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[Quicksand-T]

I'm surprised this is all done with Construct 2. How is your experience with it so far? You talked about its ease of use for a non-programmer, but I'm more interested in the performance aspect. On the Construct forums many people have been complaining about frame rate "jank", and their games can't possibly be as resource intensive as one with "little to no reuse of art assets" like yours.

[kinnas]

Yesssss, love the art and ponderous tone!

and statements like "jumping on to a platform at least twice the size of your character or wall jumping among other things was a big no-no in terms of game design." and "We’ve also chosen to refrain from using any form of in-game text and dialogue" - be still my beating heart!

[jamesP]

I love this project. The art is beautiful and I love that you're building in mechanics that help strengthen the bond between players. I'd love to hear more about how the mural-story system works - very intriguing!

Also, do you have any thoughts about control schemes/how the two players will play? Will it be local co-op on one machine, or LAN/internet?

[yanimstudio]

It looks so nice, i love the light you've used in the enviroments, all the best!

[purplemonkey]

This looks wonderful. I saw a video recently dissecting a co-op mechanic which might be of interest to you guys.

Thanks for the tip!

I'm surprised this is all done with Construct 2. How is your experience with it so far? You talked about its ease of use for a non-programmer, but I'm more interested in the performance aspect. On the Construct forums many people have been complaining about frame rate "jank", and their games can't possibly be as resource intensive as one with "little to no reuse of art assets" like yours.

The frame-rate stutter "jank" seems to be an on-going issue no matter how resource heavy a project is. That said, it hasn't been much of an issue for us. There was stuttering a few versions back but we're not experiencing anything of that magnitude at the moment.

Regarding performance in general, our scenes/layouts are around 10k pixels in width and we're using multiple effects at all times. The two main characters have about 35 animations each (and growing) which equals roughly 350 frames per character. Current estimated image memory is 200-350mb per layout. We are trying our best to regularly optimize and be wary of asset usage.

Everything is running in 1080p, 60fps on dedicated graphics and 40-50fps on my brother's Surface Pro 2 (Intel HD4400). We're shooting for 60fps on decent CPU's with integrated graphics. I can't promise anything but based on current performance measures, I'm feeling optimistic.

Yesssss, love the art and ponderous tone!

and statements like "jumping on to a platform at least twice the size of your character or wall jumping among other things was a big no-no in terms of game design." and "We’ve also chosen to refrain from using any form of in-game text and dialogue" - be still my beating heart!

Thank you for noticing, creating a believable experience is very important to us.

I love this project. The art is beautiful and I love that you're building in mechanics that help strengthen the bond between players. I'd love to hear more about how the mural-story system works - very intriguing!

Also, do you have any thoughts about control schemes/how the two players will play? Will it be local co-op on one machine, or LAN/internet?

The question of offering online co-op is still on-going for us. I did actually manage to get online running early on but it was not as fluid as I wanted it to be. I haven't fiddled with it since but I do intend to revisit again.

It looks so nice, i love the light you've used in the enviroments, all the best!

Thank you!

[nightvisioncarpetbomb]

This is overwhelmingly pretty to look at.  I especially like the immersion provided by the background / foreground, like they're hugging the characters.

[Pixel Noise]

Definitely support your decision to have a text-less story - with the type of gameplay you are setting up, and the visuals, I think you have everything you need to tell the story right there. The idea of having interactive murals/story structures is right on.

This is just so PRETTY. Keep it up guys!

[JaJitsu]

The walk cycles are both looking a little sluggish to me. I feel bad for pointing it out since everything is looking so amazing, but seeing how nicely animated the gif where one is pulling the other up a ledge, I feel the run can be tweaked a bit to be just as good.

[purplemonkey]

The walk cycles are both looking a little sluggish to me. I feel bad for pointing it out since everything is looking so amazing, but seeing how nicely animated the gif where one is pulling the other up a ledge, I feel the run can be tweaked a bit to be just as good.

Yup, I agree. It might be a number of things, I think it's mostly my fault since the animations differ from the actual photoshop animations at the moment. I also need to tweak the running speed to correlate with the animation's timing. Tweaks will be made!

[JaJitsu]

Yup, I agree. It might be a number of things, I think it's mostly my fault since the animations differ from the actual photoshop animations at the moment. I also need to tweak the running speed to correlate with the animation's timing. Tweaks will be made!

Yeah. photoshop is a bit weird with it's timing. With some tweaks i'm sure it will look great!

[mzn528]

This is so beautiful, I don't even dare to ask you guys how many hours were spent on the art..

[purplemonkey]

Single-player cooperative mode

We’ve only briefly touched on the subject of Yonder being a cooperative adventure, so I’d like to elaborate specifically on the game being cooperative even if you were to choose to play this game by yourself.


Click image for better quality

The example demonstrates switching between characters as well as a follow/unfollow mechanic for use in certain situations. I’d like to stress that these mechanics are not final and can be subject to change as we progress.

For the single-player cooperative mode to not feel cumbersome or annoying we're trying to streamline cooperative interactions so that the character following automatically responds to your actions. That being said, right now the AI is rather rudimentary and needs improvement. Our goal is to invoke the feeling of sharing an adventure with someone even if you were to play through the whole game by yourself.

Of course, if you do want to share the adventure with friends, they will be able to jump in and out at any given time of your play-through.

[GrahamOfLegend]

Good God, this game looks beautiful!!!! Damn.

[ayamflow]

Holly molly

[MereMonkey]

Oh my  This is incredible you guys!!

[and]

The art style and animation on this is awesome! It's got a nice unique feel to it. Posting to follow

[rjcade]

Very curious to hear more about how the game will play, but one thing's for sure, it's gorgeous!

[ephoete]

Holly cow this is simply stunning!!!!!! Please keep on the good work guys it cannot be this game must be released one day.

You've got talent, really, just be careful with the kind of development tools you're doing behind and make sure it's not gonna let you down in the middle of such a promising development.

[jamesprimate]

well this looks lovely!

[purplemonkey]

Game design

We mentioned before that gameplay mechanics in Yonder are oriented towards realism, though this does not mean that unrealistic situations won’t occur in the game. However, we still want the overall design to be grounded in some sort of realism.


Wait, how is this realistic?

The term “suspension of disbelief” comes up regularly during our discussions. In what way do we want our audience to temporarily accept the reality determined by our in-game rules and is there a way to make this reality as plausible as possible?

With linear storytelling some fail-states can end up being detrimental to the aforementioned “suspension of disbelief”. An example of such fail-states are when one is forced to replay an already experienced section of a game. Yonder will not have any of these sort of fail-states.

Basically, it will be hard to actually fail at something in Yonder simply because we want the emphasis to be on other things such as traversal, discovery and story.