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[aresundnes]

Been seeing this around. Looking very nice! Really neat æsthetics and a very cool mechanic. I do think you should try and put some effort into making it work well for two players, even if it won't work for one, tho. c:

Hei Prinsessa!
We will make it work for single player as well as 2-4 players. We have already implemented it so you can control two characters using both analogue sticks, and it's working quite well! It takes a little getting used to, but I'm playing it pretty effortlessly now!

Would love to know how you're dealing with the shadows, since you're doing this in Unity, yet have a lot of custom effects, as well as collision detection, going on there, so I take it it's some custom implementation we're dealing with here and not vanilla Unity?

A lot of people are asking about this, but it's actually really simple! We're using the built in Unity hard shadows for now (but we do have a few features in mind that might require us to make our own system). The characters have an invisible shadow caster that's much taller than the character itself, so it seems like the shadows are infinite. Shadow "collision" is simply done by raycasting from certain points of the character towards the light source. Really not much to it at all!

[oahda]

Ah! Was pondering whether it were some kind of stencil trickery where you compared against a shadow buffer to check whether something was in the dark or not. Good work on making it work with regular colliders!

[jg.camarasa]

Getting some serious Inside vibes here, amazing mood. Also loving the mechanics, looking forward to the variety in mechanics you guys come up with.

[Krisjet]

Post-GDC has been good, we've found some time to relax and gather our thoughts as well as finding some time for our families. We've also started working on building a cohesive story for Morkredd, bringing in a friend from another Norwegian indie-company to help us out with the structure. There's no shortage of ideas for scenarios and events that can take place during the game, but the problem is bringing it all together into a cohesive whole, and that's what we need help to do.

As well as working on the story our art director and concept artist has been conjuring up some new adversaries for the game. These are still very much a concept, but we've been brainstorming some stealth aspects lately and these corrupted sentinels were created for that purpose.



The glowing visir doubles as a way for the player to see them in the dark, as well as showing the player their range of vision.


One of our next tasks for the project is nailing down the storyline and as a part of that we want to produce a video that conveys the story both for internal use but also to potential business partners on the project. Hopefully we'll be able to show some of it in this thread without spoiling too much of the narrative!
Until next time!

[supermega_peter]

this is an interesting idea for a game!!


i find it particularly interesting that the game focus is thinking about how you have a shadow and that it is cast isn't it

after all we all have a shadow don't we?? (I do)

really makes u think

[Krisjet]

Hi guys,

As I mentioned in the last post we're getting some help on the narrative from a talented fellow indie developer. His name is Adrian T. Husby, and he is one of the designers at Krillbite, creators of the fantastic Among the Sleep. He's also the director of their upcoming game Mosaic, which has a heavy narrative focus, which made him a natural choice for us.



The last few weeks we've had some brainstorming sessions and gotten help to find the focus of the story. The story and universe in Morkredd seems much better defined since we started talking with Adrian, but we still have some work to do on defining the major plot points and deciding on what the ending (or possibly endings) of the game should be. The universe we have in mind gives us a lot of opportunities to tell a narrative through the environment, something we are very excited about. Nothing is set in stone yet, so I am afraid to say too much, but the core of our story will touch upon some of the issues facing the world today that we feel strongly about.

Until next time!

[supermega_peter]

that sounds great i think it is important to write about issues close to your heart and that is how art is made

did u ever notice that 'heart' has 'art' in it --- maybe there is a reason for that right!! cant have art without heart


well done i am very pleased to find out your news good luck with setting the story in stone

i am curious what does this means - do the stones cast shadows? are they? so many questions?

[Krisjet]

We got a grant! Here's a photo of the team at the Norwegian Game Awards, right after presenting Morkredd for the first time.



The Norwegian Film Institute partly funds game projects, and Morkredd got 35k$! It's great to see that people find the project promising.

Our consulting story expert Adrian has been drilling deeper into the narrative concepts of Morkredd this week and he's begun developing a story outline and placing events and arcs on a timeline. It's very exciting, we're loving the direction and can't wait to bring it to life!

[jctwood]

Congratulations on the grant that is fantastic news! I'm so excited to see where the project goes.

[oahda]

woohoo!!

[Krisjet]

Hi guys!

We're still kind of swamped with other projects but we're making progress on the story and world building of Morkredd. I'm still hesitant to speak about it, since things still may change quite a lot, but in some weeks I hope we can post our story-teaser video, which is in production as we speak. This week I thought I'd show off some of the brainstorming sketches that got us the idea for Morkredd in the first place.


Sidescroller
The theme of the jam we were participating in was "fear" and one of our first ideas involving light was a 4-player sidescrolling platformer with lots of jump scares. We quickly realized that a 4-player sidescrolling game would be incredibly chaotic, and we were more interested in doing a moody sort of exploration game rather than a frantic one, so we switched perspective to an overhead view of the characters.


Haunted House
This immediately got us closer to the final concept, but here we were thinking more of a "haunted house" type of game with kids as main characters. Inspired by the excellent Stranger Things series we even started looking into old school 80s references, imagining 4 kids exploring an old creepy house. Traps and jump scares would figure heavily, and we thought that if we could make the players say things like "You go first", "No, you go first" then we would really have a cool vibe going. In the end we felt the trope was way too popular right now, with games and series inspired by the 80s everywhere, so we dug deeper.


Final sketch
We ended up with this drawing, which is very close to what the final prototype ended up being. Dark, featureless characters casting long shadows standing around a luminous sphere. At this point were already thinking that the darkness would be very dangerous, although we were talking about letting people stay in the shadow for a couple of seconds before they were dragged off. From here our concept artist Mads took the concept and ran with it, creating this simple, yet beautiful image:



And this is what the design ended up being based on!

Until next time!

[Krisjet]

Morkredd has been nominated for the Nordic Game Sensation Award!


http://nordicgame.com/ng17-sensation-award-nominees-revealed/

We're super grateful and humbled to be nominated alongside other great games that are already released like THOTH and Milkmaid of the Milky Way, and interesting games in development like Budget Cuts and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I'll be at Nordic Game showing off our game, so stop by if you're there and try it out!

[Bálint]

Incredible aesthetic, following!

[Juliano]

This is looking pretty great! I love the mood and mechanics. Two analogs controlling two different players seems like a cool idea for a single player mode. Following!

[Krisjet]

WE WON!



Thanks to everyone who voted for us! All the other nominees were also great, sadly I didn't get to test all of them. Make sure to have a look at the other nominees as well: Uurnog, THOTH, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Triple Agent, Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, Milkmaid of the Milky Way and Budget Cuts!

We had some good publisher meetings when we were there, hopefully we'll find one soon!

[Xonatron]

Krisjet, congratulations!!

[Krisjet]

Anita Sarkeesian from Feminist Frequency dropped by the Morkredd booth at Nordic Game and talked to me about the game. The Morkredd part starts at around 1:00 but watch it all to get a feel for the Nordic Game Conference. It's my favorite conference, it's got just the right mix of business and pleasure





Game production on Morkredd is still in planning phases, but it looks like there's a decent chance we will be able to start dedicating more time to it after this summer is over.

[Xonatron]

Great publicity! Congratulations!

[Krisjet]

Our concept artist has been playing around with colors, trying to maintain the same atmosphere but giving us some more visual "tools" to use.
I'm especially fond of the first one of these, it really adds a new dimension without straying too far from the black and white concept.





What do you guys think?

[jg.camarasa]

These look amazing! I think it is a real good compromise between keeping the high contrast style you guys are aiming for with a richer palette. Digging it!