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[jovan.vesic]

We have been on Square Enix Collective for three weeks now, and our feedback phase is ending next monday. (You can still vote for us there. Thanks, it means a lot to us.)

We did an update there regarding history and politics of COLUMNAE, and here's a new poster we released along with it:

It's a promotional poster from a time when Deus was being built (before the apocalypse). We tried to do it in the style similar to posters in Art Nouveau / Jugendstil (cca 1890-1910). Here's the whole text of the update:

History and politics of COLUMNAE

Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was not something that happened overnight. For a long time, people perceived new inventions in the same way they perceived exotic animals or tricks with cards. The wealthy and the skillful laughed at those interested in new ways of harnessing energy, but soon their laughter was replaced with astonishment, and astonishment with respect and envy. New powerful social class was formed from those who recognized and adopted new technologies before others, and for the first time the society entered a period of constant increase in wealth, health and happiness… or at least that’s what was claimed by those who profited the most from the new ways of production.

In this new world, the underground resources were the key to securing the political power. However, after an unexpected discovery of new major fossil fuel deposits, the supply became potentially infinite, and now the only important question was how to extract and use these resources faster than your competition. This resulted in an accelerated growth of extremely narrow fields of technology, while other areas like medicine, ecology and social sciences lagged behind. This is how the same society that still hadn’t discovered antibiotics was already able to build huge and fully automated underground mining complexes.

The race in production speed led to a rapid urbanisation - giant cities and industrial areas swallowed what was once villages, forests and fields. Pollution soon stopped being just an inconvenience as heavy poisonous gases made air unbreathable in some areas. Unfortunately, the answer to this problem was not the introduction of pollution standards - the influence of big businesses on government was too massive for that to happen. Instead, the problem became another opportunity to make profit.


Beyond The Apocalypse Inc.

The government issued a call for tenders in an attempt to find a solution to the problem of air pollution. The accepted proposal that was to be funded by public money came from a controversial company called “Beyond The Apocalypse” and officially included building an autonomous high-altitude public space “Deus” for recreation and relaxation purposes - with some property reserved for luxury residencies. In reality it was intended to be a haven for the rich with the purpose of permanently sheltering them when the upcoming environmental catastrophe happens. Even though early during the construction Deus was marketed as a place where anybody and everybody could “refresh their lungs and minds”, it soon became clear that only those individuals who pre-purchased real estate in Deus will be allowed to enter it once it was finished. When the real purpose of Deus as well as the existence of the inevitable catastrophe became known to the public, chaos ensued and it is now unknown how the project was actually completed and if its purpose remained the same.

Whatever the case, metallic bud-shaped shell protecting Deus was shortly closed and people left outside it began searching for a way to escape the poisonous gases that were slowly transforming the whole surface of the Earth to the uninhabitable wasteland that it is today. Some found their shelter on the nearby Cliffs, and others improvised their new homes on Columnae - the pillars built to hold Deus high above the ground and to connect it with the underground Machina which still successfully extracts the underground resources and pumps them up via pipes. People living in Columnae have long ago perforated many holes in those pipes and are constantly using part of the resources intended for Deus.

Columnae today

Around 140 years has passed since this “apocalypse” happened, and Deus is still closed. Columnae are currently divided into two territories ruled by seemingly opposed and ideologically different groups. The Democratic Republic is centralized and governed by parliament (with upper and lower house), has complicated system of laws and is supposedly more liberal - women are allowed to vote, for example. The United Protectorates on the other hand are generally viewed as more conservative part of Columnae. They are ruled by a number of “archons”, united only by their allegiance to the supreme leader of the Protectorates, and allowed to individually set their own rules in the columns they control. On the surface, those differences may look important, but they mean almost nothing to the working class of Columnae. Common people, just looking for a way to make a living and be left alone see both parties as equally corrupted and heavily influenced by interests of wealthy factory owners.

Recently, a new religious teaching started spreading rapidly through Columnae, especially among poorer parts of population. It is centered on the idea that Deus is not just a heavenly place to live in, but that it literally IS Heaven, and that the “ascension to Deus” is the only goal worth pursuing. In this light, the conflict between the Republic and the Protectorates is seen as artificial and harmful, and their proclaimed ideals and goals as false and irrelevant.

When the apocalypse reduced the surface to wastelands, the only other known place for survivors to seek refuge (aside from Columnae) were the nearby Cliffs. Naturally elevated enough to still sustain some flora and fauna, but without the luxury of resources coming from Machina, the society and culture on the Cliffs evolved in a different direction from those of Columnae. Communication and trade between the two areas were generally non-existent or minimal, but exotic and luxury goods are increasingly being smuggled from Cliffs by a group of individuals known in Columnae under the name of “air pirates”. Through those, the word has also reached Columnae that certain “Baroness” is building an enormous Greenhouse Dome in the middle of wastelands with the purpose of extracting oil from the ground, and hiring people to live there and work for her.

********

We also did a print of the poster for a local event (GameUp) we attended this weekend :D

[jovan.vesic]

First Expo, First Public Demo Testing and First Award

Hi everybody! It's been such a long time since I posted here. And a lot has happened in a meantime. Let's start with November:
We were part of an large gaming expo for the first time, and also had our first ever public testing of the game. The event in question was Reboot InfoGamer in Croatia. It's supposedly the biggest South East European games expo and it lasts for five days. We have learnt a lot by being there, got pretty positive feedback on our gameplay and to our surprise managed to win the Best Indie Game Award as well.

Here are some observations:

- A lot of pre-teenage and teenage looking boys were at the event. We realized pretty early there is no point at all in trying to approach them, help them or explain them stuff. They would come, sometimes in groups of 2-4 "play" our demo by clicking (seemingly) randomly on the screen for 2-5 seconds in total and quickly leave. My guess is that during those 2-5 seconds, their average click count was somewhere around 30 or 40. Once two of them started fighting, (like wrestling and punching each other) during those few seconds and I had to intervene. To be honest, I never even expected young boys to be interested in this kind of game, or patient enough to even try to play it, but it seems like the graphics was kind of misleading, so a lot of them probably expected some action-oriented game. However - and I hate to say this phrase, but here it is: when I was their age, I REALLY enjoyed point & click adventures and other slow-paced types of games, and I am sure I wasn't the only one. There is a lot that could be said about what are the reasons for this change - if there is a change at all - but I will leave it for some other time.  

- Young girls (on average a little older then previous group) generally really liked what they saw and they usually read the dialogues, and tried their best to solve the puzzles. But unfortunately they usually failed to solve anything but the most trivial stuff without some direct help from us - which many have explicitly asked for. A typical representative of this group has never played point and click adventure before. Regardless, they mostly seemed like they enjoyed playing it, and were interested about finding out more - they asked us questions about world etc.

- Adults, (both males and females) came in two distinct groups. The first one was general mid-core gamer crowd. They understood the basic mechanics immediately and would play the game, some would ask for help, most would laugh at the jokes and references, many would ask us some questions, then thank us and leave - with or without finishing the game. I think those are the most important testers for us, and we should be paying special attention to the way they played the game and reacted to it.

- The second group of adults was seasoned and enthusiastic point&click veterans, and I have to admit I really enjoyed watching them play. They would read every right click ("look at") description, go through every dialogue tree (or they thought so! ), explore every corner of the scene, and sooner or later "finish" the demo. Oh, some of them had difficulties with it, but they would then be really happy when they managed to solve it. And I was really happy watching them enjoy it <3

- Of course, there were exceptions: one kid who looked like he's around four to me came with his mother (she just watched, and he played by himself) and pretty quickly solved everything. I'm still not sure how that happened, especially when you take into account that all the dialogues are in English, and the kid was definitely not a native English speaker. Other than that, there were other indie developers who tried our game and had some interesting ideas and suggestions, and there were important guys from important companies in jury who played it to evaluate it (some of them anonymously, some less so).


****
To avoid just posting four-months old news and observations in this post, here's one pretty recent screenshot from a new room we are working on:

Hope to write soon again.

[io3 creations]

Looks good.  Thank you for your explanation on how you created the light effects.

As a silhouette style, "The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello" did come to mind but that animation is more 3d than your game.  On the other hand, "Invention of Love" has a much closer resemblance in terms of style.




However, as oldlood mentioned, most gamers haven't seen those so you don't have worry too much about that.  My guess is that you're likely to to get more "LIMBO style" references.  

[jovan.vesic]

@io3 creations Thanks!

I have already stumbled upon "Invention of Love" about half a year ago and actually contacted the author about possible future collaboration. (He seemed to like the look of our game, but either didn't speak good english or just didn't sound so eager to stay in touch or something, but who knows).

I am thinking a lot about those two movies lately, because I'm mostly working on animation of characters. Somehow we decided to try more of a "natural", "realistic" or "organic" look for the character's animations for now. Not sure if we are doing it too wrong though, and I am aware it's .

Would appreciate some feedback on this: Does the movement look more like "shaddow-puppet" type (Jasper Morello) or more like "realistic" type (Limbo)? And apart from that, what is generally good points, and what are the mistakes in this animation? All answers and advises are very welcome!

[io3 creations]

I have already stumbled upon "Invention of Love" about half a year ago and actually contacted the author about possible future collaboration. (He seemed to like the look of our game, but either didn't speak good english or just didn't sound so eager to stay in touch or something, but who knows).

Yep, that can happen.

I am thinking a lot about those two movies lately, because I'm mostly working on animation of characters. Somehow we decided to try more of a "natural", "realistic" or "organic" look for the character's animations for now. Not sure if we are doing it too wrong though, and I am aware it's .

Would appreciate some feedback on this: Does the movement look more like "shaddow-puppet" type (Jasper Morello) or more like "realistic" type (Limbo)? And apart from that, what is generally good points, and what are the mistakes in this animation? All answers and advises are very welcome!

Based on the gif, the movement looks very smooth and fluid and to me it seems closer to the "realistic" style.  I like how you added breathing.  With the full scene if many things are happening, that part may not be as appearant but would still add to the character being "real".  Much like in Monsters Inc they added not only facial animations but also incorporated pupil dilation.  Consciously we are not aware of those details but subconsciously we are and can have a "feeling" when something "feels right".

The only part I'm wondering is about: shouldn't he actually pull the lever to let the drink (beer?) flow into the glass/cup?

[jovan.vesic]

@io3 creations hey, thanks for the feedback! As for pulling the lever - the middle of this animation is actually kind of "ready to pour, but never doing it" loop situation, so - no

[io3 creations]

Then I hope the context makes it clearer what he's actually doing and why he changed his mind after a reasonable long time of talking or humming or singing to either himself or others? 

[jovan.vesic]

@io3 I hope it is, because this loop is happening during the dialogue (text only for now though)


Btw, we are currently at Reboot Develop conference in Split. Our newest, expanded alpha demo will be available for testing for the next three days, so if any of you are here, please come by and say hello

[jovan.vesic]

Playable demo, take two

As I already mentioned, we had a playable demo already in November for Reboot Infogamer expo, and it was apparently good enough to get us The Best Indie Game Award there, but we weren't actually satisfied with it, for several reasons. It didn't look good enough, it didn't feel smooth enough, it failed to show some important game features, it was missing many sound effects etc. On top of it, the way we managed puzzles and dialogues has made editing and adding new stuff really hard to do and project was becoming messy.

We managed to address most of those in the meantime, and we are pretty happy with what we have right now. There are some more stuff to fix and change, but we will most probably make the demo public very soon. In case you want to try it, you can subscribe to our newsletter and we will send you the link as soon as it's ready (or you can send me a mail/message).

I'll try to explain some of the biggest flaws of the first version of playable demo, and how we fixed them (or didn't) one by one, and will start today with something I'm still not satisfied with:

Dynamic VFX

The screenshots below might look similar to each other, but if you take a closer look you might notice that the visual effects like bloom and sun shafts that we use have different settings (like thresholds, coloring, intensity etc) in every different shot. That is because we adjusted those according to the location of the shot in question, although all those four are part of the same "scene".

   

   

The thing is, one version of the VFX settings might look better with large open space, the other with dark interiors etc. Even in our teaser video, those settings change slowly as camera moves. But we never made some one-fits-all solution for dynamic changing of those settings. So in our first demo, we just adjusted settings so it doesn't look awful wherever camera is in the scene and we made those settings static. So it didn't look awful in any shot... but it also didn't look as good as when we adjusted it for specific locations. This is something we still have to work on, and figure out what is the best (long-term) solution.

[jovan.vesic]

Seamless, loopable steam pattern

COLUMNAE is a text-heavy game, and often you will find yourself standing in one place, reading text or interacting with an item in the world while camera keeps the position and not many animations happen, sometimes for a pretty long time. To keep a feel of a "living" world in this situations, we use several layers (with different z value) of constantly moving (along x or y axis) sprites representing fog or steam. To achieve "constantly moving" thing, we use semi-transparent png files which are made to be seamless patterns - that is, when you put several of those next to each other, you cannot tell where one ends and the next one begins... or at least it should work like that.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there is a dark vertical line, a couple of pixels wide, located near the right edge of the image.That's the point where two (identical) pngs should connect, but for some reason sometimes (like in this screenshot) they get separated by a few pixels, and sometimes they overlap by a few pixels. As both sprites are moving at the same speed (to the left in this case), the gap is also moving with them. This is one of those bugs that are never "priotity" to work on, because they happen sometimes, and even then they are not always noticeable (plus some testers even noticed it and thought it's a deliberate "cool effect" which simulates the noise in the old movies!). Also, this bug is not something we can reproduce quickly, so a few times we tried to fix it, it took some time afterward to realize it's not really fixed at all.

So this is something we have been living with for almost a year now, and I'm not sure anymore that we will be able to actually fix it anytime soon. Instead, recently I thought of a work-around: I would make new pngs for looping, and this time their content ("clouds") would be concentrated in the center, and slowly fading to the edges, until the edge pixels, which would be completely transparent. So it will not be seamless pattern which can be looped in infinity any more, but a series of disconnected identical "clouds" following each other. I know this will make the bug seemingly "dissapear", but not sure if it will make the steam look less "natural".

[io3 creations]

I also came across recently a transparent .png issue in Unity: a solid white line at the edge.  There seems to be a number of work arounds: save with Photoshop a certain way or remove the line in Unity with a certain piece of code.

But your issue seems different.  If you are using separate objects with textures then perhaps sometimes the objects are placed a little bit differently, especially if you use perspective view with the camera.  As a test, you could use orthographic projection for the camera and see if the issue occurs.  Wouldn't really help with the game since you need the perspective view but it might help at least in understanding what the issue is.

Another possibility might be to use one single object with a repeating texture that is at least the size of the screen and move the uv coordinates of the texture only.  That way you could have the infinitely looping pattern.

[jovan.vesic]

@io3 creations huh, these are some really good suggestions, will certainly try it, thanks a lot!

[jovan.vesic]

Retrocausality and nonlinearity in the demo

(If you have no idea what I mean by retrocausality, you might want to read the explanation in a previous post of this devlog  - here's a direct link to it)

Chapters in COLUMNAE are played in the following order: 4, 1, 3, 5, 7, 6, 2, 8. The basics of retrocausality in our game could be summed like this: Depending on your actions in a chapter (e.g. Chapter 4), the next one (gameplay-wise) will be an appropriate version of chronologically earlier chapter (e.g. Chapter 1). After that, while playing yet another chapter which is set in a future in regard to both of them (e.g. Chapter 5), you might experience the world of combined consequences of your choices in both of those (versions of) chapters.

The huge problem with our current demo is that it's less than a chapter long, and to show retrocausality mechanics in action we would have to have at least two complete chapters (e.g. 4 and 1), and three chapters would be optimal. But, having in mind our game will be eight chapters long in total, waiting for two or three chapters to be completely done while working part-time with no budget would probably take us one more year. So it's not an option we would prefer.

The other solution would be to make some kind of 2-3 mini-chapters for demo, with the sole purpose of showing the retrocausality mechanics. But, it would mean basically working on totally new game, storylines and puzzles just to make a demo, and than disregarding most of it for a final game. We don't like this idea.

We consider retrocausality to be a really important feature of COLUMNAE, maybe even its main "selling point", which our demo cannot show at this point. so this is really unfortunate situation for us.

As for basic nonlinearity, there are no such problems. Demo we had on Reboot Infogamer featured a number of puzzles which could be solved in a somewhat flexible order, but all of which had to be solved for demo to be "completed" story-wise. To show an example of nonlinearity, in the meantime we implemented two separate possible sets of puzzles, so now you actually have a choice (although not a world-changing in consequences) in how you will do it. It's also nice because it's not two explicit separate quests that are "offered" to the player, but two invisible (until you figure one of them out) ways of getting things done. This way, the player might advance in both paths (puzzle-wise) not even knowing they are independent, and the first of them to figure out might seem to be the only solution (because the other one will never be required to complete). This lowers the risk of being "stuck" for a long time, because some people figure how to solve it one way and some people the other way.

****

Unrelated: here's our first photoshop mockup that lead to the current style of the game (~2 years ago) and corresponding scene in the game:

[seancruz]

This is looking great! The mood and art is well established! Loving the history and politics background!

[jctwood]

I really love those early mountain concepts and hope to see more of the outdoor areas soon! It is all so beautiful!

[TheWanderingBen]

Narrative-drive adventure game. Gorgeous visuals. Innovative story technique. This might be the perfect game for me. I can't believe I've just seen this, I have many updates to pore over! I'm leaving this comment to subscribe to future updates. And to say Well Done! It's fantastic!

[jovan.vesic]

Playable Demo and Kickstarter Campaign

Will share more impressions as soon as I get some time![

@seancruz, @TheWanderingBen and @jctwood: Thanks!

[craigz]

Just wanted to pop in real quick and say this looks awesome! :D :D   

Keep up the energy! :D

craigz

[jovan.vesic]

@craigz Thanks!

Useful info if you like COLUMNAE: 48h early bird tier (full game +extras for €9/$10) ends in ~80 minutes: http://kck.st/29B2C2O

Screenshot from our Kickstarter pitch video explaining retrocausality

[PetterBergmar]

This looks / sounds absolutely kick ass. Thanks for all the devlogposts, seems very interesting. I will start reading through and follow future updates!