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[Greipur]

Also: Austrian, Ostrich. This makes more and more sense.

One thing that is certain is that the ostrich will be baack in this thread. Christoffer linked

to me and assures me that he will animate the ostrich with some smooth moves. One can only hope!

[Greipur]

The ostrich, now in 3d! Christoffer showed me this today, and being the ever nagging art director I urged him to make the main body bigger. A bigger and animated version will probably find its way here soon. I'm off to the hyena.









I'll probably have some news of the save system and hunter/antelope AI soon.

[JobLeonard]

Seriously though, I don't want to mess with that bird.

[Greipur]

Johannes is mostly finished with the inner workings of the save system and is now focusing on the interface part.







I can also mention that the cave paintings change according to what button you hover over. I felt that it gave a mystical feel to our menu which fit the atmosphere. The reason for the mirror of the image was simply to create symmetry, so the player won't pay too much attention to fluff. Here's a gif of how it looks like now.







We did the same thing in Credits where I did small caricatures of all of the team members.

[JobLeonard]

I can also mention that the cave paintings change according to what button you hover over. I felt that it gave a mystical feel to our menu which fit the atmosphere. The reason for the mirror of the image was simply to create symmetry, so the player won't pay too much attention to fluff.

AW YISS! Love it! People don't play enough with menu interfaces.

What if you make the interface elements like signs "hovering in place" instead of flat like they are now? Because the latter makes it look like they're glued to the screen, outside of the mystical particle cloud. The former might give more of a sense of immersion (also, perhaps, give them a mystical whisp-like quality).

Also, I'm immediately reminded of the art of memory, maybe a nice source of inspiration? There's a semantic connection too! (saving games, memory)

[Greipur]

AW YISS! Love it! People don't play enough with menu interfaces.

Glad you like it! At the beginning I had no inspiration at all for the layout or concept for the menu. But after idly watching a documentary about an ancient people in Central America (who painted religious motives in caves) I got it. I remembered another documentary talking about our ancestors in South Africa living in caves on the coast. And I felt that this would be fitting, the last bastion (or first, if you will) of humankind went out from the cave/womb to spread throughout the world! The cave paintings in themselves are inspired by the San people's rock art.




Let's indulge a bit more on the menu! Here's how the credits looks like.  

What if you make the interface elements like signs "hovering in place" instead of flat like they are now? Because the latter makes it look like they're glued to the screen, outside of the mystical particle cloud. The former might give more of a sense of immersion (also, perhaps, give them a mystical whisp-like quality).

You mean as in animated?

Also, I'm immediately reminded of the art of memory, maybe a nice source of inspiration? There's a semantic connection too! (saving games, memory)

Speaking of the art of memory we will add the outline for the game world as the cave painting hover effect in that scene. A minimap if you will. I think it will add some atmosphere and maybe make it easier to remember what world you're loading as well. Each save is a unique world since we're going for a save system akin to roguelikes/roguelites, but you can have many slots in this game.

[JobLeonard]

You mean as in animated?

More like as a flat texture floating in space. There was a chrome experiment that showcases exactly what I mean, but I can't find it. These come somewhat close though:


http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-sphere/

http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/depth_of_field/

http://☁.neocities.org

http://500.chromeexperiments.com/

http://matthew.wagerfield.com/parallax/

Basically, imagine that the menu items were actually hovering in that cave.

[Greipur]

Aha, I understand. It would be interesting for sure, but it was a conscious decision to make them flat. I guess it has to do with my minimalistic graphic design sensibilities I picked up in art school. In this case flat simple shapes on top of more complex textures and objects. It would be nice to break out of that habit in the future, but for now I think taking it easy on the bells and whistles is my way to go.  

Thanks for the links!

[JobLeonard]

They could still be the 2D textures you have now... floating in space

[Greipur]

Oskar gave me this image and said that he is fixing bugs with the animal mating habits. The temporary solution now is sending hunters to kill them before they crash the game. I think the hunter is saying "nothing personal, but I need your meat.".

[Greipur]

I just realised that there's two things I should mention, things that was implemented awhile back but makes sense to write about. That speech bubble in the last image isn't photoshopped, it's a part of our game. The number one feedback we've gotten from our community is that they don't know what a certain commandment does, and we wanted to adress that with making the followers recite a commandment when they're going to do it. Since they're always doing things because of their needs we have a "free will" bubble as well, so the player knows that this is a "rogue" action.








If you're thinking they walk slowly that's because the walking animation speed needs to be "what you see is what you get", in other words aligned with the speed of the game itself. Since the followers position and speed is relevant to the simulation they need to move in real time, so we didn't animate it in slow motion, but the programmers implemented it this way. The problem lies with that all animations have a playback speed not suited for the amount of frames and how wide the characters walk with their feet. Christoffer is working on this now as we speak.

It's tricky to say the least, since it's just one of those weird intersections between art and technology. You see, if we'd ignore what you see is what you get you'd get moonwalking, and that's worse. But we'll pull through.

[Greipur]

We're working hard to push out the update tomorrow on Steam with hunters, antelopes and saves. Oskar encountered this peculiar bug today where the antelopes are stuck in a loop of death. Oh the agony! Luckily we've fixed it so the antelopes can rest in peace.

[JobLeonard]

Oh Jezus, that would totally freak me out if I was playing that game

[Greipur]

Oh Jezus, that would totally freak me out if I was playing that game

Agreed. Bugs can truly create some of the most creepy situations imaginable. I've been toying with the idea of making a game where animation bugs are encouraged to crop up, as a form of artistic expression (to bring forth the uncanny). We'll see if that ever flies. But it's not something that should be explored in Crest.

[Greipur]

I haven't been working on the word symbols for awhile, but Oskar ordered one serving of antelope and that is what I have delivered. I thought that this was a good opportunity explaining our workflow for how me make them.

The graphical fidelity in Crest is minimalistic, that's something we all can agree upon. As I see it a clear and easily read interface is either more, or less detailed than the game itself. You need contrast wherever that comes from, be it texture, saturation, value or hue. With texture or fidelity I here mean amount of details, so when we decided to finalise the design I decided that the symbols needed to be more stark than the models themselves.



I started with looking at Christoffer's model, in my mind I reduced details, thinking like a triangle decimation tool you find in 3d programs.









I then start throwing around shapes in Illustrator. Christoffer suggested early on that we should use vector art for the symbols, which I objected to in the beginning since I wanted the same style back then. But I was wrong. You can get a similar style when working in a vector program thanks to a similar workflow. I haven't really thought about it like that before, but there's not such a huge difference between moddeling in Illustrator compared to Blender.








I usually use a few "primitives" just as I would do in Blender, but I use more of a collage method here. "Back in the day" I was fond of traditional collage so I gues it's coming back to me here. Anyway, after I'm finished with a rough version I throw it into our word template in Photoshop and see how it reads as a really small symbol fit in that space. The thing that matters most is the sillhouette, so that is what I look at the most when viewing it "from afar". Usually I have to iterate it to make it fit, in this symbol for example I had trouble with compressing the horns without making them unreadable.








It's worth to note that we try to give the symbols a hint of asymmetry so they feel somewhat handcrafted, but at the same time keep some of the symmetry. It's hard to balance. But below you can see the finished result. Usually each symbol takes an hour or two to make.

[Greipur]

Today I want to talk about streams, we've had a stab at it before (during 2014) without much success, we didn't really have that many showing up. There are probably a plethora of reasons why, the most obvious one being that our community is still small. But I thought about doing some more research to get to know our community this time around instead of just guessing, so I did a poll where they can answer what time of day, which day of the week and on what platform.






The most important reason for asking about time is the problem of time zones, we live with GMT +2 (during summertime, daylight saving and all) so it can be hard to sync with someone on the other side of the planet. What we hope to achieve is to find some middleground. I'm personally most interested in using YouTube as a streaming service since I gather the video can just be thrown into our normal playlist afterwards, which helps a lot. But I don't know how many that use it (on the consumer side). We've tried Twitch and Hitbox before.

Any suggestions about platform? What do you use?

[Greipur]

Now we have antelopes and hunters in the game! Some of the animations needs better timing, it's also one of those tricky areas where you have to iterate together with the programmers.








We've also added the savannahs which is an inbetween biome for desert and jungle (you can see a few of them, they're the orange triangles). The water system is somewhat broken however so there's not as many tiles as there should be. We really want to reduce the amount of pure desert, so there will be a lot more savannah covering the island.





In other news I read this great piece about Crest the other day, I haven't really been sharing anything from news outlets and YouTube since I didn't feel like it made sense in this context. But I wanted to share this one since it really affected me personally. I think that when making a game such as Crest it's really easy to fall short of your vision, and you get placed in the pretentious camp, and it's heartwarming to read something discussing the themes of the game. It feels like we're on the right track after all.

Here's a quote from the article:

So is it truly a God Game?

Going by Émile Durkheim's concept of religion being a product of sociological cohesion, then absolutely. The player position is not so much one of pure divinity, but an allegory of sociological evolution and progression. This is what makes Crest so refreshing in the face of even the elder statesmen of the genre, of whose revisionist assessment can paint them merely as languid RTSs wrapped in the shroud of religious artifices. Crest's simplicity is one of its strengths. Whether a player inhabits the role of some sort of divine spirit or as a faceless entity curating a tribe's collective evolutionary will, it remains a fascinating analysis of religion within a society. Even with recent release of religion-centric strategy Cults and Daggers, Crest can still claim a blissful ambiguity to its neolithic terrarium.

Reading things like this makes it worthwhile.

[Greipur]

Today I will post about some fringe stuff, marketing!

Before Crest we did a smaller game called Among Ripples which we released on Game Jolt and some other sites back in April, 2014. It garnered some attention even though we spent zero time on getting the word out. This was an obvious error, but we really didn't know much about getting the word out back then. We uploaded Among Ripples to Greenlight just after we launched it on Game Jolt not thinking much of it. But we finally got the game greenlit in January, 2015 just a few months after Crest. We just uploaded it to Steam and didn't think much of it, since it's free to play (we have not monetisation in the game whatsoever). And it exploded! Since January we've almost had 300K downloads, which is crazy to me. I looked at the stats on Crest and there's actually information for how many people who own Among Ripples AND Crest and currently it's only 1%.







I talked with a bigger indie developer the other day and one of the people of the studio said to me that it really helped with linking to their crowdfunding inside of their game (they funded an expansion). This gave me the inspiration to do it in Among Ripples as well. I was also reminded of that they did something similar in Trine. Perhaps we could convert some of our Among Ripples fans into Crest fans? So we did a small ad on the in-game menu.









Since we genuinely want Among Ripples to be a good experience, and to create some goodwill we also updated the game to Unity 5 and added an audio option. The link from the game to Crest is via a custom link so we can track how much traffic we'll get. I'l gladly post the statistics here in a few weeks, if you're interested.

[JobLeonard]

Sounds like a fair form of advertising - "hey, you like what we do, maybe you like the other thing we do too"

Hope it will work out for you!

[Greipur]

Sounds like a fair form of advertising - "hey, you like what we do, maybe you like the other thing we do too"

Hope it will work out for you!

Yeah, we were hesitant at first. I mean, we'd probably get a bigger impact if we shipped with it in January with that, since most people have played it and moved on (and it's not really a game you return to, at least not for most people). I think sometimes you're afraid of a possible backlash that you don't even consider something fully, just as here. As you say, it's reasonable. It feels like we've matured when it comes to what you can do as a developer. You realise that nothing is gained by being mediocre (at least if one is to believe Immortan Joe and his War Boys).

Thank you, I can do a summation later for how it went. But, now back to making Crest bigger and better.