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[Lavesson]

Mostly a bunch of screenshots (17 of them) to share this time. A bunch of new mechanics, plus various enemies/bosses/minibosses have been added to the game, plus a few new areas such as a town and a graveyard (where you start your first quest after playing through the tutorial part)

The town is kind of boring right now, seeing how we don't really have any NPC:s yet. It's currently a WIP which I'll hopefully have implemented at the end of next week.

Click the following thumbs to open a highres (1920x1080) version:

Cathedral, first encounter (tutorial level)






Shade Forest (area leading to first hub town)






Currently unnamed town (first hub)








Graveyard (first quest)

[Lavesson]

So, I thought I'd just drop a quick update at the Devlog here. Haven't done that in a while.

We've finally had time to get our IndieDB entry in place:


Aron Kramer, the composer of Decemberborn has already had time to write a post, and I'll probably start posting more stuff on IndieDB soon too. A lot is happening for us right now. We're currently in the progress of forming our company and we're anxiously awaiting the results from IndieCade 2015. but our game world has been growing steadily the last few months as we've added things such as towns, NPCs that you can interact with, plus started to really flesh out the game design.

Oh! And we've designed a new start screen

[Ashedragon]

Cool looking title screen!

p.s. you may want to fix your indiedb link, it tried to take me to "http://%22http//www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral%22"

[Lavesson]

Cool looking title screen!

p.s. you may want to fix your indiedb link, it tried to take me to "http://%22http//www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral%22"

Thanks for pointing that out! I accidentally put quotes around the URL, which apparently mangled it a bit when posting.
Should be fixed now

[Lavesson]

Aron and I have set up some more resources this week, and started posting news at IndieDB. We posted a few screenshots and updates today:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral/news/lessons-learned-from-writing-an-8-bit-game-engine

... And also one last week called "Lessons learned from writing an 8 bit game engine":
http://www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral/news/lessons-learned-from-writing-an-8-bit-game-engine

The newest thing we've started working on is an "overhead":ish map of the world. It's still VERY much a work in progress, but it's starting to look decent:


... But as you might see, there's still some work to do

[IndieEmma]

Looks awesome!

Best thing to ever come out of Eslöv.

[Lavesson]

Looks awesome!

Best thing to ever come out of Eslöv.

Haha. Thanks.
Well. Technically Marieholm. Probably the first Indiegame from here as well

[Lavesson]

So.. A few nice news upgrades.

First of all, Cathedral is featured on this week's Screenshot Weekly over at Indie Game Magazine, which I'm really happy about:
http://indiegamemag.com/screenshot-weekly-sentinel-couriers-headed-for-the-cathedral/

Secondly, we've continued writing about one news article per week on IndieDB:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral/articles


So, the work in progress right now is spread over a few places. Mostly, we're working on fleshing out high level details and prototyping areas, enemies and bosses. We've scrapped our first boss that we previously worked on and replaced it with a new one. We've started working on our secondary weapon system, and the first weapon the player acquires is a crossbow. We wanted to incorporate that into the first boss fight as well, and designed a new enemy around it.

Here's an early prototype/design:


We're still working on the AI for it, but I'm pretty pleased with what we've come up with so far.

Another piece of news is that we've started doing some serious work on our "memory flashback sequences". One core idea of the gameplay is that the player has lost his/her memory, and needs to regain it by collecting something we're currently calling "elemental orbs", each which triggers a lost memory, and lets the player remember a skill as well (which technically means learning a new skill)

Here's a screenshot of one of those sequences. These are fully playable parts of the game, and we chose to do it in a Gameboyish palette to have that part of the game stand out a bit. click on the screens for a high-res version



And finally, we're currently prototyping boss #2 as well, called the Necromancer. This was our IGM exclusive picture, so I've wanted to share this one for the last week, and since it's now published, I'm free to do so




Anyway, we've reached a nice point with our custom engine where we aren't really writing that much core renderer code anymore, but mostly scripting things. There's still a bunch to do in order to expose reasonable scripting APIs, but it's going forward. Right now, creating resources is probably the most time-consuming task.

Anyway.. Let us know what you think so far

[Lavesson]

It somehow always seem to pass too much time between updates on my end here

But we've certainly had an interesting couple of weeks. First of all, Aron posted one of my articles on Gamasutra, and apparently, it got featured! So that's always nice:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AronKramer/20151109/258800/Lessons_learned_from_writing_an_8_bit_game_engine_from_scratch.php


Øredev 2015 showcase
(Note: We did a slightly different write-up about this topic at IndieDB too: http://www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral/news/cathedral-showcased-at-redev-2015-and-how-we-approached-it)

Secondly, we got to show off our game in a *very* interesting way. I got a last minute suggestion to showcase Cathedral at Øredev 2015 in Malmö, Sweden. So for three days, I had a bunch of strangers playing my game, getting feedback, suggestions and talking to other developers about it. It was nothing short of awesome (even though I was extremely nervous the entire time). We hooked a laptop up to a 47" screen and an XBox 360 controller, and let people have at it.



So, the deal for this to happen was to be able to somehow showcase the game in conjunction with another (dev, but non-gamedev) company named Edument, where I'm currently employed. The idea was to have some kind of competition element, since we wanted to give away one Apple TV to a winner each day.

Only problem: Cathedral was never a "Highscore" kind of game. There's more RPG elements than anything. The only really linear part of the game we have where these things haven't come into play yet, is the initial sequence.

So here's what I did: I pulled an all-nighter, and created a special time-trial version of the game for this year's conference only, called "Cathedral - Øredev edition"



This version was created to measure the time it took you to run through the introduction level and fight the boss at the end. I had time to throw in a couple of timers, showing the current play time, plus the best one so far, and I even had time to implement a scoreboard. I did implement it in a crude and quite ugly way, but it served its purpose just fine for the three days of the conference

At the end of each day, we cleared the scoreboard and started over.




And finally, here's a couple of links to a few videos of people playing the game








Current development

Øredev was really fun, but we're back to developing the "regular" version of the game again, and we've have a bunch of interesting ideas that we'll probably start show off soon as well. A few of those has been new render effects (see images further down). We're currently incorporating a day/night cycle into the game as well. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but we haven't figured out exactly how it would work in terms of gameplay, as well as the best technical way to do it.

It's done, minus a few cleanups and tweaks. We ended up using a "reduced" NES palette for night colors, and we interpolate the onscreen colors between two palettes. You can see one of the early tests of that interpolation here:
(It's a rather large gif, so it might be a bit slow to load)




After each boss, you get to play a short memory sequence, which we early on decided to color in something reminiscent of a Gameboy. One of our new effects has been working on reproducing feasible colors for this. We've had solutions for this before, but the early ones consisted of recolored sprites. Some time ago, I wrote a small GLSL shader to do this for me:



It's basically a sepia filter with some individual tuning of the color channels on top. Plus some scanlines (which might not be entirely visible from this gif)


Finally, another shader I've started working on has been to illuminate dark areas using a lantern.. The lantern itself isn't incorporated in the spritework yet, but I've written the illumination part at least. The trick so far has been to not make it look too good. It's easy to write a shader for a point light with a gradient falloff, but it's going to look A LOT out of place in a game like this. So far, this is what I've ended up with:



I've tried to create a small dithering effect in the outer part of the light. I'm not completely happy with it yet, but it's getting there.


Until next time
// Eric Lavesson

[DangerMomentum]

This looks sweet, I'm getting a bit of a Zelda 2 vibe from it. How do the day / night cycles affect gameplay?

[Lavesson]

This looks sweet, I'm getting a bit of a Zelda 2 vibe from it. How do the day / night cycles affect gameplay?

Thanks. We haven't got all details in place yet, but in a broad sense:
* Some events will only occur during day/night
* Some areas can only be accessed during the day/night
* You can't access as many places in towns during night, such as visiting healers and shops etc.
* We know that we want to have enemies be affected by day/night. We're still discussing exactly how to do this. Either by raising the stats on all enemies during the night (simple, but boring), or if just it affects certain enemies, etc.

Zelda II - yes, absolutely. Also trying to be inspired by the good parts of Simon's quest . One of the things I really liked is how small things such as villagers locking their doors at night added to the ambience of the game. It felt a lot more terrifying somehow

[Lavesson]

So... As usual, a lot of time passes, and I don't keep my devlog up to date
I should probably go to sleep, so I'm going to keep this one short. Basically, we have a bunch of screenshots of new and redesigned areas to show off.

Redesign of Shade Forest

First up, we've redesigned the area that we've called "Shade Forest" so far. This is what it looked like to start with:





A couple of things bothered me with this one. This was the very first area I designed for the game almost a year ago, and I've felt more and more that it doesn't fit very well with the newer designs I'm doing. First of all - we're going for a NES styled game, and even though we cheat all the time with the technical side, this one felt way out of place. It also didn't correspond very well with what I initally envisioned. For instance:

• Too many colors on-screen at the same time, all the time
• Way too much parallax scrolling (Not visible from the still of course, but I got a bit carried away)
• We envisioned a dark haunted forest. The old version especially lacks both the darkness and the depth of a forest that I really wanted

So, the new and redesigned one is using a far smaller palette, and looks more like the rest of the game:






New Area #1 - Poison Pavilion


On top of this, we've designed two new areas. The first one up is called "Poison Pavilion", and it connects our new version of Shade forest to a dungeon called the Necromancer's lair. This is the entrance, as seen from Shade forest:





... And here's a few screens from the actual "Poison Pavilion" area:







New Area #2 - The Meadows

We still haven't landed on a name here yet, so right now we're just calling this area "The Meadows". It's pretty bright and happy. Probably the brightest area we have in the game so far







Now, I did actually make a few early decisions about things such as doors/entrances/pits:

• If there's a visible door, you're supposed to be able to go through it, sooner or later. In a nutshell - I don't want to place doors as props only. If it's there, it's something you can interact with
• There's no such thing as a bottomless pit. If you can jump down somewhere, you should end up in a new location.

With the second one in mind, you can of course jump down all of these waterfalls and end up in a slightly less bright location. So the entire thing is ending up more to look like this:




Anyway, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed the screens

[Eendhoorn]

I'm getting some real Shovel Knight vibes from this, and that's a good thing!
The boss you posted earlier is really similar to my warlock character from spiritsphere haha, long lost brothers.
Keep it up  

[flipswitchx]

Love the concept. I don't know if you are using the exact NES palette but everything looks really authentic 

[Lavesson]

Thanks for the kind words guys!

I'm getting some real Shovel Knight vibes from this, and that's a good thing!
The boss you posted earlier is really similar to my warlock character from spiritsphere haha, long lost brothers.
Keep it up  

Shovel Knight vibes = high praise. Thank you!
Haha. Yep. If you're talking about our Necromancer boss, then yeah, I definitely see what you mean
Spiritsphere looks interesting too btw. Gonna keep an eye on it.

Love the concept. I don't know if you are using the exact NES palette but everything looks really authentic 

Well, it's *mostly* an NES palette. I did add a few extra colors early on (6 of them I think) to complete it with a few darker shades. I started out a year ago knowing nothing about pixel art, and as I've managed to become better, I've been able to get away with using fewer colors in each sprite. There's still a few places where we use non-NES colors, but I'm trying to use them quite sparingly

I'll see if I can find the palette later on and post it here too.

[Lavesson]

Wow... I've neglected this devlog for a long time. Scrolling up in this thread, I also see that I have managed to break a few links. Mostly due to us replacing our website (www.decemberborn.com) (Lots of thanks to Kyle Harrison for creating our new website + backend). I apparently forgot to setup redirects though.

I have to admit, it was pretty interesting at this point, scrolling through the thread and looking at the updates I wrote about when I started working on the game. According to my git log, I made my first commit on the engine for the game on the 8th of December, 2014. The game has come along way since then, and I can hardly believe it's the same game. The one thing that makes me certain that it *is*, is that even though we've redone almost all sprites from scratch, the core idea and gameplay is still the same

Before the updates, let me start by just posting some gameplay right away.





Check out our latest IndieDB post (http://www.indiedb.com/games/cathedral/news/finally-some-new-gameplay) for some additional screenshots and info as well.

So, a few quick updates over what has happened over the last half year (yes, it seems to be something like that since I last posted here):
* Victor Leão, who is also currently working on the game Möira has joined as our main pixel artist
* We're going to Poland this October, to Poznan Game Arena, where we'll be showcasing Cathedral. If you're there, come by and give it a try.
* All the paperwork with setting up a company is done, and we also have a new guy (well, since I wrote the last post), Acke, who is acting as our CEO/head of marketing.
* We have another person, Jeff Sunseri, involved too, creating concept art and promotional art for the game, so all-in-all, we're about 5 people working with the game, one way or another (I have to admit though, if we're creating the engine ourselves for our next game too, I'm goingt to opt for having more than one programmer. I'm constantly busy - Fun work though!)
* We're getting closer to our Greenlight and Kickstarter campaigns

.. And of course, a million tiny things as well

Anyway, I kind of feel like this thread here is exactly where the game started, where I posted my first screenshots, and it's fun to go back to it, take a look and realize how far the game has come. It also makes me slightly nervous when I look at the old screenshots and realize that I honestly thought the game looked really good back then (which I have a hard time thinking today, at least when I compare old and new screenshots). Kind of makes me realize how biased I am when I'm trying to determine quality

We're currently working on our first town (showcased in the video too), and a few connecting areas. Here's a couple of screenshots:


Inside one of the town houses


Having my ass handed to me by a reaper in Shade Forest


Me, trying to avoid getting killed by our own creations, while tweaking AI for a gargoyle miniboss fight

Anyway, we're still updating things, and a lot more updates are on the horizon, but I'm happy I finally got around to posting an update on TIGSource

[Lavesson]

I thought I'd brush off this old devlog, and let people know that our Steam Greenlight campaign is up and running. You can find it here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=876843423

So.. We've spent about 2 years in development, building a renderer, script engine, physics enginge, level editor and all other various tooling from scratch, plus designing large parts of the game world. We've had a very productive, but exhaustive weekend, getting our Greenlight page setup.

Oh! We also made our first live-stream, and will be doing more in the near future: twitch.tv/decemberborn

For those of you who haven't seen our trailer yet, you can see it either on our Greenlight page, or on our Youtube channel:



Until next time!
// Eric

[InterGalactic]

Grats on keeping at it, definitely voted YES for this gorgeous game. Good that you kept at it.

Can you share some marketing tips on greenlight? Any good place to promote it to?

[Lavesson]

Grats on keeping at it, definitely voted YES for this gorgeous game. Good that you kept at it.

Can you share some marketing tips on greenlight? Any good place to promote it to?

Thanks for the support!

I still feel a bit new at the whole Greenlight process, but I'd be happy to write up my experiences about it afterwards if it would help anyone (that said, Greenlight does have a limited lifetime before being replaced by Steam Direct of course).

What I can say so far is that our stats has definitely been helped by individuals/blogs/various media outlets following the game for a longer period of time. I think most places that has ever written anything about us suddenly came out of the woodworks to post about our Greenlight campaign, which helped immensely. If we'd gone to greenlight too early, without cultivating any kind of relationships, we'd have a much tougher time.

Getting people to write about your game, keeping relationships with fans and media alive, and then try to reach out to as many as these connections as possible, letting them know that you have a Greenlight campaign up - I guess that's my advice, albeit a bit lame and cliché. Sorry 'bout that

[Lavesson]

I'm just going to drop this here, and then go have a beer:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=876843423

Cathedral is greenlit, so we're officially releasing on Steam at least.