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[Jasmine]

Personally, I understand the desire for "nostalgia", but there's nothing wrong with deviating a little bit. For me, seeing a tad bit more effort being put into the animations does more good than what you'd expect.

Examples of taking that extra step:

https://youtu.be/6QU7RoZMflc?t=1m32s

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=52290.msg1211612#msg1211612

https://youtu.be/2plh09feicc?t=6m16s

Their movements are really clean, and personally, settling on walking animations almost feels like a cop-out when you are in a position to expand on the idea. Of course, that is if you are in a position to do more.*

[6 Eyes Studio]

Item Usage Design

When it came to item usage, we really wanted something different than other tactics games.

Everyone involved in our design process has the same issue with items in most games: you spend the whole game collecting them and more often than not they remain unused because they are a finite resource and you could "manage without it". So you save them for some "critical moment" that may or may not ever come.

The other side is items might be too cheap and then you just buy a huge stack and spam them with abandon, which usually breaks balance.

It's really a balancing issue, but we felt it's one that might be solved differently.

Key notes for our system:
- Every combatant has access to the Item command (you don't need to equip it specifically, like in some tactics RPG). The idea is that you don't need to mess up your 'build' to be able to use items and everyone has a bit of flexibility.

- To compensate for the above, we have a limited amount of different items in the game: we have only 9 different items in total, but every item has some value (no fluff items).

- Every combatant uses item from a 'team pool' of items (so, you don't equip individual combatants with specific items). This simplifies character management, as you don't have to individually set items for each. Since we have so many customization options (6 pieces of gears and a lot of ability customization options), we felt it would be important to keep items simple.

- Tied to the above, each items has a maximum count you can own (for example, at the start of the game, you can only have 3 potions), which means that your team will share 3 potions during a specific battle. But, this count starts filled up with every new battle (without you having to purchase anything: you can't purchase items).

The net effect is that you have a limited amount of items each battle, so they are precious, but at the same time, you always get that amount every battle, so you can feel free to use them, knowing it's not depleting a finite and precious resource. So far, we've really been liking this system. The only downside is that we must make sure to have some quick tutorial about it, since it is completely non-standard.

Since we have only 9 different items, we have to make sure they remain interesting and useful throughout the game. Options were basically to make their values % based (% are usually always useful throughout a game) or allow the player to upgrade them. We went with the later, as it works right into the crafting system we made for the game.


As can be seen here, the player doesn't start with all 9 items unlocked and must use crafting to unlock some of them. Furthermore, all items have 3 different tiers of potency, which increase a combination of effectiveness and usage count per battle. Again, using the crafting system, the player can upgrade those items.

One of the ideas of the crafting system is giving players "hard choices to make", meaning that some craftable items share their craftable component, so you'll have to pick which one you want to unlock first. Without getting into the details for now, many other things can be crafted, including accessories, gadgets (which are used by gadgeteers for their abilities), class badges (to open secret jobs), etc, so those can be difficult choices at times

As usual, questions and comments are welcome

[6 Eyes Studio]

Story Cutscenes

I already covered in the tools section the basics of our simple "story events" system, but mostly on a technical front. Here I'd like to cover it more from a design perspective. Settling on our cutscenes system took a bit of work, as we tried to figure out what would be best for the game.


Our first thought was actually to use the very scripted events/cutscenes we ended up doing. But initially, after some thinking, we had decided against it. The primary reason for this was that scripting the sprite events to the level of quality that I find acceptable is very time consuming. I had to do all of them in Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled and while I was quite happy with the resulting cutscenes, it was a very laborious process, even with the custom editor I had made for it. So, instead we were going to have large character portraits, with a few distinctive emotions and simply have a string of text boxes with large portraits happening over a map. Games like Disgaea have a somewhat similar treatment, although they usually also have fairly minimal "scripted events" as well.

But, the above plan just seemed like it was lacking in ambitiousness for us, so we kept trying to think of a better one. Our next idea was going to be something akin to the simple cutscenes in Pillars Of Eternity, where there's basically a hand-drawn black and white image with some text (and a narrator). We thought we could get very detailed scenes that way and we would be able to use our artist's excellent painting skills. We'd probably complement this with large portraits and maybe a few sprite effects to look more animated.

We liked that plan quite a bit, but after estimating the work and required art, it seemed to us that it would end up being a similar amount of time needed to our original plan of scripted events (FF6 style). Furthermore, the added time would fall on our artists, which are already at capacity for workload, whereas the scripting would fall on our programmer (me ^^) and I actually had the bandwidth to handle it, since most of the code of the game is already finished (thanks to using Unity, that was a fairly quick task overall).

Hence, we ended up going full circle and ended up right back to the class scripted events that our team so enjoyed in games like Final Fantasy 4-6 and, of course, Black Sigil. We dropped the large portraits, primarily because they would end up covering a large part of the screen, which would only detract from the actual scripted event. We are still slated to have emotions on the portraits, although the work there hasn't yet started.

At the end of the day, the work distribution aspect combined with the fact we really like the classic old-school feel of those scripted events is what prompted us to go to our roots on this one.


Game opening cutscene.


Very early cutscene, shows the general style we went for.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Design: Spells

I already covered the technical aspects of our spells/combat effects and some of the reasons that led to it on the technical side. Here, I'll touch on specific design decisions we made on that front.


(2 different tiers of earth magic)


(2 different tiers of lightning magic)


First thing to note is the style. We went straight for pixel art effects, very old school.
No particles, no 3D, etc. We've been aiming at a clean and high-res pixel art style for the game from the start, so it made sense to us to stick to it for our spell effects as well. We explored other alternatives (particles being the other big contender), but ultimately we thought the style wasn't fitting that well and we were lucky enough to find someone very talented for the spell effects, so everything more or less fell in place naturally.

As far as the design of spells/abilities in concerned, one of the key design aspects of our game is the various elemental and physical damage types. After a few revisions, we ended up using 6 elements + 1 physical + 1 non-elemental magic, for a total of 8 damage types. That sounds like a lot (and it is I suppose ^^) but we started with about 14 before we decided to simplify things considerably.

The final layout is fairly classic elements:
- water > fire > earth > lightning (each working in a rock-paper-scissor fashion)
- dark <> holy
- physical damage
- non-elemental magic damage

There are multiple reasons we went with this layout. First, we want the rock-paper-scissor feel and the ability for the player to customize both their resistances and their damage types. Multiple enemies are designed to have specific elemental strengths and weaknesses on top of their base physical/magical defense scores, so it offers strategical options in combat.
We're trying to keep it to a small enough count so it's not overwhelming either.

The 4 elements also serve to ensure there's some possibilities for impressive looking magic and cool signature spells.

Dark and Holy were added in part because there are a lot of demonic creatures in the game settings, so we wanted to allow specific spells and classes to specialize to dealing with them. Initially, healing magic was supposed to be holy magic as well, but we eventually changed all healing spells to being 'non elemental' in nature, as it was causing weird effects (such as your people resisting holy magic, hence diminishing healing magic power on them or demons taking damage from healing magic, which we didn't specifically want either, etc).

Then we have pure physical damage, which encompasses most physical abilities (although physical abilities could also be elemental, in which case they target the enemy's physical defense, combined with their elemental resistance, instead of targeting their magical resistance combined with their element resistance, like magic would).

Lastly there's non-elemental magical damage, which is a fairly rare type. Generally speaking, if you exploit the weaknesses from enemies, the 4 core elements should be more efficient than the non-elemental damage, but having a flexible non-elemental spell can always come in handy and specific classes try to take advantage of that.

Characters have a resistance score (seen as a % resistance value) for each of the 6 elements and will end up taking extra damage, normal damage, no damage or even absorbing the damage depending on their actual resistance. Generally speaking, the resistances will come from gear for human characters, whereas monsters have built-in resistances, often reflecting their standard fantasy archetype.


(Here this recruit has 50% water damage resistance)

There's a lot more than just the elements to the design of our abilities in general, including their range, shape, size, etc. I'll cover more of those in a later post

[Ashedragon]

The art looks really cool, but, at least so far, it seems like the spell animations really lack impact. Very linear and not very strong.

[Kyle Preston]

Beautiful stuff in this thread. Can't wait to play a demo Also interested in hearing what your composer does with the score. Will you share future audio snippets?

[6 Eyes Studio]

The art looks really cool, but, at least so far, it seems like the spell animations really lack impact. Very linear and not very strong.

Hmm, might be a question of taste, as I personally don't feel that way.

Thanks for the feedback though! I'm adding it to my notes. Going to need to find a way to get a large amount of feedback soon though, to make sure I can get a better idea of what's a general trend and what's more of an isolated opinion.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Beautiful stuff in this thread. Can't wait to play a demo Also interested in hearing what your composer does with the score. Will you share future audio snippets?

Thanks!

Demo: Well, if you're in the Orlando area, we have a presentation tomorrow night (August 3rd) as part of an Indienomicon event and we'll have a playable demo. Also we'll be at OrlandoIX on August 19-20, also with a demo.

Other than that, we're still thinking about the best way to handle early access, beta access and a demo... We should have a better idea about that soon enough!

As for the music: the music in our trailer was made by our current musician, so it should give a decent idea of his skill. He hasn't yet finished anything else, as he took an extended vacation abroad pretty much immediately after we signed him up (bastard!), but I'll be putting in at least a track in here for sure, although we're saving that 'reveal' for our upcoming September Kickstarter first.

[Kyle Preston]

Awesome, I actually will be in Orlando...........but not until September  Hope Indienomicon goes well for you!

Guess I'll just have to stare at these beautiful gifs for now and be content...

[6 Eyes Studio]

Awesome, I actually will be in Orlando...........but not until September  Hope Indienomicon goes well for you!

Guess I'll just have to stare at these beautiful gifs for now and be content...

We might end up attending some event in September if there's anything going. I'll post about it if it happens ^^
Thanks again for the kind words friend

[bauer]

Hey, just wanted to chime in that this looks bloody sweet! Also big props on the awesome updates, lots of interesting detail.   

[6 Eyes Studio]

Hey, just wanted to chime in that this looks bloody sweet! Also big props on the awesome updates, lots of interesting detail.   

Thanks a lot friend!

[6 Eyes Studio]

We've officially been approved by Microsoft for Xbox One!

Here are our shiny dev kits:


We'll be starting our Xbox One tests this week and we're hoping our Unity build will work fairly easily. I'll be posting the results of the initial tests in here

[Ashedragon]

Oh, nice! I didn't realize Microsoft sent out free cats with their dev kids. I would've gotten one a long time ago if I had known!

[6 Eyes Studio]

Oh, nice! I didn't realize Microsoft sent out free cats with their dev kids. I would've gotten one a long time ago if I had known!

Not just any ordinary cat either! That cat is our chief HR officer. He knows his stuff... Can't ever say 'no' to him.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Gotta find the time to get another batch of design concepts transcribed here, but in the meantime, here's the presentation we gave at the Indienomicon event I mentioned before.

We made a short powerpoint presentation that covers the basics about our team, how we formed, a quick overview of the game, our graphics and some programming decisions. The real interesting point of the presentation is probably the Q&A at the end IMO. The audience was quite engaged and we had great questions that really showed how savvy the crowd was when it comes to development and tactics games




The questions at the end are a bit hard to hear, but I transcribed them as best I could in the video description with timestamps.


As a bonus announcement: we'll be at the OrlandoIX event coming on August 19-20! Anyone feels like checking out our game or chatting us up, feel free to drop by our booth! We'd love to see some fans and get some feedback and comments on the game!




edit: fixed the youtube link >.<

[6 Eyes Studio]

Still haven't gotten to keeping up with the devlog, as we've been very busy with events and with finally releasing a first version of our public demo.

Here's a link to the demo in the meantime. That's gotta be even more interesting than a new devlog entry!

https://gamejolt.com/games/fellseal/278902

[6 Eyes Studio]

Story Characters Creation: From Concept Art to Sprite

First, apologies. We've been extremely busy in the past 2 weeks with all the various milestones we've hit in a row, such as
Demo is out: https://gamejolt.com/games/fellseal/278902
Being featured by the Square Enix Collective: https://collective.square-enix.com/projects/388/fell-seal-arbiters-mark/
Steam page is up: http://store.steampowered.com/app/699170/Fell_Seal_Arbiters_Mark/
Kickstarter is coming: September 26th!

So I've been slow with updates in here.

Now, onto the "pièce de resistance"! Here's the rough workflow of turning a character concept into a sprite:

First, we start with a 'blurb of information' for our excellent character concept artist. Something like this:

Name: Kyrie
Gender: Female
Age: somewhere in her 30s or 40s
Role: Arbiter* captain, main protagonist.
*The Arbiters are basically an elite force of warriors that act as policemen and diplomats throughout the land. They are invested with immense power from the Immortals (the ruling council of the land), acting as their primary agents.
Personality/History: Kyrie is tough, stern, and not afraid to dispense justice when it is deserved. When she sets her sights on a wrongdoer, she can be impulsive and borderline obsessive. But she does have a dry sense of humor and whimsy that sometimes reveals itself.
She was once trained by a famous Arbiter, and she is now mentoring the daughter of that Arbiter.
Design notes: We picture her sort of like a female Jon Snow from Game of Thrones: a medium height and build, with medium-weight armor (leather). Maybe a fur-collar cape if you think it's a good idea. We'd prefer a little more color in her clothes, though (maybe some purples?). Our writer says he was inspired by Cassandra from Dragon Age as well.
She should have an Arbiter's armband on one arm (sketch attached, but it doesn't have to be the same color).
I've attached some inspiration images for her face and hair. We will probably prefer medium length hair styles, like the image of <some lady>, more than the very short hair styles that some of the images have.
The silhouette in the game's logo was originally intended to be Kyrie, but don't feel like you need to limit your design because of that. Go in whatever direction you think is best!


Next, our awesome concept artist sends us some sketches, and we help him zoom in on what we envision by pointing out which parts we like/don't like.


Basic sketches to start orienting the design process in a specific direction.


After a little back and forth, we then get a refined sketch, where we now select finer details in general:

Refined sketch showing more of the details


Then from this the final image is produced:

First version of the final image.


At that point our artist gives a lot of thought to how the resulting sprite is going to look. In some cases, there are still some small tweaks we'd like, usually pertaining to details or colors.

Final version, with belt altered, hair tweaks and red rather than brown sash.


Finally, we have our final concept art and we then start working on the in-game sprite.

First version of the in-game sprite.

We're still finalizing the sprite, but the idea will be to create a front and back version of it and once we're 100% happy with it, we'll start creating the walking, attacking, etc, frames.

There are some constraints in that area, primarily from the way weapons are equipped on sprites during combat. Each weapon is also a sprite and they are shown over/under the character sprite, so they must line up properly. Every weapon in the game (and we have over 153 weapons) has its own sprite (that's probably around 2000 frames for the weapons alone).

Thus, every weapon we have MUST work with every humanoid sprite, otherwise it would be a crazy amount of extra work. That's where the constraints come in. Basically, the 'hands' of all characters must line up in a similar fashion for all generic sprites and story characters. That way the weapons line up with the characters properly. Characters can have different builds and girth, but the hands will have to line up for the weapons to fit properly.


Image is made from a character sprite (which is itself made from a head, hair, helmet, outfit, etc) and a weapon sprite.


And that's how we go about creating a story character and also how we handle weapons in battles.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Design Spells - Part 2

I promised before an extended spell explanation, this time about their range, height and size, so here it is!

It's been a bit harder to find time lately since we're launching our Kickstarter in 5 days from now and those are certainly a lot more work than expected, haha. >.<

Here goes:
Our spells have a fairly standard system involving range, size, shape and height, but with a couple of details to hopefully make it fairly simple and more intuitive than some other systems.


Range:
Each ability you can use has a specific range, in tiles, from the caster. Most basic skills share the same range as your weapon (so, a sword has a range of 1, but a bow has a range of 6 for example), whereas most spells have an effective range of 4. When designing the range of abilities and weapons, it's important to match them to the basic movement range of characters, which in turn must be matched to the overall size of the map. There's some leeway with matching the map, in the sense that you could want small, medium or large maps to begin with.
Most of our characters have a base movement of 3 or 4, so the base range of spells is around 3 or 4 as well, so these values match. This means that the basic setup is where the player is NOT able to "kite" an enemy by staying always out of his range, unless the enemy has a movement of 3 (but those usually have range abilities of their own). This dynamic can then be changed by what the player equips (movement increases, etc), thus adding more strategical options the player can go for when designing his characters.

This is the basic layout for simple single target attacks:


(Single Target Close Range Attack)


(Single Target Long Range Attack)


Shapes:
Next, we have all sorts of different shapes including single targets (as above) and:

(Ranged cross shaped attack of size 3)


(Perpendicular line w/r to caster and target, of size 3)


(Line shooting out from the caster, of size 4)

We have a few more esoteric shapes, but you get the idea


Size:
Next we have the size of the area. In the above images, we can see a line that's 4 long and one that's 3 wide. The cross shapes are a good example of where the size can make a big difference, as here:

(Self centered cross shape attack of size 5)

This attack is centered on the caster, which means they must be in the thick of things for maximum impact, but to compensate the attack has a good size and is pretty powerful: high risk, high reward.


There's also special shape+size combos, such as abilities that target all allies, all enemies, everyone on the field or only the caster.

(Ability that only targets the caster)


Height:
Finally, we have the height of the ability. There's actually 2 different heights to worry about. The first one is the height difference between the caster and the target, which applies to all abilities, be they single target or AoE.

(Here, you can't target the lady down-right of you with a sword since her height on the map is too dissimilar to yours. This wouldn't be a problem with a bow though.)

Then, the other height value comes in play for AoE attacks only. It represents the maximum height that the AoE will spread from its center.

(Here we can see that only 2 of the possible targets have the "triangle target indicator" over them, meaning the other 2 targets aren't included in the spell because of height issues)

This one is definitely making things a bit more complicated than we'd have wanted, but it's important as it prevents strange height abuses cases. Options were to keep it 'the same' for all spells (so it's simpler) or have it change a bit, to differentiate the stronger spells further, since those tend to have the same size as their weaker counter-parts (but more damage). We went with the slightly different values and are hoping it won't muddle things too much. To help with that, we're also making it so that all 'weak spells' share the same height and all 'stronger spells' share the same height, etc., so that in the end, there's only about 3 different heights to worry about and they should be fairly intuitive (hopefully ^^).

This covers the way spells, abilities and simple attacks are generally handled when targeting. The system is fairly standard, but also very intuitive to use. We've been pleasantly surprised at conferences and events that everyone has just been able to pick it up and grasp everything very quickly. I believe the height system might not have been understood immediately, but it doesn't come into play in the early maps and will allow the players to pick it up as they grow more comfortable with the systems.

[ionside]

Beautiful! What a great style.

Admittedly, the walk cycles on the spot are messing with my simple mind though.