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[hube]

It's looking amazing. Working on such a small team is never easy. When we attempted this initially we didn't make it. Our game was too big and there was just too much to handle with our days jobs getting in the way.

You are making good progress! I hope you keep at it. The game has great visuals. My word of advice would be to not make the game open world. Try to break it down and make it as modular as possible. That way you are able to build a complete product out of smaller finished pieces rather than have one giant piece that is either finished or not. It helps to have flexibility.

Seems like you've got good momentum though. I'm rooting for you!  looking forward to more updates!

[EDarkness]

It's looking amazing. Working on such a small team is never easy. When we attempted this initially we didn't make it. Our game was too big and there was just too much to handle with our days jobs getting in the way.

You are making good progress! I hope you keep at it. The game has great visuals. My word of advice would be to not make the game open world. Try to break it down and make it as modular as possible. That way you are able to build a complete product out of smaller finished pieces rather than have one giant piece that is either finished or not. It helps to have flexibility.

Seems like you've got good momentum though. I'm rooting for you!  looking forward to more updates!

Thanks for the advice.  We were originally gonna go with an open world approach, but that seemed so daunting.  We finally decided to go with "zones" as it would make building the world much easier.  I was worried about exactly what you described, and based on your story, I'm glad we didn't go that way.  Open world would be awesome, but I think managing it is hard.

Still, thanks for the support.  Makes it easy to carry on.

Here are a couple of screens this week:

[EDarkness]

The technical side of development is something that I've spent a lot of time learning in recent months.  How many polygons should be on the screen, what effects work and don't, etc.  It's a relatively daunting task and one that can create a lot of limitations in how the game is crafted.  I guess I can understand why so many game studios and developers want to have more and more powerful hardware so that those limitations won't be limitations anymore.  Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that.  Sure, it's great to have lots of power to do whatever we want, but I in my own experience, I feel like it just makes me a lazy  developer.  Don't worry, I'm not talking about you (the reader) as everyone has their own  way of doing things.  However, for me, I feel like it just makes me lazy and I start throwing things in willie nilly without a thought about how it's going to work for people with less robust systems.

I bring this up because one of the problems I have with game development these days is getting things like "water" working properly.  People don't realize that good looking water is real expensive as far as system resources go.  Finding a good solution that looks great, yet doesn't impact the framerate severely is a difficult task.  Looking on the Unity Asset Store provides a plethora of options, but so many of them just don't work well for what I'm trying to accomplish.  Now, if I had no concern about performance, then there are some decent choices.  That just isn't the case for me now and that's what is really frustrating.  Sometimes I wish Unity would have simply included a good solution for us to use, but I'm not really happy with Water4 as I feel like it was thrown in just to have something there and that if we wanted something "better" we'd have to hit the Asset Store to find what we're looking for.

Of course, it doesn't help that my game is "top-down".  Getting water to look good from this angle is pretty difficult.  I've tried many solutions with varying levels of success.  At this point, it's getting to be too expensive to keep looking for that one asset that fits my game the way I'd like it to.  So that means my current solution is to us this one water asset that is more of a performance hog, but that can't be the final option as it doesn't run well on lower spec'd hardware.  I just wish there were better options.   

Here are a couple of screens of the water we're using now....

[jctwood]

What are you building this in? I adore those dark interior shots with the blue lighting!

[EDarkness]

What are you building this in? I adore those dark interior shots with the blue lighting!

We're working in Unity.  Thanks for the comment.  We wanted something moody for that dungeon and I think it turned out quite well.

[EDarkness]

Hello again, folks.  I was under the impression that I had updated this last month, but checking it seems that didn't happen.  Going forward, I'm going to try to update at least twice a month even if I only post screenshots.

The good part is that I'm working on putting together a monthly video series of the game to show some things off and to provide a better look of the game in motion.  Screens are cool, but it's always great to see the world in action.

As for progress, we've made some decent progress, but mostly we've been building certain sections of the city.  I gave up messing with the water in the meantime and I'm open for a better solution later on down the line.  We'll just have to see how that works out.

We've also been working on the final leg of the demo...off and on.  It's just a demo and we didn't get it ready in time for Pax Prime, so it's kind of on the back burner.  Getting the main game done is where I should be spending my time. I included a couple of screens below.  Enjoy.







And lastly a rare view of the game.  I don't usually post pics of the further out camera, but someone asked and I provide a screen to give an idea of how far out it is.  Some people say it's too far out, others say it's just right.  Good thing there are options.



Until next time.

[EDarkness]

Hello, everyone.  Not much to get into today, but I had a few minutes and I figured I'd get into the recent issues I've had.  Crafting a game is incredibly difficult.  I'm sure almost everyone who posts in this forum understands just how difficult it is.  One of the problems we tend to face has to deal with keeping backups so when we hit that critical failure, it's easy to go back and put things right.  Up until now I've been using Subversion and while I find it to be fairly easy to use, the software required can be fairly pricy.  In order to cut down costs, one of my game dev friends suggested that I try something different.  At first, I thought this would be more expensive than what I was currently using, but, turns out, it's a lot cheaper.  Shocking, eh?  Well, it took a bit of work and I'm finally able to move the project over to this new versioning system.

Unfortunately, I've been hesitating to move my project over as I worry about what's going to happen once the transfer happens.  It's a natural thing, however that doesn't make it any less worrying.  This has lead to a lot of procrastinating.  That all ends tonight when I finally copy Skullforge to it's how server home.

If you are working on a game, then I highly recommend you seriously look into a versioning program like Subversion, Git, or Perforce.  It provides a fair amount of peace of mind and makes it easy to recover from mistakes that would have lost many hours of work.

That's all for today, not much, but just something that was on my mind.

[EDarkness]

It's hard to believe how much time has passed since I last updated this blog.  Lot's going on in my life and after moving back to the States from Japan, I just kind of lost track of some things.  Of course, I'm still working on the game and everything is moving along fairly well.  Much of the last couple of months has been spent rewriting a lot of code and trying to add a true level of efficiency to my code since so much of it was written when I first started working with Unity.  It's always funny looking over old code and wondering what the hell I was thinking about when I wrote it.

Main things that have changed have been animation, A.I., and some models.  I've spent a lot of time trying to make the systems in the game easy to use so even if something happens to me, someone else can come in and pick up where I left off.  Some of the more complicated systems (like the animation state machine) I have diagrams for how to interact with that system.  Up until now, adding in spells was a pain in the ass.  And I only had two of them in the game.  Strange thing to admit, but there it is.  I knew this system needed to be reworked to be less clunky and more open for a variety of spells and abilities.  The new system I have in place is much more functional, but I just finished the core code so there's still a lot of iteration.  Still, in it's most basic form I already have more spells than I had originally and the system works with legacy animations as well as the new Unity animation system.

The real question is when I'll feel comfortable about showing the game in motion.  It's funny, before I did the Kickstarter I was totally confident in what we were doing and how we were going about it.  After that, I've been afraid to really show the game off.  I know it can't stay like that forever if we want to ever release it to the public.  Not sure why, really.  I think the game looks miles better than what it did back then, but I think it's hard to keep other people's expectations in check.  My little crew is only two people and we've done the best with what we had to work with and a meager budget.  Expecting the game to look like a game with hundreds or even 10 people is folly considering that neither of us is a traditional artist.  Still, it's a sticking point and I'm proud of what I have been able to accomplish with so few resources.  The real goal is for people to enjoy the game and I hope we accomplish that at the end of the day.  That's all that matters, really.

Well, I figured I'd step in and fill things out a little bit since it's been so many months.  We're not dead, folks...yet.  Heh, heh.  Here's a new screenshot, too.



Also, I did manage to put together a Made With Unity page.  I didn't have any new video to use, but I think it turned out okay.

http://madewith.unity.com/made-with-unity/games/skullforge-hunt

Until next time.  Everyone take care of yourselves.

[EDarkness]

Everything is going pretty well these days.  I had to redo our Title Screen code because after an update it became broken somehow.  The funny part is the first thing I worked on with Skullforge was the Title Screen.  It was my best to see if I could even get something working using C# and Unity 3D.  That was over two years ago and I hadn't messed with the code since then.  Going back to it, I realized I really didn't know what I was doing then.  Lots of poor choices in how to get things working and too many roundabout ways to do something simple.  So I set out to rewrite the Title Screen code and change it up as well.  I gotta admit that I think it turned out much better than it was and I have a lot more flexibility with the system now than I did.  I feel pretty good about it now.  Below is a little video I did of one of the new instances of the Title Screen.  This is one of the few times players will be able to see zones from this perspective.

[EDarkness]

Wow.  I can't believe that it's been so long since I've posted here.  I had been trying to post on a regular basis, but time just got away from me.  Ended up moving to a new city, had some financial problems, and then trouble with sections of code that had to be rewritten.  Good thing is, the game is still being worked on and we're still chugging along.  Sometimes it's hard to believe that we're still going, but here we are.

I have quite a bit of stuff to talk about, but I'm going to save it for another day when I'm not so tired and have less to do.  Going to redo the combo system in the game since I feel like the animations aren't firing the way they should as the code isn't as tight as I would like.  Best thing to do in this situation is to simply start over and work out the kinks in a systematic fashion.  If I get it sorted out, then I'll post a little video of the progress.

In the meantime, I have a couple of new shots from the game that you can check out below.  We're getting closer to being done, but I feel like we're still far away.