Breeze in the Clouds

Development Blog | Follow for Updates! www.breezethegame.com

[breezethegame]

So we’re back on Tumblr I see...

[breezethegame]

*dusts this account off just in case*

[breezethegame]

The Pre-Launch Merch Run is NOW ON KICKSTARTER! http://kickstarter.breezethegame.com

[breezethegame]

We’re Launching a Merch Kickstarter soon! Visiting the prelaunch page and select Notify Me, and you’ll be alerted when it’s live! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sirvictory/breeze-in-the-clouds-pre-launch-merch-run

[breezethegame]

Mini Devlog - #15

Hey everyone! Hectic month, but plenty of progress. Seeing how I have a 3 day weekend, I figured I'd get another post out of the way!

This month, we've been focusing on quite a few things.

Background Development

In the last devlog, I included a mock-up of the sprites against a background. Well, I have a couple more backgrounds to demo from Cindy!

More Character Sprite and Animation Workflow adjustments

We've continued to work on adjusting several more characters to fit the newer "SD" direction, and have actually begun some animation work to test them out! You might have seen an animation of Sodo I posted on Twitter, but if not, check these out:

Look at him go! We've still been using most of the previous pipeline's steps when making this animation

We decide on a pose that we like, and then move on to roughing it out...

I think Piti got a bit excited, so here's a "60 fps" version XD

We've also worked on some poses for his jump and fall poses. Since we're still early in the production pipeline, we can hold off on fully animating them for now:

Anyway, we've also been working on adjusting Breeze's model and animations as well, considering he's likely to end up with the most animations in the game.

I've simplified his design for sprite form to match a rough Piti did a while ago:

There will probably be some tweaks done over time, but this is enough to work off of for drafting out his modified animations.

Up above, we also have an updated rough run cycle to match the new sprite.

One noticeable difference is that many of the sprites will be in a 3/4 view, to give them a little more depth and to not look as flat as before when not moving.

Programming

Since most of the physics have been implemented now, I've been able to focus on creating different rooms to test and verify certain situations (i.e, how will the player act on slopes, what do different movement speeds feel like, can I drop through platforms, etc.)

It's nice to have these type of rooms to essentially play test in. Sometimes I kinda wish I could play test on the go (like when away from my desk or when I don't have my laptop ((which ironically just recently came back from repair)), but then I thought: "I have an iPad, I wonder if I could get it to run on it?")

So I did:

Surprisingly, it managed to get a controller to work (Only the specific 8BitDo controller in the photo, as well as the PS4 controller via a USB converter... oh, and  the iPad keyboard, which won't take multiple buttons at the same time),

The build runs perfectly. Took some time to get it to build (and had to learn how XCode works again, but alas, I have a testable build on the go).

Don't take this as official iOS support though XD.

In any case, Patreon backers, I'll be preparing a new build soon for Windows! Wanted to get it out today, but there are still some things I want to prepare first.

Next Enamel Pins!

If you haven't seen them already on twitter, I've got new pin designs!

I'm going to be looking at launching a Kickstarter for these exclusively soon! I'm planning some other neat items as well, but I'll formally announce all that once it's prepared. I'll also provide an opportunity to get Breeze pins as well.

[breezethegame]

Character Reveal: Cori

Say hey to Cori!

An... interesting wanderer known to get distracted easily, and tends to show up in places unexpectedly. He's also fond of toys and knickknacks, especially if they spin.

He runs into Breeze rather early in his adventure, and assists the lost pup with... (well, actually nothing), right before leaving him with the Climate Committee and promptly departing... strange fellow.

What's his role? ...I'm not even sure he knows.

Cori was designed by Clipey! His conceptualization was rather quick. Such a good boy. Haps scores Cori a 14/10! (I didn't actually ask, I’m just assuming)

Cute guest piece by Kahmurry, and this post's cover art was done by T.J!

Say bye to Cori before he wanders off again ~

[breezethegame]

Dev Log #3

Aug 4 at 10:01am

Alrighty (I've been abusing Mini dev logs for a while so... time for another journal!)

So this post was a little delayed. Discordians know already, but my laptop decided that it hates me and the GPU died, so I had to send it out for repair.

Meanwhile, I kinda messed up my Window's partition on my desktop after removing one of the drives to use for backing files up. Managed to fix that issue, but lost a couple days of dev time :P ANYWAY! Some things did get done! Some of it harder to show (and some things I'm not wanting to show off just yet)

Character Sprite and Animation Workflow adjustments

Firstly, we've been working on ways to both expedite and simplify our animation workflow. As most of you have seen thus far, there's many characters in the game, and many of them will need a lot of animation.

We've been looking at some of the current character models, and have been working to stylize them in a way where they are simplified while retaining the important aspects of their design, and ultimately went towards a super-deformed (SD) direction with many of the character's in-game sprites.

Through this process, we've focused on narrowing down what details are the most important, and which details would be ultimately lost in animation (and the character's sizes).

Some of the ones displayed here are first passes, but I think they're really coming together so far. We'll be creating and reworking some animations to test this, and tweaks may follow depending on the outcome.

Combat Design

For those who've been following the project for some time, you may have seen mentions of Breeze having a few forms before. Two of Breeze's "Weather" forms include a Wind Form and a Cloud form. We intend on these forms to provide Breeze with additional combat moves and other features.

We've been working on developing Breeze's Wind form some in the last month or two. Originally I developed some designs in a really drafty format and Haps, well, he kinda interpreted them as yo-yos... I ended up liking them more than my idea!

Without spoiling too much, the uncanny idea of wind yo-yos fit Breeze a lot.

Programming

Interesting progress on the programming front. I'm recently completed integrating a new "kinematic" controller into the game. In layman's terms, this allows me to bypass using the default Unity physics, or rather, allows me more finite control of how I want the game physics to work.

Breeze and other actors have a series of states that they can be in. Each of these states causes Breeze/other actors to perform very specific things. Current Breeze himself has 20+ states, and this is very likely to grow.

One of the struggles was controlling the physics between the states since it's technically a layer outside of the state's code that mostly works independently. I would need to basically introduce additional flags to "tame" the physics, but this was proving to be troublesome.

Another problem with my current physics implementation was how slopes were being handled....

They weren't (at least, the way I wanted them too).

Now I'm able to have slopes (and can control slope limits and such). In the previous implementation, I would need to apply different physics materials to control the friction of a surface, as well as change the collider an actor has so that they don't start sliding or aren't able to move on the slope at all!

Anyway, with this all said, I'm finally wrapping up some major gameplay components, and move more into things I really want: AI and level development!

We've begun some development on pathfinding, which will allow AI to navigate better in levels, but I'll show more of that in the future.

Cindy did the awesome background above and is developing on additional concepts to help with helping towards getting a visual style going, and making sure character/sprites match up well.

[breezethegame]

Meet Alto and Cumuli!

Who are these cloudy bears? Guess we’ll find out in the future ~Character designs by Komoroshi, KeysaTrii, and the top illustration is by Deadbear! Here’s another set of concepts that Komoroshi did of Alto as a bonus:

[breezethegame]

Mini Devlog - #14

Ok.... so implementing irregularly shaped health/stat bars is.... something... Basically, this required some shader and texture magic to properly pull off.

In the current implementation, there's 3 (well actually 4... MAYBE 5?) layers to the health bar:

A background

A fill for the health (there's two of these, one for the health value, and another that lingers when the player gets damaged)

A frame (sits on top of the health fill)

There's also a "cutoff" mask, which we use along with a shader to determine how much of the bar to "show". It's a gradient!

The shader I'm using (thanks Cocefi) has a cutoff property (0 to 1), and basically utilizes the above texture to gradually mask/clip the fill texture underneath the mask.

Another tricky part was actually making the gradient, which I was able to do thanks to a feature in Adobe Illustrator called Freeform Gradient

This allowed me to define points in my shape where certain colors should be in the gradient. And of course, the end result is in the video!

Now that I've got that figured out, I'm probably going to test out some other directions for the Healthbar and the other gauge:

[breezethegame]

Meet Alto and Cumuli!

Who are these cloudy bears? Guess we'll find out in the future ~Character designs by Komoroshi, KeysaTrii, and the top illustration is by Deadbear! Here's another set of concepts that Komoroshi did of Alto as a bonus:

[breezethegame]

Mini Devlog - #13

Hey everyone! It's been a few (busy) weeks!

I'm finally getting settled in after a pretty sporadic period of moving and adjusting to the new place! A lot of unpacking, back and forth trips, tackling the backyard, non-working AC for a couple weeks (Texas summer, ugh), and also work woes! Pretty tiring overall!

Not a ton of progress on Breeze the last couple weeks cause of it, but I'm eager to get back into the more groove! (Also, my birthday was a few days ago, level up!)

Anyway, Piti Yindee managed to get some run cycles animated for Drop and Temper:

We haven't done a lot of run cycles yet, but we're utilizing some steps that I documented to make the process of drafting to final somewhat smooth.

I also had the chance to work on some low-fidelity mocks of parts of the game's UI! These were done in Adobe XD.

The focus here is to determine where certain elements should go and how much space they should take up.

This also provides an opportunity to really think about what information is important to see, and if there are any elements that don't need to actually stay on the screen, etc

I also started working on a couple high fidelity mockups (not final, but enough to see how they could look)

(These were done in Affinity Designer!)

That's pretty much it for this update! I'm going to be focusing on figuring out UI implementation a bit more, and trying out a few tools and techniques to speed that up!

Fan Art

Starlimisky did this really cool piece! Check them out on twitter and give them a follow :D

[breezethegame]

Mini Devlog - #12

Hey! Just a quick heads-up for those that didn't already see on Discord:

I'm in the process of moving, and will start moving things into my new place starting Monday! If you're lucky, I might be able to sneak in a little post at the end of next week.  It's basically in the same city, so nothing too crazy!

I did manage to sneak in a little dev this week. I fully integrated Kai's Fleece Dialogue tool that I mentioned in the last dev post! I did some slight mods to it to update the UI, but other than that, I'm now getting rid of a lot of junk I was using before!

I'm also able to include GameEvents into the system in a much cleaner way AND use them inside of Unity's Timeline system, basically allowing me to animate cutscenes and have them pause when dialogue pops up.

Piti Yindee also worked on updating Pile's model sheet for his sprites:

Pile's design has pretty much evolved from a combination of me, Piti, Haps, and Clipey's efforts, so there's a little bit of everyone's design in him now!

Animation Practice

Some of you probably saw an older version of this, but felt a bit anxious art-wise because I haven't been able to really sit down to animate/draw over the last few weeks, so thought I'd update this animation of Drop some:

Enamel Pin Update

I've packaged and/or sent out pretty much all the pin orders (I think I might have 1 or 2 international pins left to ship) as of today. Quite the learning experience shipping all of those pins out!

That's pretty much it for this update!

Oh, check out this art piece of Frost by BobbyLontra! Turned out really cool ~ https://twitter.com/BobbyLontra/status/1134136935038029825

 (wait, darn it I didn't mean for that to be a pun...)

[jonathan-wedge]

It’s video time! Come check out the interview between me and @breezethegame​, as we talk about some of the magic brewed into what’s looking to be a special indie game that’s on my list! Don’t forget to like, sub, and share what you thought of the interview!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf7RY6g3p2E

[breezethegame]

Character Reveal: Coal

Pile’s short and rowdy assistant!

Coal has taken much of the "Manager" burden away from Pile, and ensures clouds are built and developed to Pile’s spec. He manually checks cloud structures for stability, growth, CCNs (cloud condensation nuclei) and water vapor in the air, etc.

(Character Design by @eclipticafusion!)

He also does a lot of the communicating and review of work that will be passed onto other weather domains.

(Guest art by TairuPANdA!)

Although Coal comes off as mature and overly prudent about everything, he does have a juvenile side. Press him hard enough and you might able to encourage him to play a game or join in on something silly (Pile’s really good at this). He’s also a bit of a gambler.

Speaking of Pile, despite getting on Pile’s case nearly daily about needing to be a little more “professional” and "leader-like", he’s still a bit of an enabler…

(Guest art by thebluebear27)

Despite not being much of a fighter, Coal can develop cloud-based objects that he or others can use in battle, and he’s also able to destabilize cloud structures, which can be used to modify battlefield.

- Imagine having Coal as a roommate...

Cover art by Luis Huerta!

[breezethegame]

Dev Log #2 - April 30, 2019

So, it's been a productive couple of weeks! I got some rather disappointing news that might affect my productivity for a while, but gonna keep truckin' along as much as I can. Anyway, here's the current changelog since the last dev update!

I also wanted to start doing some videos as I think that they might cut down on the amount of writing/explaining and might be a little more engaging. I already wrote up a large changelog below, so I'll be adding it too, as I didn't want to add all this content to the video (so lazy, I know).

Anyway, here's a pretty lengthy Changelog:

Updated Unity and Project to a newer version

Platform dropping now requires holding down then pressing jump. This will reduce mistakes when performing directional attacks.  

HP Properly updates now. It will take into account the player’s health.

GameOver works now. It will respawn the character to the last checkpoint.

A character can respawn at his starting position or at a checkpoint depending on if they’ve entered a checkpoint.

Checkpoint system now works. These are triggers that when entered by the player, will inform the relevant system.

Refactored every single script to match a naming convention that makes it easier to know that is doing what

Fixed some issues with the dialogue system

Created a new Actor Editor

Created a new Scene Builder that also makes it easier to create objects

Music looping now takes into account the currently playing song

Hurt/Hitstun works properly now

Much more optimized Statemachine system that’s also much easier to add new states too.

Refactored the animation state machines and have them sharing a common base state machine. This makes it easier to setup animations when new characters are created

Updated RoomManager to evaluate events when moving into new rooms and doing things such as loading and executing cutscenes right when you walk in

Attacks can now spawn/shoot projectiles

UI now includes new animation events thanks to DoTween

File/Asset Clean up. Got rid of a lot of unneeded place holders and scripts written for testing purposes.

Player can now be spawned using a spawner and no longer has to be placed in a scene manually.

Updated framedata to store more information such as independent vibration and camera shake variables

Added Scene Fade in/Out effect. This will play automatically when entering a scene.

Projectiles will now emit particles when they hit stuff.

Added “Pressed Start” to the main menu.

Added a Scene and Game reset button (R&T)

Message Box UI will now wait until the message box is fully rendered before drawing text.

Breeze retains his health between scenes

Cutscenes no longer automatically pause player’s physics.

Created Scriptable Data for Music. This will store the Song’s name, Loop Point, and potentially some other information.

And for some other misc stuff:

Revealed like, 3 characters in one weekend (Hume, Float, and Peb).

Developed Updated Height Chart for the Current cast (this was a lot of work)

Developed Model Sheets for the sprites of the Demo characters

Started Development on Pathfinding/Navigation system for AI.

Selected an Enamel Pin vendor and submitted an Order, then received it the day I wrote up this post!

[breezethegame]

Is Float going to be similar to Jimmy Cricket in Kingdom Hearts or is he just another NPC?

Similar to that, yes! He’s a very active companion.

[breezethegame]

Character Reveal: Float

April 13, 2019

“ugh...... give me like... 5 more minutes 'k?”

Float is direct assistant to “The King”, he’s a small field mouse, but knowledgeable of Tropolis’ operations. He kind helps keep things... afloat.

(Designs by keysatrii)

Not much of a small talker to strangers and tends to try to cut to the chase; coming off as heavily impatient. He can be inadvertently comical and is very sarcastic but blunt at times. (He's working on it). Once he opens up to you, he’ll talk for ages.

Float has the unique ability of, well, floating, he often does over walking. He’s also seemingly lethargic (or perhaps just overworks himself?). In any case, don’t be surprised when you see him asleep somewhere.

Float has an excessive habit of writing even the most trivial things down, despite having an incredibly strong memory? His noting taking is a bit... unique. He has his own method, and many people often get lost reading them.

Float doesn’t have a lot of friends, which he isn’t bothered by, but it does make it a bit harder for him to gain the trust of others. He’s more inclined to work with those who show potential to be of “use” to him.

He's... kinda arrogant... at least he's cute?

(Guest animation by aebreedraws)