heroes. You build a manifest of sorts. Your "Hero Deck" describes the type of gifted individuals your agents seek out. As such, each card represents a classification of hero. When you choose to recruit one, you are symbolically sending out an agent to follow up on a fairly thin report. There are cards in the "Agency Field Deck" that can increase the amount of information known about these recruits before you bring them on board, but most of the time you don't now anything about them until you recruit them. At that time, their name, traits, costume, symbol, personality, origin and physical features are all generated. Suddenly the card that had a vague shadow on it, now has an amazing super hero, ready to be equipped with powers and gadgets and help you save the world.

The rest of your cards go in your "Agency Field Deck". These cards represent the mobile HQ capabilities of your agency. They include things like medical facilities, mobile laboratories, barracks etc and they allow you to support your heroes wherever their mission might be around the world. These aren't 100% reliable, and you never know exactly how powerful a card is going to be until you use it. But again, there are cards that can improve the minimums or otherwise help you make your choices.

OK. So where does the comic come in?

Ah! Glad you asked. I mentioned missions. Given the increase in these somewhat unusual individuals, and the nature of humans in general, the world as a whole is in a rather uncertain state. There are people calling themselves Super Villains that are taking world leaders hostage or threatening to blow up buildings, there are sad individuals that have lost their grip on what's real and what's not that are inadvertently putting people in danger, there are, as always, people using what they possess to perform petty crimes. And there is also an alarming increase in natural disasters. Floods, fires, volcanic eruptions. You name it, it seems to be happening in the world. It's up to you and your agency (and the other agencies springing up around the world) to try and save the innocent from these events. These events are represented as cards on the global map. There will usually be a few in play, each with a countdown on them. If they aren't stopped before that timer runs down, the world "takes a hit" and there are only so many hits it can take before it's lost. Hero(es) are assigned to the event cards when you are ready to deal with it. You take a guess on which of your heroes is most equipped to deal with it.

In Exemplar, these events are expressed as issues in a comic book series. Each double page presents a problem to the player and the possible solutions. The left page shows the story of you hero(es) arriving at the problem site. The right page shows possible solutions based on the abilities and gadgets of the assigned hero(es). You choose what you think your hero(es) would do, and the right page will transform into the panels that show the outcome. Eventually, either the world ends, or you reach the final confrontation (often the super villain) of the issue. It is possible to face the final confrontation at any time, but each event that is nullified shifts the confrontation slightly further in your favour.

Here's an early test of the tech for the comic books.

We're still quite early in development. Working on the card generation at the moment. The turn based framework is in place already. There is still a lot to show and talk about though. The final look of the comics is still to be done. Saving comics and exporting issues to your favourite comic reader, having heroes that survive issues persist into future issues, how multi player will work and the extra layers of strategy that entails. So much.

We would love to hear you thoughts and feedback as we go through the process of making Exemplar, and we'll have plenty more to show here soon.

[Christian]

Any chance this appear on mobile? I love playing Sentinels of the Multiverse on iPad

Also, the main thing I'm curious about: will there be animations and such in the turn-based section? That's one aspect I wish Sentinels was more exciting, having the battles be shown more visually

Actually, will there be actual turn-based battles with villains or just reacting to events?

[OneCoin]

Hi Christian!

Thanks for the questions, I should update the opening post with some details on platforms. Unfortunately it's very unlikely that Exemplar will come to mobile. The tech for displaying the cards and comics just isn't capable on mobile hardware at this stage. But who knows where that will go in the future.

The battles themselves aren't turn based. The turn based aspect is the playing of your cards. You are dealt 5 each turn and discard any you don't use (like in Dominion if you've ever played that). Any reward cards you earn while playing are put into your discard and are shuffled back into the Field Deck once you've gone through it, again, similar to dominion. These are tentative rules, we still have a lot of play testing to do there.

The battles themselves are more like a free form RPG story telling thing. You see some story panels, which definitely are animated, and some options to select based on the heroes you've assigned. You select one and then more story panels are generated that show the action and outcome. These are animated. So to answer your question, the fights will be animated, but they aren't turn based. It's almost like the Fate pen and paper RPG system. You choose an ability or piece of equipment to use pitted against some trait or ability of the event and an outcome is generated which you see as animated story panels.

I hope that answered your questions. Thanks for taking an interest!

[samuraifight_ks]

I wouldn't rule out mobile yet. I think the art looks very doable on a modern tablet, you'd be surprised.  Check out Dungeon Boss, I work with the developer of that game in my day job, they were able to pull off a lot of 3D characters and nice effects. The big question is does your engine support it. 

[OneCoin]

It's not so much an issue of the number of models. We've intentionally gone with an efficient, low poly design because the bottleneck is in the rendering. The technique we have developed to allow not just animated cards, but the content of the cards to be procedurally created, is obviously different to how games like Armello and Infinity Wars have done it.
Add to that the post effects to get the visual style we are determined to have and it's quite render heavy.

Having said that, it won't stop us from throwing it on a device and seeing what happens, that's one of the best aspects of using Unity

[OneCoin]

Over the last couple of days, I've been working on the environment for Command HQ. Command is where the player manages their super agents, world events, and agency facilities. It's essentially the table where you play cards, but cooler.

The trick is creating an environment that's more than just a table. I started with a very basic block out of the main gameplay features:

Pretty boring, right? So we have our table where the players can sit and see their cards, and space in the middle for the comic book, and a world map to see event cards.

Next up is placing that table into an interesting space. The general idea was to have a large open room, where players can see their agents and superheroes walking around, using equipment, and reacting to the things that happen in the world. I wanted the environment to feel like a retro building, and definitely had to have the typical overhanging 'war room' style light.

After that, the environment gets fleshed out with a few quick details:

So when you play the game, you'll see the heroes from your cards appear around you, sitting at desks, using radios and computers, or watching from the walkway above.

The style in Exemplar is mostly flat colour, so the environments can easily be broken into shared colours and use a single atlas diffuse texture. The breakdown is done with crazy colours in Max, so I can easily tell what is what.

After that, I swap from a rainbow texture to something that actually makes sense.

Most of the visual style comes down to custom shaders. Exemplar hardly uses Unity's default lighting system at all. Everything is brought together with some camera image effects and light effects.

Finally coming together with a few more details added. The environment still needs to be filled out a bit more with smaller props, and the main table area will have it's own separate pass. But for now things are looking pretty good.

Let us know what you think.

[samuraifight_ks]

I really dig this art style, it's very distinctive.

Are you going to be able to interact with your characters in this screen, and bring up their stats / cards  / etc?  Or does most of the action take place on the table?

[blacktowerbasement]

Really love this amazing artwork and style! Reminded me of Evil Genius game, which is one of my favorites. Keep it going and good luck!

[SunWuKong]

Art looks really good and the concept is interesting. Good luck and I will be checking back for sure!

-Tim

[OneCoin]

@samuraifight_ks
   We're still toying with what plans we have for this setting. But we want everything in Exemplar to grounded in a place. We're minimising typical "hud UI" elements as much as possible for instance. All the information the player needs comes from the environment they are in to cement the idea that you are managing everything from where you are sitting in a 1950s-esque world. So one thought is that as you pin a hero's image to the world map, assigning him to a mission, they might walk up and stand beside the map. You might take them down again and choose someone else and they'll salute and walk off or something like that. When you commit the choice, they might strap on a jet pack and shoot out of there. Who knows. But that's the type of thing we're aiming at with having the game take place on the table right there in the agency. We want the player to be able to see their super heroes right there around them, not just living on the card.

@blacktowebasement
    Thank you! Evil Genius wasn't a direct influence on our list, but I'm a huge fan of that game, and every game we play has some effect on what we make, so you're probably right. At the very least we're stoked that it puts one of your favourite games in your mind, that's a win as far as we're concerned.

@SunWuKong
    Thank you so much for the kind words. We're glad you like it. I'll be doing a weekly update shortly and hopefully tonight or tomorrow another update with some new gifs.

[Dementor561]

This is gorgeous!

[OneCoin]

Thank you so much @Dementor561

[OneCoin]

Weekly Rundown:

Thus marks the end of our first week running the devlog. I don't think it was quite a week, we started a couple of days in. But it was a productive week for us. For anyone wondering, we are two guys with full time jobs and young families. Our dev time gets slotted into our nights when it can and we probably get about 8-12 hours of time on a good week. So it can be slow going.

This week's achievements:
- Hero generation now driven almost completely from data (except for colour values for skin and hair). Previously all the heroes that had been shown were hand made. Tomorrow I'll post a gif of some hero generation.
- Main level designed, concepted and modeled.
- Began porting the current main game interaction to the new Main level to see it in action and prepare for new camera movements to be implemented this week.
- Card Generation achieved. Big milestone! Heroes can be drawn and generated from the deck at runtime. The tech works perfectly and we're super happy with it. Again, gifs tomorrow. Until then, here's a quick, unexciting snapshot.



Maybe we'll put together a little executable demo that just spins up hero cards. Would anyone be interested in seeing that?

[OneCoin]

As promised yesterday, some gifs.


First, Hero Generation



And now they're generated on the cards themselves. Very exciting development for us.



And since recording these last night we've added camera movement between the cards, comic and world map, and increased the Hero Emblem combinations from 144 to around 2650.

We'll have some more to show in the next couple of days. Next up is adding some more base models for female heroes and the other classifications like the Beast. We'll also post a link to a small build that just generates hero cards for you all to try out.

[OneCoin]

Super quick mid-week update

Hero emblems are now being set on the cards. We are working on getting a small executable out to you guys that will let you spin up hero cards on the press of a button. In the coming week we'll have more hero classifications and the female heroes showing up, so we'll update with new versions of the demo as we add content.

Till now, here's what the demo will basically look like to begin with.

[OneCoin]

It's been a good week for Exemplar.
 
- We have the card generation working from data.
- We've just added the female gender to the data, though they don't have their own hair styles or outfits yet. And their logos don't appear on their costumes yet.
- We have the level itself mapped out and the WIP build moved into that level.
- Hero logos were upped from 144 to around 2650. Not all of these will survive. Some foreground symbols just don't work with some backgrounds.
- We started investigating music and have a couple of tracks on the short list. Hopefully more on that next week.
- And we put together a downloadable demo of the card generation for you to try out yourself. The link is in the initial post of this dev log as well.

In the next week I'll be working on the card interaction. Improving the players ability to be able to drag them, select them, zoom in on them and really nail down that physicality. Harley will be making content. Rounding off the initial content for the Female before moving onto the Agent and maybe another classification. That's a lot for the both of us in a week. We'll have to see how well the kids sleep.

Don't forget to share your favourite generated heroes with us!

Here's my favourite after a few quick spins. I call him El Scorcher! - So bad ass he tattoos his emblem to his chest! (That's on the bug list)

[OneCoin]

Testing out some effects and styles for the comic scenes. Here's a shot of some agents fighting a bunch of killer robots:

[OneCoin]

It has been a massive week for us, lots of progress made.

A new Card Demo  build is availble with new costume options, logos, icons, colours and both genders.

Updates:
- Cards in the hand now zoom in when hovered over, snapping to the bottom of the screen.
- When dragged, cards now tilt in the direction being dragged.

- Cards in the hand now sit in a fanned orientation that realigns automatically when a card is added or removed

- New card animation when attaching cards to heroes
We've gone from this:

To this:

- Implemented the placeholder icons on Heroes and Powers. It is now possible to see which traits are needed on a hero to attach a power.
- Female heroes have their logos showing
- Female hero outfits
- Three head meshes for the males, three for the females
- New hair meshes, 5 for the males, 5 for the females
- From 3 colour sets to 45
- Three idle poses randomly selected

Thank you to those that have downloaded the first version of the Card Generation Tech Demo. Hope you enjoy the new version. And as always, share some screenshots of your favourite heroes.

[OneCoin]

We've spent the last few days working on the Agent class. Agents are unlike the other hero classifications in that they don't have any natural superpowers; they are just regular employees of the agency. They make up for that by being excellent leaders, administrators & spies, and are the only ones capable of utilizing most agency facilities.

[OneCoin]

--> New Card Demo <--

Weekly Update:

This week we have been focusing on getting a new type of character on the cards. Until now, all the heroes you've seen have essentially been the Sentinal class hero. Perhaps you could think of them as the "standard" hero. Last week we tested the content pipeline by adding the female gender to the data, which used new sets of meshes and textures. So the next test to that process was adding a new classification.

When the game first starts, the player is dealt two Agents. Agents are your agency's average, non-super employee. They make up for that fact by being able to man and operate most of the field facilities you'll use. So it made sense to get them generating on the cards. Above you can see the original mock ups Harley did in scene. These are examples of they types of things the card generation could produce, but hand made by Harley. They are now fully supported by the card gen system which means they are a possibility in the new version of the card demo (version 3) that is linked to at the top of this post and in the opening post.

We had a lot of fun playing with the Agent's pseudo 50's style, and I have to say we think they are looking pretty dapper.

Next week's plan

In the coming week we'll be working on the table layout, figuring out exactly how the player will assign heroes to events and how the cards will interact with the space the player lives in. We'll hopefully be posting more frequent updates on that process as it'll be more iterative than this week's work was.

I'll leave you with a sneak peak at some of my fave Agents so far.