DevLog 1 Breakdown
Alright everyone, I'm going to break down the technical aspects of the demo. Let's start with yes... the mic... I know - I had an old Microphone I thought would work, it didn't, so I put on my new PS3 Bluetooth headset I got used for 30 dollars... oh... so much worse. This lead to me sounding like I'm recording the entire video underwater, developing in R'yleh, which I swear I'm not.
I have since bought a Snowball Blue microphone for 40 dollars, so much better and the quality of Videos 2 and 3 (4 and 5 aren't finished yet) is much better. On to the video.
Intro Screen
So yes, it's a title screen - nothing to see here please move along. The most important thing to note is that the effects here were generated by
Particle Playground, a very useful albeit expensive tool for those who want to make some effects without much of a background in the arena.
The
Particle Based Text effects are derived from their Logo example, which takes a simple font texture (we used
Cinzel Decorative as a font) and spawns particles around the vertices, and a simple script that "disintegrates" them after a period of time. The
smoke particles are relatively straightforward, but also from Particle Playground which I've found is much simpler to get the effects "right" then using the base Shuriken system.
We combined these effects with the fantastic
Moody Soundtrack made by the absurdly talented Paul Giangregio whose work you can see
here, and he also has some hilarious League of Legends parody videos (that you can see me in as well) - check out the
Alistar Song. His work pervades the game with the atmospheric feel that we wanted to achieve, and does some heavy lifting when the art lets us down.
Scenario Screen
The Scenario Screen gets all folders in your Scenario directory that contain a "manifest.xml" file, or in the case of running a non-english language it looks for "manifest-XX.xml" where XX is your iso language code, which indicates the scenario supports the chosen language. The manifest file is small, containing only the information relevant for scenario generation - it caches the values chosen and passes them along to the actual Scenario itself when it is generated. These files are all serialized into XML, easily modded in any program you'd like or even easier to mod in our
in-game editor.
Old Ones
The meatiest choice of the Scenario is which
Old One to play, each has a very distinct playstyle and abilities that are fundamentally different and alter the way the game can be approached. The values present indicate "how many agents" the Old One can control at game start and how many "Dark Orbs" must be filled before the Old One awakens - more orbs equals more power to use for abilities but also means you must be more subtle to time your rise with a properly weakened world.
Old Ones are drawn from the OldOnes.xml file in the Globals folder unless the Scenario has an OldOnes tag that has attribute 'UseGlobal = false'. In either case, it will then read any
Scenario Specific Old Ones and load those in as well.
Abilities are part of an Ability Tree, with appropriately thematic descriptors, that are set in through the game editor. Old Ones can have only two ability trees, but they can contain any number of abilities set to expose themselves by either a certain number of Dark Power Orbs or through events. Abilities tie back by a unique identifier to a series of results, exposing variables to be changed and to a resultant event.
Choices
Choices are driven by two sections, one is an OldOneChoices section that tells the engine to show specific choices for Old Ones first - we make use of this for Sisyphus at this time - and then it loads the remainder from the manifest.xml file. You can configure, the title, the descriptor, the icon, the background, and then of course the effects.
Why did we do this? Obviously we love
King of Dragon Pass, one of the best games that no one had heard of
(until its recent re-release), and the THEME that game helps establish is incredible. However, we also wanted to allow some randomization of the otherwise static scenarios that players interact with.
Let me give you an example of what can be done, choosing to "smite the homeland of the heroes" triggers an
alternate map that does not contain the island at the center, instead having a high danger quest area there. Choosing to raise the black fortress adds a
Unique Building to the great seal that is incredibly hard to quest against or siege, as well as providing an extra
Unique Building slot. Raising the Shadowmere puts that otherwise recruitable agent into the game already,
terrorizing heroes as they quest and allowing your Agents to call upon him for aid - though it also increases ancient lore and increases the percentage of 'hunter' classes that spawn.
Small changes lead to much larger ones, and play styles vary accordingly. Hopefully you enjoyed our first video, the second one is in the hands of the press and if they deem it worthy it should be up soon - otherwise we'll post it this weekend to all the usual channels.
We plan to Launch our Kickstarter September 22nd but this is prone to delay if we get absolutely no media coverage.
As usual, if you want to support us join our
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