next »

[YogX]

holy... crap... this looks creepy as hell..
AMAZING!

[jctwood]

This week we sent off an application to Dare Academy which we should hear back on in the coming week along with the results of Stugan which is exciting! We mainly worked on adding some new animations which our artist Doug has created. They are really delightful and you can see the sleeping giant and the wriggling worms below.

Our studies are over and our degree showcase is next weekend. After that we plan to begin development full time focusing on a more complete and fun prototype we can use to seek funding. Something we recently thought about was how we could translate the game to mobile devices and expand our audience.

It did not take long to implement a quick test with virtual joypads for movement and double tapping to grab. The game feels surprisingly good and looks great on the smaller high resolution screen. I'm not generally a fan of virtual pads but because movement in PHOGS is not extremely precise the game actually feels quite responsive. You can see a short video of us playing below, no sound unfortunately.

Over the next week we are going to try and make some posts about the art and the sound in the game. Thanks for stopping by!

[jctwood]

holy... crap... this looks creepy as hell..
AMAZING!

Thank you godmoney! Creepy isn't our intent but we have had that feedback from some people. I wonder what it was that struck you as creepy? The idea of a double ended dog is quite strange and Frankenstein I admit.

[Douglas Flinders]

Hello Tig forums, I figured it would be a good to introduce myself, I'm Doug the artist on the team. Unfortunately I haven't had nearly as much spare time to work on the game as I'd like lately but I wanted to share a couple of concepts I've worked on.

First some ideas for the kinds of character's that might populate the world of PHOGS. While these are just somewhat random sketches for now as they don't necessarily have a purpose in mind I just wanted to get some visuals down for the kind of style I have in mind. Will hopefully get a lot more out soon with some more purposeful designs that have some puzzle interactions in mind.

I also played around with a quick environment concept to try and get a more solid idea of what the final levels might look like. I'm not totally happy with this one as I feel like I kind of jumped on the first most obvious design but hopefully now I've got it out I'll be able to play around with some more interesting and creative ideas.

I'm looking forward to getting stuck in properly though and I hope I'll have a lot more stuff to share with you all in the not too distant future.

bitloom

[jctwood]

These remind me a little too much of us hahaha.

Doug Henry James

[henwuar]

Hey, I'm Henry, the other programmer and audio designer for the project

I've been doing a lot of playing around with various pieces of music and trying to thematically link them to create a sort of coherent style. I've currently made 4 sketch tracks which I feel fit well with the game and some of the ideas for environments and its been fun to mess around with some pretty wacky sounds. I've put all the tracks so far up on Soundcloud and I'll continue to update this playlist as and when I make more tracks.

In terms of implementing the audio, we thought it would be cool if there would be different music playing when the dogs were asleep than when they were moving around (the dogs go to sleep after a few seconds of player inactivity). I rendered out two versions of each track - the quieter intro loop and then the full piece of music as shown in the video below:

The tricky part with this was syncing up the two tracks so that they transitioned nicely. It seemed like the easiest way to achieve this was to have a muted track looping that played a segment of audio the same length as one bar of the full piece and then only changing the music when the control segment had ended. This doesn't always produce perfect results but it will be fun to tinker around with it and see what we can do to try and keep the music responsive the to the world around the PHOGS.

[jctwood]

smooth

[ActualDog]

Seems like you've got some real solid dog-tech going on here. Very excited to see more! Core gameplay looks like it's got a ton of potential.

[foofter]

Those monsters are a treat! I especially like the mustachioed one, the one next to it (James?), and the red long eye-stalk one! 

[jctwood]

Thank you both! I am a huge fan of Wobble Dogs and Monster Garden. Hoping to make a more in-depth post about the Dog Tech soon ActualDog. I love your posts breaking down how the wobble dogs work!

[Douglas Flinders]

Haha thanks foofter, I feel honoured that you referred to them as monster as well although I suppose you maybe just see everything as monsters now

I do also quite like moustache guy I think he's probably my favourite, for the next batch I'll be trying to get more weird designs like him.

[foofter]

Yea, sorry, anything remotely non-human is automatically a monster to me now...

[io3 creations]

Looks fun!  Gotta love those "Slinky Dogs"!

[jctwood]

This week we began working on PHOGS again after a short hiatus post-graduation. We are slowly building a framework which we can fit content into and build puzzles with. This is in preparation for the DARE Academy competition being run through July by our University which we recently secured a place in alongside 5 other cool looking games which you can read about here. I'm glad they put the game name in all caps with an exclamation mark, PHOGS!

Henry created a kind of event system tied to Unity's animation timelines so that certain actions, Grabbing/Fetching/Proximity can trigger events on a timeline like animations and particle systems as well as other events. This should allow us to start sketching out little character interactions and scenarios, the gif below shows a quick test with a worm that comes to life when the box is brought to it, Henry may talk about it in more depth at some point soon.

I worked on a simple menu system with custom highlighting. The colours are placeholder and a little unreadable on the orange backdrop but it works well. Getting the keyboard focus to function correctly took some fiddling with Unity's UI Select, Deselect events but it seems stable and should work with controllers and hopefully touch devices. The only issue is that if you use the mouse to take focus away from the menu the arrow keys/WASD no longer navigate. The level select menu is for testing purposes and allows us to quickly choose which level the menu transitions into.

Doug showed me some sketches of new creature ideas and we briefly discussed having a slingshot puzzle which has the phogs pull back two pieces of elastic to throw themselves forward. These development updates should become more regular as we get back into the rhythm of things. Although Doug and I will be down at Feral Vector this weekend which should be great fun but will halt development as there is no wifi in the countryside location.

[jctwood]

I tightened up the controls a little. Players struggle with the speed and slidiness when both phogs are moving. Although this was initially charming, it becomes frustrating when using buttons and smaller platforms. I tweaked the friction and added a max velocity, simple things that make a big difference. The phog occasionally becomes stuck in step type situations so some fine tuning is still needed.

I also spent some time testing backgrounds which you can see below. The clouds are a particle system and the scrolling bones use layered UV offsets. Messing around with this type of visual element is super fun and rewarding.

     

I quickly tested an idea for a coloured activity indicator on each side of the screen to remind players which end of the dog they control. Currently it is quite distracting but could be a simple sprite showing whether the phog is moving, sleeping or biting.

We are experimenting with a BSP brush based level editor asset called Sabre CSG which is open source and bypasses the current workflow of creating a mesh in Maya before playtesting in Unity. Perhaps Doug will do a more in depth review of the features we are using and how he is finding it.

Doug and I are settled in at Biome, the local coworking space we have desks in and over the weekend drove down with some other members to Feral Vector. It was a really wonderful mix of talks and workshops, my highlight was the Wicker Jam during which we created Folk Games in the woods. Also the cardboard jam (we made a tough-as-nails pachinko style dropping game) and various LARPs including a mix between Mad Max and Business culture.

I am quite keen to try and run a similar event up here in Scotland now.We also set up a little website for our team which is over at bitloomgames.com. We are using github for hosting which works nicely past the initial set up and reloads in seconds after pushing changes.

[Douglas Flinders]

Over the past couple of weeks I've been experimenting with some environment concepts to try and nail down a more solid style. I started with some 2D paintings but didn't feel like they were working out so instead tried a 3D concept. Just keeping shapes simple and not worrying about topology or anything for now.

This was the first test created. I still like the idea of floating platforms as a nice way to keep each level discreet and simple.

This second test is more indicative of playable level with a clear path, while I like the clean boxy style I can't decide if it's really as suitable for the game. I'll need to do a decent amount more testing to see.

I also spent a bit of time experimenting with some different unity plugins that could help with rapid level prototyping. Eventually it seemed that Sarbe CSG was the easiest to get nice quick results from.

I also moved onto some tests for basic character's. One of the very simple character's we've talked about are these little boingles who help you complete the first few puzzles and teach you some of the basic mechanics. I made a quick 3D model after some sketching but I don't feel like they're quite as cute looking as they should be so may go back and change them.

Lastly I've been considering options actual asset creation particularly texturing. My normal workflow is simply unwrapping and creating textures in 2D in Photoshop but it doesn't feel particularly fast and often results in a fair amount of seams without a lot of tweaking back and forth. I experimented briefly with the paint room in 3D coat but ultimately was frustrated by the inability to select individual UV Shells for painting with large brushes on specific areas, for things like gradients. I have yet to properly try out substance painter but may have to give it a proper look next week and see if I can find a nice quick method for applying clean patterns and details to my meshes. If anyone knows of any useful tutorials or tips particularly aimed and simple, cartoony texture styles they would be much appreciated!

[jmas]

i love this :D the quirky and cute aesthetic is super charming, keep it up it's amazing.

[jctwood]

i love this :D the quirky and cute aesthetic is super charming, keep it up it's amazing.

Thank you so much jmas, Zone is wonderful!

[jctwood]

I worked on one of the PHOGS' abilities, stretching. This allows players to extend their dog body and could be used to grab things far apart, sling things, climb up ledges. One use Doug suggested after seeing the implementation was to cross gaps using the stretch ability. I quickly tested it and it works surprisingly nicely as you can see below. We are still deciding whether players should be able to fall off the edge of the platforms as movement can be quite slippery. For now the plan is to prevent players falling off the edge of the map but let them fall down onto lower ground.

Next I'm going to look at the gobbling mechanic allowing players to eat something and then kind of fire it out the other end of the PHOG, typing it out I realise how gross it sounds, hopefully we can make it more playful.

[henwuar]

So I've been working on a bunch of little things over the past couple of weeks mostly aimed at making it easier for us to make content.

I've improved the music system somewhat to allow for different areas of the game to have different pieces of music associated with them and have the music transition nicely between them. For example I could write a track for a specific character that the player would only hear when close to that character. To help facilitate this and easily organise each track I delved a bit into Unity's asset system and created an asset type that stores two audio clips - one for when the dogs are awake and one for when they're asleep which keeps everything a little neater.

I've been working on some simple AI to help tutorialise the game. We are always keen to see how much you can teach the player without words and our current idea are these little "Boingles" which run around and show the player how the basic game flow works and give the player an idea of what their goal could be in any given level.

The Boingles have a series of goals that are easy to set up and allow them to do things such as pick up or put down an object and wait for the player to catch up. Our idea is to show the player that they need to bring an object to the end of the level to progress to the next section/area.