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[Eneko Egiluz]

Thanks, we want all the characters to feel and look different, as it is one of the key features of the game. There are still two more characters from the Japanese family to reveal, and another two dynasties to complete the set of 8 dynasties that will be available in the game. If I have time I would like to make a small post per family showing all the differences and explaining the different movements and attacks once we have unveiled them all.

[Eneko Egiluz]

This is the Onna bugeisha, a wide range melee character. Her reach can be really dangerous but also very risky as she can not do damage close to her, but you still have to evade his first attack to reach her. And there is only one more Japanese character to go.

[Eneko Egiluz]

What would a Japanese Dynasty be without an ancient martial sensei? He may have a few years behind his back, but he is still as young as the first day he began to train. A skillful warrior, faster than anyone else and dangerous in the ground, in close range, and a real threat in the air. Most of his attacks allow him to move in the air and slow the effects of gravity, making him traverse long distances while attacking.

This is the last member of this dynasty, focused in fast melee combat.The Yokozuna, the slowest but still dangerous. The Onna Bugheisa, with her halberd has a great reach with her attacks. The Sensei, fast and really dangerous in the air. The Ninja, sneaky and fast. And the samurai, a fierce warrior, well suited with an armor, but still fast and deadly in close combat. The only thing left is to present the Warden Spirit and its power.

[Eneko Egiluz]

Today we want to talk about the HUD. We wanted to do an overhaul of it. Trying to do it in high definition instead of pixel art. This change will make it stand out more. The purpose of this change, apart from making it more beautiful is to show the number of characters left in a clearer way, and easier to identify. We have changed the character left from standing up in pixel art, to a coin with the head of the character in concept art. This way it shows more detail from the design of the character, that in pixel art was almost impossible to see and could be overlooked. And now that it is depicted in the coins, the small details of the pixel art representation can shine and our artist will be happier because all the details he puts in the design, can be appreciated.

We have changed also the superFeud bar. We are making it discrete with the diamonds, they are still not finished, but they work as intended. Now it is easier to see how many each character gain, 2 diamonds or 1, and not a random value that fills the bar.

The color of each dynasty is shown clearer, the coins and the frame stand out more.

Each dynasty will have a thematic HUD, this one is the Aztec.

We are still testing several designs, this one is more realist and we want to do another test with a cartoonish HUD, but we like the overall layout.

[Eneko Egiluz]

We keep improving the HUD. This is the cartoonish version, and we think it fits more the overall game look. Also we have replaced the old countdown, with a much better and cooler introduction.
Seeing both changes together. although small ones, we think it gives the game a way different look.

[Eneko Egiluz]

As promised, this is the concept of the Japanese family, with all the members that we have been introducing in the previous posts. Next dynasty will be Pirates. Tomorrow we will do a playtesting in a commercial center in the neighborhood, it will be the first time for Aztec level, the Japanese and the Pirate dynasties, scary but exciting, wish us luck!!

[Eneko Egiluz]

Today we have the portraits of the Caveman for you! Hope you like them!

[Eneko Egiluz]

We have shown you the families, today we have their warden spirits!

 

Japanese                                                              Caveman

[Eneko Egiluz]

HI guys! We have been busy these days working on polishing, but time has come to keep on working on levels, and so i have done today! I have been working on the pirate level, and it looks like this right now! what do you guys think? what about that lava falling for late stages of the level?  Also, the Jaw is moving up and down in order to isolate those lower platforms.

[Eneko Egiluz]

We have been silent, but that does not mean that we have not been working hard, just the opposite. A lot of things have happened in this past few weeks. We have attended the indiehub at Gamelab16, the national awards, where we had the chance to met some great fellow developers, and also Rami Ismail, who gladly played our game, providing with some really good advice and pointed out some issues we have to manage.
 
We also spent some time working on our announcement trailer. Give us feedback about it so we can improve it!

Remember! TAP!   TAP!   TAP!   TAP!  

[Shambrook]

Why are all the Aztec dudes white? You've designed like 30+ charecters from a bunch of different countries and cultures, and managed to not include a single touch of melanin in your entire roster. Hell even the Japanese Dynasty look white. That's kinda weird.

[Eneko Egiluz]

Why are all the Aztec dudes white? You've designed like 30+ charecters from a bunch of different countries and cultures, and managed to not include a single touch of melanin in your entire roster. Hell even the Japanese Dynasty look white. That's kinda weird.

That´s actually true. We are definitely going to change the high-res portraits of the characters. About the in-game look, the skin and hair color changes depending on the color assigned (red, blue, green or yellow), creating some really strange combinations (like the one below). Thank you for noticing that, we should have seen it before.

[Shambrook]

Ah cool, thanks for the response.

[Eneko Egiluz]

Hi everyone!

It's been awhile since we have written anything about the game. And we have to apologize for that, It is harder than what we could imaging to find the time and energy to write about the development, but it is a good practice to write down what we have done so far, the struggles, the ups and downs of such an endeavoring task as developing a game. Not only for the people to know about our project and learn what our experiences were, but also because it helps our sanity. Working so hard on something leads to a complete loss of perspective and you end up undervaluing all the work. Taking the time to recap about everything done, helps us look back and put value on everything we have worked on, which believe me it's quite a lot.

We are almost content complete if we talk about levels and dynasties, we have 8 of both. They are playable and working fine, and we have started the final polish pass on those, mainly on the characters.

So let's sum up where we stand right now in the development, beginning today with the changes of art on the levels.

Most of the art from the firsts levels has changed. We had from the beginning a loose pixelish style without being too strict, about maintaining the sizes of the pixels in all the elements. One of the problems we had with this is that the level created visual noise and it was hard to follow or understand what was happening (this has been and still is our main struggle). So we did a pass over the levels simplifying the forms and designs of the elements in them, but also trying to improve on what we have.

We were working on levels when we realized of problems with characters visibility, so we decided to try a new cleaner style for levels in order to solve this. Characters are, in general, brighter than the background, but the noise created by the amount of details and texture, brought some highlights that made the characters not remarkable in the environment, that was indeed what we were looking for.

We erased noisy texture from flat shapes and stylized them into more geometric drawings. We also added small color variations and smooth gradient shading in order to enhance visibility and give depth to the elements. Both, contrast levels and saturation were drawn near to midtones. We tested this changes on the levels we were currently working at, the pirate cave and the japanese pagoda.

We were happy with the result so we decided to start a rework on the previous levels, viking, aztec and western level. These changes also helped to unify the in-game art and to establish some style guides.

At this point we polished the original cave and pagoda,and we were done with the first 5 levels. We still had 3 more levels to go; prehistoric, medieval castle, and futuristic, which were on an early stage. We keep on working following these guidelines and this is the result we achieved!

And we are pretty happy with the result. Although for some people there is still too much noise, they are a lot clearer than what they were and there is a hard balance between an appealing level and a playable one, if you know what I mean.

It's been quite a wall of text, and this is only covering the art changes on the levels. I promise that we will try to do this more regularly regarding more topics, because it feels good to see all the things you have done; and explain them to clear and reinforce our ideas of why we do what we do.

Thanks for reading.

[Eneko Egiluz]

Yes! We finally have menus we are not embarrassed to look at. Yeah!!. After more than a year of a dull, “do not look at it you know it is still temporary”, “it does what it is supposed to do and that’s it”. After designing them several times and deciding the theme another hundred times, there they are, some good looking menus with their animations and sounds (this part is not finished yet, but almost).

But let's start from the beginning and this is what we had.

You can see how ugly they were and we knew it, because something else would be coming in the future, something better, but it took us a while to reach there.

We decided to do a pass on the layout and improve a bit how they looked, trying to show a bit more of the game appeal through the menus.

It was better, but we had the feeling that it was still generic. The background and the panels were a bit soulless, and didn’t say much about the game. Something felt off.

We added transitions and some animations but they were placeholders, we were going in the good direction but they needed much more work on them.

We liked the layout of the selection panel, it gave importance to the player and the Warden spirits while selecting your dynasty and that was something we wanted to enhance.

So we did another pass, this time trying to impregnate, not only the assets but also the transitions and animations, that cartoony style the actual game and character design has.

And this is the final result.

The colors are more vibrant, the black outline unifies everything and the animations gives personality to the game from the very beginning, and they are a lot more smoother than what we had.

In general everything is more polished and felt better just to navigate between the different options. Something we wanted is to add animation to every interaction the player does, there are still some things missing but the change has been huge and we are happy of the direction it is going.


By the way, we hope you guys have a nice holidays! And a happy new year, if we do not reach you sooner!

[Eneko Egiluz]

Happy new year everyone! Back to work after holidays, it was good to see family and friends, to eat as much as we could, and get some sleep to recharge our batteries. 2017 is going to be an amazing year and we have to be ready. It will be the year Dynasty Feud will come to life, our first commercial game, but let’s talk about the development.

We want to talk to you about one of our biggest headaches during the development: the comeback mechanic. The mechanic that would give to players the ability to break the rhythm of the game, and we have struggled to find it. We initially discarded the classic idea of having a super. So we tried several things.

Our first approach was allowing to switch characters in the match even when you were not death. This way if your opponent is selecting a good match up against your pick, you can counterattack. The time when you can select which character is going to appear next is when one of your character has died and the Warden Spirit appears, having up to 5 seconds to change the order of spawn and position where it will happen. So our first comeback mechanic gave the player the chance to store the current character you were playing and summon the Warden Spirit, so you can select which character will appear. This also provided with an invulnerability of 5 seconds, because the Warden Spirit cannot be harmed and you could escape from dangerous situations.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? The reality showed us it was too confusing. No one understood what was happening, they thought their character died instead of storing it for later. We could have fixed this with more feedback or making more obvious what was happening, but what was a good idea in paper, taking advantage strategically changing characters, was mainly useful only for its invulnerability time, and wasn’t spectacular at all. So we threw it to the bin.

Next approach tried to improve the player stats for a while, allowing the character to move and attack faster and jump longer, what we called internally a “saiyan state”. It was a moment in which the rest of the players had to forget about attacking each other and focus on the character with the saiyan state. It worked as a rhythm changer, and as a powerful comeback mechanic, but it felt cheap, and the same boost was not improving all the characters equally. It was not the same for an agile melee warrior than for an slow stationary ranged. So if we wanted to make this ability useful, powerful, and spectacular enough for all the character, we need to revisit most of the attacks, that meant probably redoing many of their animations and balancing everything, and we have up to 40 characters, the artist would have killed us, so we quickly remove this idea from our heads.

This last try was actually pretty close to the super we discarded at first, so things were looking at that as the best feasible idea. So we finally surrendered, we have 40 characters divided into 8 different dynasties, it was a lot more manageable to do something cool, powerful and spectacular per dynasty than per character. We took advantage of the common element inside the Dynasties, the Warden Spirit, that appears casting a devastating spell upon their enemies. And it worked marvelously. Yes they are almost a no skill button attack, something that we wanted to avoid, but there is still an strategic use, when and mostly where to use them, that we are happy with. They provide some rhythm to the match, a moment in which everything stops and the action is focused on one point. It is paradoxically a moment of relief, an impasse in the fight before the maelstrom is released.

This iteration was a valuable lesson for us. Do not discard anything until you try it, even when you want to avoid it. Understand what the general solution is, why most of the people use it in their games, analyzing them or implementing it in yours. Finding exactly what brings to the table and what not, so it is easier to improve upon that, once you did it yourself.

[Eneko Egiluz]

Hello!
Today we bring the movement collection of Raiga, the Doomed Samurai from Japanese Dynasty.
Enjoy it! 

[nu_muso]

Very smooth. Nice!

[tanis]

It looks like you're using Unity as the engine for your awesome game, so I'll ask you one question about the way you manage collisions. Are your colliders actually Collider2D or are you using your own objects and doing all the collision checks by hand without using the Physics2D overlap and the like functions?

[Ohmnivore]

I'm really curious about the networking implementation for the online feature. I apologize if you have already written about it, but I glanced through the devlog and couldn't find anything about it.

Which networking library are you using, and how do you handle latency? In a fighting game I can imagine it's really important. I can see the need for a handful of techniques: client-side prediction, state rollback on the server to validate instant hits, and projectile pre-stepping for instance. I might be completely wrong on those, but still I'm curious how you guys do it