next »

[IsacDee]

Twitter | Facebook | Website

Steam Page

Launch Trailer

Game Summary

Alwa's Legacy is set in the world of Alwa and the game will start with the heroine Zoe waking up in a strange land. She doesn't know where she is and she doesn't know what land this is but for some strange reason everyone and everything seems very familiar. It's like she's been here before, but can't remember. Why is this?

In Alwa's Legacy you use your magic staff to move across the land, you'll solve puzzles, traverse through dangerous dungeons and defeat many enemies along your journey to save the land of Alwa. We have striven to create a main protagonist that's relatable, strong and with great movement skills. It's a breeze to swiftly make your way through the game. Exploration and freedom are other design pillars we had and in Alwa's Legacy you'll find an adventure that's fun to play, exciting to explore and discoverable in your own way!

Features

• An interconnected world with many branching paths (We guess some would call it a Metroidvania)
• Massive background parallax artwork by pixel artist Vierbit
• Many dungeons that each has a unique look and design and of course lots of bosses (attack their weak spots)
• A skill tree that would put any RPG to shame (Not really, but we have 16 upgrades)
• Chip music soundtrack with 25 tracks made by chip artist RushJet1(1001 Spikes and PewDiePie’s Legend of the Brofist etc.)
• Modern sound design by Joel Bille (Ghost Giant and Fe by Zoink Games/Electronic Arts)
• Full controller support and layout for all common controllers
• Accessibility and gameplay settings to easily change up the difficulty level
• A talking pig NPC (pettable of course)

Gifs!

Thank you for checking out our game!

For more info, screenshots and gifs check out our Steam Page.

Links
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205900/Alwas_Legacy/
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/jxA7WSu
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eldenpixels/alwas-legacy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EldenPixels/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EldenPixels/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/EldenPixels/
Website: https://eldenpixels.com/


 

[CSR-Studios]

Gorgeous pixel art.

Hope you reach your kickstarter goal.

[IsacDee]

Gorgeous pixel art.

Hope you reach your kickstarter goal.

Thank you! We're very excited with the positive feedback we've received so far.

I'm gonna be posting some behind the scenes stuff on here in the future as well!

[IsacDee]

Ayoo! Over the weekend Alwa's Legacy got funded! Now we're pushing for some stretch goals.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eldenpixels/alwas-legacy

[IsacDee]

Making Levels!

Now when the kickstarter-campaing is over I'm able to focus on making games again!

In Alwa's Legacy we do all the level editing in an external editor called Tiled. The foundations of our levels are built using a sprite sheet for whiteboxing. Then using the whiteboxes we can generate some of the graphics from whichever sheet we want to, depending on what level we're working on.

Extra styling and polishing is done by hand though and can be quiet time consuming. Here's a video showing the process of building a single room!





Using Tiled really helps with the workflow for the team since you don't need to have Unity installed to design some levels. In order to get the levels working we use a tool called SuperTiled2Unity, which really helps speed up the process of getting those levels running!

Here's links to the level editor tools we use:

Tiled: https://www.mapeditor.org/
SuperTiled2Unity: https://seanba.itch.io/supertiled2unity

[IsacDee]

I've been making bosses!

This week I've been focusing my work on the bosses of Alwa's Legacy.
So I figured I would talk a little bit about the first boss in the game, that's also featured in the Demo.

Imprisoned King

Back when I first started at Elden Pixels as an intern, one of my first tasks was to program this boss. I decided that the easiest way for me to quickly iterate and test the boss was to base his behaviours on states.

So I added his different behaviours, fly, land, shoot etc. and made them all work independently from one another. This way I could bind each of his behaviours to the keyboard and manually change his states, making the boss player-controlled.

This let me do some funky stuff!

This helped me test his attacks and see what patterns and attacks worked well with each other as well as scaling the difficulty levels of each attack.

When all the behaviours felt good and fun to play I simply swapped the keyboard bindings with a timer that cycled through all the attacks in the order I wanted them to happen.

Recorded from the demo version!

This is pretty much the same way all bosses have been developed in the game, we first make them player-controlled and then write some code to let the computer control the boss using timers or any other way that fits the boss.

Not all bosses are controlled by a timer, certain bosses might change behaviours depending on health levels, player position, getting attacked or other criterias.

This method has helped in creating a workflow for creating new bosses and it makes it easier for us to estimate time and set a realistic scope.

[IsacDee]

The Build Computer

and the

Automated Build Process

This week has been full of design meetings and fixing some technical stuff related to building the game.
So this weeks post is gonna be about our automated build process! And the computer that does all the work.

In order to save time and resources we have a computer in our office that we call "The Build Computer".
The Build Computer's main task is to download our latest changes and build the game for all platforms and then upload the game to Steam and save backups!

All we have to do is tell the computer if we want to have a Windows, Mac, Linux or Switch version of the game (or all of the above) and then tell it if we want to include debug tools and cheats or if we want a clean version. After that it takes care of everything for us! It even messages us on Slack during each step of the process so we can keep track of what is happening and if it has run into any problems along the way!

The build computer uses a Powershell script to take inputs and send messages to Slack, it also starts up Unity and tells it what versions of the game we want built. Powershell is really powerful and I can't recommend it enough, or any other tool that automates this kind of work.

So before this week we didn't have a Linux version of the game for our Demo. However since we have this automated build process all I had to do was add another option for building to Linux which was pretty straight forward since the majority of this process is already automated.

With that said, The Alwa's Legacy Demo is now out on Linux! (Both 32-bit and 64-bit)

All of this thanks to The Build Computer doing what it does best...
Build games

This will be the last post of the year, Elden Pixels will head out for the holidays (yes that includes The Build Computer). But we will be back in 2020 so see you then with more posts and updates on Alwa's Legacy!

[Oa]

The art looks fantastic, amazing work! Congratulations on the successful kickstarter as well :-)

[michaelplzno]

I like your pixels!

[gamagogo]

Nice work !

Which engine or framework do you use to make this game ?

[IsacDee]

Thank you for your kind words!

Nice work !

Which engine or framework do you use to make this game ?

We are using Unity Engine!

[essencescape]

amazing art, loving the overall well designed look of it all. will keep an eye on this project! 

[IsacDee]

amazing art, loving the overall well designed look of it all. will keep an eye on this project! 

Thank you! I'm back at the office again and will post this years first update this Friday! Just gotta figure out what to post about.

[TonyManfredonia]

Wow. As mentioned above, the pixel art is gorgeous. It's very crisp.

It reminds me a lot of SNES games...with a solid amount of High-Definition. It's not ultra retro, which is nice. It has a modern feel to it.

Following. This is looking incredible. Can't wait to see more! I'm sorry that I missed your Kickstarter. But, congratulations on the funding!!! It's becoming increasingly rare for games to get funded on there. You've done some seriously great work.

[IsacDee]

Wow. As mentioned above, the pixel art is gorgeous. It's very crisp.

It reminds me a lot of SNES games...with a solid amount of High-Definition. It's not ultra retro, which is nice. It has a modern feel to it.

Following. This is looking incredible. Can't wait to see more! I'm sorry that I missed your Kickstarter. But, congratulations on the funding!!! It's becoming increasingly rare for games to get funded on there. You've done some seriously great work.

Thank you very much! You will get to see more in the weekly post that will be up in a few hours! :D

[IsacDee]

Hello! I'm back on ordinary schedule which means more weekly updates!

I've spent this holiday with friends and family, so this weeks post is gonna be about ENEMIES. What a twist!

Enemies

In Alwa's Legacy we wanted to bring more variety and depth to the enemies. The enemies are supposed to be in your way but they shouldn't break the flow of the game, which is pretty hard to balance.

When designing the enemies I tried to make it more about figuring out the strategy against each enemy, so that when you know how to defeat it, it will be a breeze. This way they won't be too easy when you first encounter them and they won't be too hard when you just want to pass through an area you've already been to.

A good example of this is our Shielder enemy.



You've learnt that you can beat the Skeletons by just hitting them. However these guys will block your attacks, so now you gotta figure out the strategy, in this case jumping over them and hitting them from behind. This adds that extra level of variety and difficulty that keeps the combat from being too repetitive.

A couple of things I've done to make it easier when balancing and tweaking each enemy. I've set it up so their attacks are all triggered in their animations, so if I speed up or slow down the animations the hitbox comes out faster or slower. I've added sliders for speed, damage, health etc. so that it's quick and easy to tweak the important values.

Almost all enemies have been implemented in the game, however there's a few left that needs to be added and a full overhaul of balancing and value tweaking is needed before I feel satisfied!

[IsacDee]

Discord

Hello! This week has been all about fixing bugs and cleaning up the project. We went from 120 reported bugs on Monday to under 10 today on Friday.

So in other words I don't have much to update on more than that the game works better than before! So I figured this might be a good time to link to our Discord server. Feel free to join in and chat with us here at Elden Pixels about Alwa's Legacy and Alwa's Awakening or just hang around and be social with our community!

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/jxA7WSu

[IsacDee]

Steam Page

Quick update! We now have a steam page live. This means that we have one single place that we can link people to featuring all info and screenshots from Alwa's Legacy!

Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205900/Alwas_Legacy/

[IsacDee]

Hello! It has been a while since my last devlog update. So this week is gonna be about something that every project should have from day one, a

Debug Menu

A debug menu is an in game menu that lets you modify the game and enable handy tools like enabling development cheats and showing stats.

This is how the debug menu looks like in Alwa’s Legacy.



This is only available in the developer builds of the game. So there’s no way to access this in the release version.

We have a lot of useful tools in there, I’ll go through the ones we use the most!

Warp
Inside the Warp menu is a list of all areas of the game. This lets you warp around the world and is super useful for speeding up the process of showing new content and testing to make sure new added content works as intended.

Give Item
This speaks for itself. It lets you add any item in the game to your inventory! This is super useful for testing purposes but also when we have people testing the game we can put them anywhere we want in the game with any set of items that we want.

Fly mode
This is probably THE most used debug tool that we have. It lets you fly through walls and everything. This has saved so many playtest sessions where the player gets soft-locked in an area and can’t progress.

Invincibility mode
This is useful for when you want to do tests and don’t want to be interrupted by a pesky skeleton smacking you. We tend to use this a lot when we review and test the bosses in the game. It lets you focus on what the bosses are doing instead of screaming your lungs out at all the fireballs approaching you.

Saved Events
In Alwa’s Legacy there are a lot of events and all of them are neatly saved as a unique Event-ID. At the start of a new scene it checks what events have already been triggered and updates the scene accordingly. Inside of Saved Events we have a long list of all events that have been triggered in this save file. This is extremely useful for finding bugs and making sure that certain events trigger correctly.

Favorites
Favorites is basically a shortcut menu. Whenever we feel like we use a certain tool more than others, we put it in here. This is to speed up the process of navigating through menus to access a tool we frequently use.

Having a debug menu speeds up the development time by a lot. I can’t recommend it enough and if you don’t have one in your project you should add one right now. I’d say debug menu is one of those things that are essential to add when setting up a new project.

[IsacDee]

Hello party people! We’ve been hard at work here at Elden Pixels in getting the game done and we’ve made a lot of progress! The world is feeling a lot more alive and part of that is due to our...

Sound Effects

In order to have a smooth workflow in Alwa’s Legacy we’ve set up a lot of systems that allows external artists to work as independently as they want and still be able to add content to the project and see the results in the weekly build of the game. One of these systems is our Audio Files system.

In the project we’ve set up a file called AudioFile, for a sound to exist in the game it needs to be put inside of an AudioFile and then this AudioFile needs to be triggered through code. It looks like this:


This is the AudioFile for whenever a block lands

In here we add all the settings that we need and since Alwa’s Legacy is a 2D game we can get away with keeping these settings to a bare minimum, making it easier to work with.

On top of this we also have a Google Spreadsheet where we keep track of the progress and status for each and every sound effect.


Some AudioFiles that the block uses

So the workflow goes something like this:
The AudioFiles are created inside of Unity and given a temporary sound effect. Then the AudioFile is added to whatever needs to make that sound through code. Then the sound designer can create and add the sound effect to the AudioFile and immediately tweak it in game without having to wait for someone to implement it.

This system and workflow has saved a lot of time for both the programmers and sound designer and it also helps us keep track of all sound effects in the game and where they’re triggered!