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[marcuz]

I'm recently filling in some tiny holes in past assets, among which, these two story illustrations, here in form of process animations:



and



The second one got me to think: how really hard should the finished game be?

Since I started designing it, I was convinced that AoS should have been very hard, on the verge of a survivalistic game, but as I go on, I find that what constitutes a difficulty is different between any tester, even between me and SiENcE.

Not only that, but since this kind of the dungeon crawler doesn't offer much of a sandbox approach, unless we throw away the game story and setting entirely, only a certain amount of mechanics are available to raise or lower the difficult bar, combat being the preeminent.

So, I wish to ask you:
- what 'right' difficulties do you expect to meet in a crpg / dungeoncrawler?
- What are the struggles you want to win?
- Is escape ever an option?
- Do you feel more rewarding to find an off beat path or to overcome a difficult fight where the balance is in favor of your opponent?

[Pixel Noise]

Well, if it's possible, give options. It would be great to have both the big fight option, as well as others. If that's not possible - I think excessive difficulty is going to hinder progression and willingness to explore. So if you want to promote a more "open" feel, I'd say don't make the difficulty punishing or relentless.

Also, as I've entered my 30's (and before), I just don't have the same amount of time to devote to each game, except for certain rare ones (Dark Souls...) and so I usually look for an easy/normal difficulty setting, to save myself some time and frustration.

For me - in dungeon crawlers the thrill comes from surviving, for me - so I like escape to be an option. I hate entering a fight knowing, "oh, well, this is it".

[marcuz]

Well, if it's possible, give options.

That's the core of it, I agree; on the large scale, the player will inform the game and the situations to face, in particularly the difficult of what lies ahead by his choices in the dialogues: I hope on that regard to have handled paths with some subtlety, though, but only betatest will tell.

What keeps us busy more at the moment is the actual laying out of the actual dungeon crawling, everything other than the main plot: what's the difficulty you face here, what's the one there, etc; I agree with you that punishing the player with an impossible situation after the other is just bad: we have to find a fun path between the spirit of the story (which is survivalism) and letting the player actually complete the game, or else, where's the point

One thing that helps the player to go back and return later to Aeon is the distribution of the game's dungeons on a map, that he or she can roam, facing the encounters more or less in any order.

So in any case, my previous questions stay open: we will search the answers in the next few months!

[marcuz]

New update is out!
Check on our blog for an animated snippet of our new open air dungeon and status info!

[Jasmine]

Phew. I do love stumbling upon composers with stunning work. I am extremely excited about what Mr. Artuso has in store for the game soundtrack!

His soundcloud pieces are wonderful. Ambient jazz flute!

[marcuz]

Thanks M4uesviecr, I'll pass along the appreciation!

[marcuz]

These weeks we're deep into popoulating mazes, giving cozy homes to monsters and basically trying to pace encounters.

But that's more SiENcE department; me I'm mostly going through the slow design part: each creature gets a rough sketch in ten framews, to set the animation, greyscale values, and basically its shape right; only after I complete all monsters and NPCs (three weeks yet at least) I get to finally color them and detail them.

An exception to that is the centipede-like thing here, that we moved on the fastlane, to have something new to play with right away.

In the gif, you can see a bit of combat and a couple of spells in action too; criticism and suggestions welcome
 

[marcuz]

From concept to character animation of a NPC

[SiENcE]

I just want to share a quick status update.

Marcuz is in the final phase of asset production. This means drawing sprites, sprites, sprites of enemies. I do a lot of feature integration stuff and maze building.

I like to show my latest addition to the game. I got this idea from a friend. Please note that we don't use a 3D engine at all not 3d models!

It's very easy if you know how old 2d 1st person dungeon crawlers work.

You only have draw the canvas 3 times...with normalmap, depthmap and colormap. Then you push normalmap and colormap into the shader and draw the colormap. It's basically 3d dynamic lighting using fake deferred shading.

This is the result with only one white lightsource.


If you have questions, please ask me...i want to write a blogpost about this technique.

[marcuz]

Live Rust? They Came from the Dese...*? THEM?
Obviously my mind is a clichè.

...

Aeon of Sands: the game set in a pulp magazine.







* Definitely not that one.

[SiENcE]

Our monthly update for May is out.

Read: http://blog.aeonofsands.com/2016/05/monthly-update-may.html

What have we done the last weeks, you're probably asking?
We worked mostly on 3 areas: opponents, text presentation, and a new dynamic light system.

[marcuz]

We will play the early levels of Aeon of Sands on a Youtube stream this Sunday, 05/06 at 18,00 GMT, and will do a bit of Q/A.

For all the info, here's the blogpost announcement

And here's the direct link:






We will welcome questions, critiques and suggestions; about Q/A specifically, any question received beforehand will help us better structure the one hour session.

You can write us here in the comments or in any of our official contacts: in the blogpost comments, on Facebook, Google+ or by email, at info AT aeonofsands.com.

Feel free to spread the news like it's the common cold

Thank you!

[marcuz]

And here the complete video session, where we almost destroy English language, play a bit, answer questions from forums and chat, and manage not to get killed by various insects.

[oyog]

Your link points to "http://"

"

Easy enough to fix by hand but figured I'd let ya know. I'll probably check this out when I get home from work tonight.

[marcuz]

That happens when I'm online waaaay too late thank you very much in fixing this, thank you, oyog!

[oyog]

I completely forgot the forum automatically embeds YouTube videos now.

I didn't actually fix anything but that's a solution, I guess.

[marcuz]

New blog post is out!

In it, we discuss the font problem in Aeon of Sands, and where the search for the readable display of text brought us.




Did you ever have similar problems with your games?

If you used a fixed resolution and a pixel-like font, or, any kind of font really, what solutions did you try?

[marcuz]

This summer I will still be sludging through the opponents creation, trying to get a sense of what misses yet, or is out of place, in the growing and roaring sea of game assets.

Here below, a 3 minutes video in which I illustrate the creation process of a creature, from the puppet sketch to the final frames of animation in game.





As I mention on passing in there, the dirty puppet underlying the animation, and the time it requires to be cleaned out, are a necessity for my keeping together the creature, to be able to give it consistency with all its frames and all the other creatures; this imposed constraint is actually boring to keep with, but effective in avoiding me going away in 100 different directions at the same time.

When I do not care for consistency, but only for expression, I would normally keep the puppet sketch, that encompass my understanding of the object, on one side, as a shorthand note, and do something only slightly related to it on a new page.

What I found is that in game design, that almost never happen, sadly.

As a result, this is the face of my dizzyness, that's amazingly similar to the result of hitting yourself with a magic in game.

[marcuz]

I thought to share this, a glimpse of the map and of the new and still buggy party inventory.

I took always the quick way out of encounters.
I'm that shy.



Still needs tons of polishing and test, (like, cut away the roads from the map. or a long list of bugs in the party inventory, editing of the dialogues to be in shorter blocks, etc.) but this is the larger structure of Aeon of Sands.

Please write your criticism, if you got it!

[oyog]

Looking awesome. Can't wait to try it out!