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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE DEMO NOW AVAILABLE)
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on: November 08, 2020, 03:15:01 PM
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Hey Folks! So just as a heads up, we've been using this weekend to plan out the next steps of the project (from December to March) in which we have a lot of exciting stuff we plan to work in! Development will be resuming next week and with that, expect more updates!
Because we didn't do development on the project in October, the monthly update will likely just be a minute long (or I'll just skip to November as other than Indiecade there's not much to report!)
Stay tuned for more soon!
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Developer / Playtesting / MORSE - A strategy game using timing, tactics and telecommunications.
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on: November 03, 2020, 09:39:50 AM
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Hey Folks! Thanks for checking out the page, we recently released the MORSE demo during Indiecade and are looking to gain more feedback on the project. Here's some questions for testing: 1. Was the tutorial thorough enough to get you understanding the controls? 2. Were there any areas you felt were too difficult? Did you manage to complete the entire demo? 3. Did you experience any bugs or issues? 4. How did the threshold for the morse controls feel? (Sensitivity) 5. Did the game scale correctly to your device and was it stable throughout? 6. For a commercial release, how would you prefer to play this game? (Platform, control setup) 7. Any improvements/recommendations for features/elements? 8. Any other suggestions would be appreciated! Feel free to bob feedback on here or contact me via the Twitter link above! All the best, Alex |
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE DEMO NOW AVAILABLE)
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on: November 02, 2020, 06:03:10 AM
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Hey Folks!
So it's going to likely be another relatively quiet week (Have a backlog of admin stuff to do followed next week by development!) but nevertheless, figured I'd bob some more content on here for you folks to check out! Here's a video of me and the team talking about the inspirations for the project that we produced for IndieCade, hope you find it interesting and stay tuned for more content next week!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE DEMO NOW AVAILABLE)
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on: October 27, 2020, 03:59:30 AM
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Hey Folks! So Indiecade is over, I've enjoyed a pleasant weekend off to recover after what has been an intense few weeks leading up to the event! I'll be taking the rest of this week off from Morse related stuff for my wellbeing but also to catch up on neglected commitments elsewhere. Before I do go, here's the link to our monthly update (For September). We've more or less had October off from the project (in terms of development) to focus on Indiecade, nethertheless we will kick things back off once things have settled down. I'm heavily determined to not let the project lapse into another gap, but I need to evaulate what to focus on next (Given that the vertical slice is effectively done and the next steps are significantly more ambitious). Stay tuned for more soon!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE NOMINATED)
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on: October 17, 2020, 07:07:50 AM
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Why Unity instead of, say Godot or Defold? I guess mostly the plugins you mentioned?
Thanks for the question! So the main reason was Unity was already something I was teaching at University level, and the process of skilling up on it for that was enough of a push to get on board with the tool. By the time I started on the Unity port, I already had the knowledge of how to use most of the systems within Unity, was just getting the actual programming logic figured out (Arguably even now my weakest area within the tool). Admittedly I’ve not touched Stencyl in probably over a month which is unprecedented for me and shows that I’ve managed to transition quicker than I thought! The hardest next step is going to have to shift to programming from using Bolt, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. |
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE NOMINATED)
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on: October 16, 2020, 04:33:45 AM
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Telegram 3: Moving from Stencyl to Unity
As highlighted in previous posts (And progress being shared on here), the game is moving over to Unity from Stencyl. It's something I wish we didn't have to do, but realistically as incredible and instrumental Stencyl has been in my path as a developer, in the long term I can't keep using it for MORSE because of:
- A number of Publishers have porting as a dealbreaker.
- The tool Ink is used to handle the narrative systems, which has plugin integration in Unity and has enabled Danni to write scripts/narrative sequences directly into the game. Localisation for this game in Stencyl would also likely be extremely hard.
- There's things composition-wise that I can technically do in Stencyl but can be done effortlessly with a 3D engine. For example, Unity has a metric tonne of options for manipulating the camera, which I can use to create cinematic compositions (To hide the fact we're just working with mostly static characters) .
- The process of porting the game in Unity will significantly improve my prospects for client work in the future (will be able to do a wider variety of client stuff). Times were already really tough for mobile devs before COVID hit and this funding isn't going to last forever, so taking on clients may be a path forward.
This isn't to say that there hasn't been MASSIVE roadblocks as part of this changeover, by doing this I'm basically binning the decade of experience using Stencyl (where I can ship polished games in very quick periods). To help with the transition, I used the visual scripting language, Bolt to ease the change. With Unity, I've used it for casual projects/jams and taught curriculums in it but prior to Morse haven't completed a commercial project in it before. One thing I've kept in mind throughout the process is whilst there has been a steep learning curve learning Unity, there was a time where even using Stencyl for me was a daunting challenge.
I will be continuing to use Stencyl for my mobile free to play development and educational purposes. In my own career in general I've still got a backlog of Stencyl games I intend to launch in the long run (Along with a backlog of games to port to Android/PC). Without Stencyl, that initial Flash build of Morse would cease to exist, so I am still incredibly grateful to the team working on the engine for their software and would strongly endorse it as preferable to use for those starting out in games development compared to Unity.
Another blog done! Thanks again for reading and if there's any suggestions you have for topics for me to write about related to the project, let me know!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE NOMINATED)
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on: October 01, 2020, 08:50:55 AM
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Hey Folks!
So here's an update on what we've been up to, the last few weeks have been absolutely bonkers getting this all done for Indiecade, but we did it! Here's what made it in:
+ Artillery Improvements: We managed to get 4 different artillery shells in for the demo (and the infrastructure in place to add other patterns easily) and we used raycasting to make explosions land in line with terrain height (rather than just at an arbitrary z position).
+ Tutorial Integrated: It was a lot of work, but the tutorial now walks the player through their first few letters, makes the player enter multiple coordinates before firing a shot (with an accompanying dialogue from Eliza), staggered introduction of UI elements and gives the player time to get used to the controls. I decided that it wasn't necessary to add the tooltip bar in at this point, as I think we covered the tutorial a lot more elegantly than we did in the Stencyl demo.
+ Notifications: These were actually implemented better than in the original game, making use of the space at the top of the screen (now empty space because of perspective). Currently these are just used for the tutorial but will in time notify the player of events mid-battle (E.g. Approaching reinforcements, new units on the battlefield, how you're performing).
+ Garden revamped: Out of the various spaces, the garden was hilariously basic. It's still not 100% there but it's in a much better way than it was before. I used British walled gardens as a reference and knobbly pear trees to decorate the outer walls with. In time we'll make it look glorious, but for now, it'll do. 
+ Printout page overhauled and updated with new animation function: Whilst the scaling issues were fixed, it broke the ammo loading system and printout display because they were basing their spawn patterns off defined values rather than relative locations. The printout pages are now controlled with animations and have a nice little punchcard edge to them.
+ Trench combat fully implemented: The demo now has two instances of trench combat; first, charging an enemy trench through barbed wire and then on the other side defending that trench from German units, holding out for British reinforcements. I initially leant in hard to physics (So the units could traverse the trench line) but realised that this was going to make things significantly more complicated than they needed to be. For now, the trench has objective regions either side of it which if units interact with will trigger win/lose states. As for the combat itself, I opted for just infantry combat (no machine gunners), though I did create a complex sequence of states for defining different unit types (Bullet direction, bullet type, halt when firing, speed, health, enemy etc). 
+ Updated character graphics: Katy did an outstanding job getting the assets produced for the various characters than inhabit the house, it really adds a whole other level of polish to the project and actually jives quite nicely with the clean line based graphics of the level layouts.
+ Integrated audio: Luke made a soundboard for the various audio elements in the project, produced a mixer to process it all and implemented the 3 tracks of music for the project. After a lengthy amount of tweaking I managed to get music that faded out between scenes successfully. 
+ Fixed stability issues: Because of my use of update rather than fixedupdate, units were zooming across the map and the camera was zipping around the scene. This has now been addressed.
+ Trailer recorded/edited: I've produced a trailer that I'm really proud of, Luke produced a specific track for it and like with the last Morse Trailer I edited it to sync with the music. I'm pretty sure that's it for now, I'll have some more content soon, but for now with how intense hitting this deadline was (E.g. Pretty much a week on non-stop work), I now need to rest/deal with other commitments, so things may possibly go a little quiet on here for a while (Not too long though, Indiecade is coming up!).
Thanks for your patience and more soon!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE NOMINATED)
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on: September 28, 2020, 02:29:28 AM
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Oh my, is that high definition vector art I spy?  EDIT: Oh, wait, maybe it's just the forum downscaling the image? |
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button. (INDIECADE NOMINATED)
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on: September 26, 2020, 03:56:15 PM
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Hey Folks!
I'm aware that things have been reasonably sparse on the updates the last couple of weeks, but I guarantee there's going to some exciting updates coming very soon! As mentioned in the previous post, we've been trying to get the Unity version sorted, and we're at this point just about there! I'll be (If all goes to plan) shooting the footage for the trailer tomorrow which I'll hopefully have out soon! (Depends whether we decide to save it for Indiecade). Either way, we'll definitely have an update on what we've implemented!
Here's some screenshots below as a teaser.
Thanks for your patience!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button.
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on: September 22, 2020, 11:27:17 AM
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It honestly could be a good promotion video, no?
For sure! I also love doing educational content (Do custom controller workshops on the side of games development) so getting folks involved in controller prototyping would be an ace side by product! |
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button.
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on: September 21, 2020, 10:00:51 AM
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- Custom Controller: This may seem a little indulgent, but we've wanted to get something built from the start of the summer and because of the lockdown, we've not been able to make any new updates to the controller! Katy will be at the least be finishing the existing components for the project (E.g. Morse Key, Launch button, Headphones) within the next month so that we can do streams of the game with the full setup! Please make this an open hardware project. I'm sure there's plenty of nerds out there who love to tinker this and put it together themselves with their arduinos and whatnot |
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Community / DevLogs / Re: MORSE - Change the world in the push of a button.
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on: September 16, 2020, 03:11:42 AM
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Hey Folks!
Here's a development update of what we'be been up to! See above our latest gameplay demo featuring a variety of features we'll be discussing below:
+ Narrative elements implemented: Ink has been successfully added to the project with a variety of tags to help enhance the narrative sequences. Once I had Ink implemented in Unity, I was very excited with how quickly we were able to populate the game with the scripts produced. As covered in the previous video, I've also added a variety of tags which give instructions to the game (Adjusting who the camera is focused on, FOV, where to break lines in code) and in time will hopefully be able to inform elements such as the weather, time of day and who is in the conversation from scripts (Rather than set by me).
+ Different rooms and overview: In the old Stencyl project, the game was purely linear (did combat, narrative sequence, combat, narrative sequence etc), whilst now we're giving folks the house to navigate through (Still relatively linear but with the option of additional narrative sections). It's very placeholder at the moment (Just 5 buttons) but in time we'll have something more substantial (Katy made a suggestion of a noticeboard/map with newspaper clippings/notes/easter eggs rather than a dolls house overview).
+ Shooting ships! This is a much smaller accomplishment but we've got ships that fire when units get in range (using raycast), something that wasn't implemented in the original project which should make the units feel a little bit more alive/reactive. I'm particularly excited what we'll be able to do with different unit types (E.g. having units with different shooting formations based on their raycast angle) and in particular what the infantry combat will look like with this system implemented! The combat in general has been further refined to a point where I'm ready to start creating the other settings for combat (Tutorial and landscape).
+ Training/Narrative: I've split the functionality of the game in two; You have the curated narrative sequences with set words and sequences (E.g. CHARGE, ESCORTING, ONSLAUGHT) and "Training", which is effectively randomly generated maps and units which will be available once players have completed the narrative elements (Or are just looking mid-campaign to polish up their skills). I'm hoping these training sessions will substantially increase the replay-ability/engagement time of MORSE in challenging themselves to polish up their knowledge. The Banner Saga did something similar in having the training tent to try out formations and practice abilities and for me that added at least an hour of extra gameplay to each instalment.
+ Project tidy/refinement of code: When I started the project, I was figuring at lot of this stuff out as I went, so a lot of elements became deprecated/bloated. I've since been tidying up my logic and commenting my code to try and make things easier in the long run.
Whilst it is ambitious, we are aiming to have the vertical slice complete by the end of the first week in October (Trying to keep in line with our original project plan). In that time we must make:
- Land Combat: In line with the original Stencyl demo, the two battlefields featured are land and sea. Currently the game build feels a bit silly because there's discussion in the objectives of land combat but only features naval combat! I chose to tackle the sea first as the combat is much more straight forward (horizontally advancing units, no terrain, cover or obstacles). The land battles on the other hand are going to be significantly more tricky. We're going to have trenches for units to run along/hide within, I'm going to be attempting pathfinding behaviours and having units much more reactive to artillery strikes. Thankfully most of the underlying systems are built (Letter/Number array, artillery firing system, unit template) so at the least we won't have to build it from scratch (Just effectively re-designing the shooting range).
- Integrated Tutorial: We implemented the feedback on tutorials in the Stencyl build, we are yet to do so for the Unity build. This will involve adding all the adjustments made and going beyond that to add further narrative context to direct the player (and reduce the jarring nature of explaining instructions to the player). We'll be adding the setting of Ballroom where you'll get to chat to Eliza, one of the main characters who will be helping you throughout the game (And ease you into the game systems).
- Project stability/resolution: I went to my desktop computer to play the game to record some high fidelity footage, but had a variety of unforeseen problems (Resolution being comically high and frame rate discrepancies with both units and the camera). This needs to be ironed out so I'll be spending more time exporting the project/testing on various devices.
- Graphics overhaul for narrative sequences: At the moment, the game has limited graphical assets for the character models and a lot of the furnishings for the house are placeholder. Katy is currently updating the art style for the project and we'll be integrating the new character designs at the least in the coming month. The latest round of concepts she's produced are very exciting, one of the main things we have to balance is how far to go with colour palettes and fidelity: If we update the graphics/colour for the characters, do we need the manor house to match that fidelity and is that within our budget/schedule?
- Audio integration: Luke has produced an array of audio for the project, but because of loading times I've been hesitant to overload the project early on with audio (Reducing the speed at which I can playtest). Having said that, audio is one of the key ways we'll be making up for the limited graphical fidelity, so it has to make it into the vertical slice. I'll be researching methods of audio optimisation, but if push comes to shove we'll just focus on the desktop version for now (The main load times occur on the android build). As one potential solution, I would have loading times in the project but thought of the cute idea of having a mini-game on there of translating intercepted transmissions which would give you an edge in play. This would effectively be a message displayed on the screen in Morse and the player would have to translate it before the loading finished. Whether this is something that is just practice for the player or something integrated in game I'm yet to decide, but I think it'd be a nice way of making folks not resent the loading screens. Luke himself has produced a delicious soundtrack montage which he'll be dividing up into individual sections which can be utilised in various scenes.
- Custom Controller: This may seem a little indulgent, but we've wanted to get something built from the start of the summer and because of the lockdown, we've not been able to make any new updates to the controller! Katy will be at the least be finishing the existing components for the project (E.g. Morse Key, Launch button, Headphones) within the next month so that we can do streams of the game with the full setup!
Stay tuned for more soon!
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Community / DevLogs / Re: They Are Coming - A War of the Worlds Inspired Shooter Game
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on: September 02, 2020, 12:20:01 AM
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A fearsome Tripod hunting people with its ferocious Tentacles
This video clip with fog/atmospheric effect was what sold me on this project, looks absolutely incredible when it comes together. Please consider at least the fog as the default (Rather than what was in the online demo), it makes such a huge difference to the mood and will probably help with optimisation too! If you haven't seen it, I think the atmospheric lighting/post processing for Mandy would serve as an excellent reference: Look forward to seeing more from the game! |
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