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[AlexVsCoding]

The gifs look great! And good that you gave yourself a little break, this has been an exhausting year for everyone

Thanks! Hopefully there'll be some more varied stuff in the pipeline on the GIF front, I'm conscious I've been posting a lot about boats and not much else! The break was absolutely necessary, in general from a health perspective I've been taking my weekends off now and trying to keep myself to 8 hour days.

Recent screenshots look awesome. The gameplay of Morse looks very authentic and you have nailed the retro look (the visual of the ships on radar is very neat). All the best, looking forward to the progress

Thanks! I'm really looking forward to expanding to the different theatres of war (Land and sea), should hopefully be able to do a lot with a little! Stay tuned, should be a post coming tomorrow!

I love how experimental this game is mechanically. There is a bit of a learning curve, and the level of familiarity with morse code will certainly affect how well someone might adjust to the controls. I never learned morse code before, but this game looks like a fun way to learn! I especially love the black and white visuals on the earlier versions.

Thanks for your kind words! Getting folks over that initial curve of not knowing Morse really is a tricky one (One that proved too much for several publishers I spoke to when I pitched it back in 2015), what is nice about the language though is I can weight the difficulty of letters and figure out the difficulty of words to write, so I can start off with words like LEARN which gives the player a selection of common letters they could use in more complicated words such as, BREAKING, TRENCH or BLANKETS.

[AlexVsCoding]

Telegram 2: Meet the Team!
Whilst over the years I've got the knack of wearing many hats in games development, there are areas of games development that it's much more fruitful to outsource. For example, whilst I am good at coming up with concepts and storytelling through mechanics, writing deep written narrative between characters is not my forte!

So without further adue, here's the roster of folks who will be joining me for the project!

Danni White: Writer/Narrative Designer
With the game having a majority cast of women, I thought it wasn't my place to be clumsily writing the narrative. Danni will be responsible for breathing life into the currently paper thin characters in the MORSE demo, structuring the long term plot and researching the era/history of women in technology further so that the game reflects the politics and mood of the era.

Katy Marshall: Illustrator/Installation Designer
To bring Ada and the cast into the game, Katy will be illustrating the various characters, along with advising me on composition, brand and style. She'll also produce assets such as furniture and ornaments in the manor house the game is set within and polish the graphics I've done for the current cinematic sequences. She's also responsible for making the latest version of the Morse arcade cabinet (Though that's currently on hold because of COVID!)

Luke Smith: Sound/Music Production
Currently, the game is still mostly using the soundtrack/audio from the original demo back in 2015, so Luke is responsible for finding a suitable mood for the game, producing a full soundtrack and of course, making a bunch of badass artillery sound effects and other atmospheric audio.

Alex Johansson: Programming and Design
My role in this will be programming the game and building the systems which will be used for content creation! I'll also be managing the project and the team. Another major role in the project will be talked about in the next blog post!

UKGF
Figured some of you might be interested in more information about the UKGF, basically they're a collection of industry veterans who have spent the last 6 years curating and funding various projects based in the UK. They will be making sure we're meeting the deadlines set and supporting the team with various events and workshops throughout the year ahead. If you're interested, they have a podcast that has quite a few former applicants on there and industry veterans, so might be worth giving a listen.

That's all for now, more soon!

[JobLeonard]

Somehow, the combination of a mono-serif font and "Meet the team" made read the entire post as if the first thirty seconds of this video were looping:

[AlexVsCoding]

A little sneak preview of what we've been working on, a full update coming soon!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks! For a longer demo of the current gameplay, check out this video on Twitter of the first 2 minutes of MORSE!

[JobLeonard]

Nice!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey folks!

Here's another monthly update on the project; Apologies for the gap in video updates but as described above, it's been a hectic time!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks!

Here's a development update of what we'be been up to! See above our latest gameplay demo featuring a variety of features we'll be discussing below:

+ Narrative elements implemented: Ink has been successfully added to the project with a variety of tags to help enhance the narrative sequences. Once I had Ink implemented in Unity, I was very excited with how quickly we were able to populate the game with the scripts produced. As covered in the previous video, I've also added a variety of tags which give instructions to the game (Adjusting who the camera is focused on, FOV, where to break lines in code) and in time will hopefully be able to inform elements such as the weather, time of day and who is in the conversation from scripts (Rather than set by me).

+ Different rooms and overview: In the old Stencyl project, the game was purely linear (did combat, narrative sequence, combat, narrative sequence etc), whilst now we're giving folks the house to navigate through (Still relatively linear but with the option of additional narrative sections). It's very placeholder at the moment (Just 5 buttons) but in time we'll have something more substantial (Katy made a suggestion of a noticeboard/map with newspaper clippings/notes/easter eggs rather than a dolls house overview).

+ Shooting ships! This is a much smaller accomplishment but we've got ships that fire when units get in range (using raycast), something that wasn't implemented in the original project which should make the units feel a little bit more alive/reactive. I'm particularly excited what we'll be able to do with different unit types (E.g. having units with different shooting formations based on their raycast angle) and in particular what the infantry combat will look like with this system implemented! The combat in general has been further refined to a point where I'm ready to start creating the other settings for combat (Tutorial and landscape).

+ Training/Narrative: I've split the functionality of the game in two; You have the curated narrative sequences with set words and sequences (E.g. CHARGE, ESCORTING, ONSLAUGHT) and "Training", which is effectively randomly generated maps and units which will be available once players have completed the narrative elements (Or are just looking mid-campaign to polish up their skills). I'm hoping these training sessions will substantially increase the replay-ability/engagement time of MORSE in challenging themselves to polish up their knowledge. The Banner Saga did something similar in having the training tent to try out formations and practice abilities and for me that added at least an hour of extra gameplay to each instalment.

+ Project tidy/refinement of code: When I started the project, I was figuring at lot of this stuff out as I went, so a lot of elements became deprecated/bloated. I've since been tidying up my logic and commenting my code to try and make things easier in the long run.

Whilst it is ambitious, we are aiming to have the vertical slice complete by the end of the first week in October (Trying to keep in line with our original project plan). In that time we must make:

- Land Combat: In line with the original Stencyl demo, the two battlefields featured are land and sea. Currently the game build feels a bit silly because there's discussion in the objectives of land combat but only features naval combat! I chose to tackle the sea first as the combat is much more straight forward (horizontally advancing units, no terrain, cover or obstacles). The land battles on the other hand are going to be significantly more tricky. We're going to have trenches for units to run along/hide within, I'm going to be attempting pathfinding behaviours and having units much more reactive to artillery strikes. Thankfully most of the underlying systems are built (Letter/Number array, artillery firing system, unit template) so at the least we won't have to build it from scratch (Just effectively re-designing the shooting range).

- Integrated Tutorial: We implemented the feedback on tutorials in the Stencyl build, we are yet to do so for the Unity build. This will involve adding all the adjustments made and going beyond that to add further narrative context to direct the player (and reduce the jarring nature of explaining instructions to the player). We'll be adding the setting of Ballroom where you'll get to chat to Eliza, one of the main characters who will be helping you throughout the game (And ease you into the game systems).

- Project stability/resolution: I went to my desktop computer to play the game to record some high fidelity footage, but had a variety of unforeseen problems (Resolution being comically high and frame rate discrepancies with both units and the camera). This needs to be ironed out so I'll be spending more time exporting the project/testing on various devices.

- Graphics overhaul for narrative sequences: At the moment, the game has limited graphical assets for the character models and a lot of the furnishings for the house are placeholder. Katy is currently updating the art style for the project and we'll be integrating the new character designs at the least in the coming month. The latest round of concepts she's produced are very exciting, one of the main things we have to balance is how far to go with colour palettes and fidelity: If we update the graphics/colour for the characters, do we need the manor house to match that fidelity and is that within our budget/schedule?

- Audio integration: Luke has produced an array of audio for the project, but because of loading times I've been hesitant to overload the project early on with audio (Reducing the speed at which I can playtest). Having said that, audio is one of the key ways we'll be making up for the limited graphical fidelity, so it has to make it into the vertical slice. I'll be researching methods of audio optimisation, but if push comes to shove we'll just focus on the desktop version for now (The main load times occur on the android build). As one potential solution, I would have loading times in the project but thought of the cute idea of having a mini-game on there of translating intercepted transmissions which would give you an edge in play. This would effectively be a message displayed on the screen in Morse and the player would have to translate it before the loading finished. Whether this is something that is just practice for the player or something integrated in game I'm yet to decide, but I think it'd be a nice way of making folks not resent the loading screens. Luke himself has produced a delicious soundtrack montage which he'll be dividing up into individual sections which can be utilised in various scenes.

- Custom Controller: This may seem a little indulgent, but we've wanted to get something built from the start of the summer and because of the lockdown, we've not been able to make any new updates to the controller! Katy will be at the least be finishing the existing components for the project (E.g. Morse Key, Launch button, Headphones) within the next month so that we can do streams of the game with the full setup!

Stay tuned for more soon!

[JobLeonard]

- Custom Controller: This may seem a little indulgent, but we've wanted to get something built from the start of the summer and because of the lockdown, we've not been able to make any new updates to the controller! Katy will be at the least be finishing the existing components for the project (E.g. Morse Key, Launch button, Headphones) within the next month so that we can do streams of the game with the full setup!

Please make this an open hardware project. I'm sure there's plenty of nerds out there who love to tinker this and put it together themselves with their arduinos and whatnot

[AlexVsCoding]

- Custom Controller: This may seem a little indulgent, but we've wanted to get something built from the start of the summer and because of the lockdown, we've not been able to make any new updates to the controller! Katy will be at the least be finishing the existing components for the project (E.g. Morse Key, Launch button, Headphones) within the next month so that we can do streams of the game with the full setup!

Please make this an open hardware project. I'm sure there's plenty of nerds out there who love to tinker this and put it together themselves with their arduinos and whatnot

Haha, that sounds like a really good idea! I love doing hardware based stuff so I'd be happy to try and post the schematics! Easiest way to do a Morse Code Key is with a peg, two pieces of sticky foil, two wires and a Makey Makey (One to earth, the other to a button). When I get further into development, I might do a video tutorial on how to build one!

[JobLeonard]

It honestly could be a good promotion video, no?

[AlexVsCoding]

... .--. . -.-. .. .- .-..
.- -. -. --- ..- -. -.-. . -- . -. -
-.-. --- -- .. -. --.  
... --- --- -.

[AlexVsCoding]

It honestly could be a good promotion video, no?

For sure! I also love doing educational content (Do custom controller workshops on the side of games development) so getting folks involved in controller prototyping would be an ace side by product!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks!

Super exciting announcement that Morse has been nominated for Indiecade! Me and the team are really excited and frantically trying to get the Unity prepared for the event. Stay tuned for more updates soon and if you can, share these Tweets!

https://twitter.com/alexvscoding/status/1308837328144740352?s=20

https://twitter.com/alexvscoding/status/1308844647452729348?s=20

Thanks again!

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks!

I'm aware that things have been reasonably sparse on the updates the last couple of weeks, but I guarantee there's going to some exciting updates coming very soon! As mentioned in the previous post, we've been trying to get the Unity version sorted, and we're at this point just about there! I'll be (If all goes to plan) shooting the footage for the trailer tomorrow which I'll hopefully have out soon! (Depends whether we decide to save it for Indiecade). Either way, we'll definitely have an update on what we've implemented!

Here's some screenshots below as a teaser.

Thanks for your patience!

[JobLeonard]

Oh my, is that high definition vector art I spy?

EDIT: Oh, wait, maybe it's just the forum downscaling the image?

[AlexVsCoding]

Oh my, is that high definition vector art I spy?

EDIT: Oh, wait, maybe it's just the forum downscaling the image?

Hahaha, that is definitely high-resolution artwork! Katy has done a really smashing job on the art. For the purposes of the demo we're just doing it for the characters, but may in time (depending on budget) update the whole manor house! The gameplay itself would remain pixelated (As if being inside an interface).

[AlexVsCoding]

Hey Folks!

So here's an update on what we've been up to, the last few weeks have been absolutely bonkers getting this all done for Indiecade, but we did it! Here's what made it in:

+ Artillery Improvements: We managed to get 4 different artillery shells in for the demo (and the infrastructure in place to add other patterns easily) and we used raycasting to make explosions land in line with terrain height (rather than just at an arbitrary z position).

+ Tutorial Integrated: It was a lot of work, but the tutorial now walks the player through their first few letters, makes the player enter multiple coordinates before firing a shot (with an accompanying dialogue from Eliza), staggered introduction of UI elements and gives the player time to get used to the controls. I decided that it wasn't necessary to add the tooltip bar in at this point, as I think we covered the tutorial a lot more elegantly than we did in the Stencyl demo.

+ Ballroom introduced: Given the importance of the workspace Ida was going to be operating from (and the design/integration of frivolous spaces such as the Tearoom), it made sense for us to add the Ballroom to the project (including the machine, Dotty). As part of this, we added a pre-amble with Eliza which flows seamlessly into the tutorial.

+ Notifications: These were actually implemented better than in the original game, making use of the space at the top of the screen (now empty space because of perspective). Currently these are just used for the tutorial but will in time notify the player of events mid-battle (E.g. Approaching reinforcements, new units on the battlefield, how you're performing). 

+ Garden revamped: Out of the various spaces, the garden was hilariously basic. It's still not 100% there but it's in a much better way than it was before. I used British walled gardens as a reference and knobbly pear trees to decorate the outer walls with. In time we'll make it look glorious, but for now, it'll do. 

+ Scaling correctly: I made the mistake in Unity of setting the scale width to horizontal rather than vertical, leading to comically stretched elements of UI. Adjusting this made the text nice and readable on most devices and standardised the display.

+ Printout page overhauled and updated with new animation function: Whilst the scaling issues were fixed, it broke the ammo loading system and printout display because they were basing their spawn patterns off defined values rather than relative locations. The printout pages are now controlled with animations and have a nice little punchcard edge to them.

+ Trench combat fully implemented: The demo now has two instances of trench combat; first, charging an enemy trench through barbed wire and then on the other side defending that trench from German units, holding out for British reinforcements. I initially leant in hard to physics (So the units could traverse the trench line) but realised that this was going to make things significantly more complicated than they needed to be. For now, the trench has objective regions either side of it which if units interact with will trigger win/lose states. As for the combat itself, I opted for just infantry combat (no machine gunners), though I did create a complex sequence of states for defining different unit types (Bullet direction, bullet type, halt when firing, speed, health, enemy etc). 

+ Animated intro cinematic: This was something I was particularly proud of; I used the graphics from the Stencyl version and gave them a fresh look in the Unity animation tools. In time we will improve the fidelity of these graphics and expand the cinematic sequences, but it's good enough for now! 

+ Updated character graphics: Katy did an outstanding job getting the assets produced for the various characters than inhabit the house, it really adds a whole other level of polish to the project and actually jives quite nicely with the clean line based graphics of the level layouts.

+ Integrated audio: Luke made a soundboard for the various audio elements in the project, produced a mixer to process it all and implemented the 3 tracks of music for the project. After a lengthy amount of tweaking I managed to get music that faded out between scenes successfully.

+ Debrief: Like in the original, the mission starts with a paper based debrief, but now we have tasty audio accompanying and the message rendered in 3D space.

+ Fixed stability issues: Because of my use of update rather than fixedupdate, units were zooming across the map and the camera was zipping around the scene. This has now been addressed.

+ Trailer recorded/edited: I've produced a trailer that I'm really proud of, Luke produced a specific track for it and like with the last Morse Trailer I edited it to sync with the music.

I'm pretty sure that's it for now, I'll have some more content soon, but for now with how intense hitting this deadline was (E.g. Pretty much a week on non-stop work), I now need to rest/deal with other commitments, so things may possibly go a little quiet on here for a while (Not too long though, Indiecade is coming up!).

Thanks for your patience and more soon!

[AlexVsCoding]

Telegram 3: Moving from Stencyl to Unity

As highlighted in previous posts (And progress being shared on here), the game is moving over to Unity from Stencyl. It's something I wish we didn't have to do, but realistically as incredible and instrumental Stencyl has been in my path as a developer, in the long term I can't keep using it for MORSE because of:
- A number of Publishers have porting as a dealbreaker.
- The tool Ink is used to handle the narrative systems, which has plugin integration in Unity and has enabled Danni to write scripts/narrative sequences directly into the game. Localisation for this game in Stencyl would also likely be extremely hard.
- There's things composition-wise that I can technically do in Stencyl but can be done effortlessly with a 3D engine. For example, Unity has a metric tonne of options for manipulating the camera, which I can use to create cinematic compositions (To hide the fact we're just working with mostly static characters) .
- The process of porting the game in Unity will significantly improve my prospects for client work in the future (will be able to do a wider variety of client stuff). Times were already really tough for mobile devs before COVID hit and this funding isn't going to last forever, so taking on clients may be a path forward.

This isn't to say that there hasn't been MASSIVE roadblocks as part of this changeover, by doing this I'm basically binning the decade of experience using Stencyl (where I can ship polished games in very quick periods). To help with the transition, I used the visual scripting language, Bolt to ease the change. With Unity, I've used it for casual projects/jams and taught curriculums in it but prior to Morse haven't completed a commercial project in it before. One thing I've kept in mind throughout the process is whilst there has been a steep learning curve learning Unity, there was a time where even using Stencyl for me was a daunting challenge.

I will be continuing to use Stencyl for my mobile free to play development and educational purposes. In my own career in general I've still got a backlog of Stencyl games I intend to launch in the long run (Along with a backlog of games to port to Android/PC). Without Stencyl, that initial Flash build of Morse would cease to exist, so I am still incredibly grateful to the team working on the engine for their software and would strongly endorse it as preferable to use for those starting out in games development compared to Unity.

Another blog done! Thanks again for reading and if there's any suggestions you have for topics for me to write about related to the project, let me know!

[JobLeonard]

Why Unity instead of, say Godot or Defold? I guess mostly the plugins you mentioned?