Hi there!
This post was meant to be made on Friday, but then the events in Paris happened... It's been a strange and painful week-end since then here in France... Still, we won't let these people stop us from living our lives. So! Here we are, a month after our first « Behind the game », to talk about the progress we made in the last weeks. As you’ll see, there was a lot!
EnvironmentsOne of our main goal was to put some graphic elements on our level design in order to get as close as possible to our first concept-art.
Many questions have arisen from this goal, and we had to answer them one by one, while keeping in mind the technical aspect.
First step was to set up the “Game Plan” (i.e. the plan on which the character will move).
A lot of solutions came to our mind, but we wanted to have a way to make our levels without using too many graphical assets. There was 2 reasons for this: the size of our game and the production efficiency.
So we cut our concept-art into elements and put constraints on each of them. For instance, all our ground textures had to tile with each other.
We then produced our first texture atlas that looks like that:
With this atlas, we’re able to place all of the game plan of a level in only one day, and we can do it without the help of our graphist!
Here how it looks in the editor (unity):
Believe me, this was a great victory for us. But we still had a long way to do before our game looks like the concept-art.
In the meantime, our graphist had iterated his concept-art, making the ambiance stronger. This is now the graphical level that we want to reach in our game:
Next step was to create the background layers. We used the same method as before and we obtained this texture atlas:
This step was faster because a lot of the difficulties were already answered with the gameplan. But other problems have arisen:
- How to handle the speed of our plans?</li>
- How to integrate our layers to the Unity editor?
Most of the technical issues have been resolved. However, we’re still working on the graphical aspect and the feeling in-game because it’s still not as good as we want it.
Even if this step is not yet finished, we already learned a lot on the creation process and we’re thinking about a more efficient way to design our levels:
- We first create grey assets to have the shapes of our elements.
- We put this assets on our level, so we can test the graphical rhythm of it.
- We create the texture atlases that we need and optimize them.
- We make a first graphical iteration of each assets with colors.
- We make the final version of the assets.
I think it’s important to take the time to make these feedbacks during the production in order to improve our working process. It’s better to lose some time at the beginning so we can gain a lot in the end!
In the meantime, we made our first attempt to add particle effects, with always the same goal: get closer to our concept-art.
Unity integrates a really cool editor of particle systems. It allows us to make a lot quickly. But to have a high quality level, it still takes time.
As I said before, it’s a first iteration, we’re still working to improve that.
Finally, we’re working on giving some “life” to our scenery, by animating some graphical assets as if the wind is going through the trees.
To do that, we’ve decided to use a script, rather than a spritesheet.
Right now, it’s almost done, and we’ll soon be ready to make our first tests.
The Sklaf and the chara designThe other big task we had was the work on the Sklaf.
The original idea was to control a rather silly character who was send on missions with questionable goals.
This wasn’t a unique creature but something crafted by a machine. So it was expendable, and each time a Sklaf died, another one would be teleported to continue the mission.
When the first designs came out, we were seduced by one strong idea: only one eye which would be in fact a screen showing emotes.
We then created the sprite, then a doll that we can animate with Flash.
What’s interesting in the creation process of this character is that researches have really brought a lot to its personal story. For instance, when we worked on its death, we had to make a LOT of sketching on the corpses because they have a huge place in our gameplay.
But we stumbled on a big issue: how to draw a corpse which become a platform with some special effect on it to be understandable by the player. Sketches after sketches, a new idea came, that the Sklaf could be made with a type of jelly that can take the shape of a cube when it dies.
This research brought the idea that the Sklafs are made of Gelamex, and that without their armor, they go back to their original shape: a cube.
Last week, we showed the Sklaf for the first time. This allowed us to take a fresh look at it and have some feedbacks. I think it’s good to show our work early so we can have the opinions from other people.
We asked ourselves (or re-asked) these questions: does the story we’re telling is coherent with our way of presenting it? Is it consistent with our gameplay? Does the player will be able to identify with the character?
We discussed it a lot to finally come to the conclusion that even if the Sklaf are innumerous, the player doesn't control many characters as we can see in Pikmin or Lemmings. He plays with only one Sklaf at a time.
Consequently, even if there is a lot of Sklafs, we decided to present the one being played as a hero. There will be different kind of Sklafs, each one with a special power coming from genetic modifications. So we'll take the original Sklaf, and we’ll make physical variations on it. Our goal is to work on different animations to accentuate the different behaviours of each kind.
We’re currently re-working the posing of the character thus he looks less childish and more like a creature (but still a cute one).
The Sklaf and how it looks like in-gameThe last work on the character we’re still doing is to find the best way to render it in-game.
The new direction we’re taking modify also some animations, like the running one as we’ll be testing a four-legged run.
For the rendering part, we’re testing something more like traditional animation. It requires a lot of work, that’s why we’re making a test on one animation before applying to the rest of the game.
We’re already making some quick animatics in order to be sure that the animations are clear.
Some more!In addition to working directly on the game, we have to do things less visible but also important for the rest of the project.
We set up a tool for following our progress, listing every parts of the game, from the GUI to the smallest graphical asset of a level. It’s a tool we would like to put on our website so that you can follow every progress on the game instantaneously. We also set up another tool so we can share our sources for the game easily between the members of our team.
The sound design started this week so we can add some ambiance to the first planet, and we’ll soon come back to talk about it in the following weeks.
The first step on the GUI is done. There's a lot more work to do, but it allow us to have a base to work on.
We made a great work on cameras and player control and we’re still tweaking the jump and how the camera follow the player.
As you can see, our game made a lot of progress since last time, but there’s still so much to be done!
I hope you liked this (long) article. Our first in-game footage is almost ready, so we’ll come back soon to show it to you!
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