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[richardeflanagan]

And finally, just in time for the build we snuck in a pinch of missing sound design. Basically just a few sounds that help give a bit of feedback to the player. Namely the sound of surfaces they're riding on, and a bit of wind. Three sounds derived from white noise can add so much.





There are some one shot sounds in that first half (all prelim stuff btw), but we're missing things like wind, snow and other surface sounds - it adds a lot. We ended up implementing them pretty crudely (this is a mockup) but they really contribute a lot to this simple little game we're building.

[richardeflanagan]

So today I started a fresh level to test a few methods we'll be using going forward. First and foremost is Unity terrain as a starting point. We reverse engineered our old terrain from the Jam terrain mesh, and that was a headache. Assuming we're going to use Unity terrain moving forward, how easy is it? Pretty easy!





Next up was trees. I love back country riding, so trees are important to me. While 'too many' is attainable - this density is actually totally ride-able at speed. Fun? Not sure yet.







OK, back to the woods

[richardeflanagan]

and here's a gif, because GIF

[archgame]

Really enjoying the progress of this, the level designs are looking good, glad you figured out the terrain.

The sounds from the video are really tight, especially going off the ramp. I dig the sound when you are just riding through the snow, but I feel like there should be an initial crunch when you touch down on the surface? Right now it just kind of fades into the snow riding sound.

[richardeflanagan]

Yup, I think you're spot on. Everything so far is just placeholder - so much much more feedback to add

[emhere]

I really like this, like either the movement or the verticality of it, though I'm not entirely sure which

[Cranktrain]

This is looking really good, a first person game focused entirely on movement, it's not something you see much. It almost reminds me a bit of Tribes, and the skiing mechanic, which was about 90% of what that series of games was about. The aesthetic is very clean too, which has the bonus as its easy for the player to tell what is an obstacle and what isn't.

[♒ben]

I really like this, like either the movement or the verticality of it, though I'm not entirely sure which

Thanks, hopefully both : ]

This is looking really good, a first person game focused entirely on movement, it's not something you see much. It almost reminds me a bit of Tribes, and the skiing mechanic, which was about 90% of what that series of games was about. The aesthetic is very clean too, which has the bonus as its easy for the player to tell what is an obstacle and what isn't.

 

[♒ben]

Log 2015.10.19




:: Recap ::

My last post was in the midst of getting ready to show our game at Fantastic, almost a month ago.. Developement has slowed significantly since then. Here's a quick recap of where we've been with the project and where we would like to go.

The roadmap for the project so far, is we created the game in two days for a game jam. We spent a week rebuilding the mechanics after that, focusing on the weightiness of the movement and playing with some new ideas we didn't get to in the jam. This is the build we submitted and was accepted for Fantastic Arcade. We were overjoyed about this, but needless to say a weeks worth of work doesn't make much of a game.

It's at this point which we started this dev log. I had 3 weeks of my full attention to put towards making something for Fantastic. The main goals were to finish designing the movement mechanics and re-design the world the player would be exploring.

The first goal took up alot of time, it really took up most of the time I had to spend on the project. It's easy to get bogged down tweaking things, especially in a physics game. I could have probably managed my time better with this, maybe sacrificing some things, like prototyping rails which didn't really play much of a part in the final build. Though the feel of the game right now is great, so I don't regret much.

The second goal should have had more priority. The design of the world was relegated to several fevered days at the end. This was made much worse by a much earlier deadline for final builds than expected. I'm happy with the final design, but it meant we only had time to make "hard" challenges. I was only able to explore the design space that I felt comfortable in, without being able to boil those designs down into anything beginner friendly.

This lack of any introduction, and the fact we had no time for playtesting meant we ultimately submitted something that was very unfriendly to players jumping in for the first time.

Playtesting with friends during the event confirmed this but has given some great info going forwards. It's difficult, and frustrating showing things this early in developement. I think we all have a tendancy to hold things close to us, for fear of misinterpretation, or of people judging our babies based on a look at an unpolished side of it. Commiting to show something at events is a pretty good way to overcome this.

I don't believe any harm is done in the long run. The worst thing that can happen, is people are uninterested by the game in it's current state. Seeing this is a necessary step along a path to making something people will really care about.


:: Next Up ::

We've been talking since the start of the project about this idea of flow and fluidity of movement. Me and Richard as designers, put alot of importance on music and sound design and I think these two ideas work together perfectly. So looking for more opportunities to reward the player with sound and visual feedback, when they are moving well. Designing the movement systems to be simpler and easier what they would like to do, trying to build a system that has depth so players will feel like they are learning and improving.

We have spent very little time so far on world building, visual design, narrative so far. I think it's very important we start fleshing out these thoughts at this point. Once they are clearer to us, they can start to inform the choices we make in all other areas. We've got a board for visual inspiration you can check out here: Fulcrum Inspiration

[♒ben]

So some feedback we had was the system of getting speed was confusing. Your main mechanism for getting speed was holding forward on the joystick, which is weird. Getting speed should come from going down a hill.

So I turned off gravity while on the ground. It was giving the player some speed going down hills but we needed something a bit more drastic. I instead took the force the player was adding with their stick and applying that in a downwards direction based on the direction the player was facing, multiplied by the slope they are on.

This is making the game feel a bit more relaxed in a way, things are flowing instead of being pushed along. Hopefully these changes will make the game more intuitive for new players as well.

[♒ben]

Log 2015.11.22 - Getting to know each other





:: What's new !? ::

Hello ! It turns out it's very easy to lose track of keeping up with this devlog. Work time for the game has been a bit all over the place for the last several weeks. It was easy to maintain constant updates when work was more consistent, but after missing a few it becomes pretty easy to slip. So to combat this, I'm going to commit myself only to one larger weekly update,every sunday. Then do more informal small updates throughout the week, as I feel like it.

So the past few weeks have been spent trying to take things a bit slower, trying to understand the project a bit better. I'm not worrying about deadlines anymore and for the most part I've thrown out any ideas we had previously about what the game is. Focus is coming back around to the important things about the project, joy in movement and a focus on the basics of the audio and visual design.

There are some areas of the project that felt very foreign to me, so the last few weeks have been spent trying to inch myself into a clearer understanding of the different parts of the project. It's very easy to take things for granted, when you are responsible for every aspect of a project. I think you need to be thorough in with each part of it or else you can easily miss important things that could make your game much better.


:: Movement ::

I spent a couple of weeks tuning the movement mechanics further based on feedback we got from Fantastic. The main point being that we were putting too much power in the player's control. Now, the mechanics force you down the mountain, and the game becomes more about how you deal with the motion you are being given. We have always wanted the game to be about flow, and this feels much closer to that.





:: Level Design ::

Level design for one was a huge blank spot in the project. We hadn't spent much time doing up until this point and had no workflow or tools in place for it. We were just throwing meshes around, trying to make something ridable. This was time consuming, and meant that since the design was being outdated constantly by the changes to mechanics, it was extremely hard to test the changes. It was important for me to be able to create a variety of levels easily so that I could test the player mechanics constantly in different situations.

I created a simple system for creating and placing terrain pieces so that I could easily do infinite runs for testing, and make those runs based on small chunks that I could easily create and update as the game changes.

We're using Unity terrain now for the ground. It was painful at first but thanks to a package called Terrain Former and a bunch of practice, making new terrains has become alot easier.

A big issue we have to deal with is properly scaling objects in the world so that the player understands their relationship to the world. This is one of the biggest draw backs of doing this type of game in first person. Before our levels were designed by throwing meshes around and scaling them up arbitrarily. I've decided to try and model everything in the future at a consistent scale and try not to grow and shrink things. Hopefully this will give the player some kind of visual reference, a consistency that they can use to understand things a bit better.


:: Visuals ::

The other part of the game that felt completely unknown were the visuals. As my ideas about where this game takes place continue to evolve it's become more and more important to develop those ideas into the game. The last couple of weeks have been dedicated to that. Changing the look of the game is a huge task though and i'm right in the middle of it so I will save that for a later post.

❄️❤️

[richardeflanagan]

:: What's new !? ::


So, I don't want to steal Ben's thunder since he's the one who has kept this thing moving, but I thought I'd atleast post in here since we've actually been trucking away on this thing, and now that our new baby is sleeping a bit more, I have some bloody time to work on it again!!

Ben did some awesome work with feel in the game (I'll let him explain) and I've been doing level design, based on our new 'mechanic' of looping. Ben introduced it around the time of his last post, and it's AWESOME.

You're bascially stuck in an infinite loop of terrain until you collect a new terrain seed - this basically tacks on the next chunk of terrain. It's simple & glorious, and really opens things up to lot of different simple mechanics

• skill based jumps to find new seeds
• exploration to find new seeds
• multiple seeds/aka multiple paths
• platforming loops to reach new areas in a looping chunk (this one is super cool)

and this is just the tip of the iceberg (snowy pun unintended - oh god, I'm a dad aren't I, these JOKES)

Here's a big air looping level with one such seed:



A few other level sections from that day's design session



AAAAND a pretty crazy strafejump exploit:



Cheers till next time

[OneCoin]

Beautiful looking game. I worked on a mobile game a few years ago called Valkyrie. We had some very similar design pillars but we just couldn't pull of the free form splines that we wanted performance wise. The final rigidity effected the feel a lot, but it's still pretty fast and fluid. It's not exactly what we were aiming for scope wise, but it wasn't bad for our skill level at the time.

Very interested to see some more of Fulcrum, really nice work guys.

[richardeflanagan]

Today I tested a bit of how the look and feel of interior spaces might go. I like it! transitioning will not be trivial, but we've got some cool ideas for these cave spaces:

[richardeflanagan]

Steep terrain today in prep for a few public showing opportunities that might come up.

[richardeflanagan]

Ben's been busy these days, so I'm going to steal his thunder again (lovingly). We've got some interesting spatial transitions in mind, and we needed these various spaces to feel genuinely different. One way we're trying to do this is with some global lighting/fog states. Ben has them keeping pretty elegantly, but here's an example: