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[ManuScythe]

HEY GUYS HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hope all your new year resolutions of 2018 will come true. My main resolutions are:
- Finish a demo for Duelcide that people can enjoy and launch a kickstarter or similar.
- Help my girl achieve her exams. She's studying so hard for a position.

What we have planned for January:
1. Movement: We're close to Finish horizontal movement animations and Input.
2. Rig: Character Rig is done, but we had some issues with Modo and we can't export. We hope to have it fixed soon.
3. Move Animations: Once the rig is ready and the turn is remade, we will fine tune the "final" move animations.
4. Contextual actions: This includes Ladders, Leavers, Picking up items and the like. We'll start with ladders.
5. Brawling Animations: As well we will be able to start the brawling animations.
6. Level Graybox: I Created x1 graybox scenario for 1 of the the 3 level concept art pieces (WIP).
7. Level 3D Model: We will start Modeling a 3D sample of this level.
8. Weapon Design: Design the weapons for both the Wolf Knight and the Ball Master.
9. Weapon Concept: Execute the actual Concept art for the Weapons.


What we've been doing (between turrón, mazapan, rosco de reyes and sidra).

Dev
Slopes: We started creating the slopes.




Jump: Adjusted jump to resist gravity (allowing jumping across platforms ds style.)




3D Art
Rig: Emilio has been working on the rig. It's almost ready.

Design
Level Design: This is how the new graybox looks like.



Next I will add ladders, leavers, elevators and hotspots for the wolf heads, which will become braziers that drop vertical flaming matter when hit.

? ? ? ?: I started working on a secret plan in the mid long term to blow your mind using something really mysterious and twisted...

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, who's everyone doing?

We had somewhat of a crisis with the rig, as when remaking the skeleton there was one more vertebra on the column.

We considered remaking the blocking animations (pretty much everything we had) and I've been having intense nightmares about the world collapsing down and musketeers and knights pointing me with their fingers and laughing about me trying to direct a project.

It may sound fun, but It has been a really rough week for me.

Fortunately I learned to chill and eventually we made it work with the previous skeleton, rescheduled the couple changes to have it like the new version. This will hopefully make the ankles work more naturally, have the hats and helmets animate separate from the head, and animatea the clothes.

 

Here's current progress
1. Movement: We have pretty much all the movement, just needing to polish some transitions and including ladder animations.
2. Rig: We solved the Rig crisis and pacheco is now working.
3. Move Animations: We will create the first combat animation and the ladder animation before making move final.
4. Contextual actions: This includes Ladders, Leavers, Picking up items and the like. We'll start with ladders.
5. Brawling Animations: This got postponed, we will start with the first weapon, Pacheco's Rapier.
6. Level Graybox: I Created x1 graybox scenario for 1 of the the 3 level concept art pieces (WIP).
7. Level 3D Model: Started sketching some 3D pieces to set the level alive.
8. Weapon Design: Design the weapons for both the Wolf Knight and the Ball Master.
9. Weapon Concept: Execute the actual Concept art for the Weapons.

I kept iterating on the design for the progression of the game, I can't wait to prototype some ideas so I can confidently share them with you guys and get your feedback.

Here's what Pacheco looks like with the provisional animations!




I hope you like it. Do you guys like the content I post? I know It's not flooding like before and I'm sorry.

Does anyone keep reading the posts from the start? Sometimes I Don't know if I keep on a good track.



Have an amazing saturday  

[ManuScythe]

Hey folks, short update today.

Last week the animator informed us that she was running low on time and also she was a bit tired of focusing the few free time for the project on technically functioning animaions and not so much on final, beautiful ones

So she's quitting te project at least for now.

Nevertheles she presented a substitute, and after some talk we decided to start working together. Our plan is to spend february creating the blocking animations, and - after we technicaly greenlight february work - March will be full beautin' it all up, and create the final versions of them.

We are optimstic!

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, we made some progress last couple days:

1. Movement: system is working and I am now identifying limit cases like:
   # Rolls, they should chain in both directions and not only in the direction of the previous roll.
   # Character speed code: Horizontal speed has a small bug causing substates to mix their speeds during transitions, resulting in supersonic 20m charges and the like.

This is how the movement systems look like with the placeholder animations INCLUDING THE LADDER, YAY! 




2. Rig: Rig export from modo finnaly worked! We can now start making progress on the Ladder-Climbing and the Combat prototypes. And that's great!

Hopefully you will have news on these soon!  

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, today I want to share our progress on the Ladder climb prototype:

We started prototyping the ladder climb animations (still dumb face blocking animations sorry).

So this is how we solved the basic ladder cases:



This only has the climb animation but we set up an animator with all the states to make the transition feel smooth and cool:
 - Enter the ladder from above.
  - Enter the ladder from below.
  - Stay Idle on the ladder.
  - Climb up.
  - Climb down.
  - Exit the ladder from above.
  - Exit the ladder from below.

Discovering a new path should feel rewarding after all

[ManuScythe]

Last weekend I had the chance to join an awesome event in Madrid called Freakend, were experienced local devs gather in a country house and share conferences and coffees, prototypes and beers, and lots of fun and enlightning conversations.

I brought a build of Duelcide to the event in  seek some of some feedback and I was so lucky that super experienced devs specialised in combat got interested on the project and shared the most amazing tips.



It was a memorable day  

[ManuScythe]

LADDER 2
Ok so this case solves the vertical navigation issue, but: The ladder means the end of a path in your current floor.
You can't chose not to climb a ladder and walk past it, that's not good, we want to chose where to go. And it hit me:

Manu you dummy, Ladders should open the path, not close it.

So I made second type of ladder that you can walk past by: the front ladder. It is also in its dumbface shape, but fully functional):

[alejocamaleon]

Simple solutions are the best!

[ManuScythe]

Simple solutions are the best!

Indeed!

[ManuScythe]

Last sunday we had a car crash.

We were exiting a tunnel and sun was about to go to sleep under the mountain. The rain was pouring like a moonsoon, and the landscape looked beautiful.
I pronounced the words "This looks beautiful".
And all of a sudden, the sun light difracted on the pouring rain and it became impossible to see.
We started slowing down, when a minivan hit us from behind.


The right side of the car was destroyed.
Cristals were everywhere. Fortunately we survived.
But as scary as the crash was,  the worst part was setting the reflecting triangles under the freezing rain knowing that any of the cars exiting the tunnel completely blinded could be the one that killed us. They were crossing at full speed at one meter distance from our destroyed car.

We dressed up with our reflecting jackets and I stepped on the edge of the road hoping the car drivers could see me and prevent aotr crash. It was the most vulnerable I felt in my life.

Fortunately the car saw me, and eventually the police came and placed the proper signals, and we're all okay with only a slight neck ache, but to me and my colleagues, it felt just like a close to death experience.

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, so yeah, car crash, lots of existentialist thoughts have run though my head last week, and guess what? I decided to channel this experience into the game.

This crash shit got me digging my head about crazy stuff last week and I think I hit on something.

Namely the butterlfy effect and how things would have ended way dfferenty if only one little detail had changed. It keeps me estimulated when Duelcide and I am wondering about stuff and considering new approachs for the progression system.

I feel it is already solid enough to talk about it.

After the crash I started wondering about those possible alternate outcomes of the accident. What if I had lost my leg, or my arm, or one of my friends? How would that have affect me and my future? What about my friends' future?
This stuff is really spooky and interesting and I want to explore those feels.

What if in Duelcide you could visit one of those realities and meet the alternate versions of the duelists? or even fight those versions of them for the rarest gear? For alternate versions of the gear.

I think all those versions of yourself are your true self. All that might have hapoened to you and how you reacted to it, what it made you become, what friendships you started or finished, how you started dressing or what your weapon of choice came to be.

And it hit me. Would it be super cool to be able to visit and challenge all those versions of a duelists, and get their as reward, and then combine them as part of a interdiomensional set?

Maybe I'm rambling and it is itself somewhat complex so I made a drawing to explain it:





I'm really excited about this feature, can't wait to prototype this!!

[ManuScythe]

Hi guys,

Today I bring you our progress on the basic attack <-> hit system.
We're conecting all the attack animations and translating them to hits ( Hit animation is placeholder ).

Here some examples:


Run Attack




Heavy Attack




Light Attack Simple




Light Attack (One two combo)


note that here a hit animation interrupts the former. Probably will include diminishing stun value to prevent stunlock in the near future.

Feedback is welcome. 

[Undomi12]

wow that's really good! the animations are great.  all i could think of while watching it was......

[ManuScythe]

wow that's really good! the animations are great.  all i could think of while watching it was......
(Princess Bride - Sword Fight)

Thank you very much!
It's an honor having Duelcide to be considered reminiscent of the Princess Bride, that film is pure gold  

[ManuScythe]

More about the alternate realities:

I'm gonna get a bit esoterical here.

There's this thing that makes us who we are and diferentiates us from the rest of guman beings.

Lots of things make us grow, and incline to different environments and different people, but no matter what happens to us, and how many masks we wear or how many versions of ourselves there are, there's always a little something that stays forever in all of them.

For me that little something started at some point in kinder garden, maybe when I was starting being able to decide whom to talk to, if joining on dangerous floor games to defend my pride... whether to enter a junkyard explicilty forbidden by my mom just ror the most radical and basic of the thrills: defy the forbidden.

Everyone has their opinion on pretty much everything that you do, dveeybody is a little judge. Some are fairer, some are not.


Now for the game itself

Same happens in Duelcide:
Whatever you do, some are going to like you, and some others are going to hate you for it.

This thought will be the seed of all decision making once you make your first trip in the castle, and you realize some haacters start sharing valuable information with you if they like you, or even offer you some service, like blacksmithing, treacherous portable devices, or even alchemy, miracles, who knows? guess we'll need to really siscover all the posibilities to know for sure :-P

In order to achieve this fantasy and make it work, there are a couple systems that I have been designing from time to time.

The first system

The first one is a dynamic reputation system that can handle how characters like each other based on your actions.

What I have in mind is a score system, that depicts how friendly each faction is with each other, and on top of this, a second layer depicting how personally each character feels about the others.

Ideally, the character layer would affect the faction one, virtually allowing one character to have their peers change their minds about a certain person, and even that person's whole faction.

Imagine the plot potential this might have.

Hopefully we can start prototyping it soon enough, once combat is working, and I can come with a tool functional enough to let me measure the viablility of the idea in terms of scalability and actual coolness potential.

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, today I share a small and pretty basic feature we implemented. Passing Through and terrain/caracter blockage.


Walk run and attack animations are blocked by enemies and walls.




While Roll passes through.




Pretty the same for walls:

Roll




Run



We have a couple bugs with the turn animations but works pretty solid.

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, last weeks we've been working on the code to allow for a better configuration.

These are a couple things our system supports now:

Fall during roll:




Light attack feint:




Heavy Attack feint:




We hope to update with some more enhancements soon. Stay tunned

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, long time no see. I know and I apologize for the absence, but! we've been busy scouting the implementation of cool new [basic] features.

Here's a little sneak peak of what we've been working on.



Yep, we can now kinda equip and unequip not one but two different weapons. One on each hand ofc.

And... and... This is the proto animation for the first action with the left hand.



Any guesses what this is? ^^

Anyway, sorry again for the long silence, we really want to get this part of the prototype ready to go, I know we are slow but again we don't have much free time and oh god I can't wait to start developing the actual unique part of the gameplay, but this really really needs to work silky smooth [and actually look exciting without an enormous degree of abstraction effort regarding animation and art] before we move on.

Thanks for reading!  Cya sooN!

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys, this week has been Feria in Sevilla so there I had some time to experiment.

First I want to show off the last version of The Ball Master Pacheco I've been working on with the awesome hand of my friend Pablo Deiver, in which we are exploring the idea of adding some cloth to the equation, with a longer suit featuring a cloack like outfit:



In order to study the viability of this idea I've made my first contact with Unity's Cloth feature, creating an example cloack. It is surprisingly straightforward and adds for a really interesting effect!



I will doing some tests with scenarios and lighting, stay tunned for updates soon!

[ManuScythe]

Hey guys quick update on Duelcide,

I am prototyping a new system, and as I am pretty newb to Unity programming it is taking me forever but I am making slow progress and I'm happy with it so far, hope I can have something working before summer starts.

Basically I want to recreate a simulation where a bunch of duelists decide where they go and who they fight, and develop friendships and enmities (rivalries?). Anyway I want all the duelists to kind of develop their own lifes inside the duelcide no matter what the player character is doing. Of course character will be able to influence their minds and thus their choices and the path they follow, maybe avoid meeting someone to prevent some murder,or precisely to provoque it and save us a hard time.

For now I am learning to fill a list of characters into the slots of the tournament, and let the player chose where they go. There are NPCS who chose their slots before the player, and after him:





It is all pretty abstract now, but let's hope it takes a good shape soon.