Artifact Krewe's little secrets
I posted a twitter thread about little facts about Artifact Krewe and its development and I needed some strength to port it there, so here we are.
First, if you don't know what Artifact Krewe is, it's a gw2 fangame I released and you should totally play it! It's the best Asura treasure hunt fangame that Skrool released in 2023 you'll ever play in your life, trust me!
More about the game here!
1- I have to mention the fantastic work of @ilona-art on the map artwork! I really love it!
2- Some parts of the game use heavy post-processing and color grading to change the mood and the feel, while the lighting is technically still the same as if it was outdoor.
Check the difference with these effect on and off!
3- There is a crepe recipe in game. You can use it to bake crepes. If you do so, I hope you'll like them!
4- There were originally round boulders in the village you could push around. They have been removed because they were useless.
You can still find one in the puzzle area that asks you to push it to the end.
Each villager had a shield crystal protecting them from boulders.
5- About this guy: he has a lot of keys modelled. They are all based on Guild Wars 1 chest key icons.
Can you recognize them all?
6- In the "blue area", some elements are changing when you are not looking at them.
7- Having dynamic grass was the first thing I did for the game. It felt like the core element from the beginning.
To avoid too many heavy computation, there is actually no collision computed. Instead, I'm just creating list weird flow map of the area seen from the top.
It encodes in which direction the grass should bend. I have a little camera only capturing the trail of the character, and updating this texture in real time.
The red channel indicates a bend direction on the x axis and the green channel on the y axis.
8- A constraint that comes with that system is that I cannot have two grass patches vertically on top of each-other.
This is why there is no grass below this floating platform.
9- I had a bug that caused the player character to stay in place when taking a waypoint, while a new version is created.
Which allowed me to clone myself.
10- The bar was supposed to have many characters referencing some friends, but the amount of work required forced me to cut that.
The area has been locked behind a closed door for a long time, but I finally decided to open it, even though no customers are there.
11- The far background elements are just planes.
12- The main menu area and the lab are actually present in the map, just unreachable.
However, if you are not close enough, they will never be loaded.
13- I wanted to put my asura in the game to give hints to player. But for several reasons (having to model him, looking for a better system to help the player, etc.), I haven't.
He was supposed to be here.
14- Which makes that Ithikk is my only existing character I put in the game.
15- The ruins are a very late addition to the game, because tests have shown the orange field were not interesting enough.
I had time to try different ways to create an environment, and to implement the math puzzle system.
16- The user interface used to be based on a web engine, a bit like gw2's trading post UI, with a vue.js interface.
However, the plugin I used for the integration was laggy, not well maintained and lacked features. I decided to redo it natively.
17- The project started with Unreal Engine 4, and has been ported to Unreal Engine 5.
Some systems broke in the transition, such as all the physics, that I had to rework.
18- Originally, NPCs had a modular systems that allowed me to change their clothes, hair, eye colors, and so on, at runtime. This was unnecessary, not flexible enough, and not worth maintaining, so it has been removed.
This allowed me more unique NPC looks.
19- Vixx is actually a character from the first guild wars game. I totally stole him and twisted him to fit in the story.
20- In the lab, there were supposed to be a maze with doors you could open before the tree room. It did not bring much and was confusing, so the doors that lead to a dead end have been closed.
21- I made a lot of the sound FX you can hear in game. For example, the jump sounds on a various number of materials were just me jumping around in my apartment.
22- The sounds the golems are making while walking are actually the sounds of my (too numerous) tea cups colliding.
23- Finding the correct colors for the grass has been really hard and took a long time.
Here is one of the early iterations:
24- Your krewe members are each based on a color. When you first see them, they are placed in the red-green-blue order.
