Demergo Studios

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[demergostudios]

More Progress on Mossborough Detailing

Just wanted to give another quick update from the weekend. Spend some more time working on detailed layouts for mossborough. I have added 2 more level areas and starting adding some lights. I would like this game to have a day/night cycle and possibly dynamic weather affects too (the latter being a far greater long shot). 

The 2 (or I guess sort of 3) panels I added were the two right most ones. They represent the mayors house (hence the fancy bushes and lighting). I also added some stones on bottom right corner of the far right level for a hidden passage later on in the game when you get the stone smashing gopher follower.

Another design I think I have settled on is that instead of trying to box players within each level area using shrubs and fences, I will instead allow a more free roaming camera system so that the player can see parts of the other level areas to give context as to why they can cross between levels in a certain spot. So for example, in the T-path that leads to the mayors house, you could go the opposite direction of the path to the mayors house and try to get back into your grandpas backyard. So instead of using shrubs to block that off, when the character navigates close to the left edge, the level area to the left will fade in slightly so they can see a fence is blocking them. The fence won’t be on their level, but they can see it on the level next to them.

Thats all for now, thanks for reading!

[demergostudios]

Quick Update on Gopher Town

It has been a far too long since my last blog post, but in that time I have done a few twitch live streams, but I have mostly been working on the art pipeline, level switching, and waiting for Huion (my tablet maker) to fix their mac drivers so I can use Substance Painter on Mac.

I just wanted to give a quick update and show some additional detailed designs of Mossborough.

Below is the full high level layout of Mossborough (official name still to be determined).

Based on this high level design, I have started to create a more detailed level design doc. Today, I managed to get pieces 4 & 5 done (or at least much closer to what I want).

Below is what I have so far:

Right now my focus is on getting a full 9 x 9 grid section filled out around the player so that I can test how my level switching works in Unity.

After I finish the above 9 x 9 grid sections, I will move the pieces into blender for full modeling. After the blender treatment, I will use Substance Painter (Windows version due to Huion driver issues on Mac) to texture the models. Once that is done, I will export them to Unity and start laying them out.

Thats it for my brief blog post update. I am hoping to start streaming again very soon.

[demergostudios]

Mossborough Sectioned Off

In our latest twitch stream we took the rough map of mossborough we designed out and sectioned it off into separate areas where each area will take up only one iphone screen size. How I envision navigation in this game is like the old Legend of Zelda style area shifting where each area is “locked in place” until you move into an exit “doorway” on the sides of the screen. Once in that door way it triggers the screen to shift in that direction to the next section of the world.

Below is our image of Mossborough sectioned off with connection points between areas. The red areas are inside locations.

[demergostudios]

Initial Mossborough Layout

Here is a quick pic of the initial layout of Mossborough that I started designing in our latest twitch stream. If you don’t have time to watch the whole stream (and its long), then essentially this is what we ended up with at the end. This is just the first graybox iteration of the town and it will continue to evolve as I start fleshing it out more and implement it in Unity.

[demergostudios]

Game Development in Layers

I spoke on a twitch stream a while back about how I kind of view game development projects as a series of layers applied on top of each other and once all the layers are complete, they form the whole game.

Here is a quick visual of how I see the game development process.

So the idea behind this visual is that every game starts off with a core gameplay mechanic that the creator is trying to get the user to enjoy. Now I understand not all games start this way, some start with a story, but essentially at the core of every game is this idea of a core gameplay mechanic. Whether that mechanic is shooting, jumping, or even just moving, there is a core mechanic at work.

After the core mechanic is established, iterated upon, and proven to be fun, the team can then proceed to design a story that supports that mechanic. Not all games have stories, but most games do, even if its just a simple princess gets kidnapped and you have to rescue her story.

Once a good story has been developed and iterated upon (along with the core mechanic), we can proceed on to building out the world, levels, and secondary gameplay mechanics. The story may not necessarily be complete at this time, but usually a main premise has been established and the overall story arc decided upon.

Side Note: Some might argue and say that they want a more organic approach and secondary game mechanics and story arc’s should naturally come up while developing the game, I would say this process of layers fully supports and even encourages that idea. The idea of layers here is not that one layer must be fully complete before the others, but that something of the below layer must exist before the next layer can even be started. For example, there is no use developing a story if you have no fun core gameplay mechanic to support it. Also there no point in developing secondary mechanics if they have no part in your story. Likewise FX are pointless without some art or environment context to put them in.

The other key to this layering view is constant iteration. So when you move on to the next layer above, you do a lot of iterating between those two layers. So changing one thing in the bottom layer will probably affect and cause an iteration to happen in the top layers too. Essentially this layering image shows not only order of development, but also the architectural structure of the game itself.

After level design and secondary mechanics have been iterated upon for a while, you can start building out the systems to support those mechanics and levels. 

Once those systems are established you can start attaching art to those systems and watching the game’s visual direction take shape.

Once some art is in, you can also start figuring out the sounds and environmental atmosphere you want to create. Some might argue here that animations (or lighting) should come next, I would argue back saying establishing great audio and atmosphere up front will lead to a much more engaging and immersive experience than waiting until later after its too late to change the art and animations to support those atmospheric sounds.

After atmosphere and sounds comes building out animations. At this point we are far enough along that the layer ordering isn’t as big of a deal. The sounds, animations, and FX layers can really be interchangeable, though I do still think the order presented above is a good guideline.

Finally FX layer comes last. For FX, I am talking about lighting, post-processing filters, particle affects, pretty shaders, etc. Pretty much all the eye candy stuff. Having said that, I think lighting could also show up in the art layer, but certainly not final lighting, which is what I was thinking of when including it in this layer. Its also plausible that lighting should be its own layer because its so complex and important, but not all games have huge lighting needs (but maybe some of them should!).

I hope you found this explanation of the game development process helpful. It is by no means a one-size fits all. This is just one simply way I like to visualize the process and it helps me not get too overwhelmed with all that needs to be done in creating a game, especially as an indie. Its a good high-level roadmap with just enough detail to make it easy to focus on the right areas of your game at the right times and not get too far ahead of yourself.

[demergostudios]

Adventures Researching Game and Puzzle Designing

Over the past week I have spent numerous hours reading and researching game design theory and puzzle design theory. I am by no means an expert (probably not even a novice yet), but I wanted to share links to some very helpful articles. I have not yet found a site with a good compilation of design and puzzle theory articles, so here is a list of great articles to read. I have read all of these and recommend them all.

I don’t agree with everything in these articles, but there are important bits and pieces to take from them all to help you form your own opinions and theories about game design and to help you build your own game world.

But first I will say, if you have not already heard of Chris Crawford, go read up about him now. His website has a wealth of game design info and the Journal of Computer Game Design he published for a number of years back in the 80′s and 90′s still contains a lot of relevant knowledge about game design. 

Side tangent: In fact I might even surmise that the game designers of the 70′s-90′s are some of the best designers because they were not distracted by the pretty graphics of today’s generations. They had to design truly fun games, because they didn’t have pretty graphics to lean on. Also I think they had a lot more creativity too, because computers and games were still somewhat new at that time and there was not an established pattern or genre of game styles like there is today.

I think imagination had to play a major part in those older style games, where as in modern day games we try to visualize those imaginations through graphics rather than story/dialogue and implied existence (the idea that it exists, but we don’t have the technical abilities to visually show you, so you have to imagine what it looks like from our descriptions of it).

Whats fun about reading books is imagining the story in your mind. Whats fun about movies is imagining the parts of the story we did not see on screen. Whats fun about games is...seeing visual representations of our imaginations...that doesn’t sound exactly right?! That sound like we took the players mental investment out of the equation. Maybe we need to get back to letting the player imagine certain parts of the game for themselves again?

The Dragon Speech - One of the first things I would recommend to do if your researching game design and have not already watched it, is Chris Crawford’s speech at CGDC (GDC) back in 1993. I think in particular the 4th video about Characters is especially important and relevant.

Designing the Puzzle - A rather exhaustive list of puzzle designs can be found in Bob Bates GDC 1997 article.

Game Design - Theory And Practice: The Elements of Gameplay - Richard Rouse III’s excellent Gamasutra article about better applying puzzles to our game. 

Puzzle Game Design - I especially like the 3 point “need to haves for planning” list from this Ludum Dare article.  It also has some good article links in the comments for game design theories including MDA in particular.

Who Killed Adventure Games? - Old Man Murray’s Erik wrote this article and this is a fun read. I think his humor proves the article’s point quite nicely and is something all designers need to keep in mind when designing puzzles, and just games in general.

Why Adventure Games Suck - “Some people say that following these rules makes the games too easy to play.  I disagree.  What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected.” I think this is one of the key take aways from this article along with the great list of do’s/don’ts about game design. (Note: This is actually one of the articles from the above Journal of Computer Game Design)

Application of Puzzle Theory - This is a great read and really takes Bob Bates Puzzle Theory article and applies it with some examples. A great take away from this article is always reward the player for solving any puzzle whether it be a small reward like a new animation or a big reward such as unlocking a new location.

Designing and Integrating Puzzles in Action-Adventure Games - This is another great Gamasutra article. It focuses much more on a few core types of puzzles than the other articles, but has a lot more depth to them. This is a must read article.

If Not Puzzles… What? - “The reason so many adventures get it so wrong so often is that puzzles are so contrived.” and “If I had my way, every adventure game developer would be forced to play A Link to the Past to expand their puzzling horizons.” are some of the many key take aways from this thorough article about diversifying puzzle types in adventure games by Jack Allin.

Puzzles, what are they good for? - “I think that simply asking the question: "how does this puzzle serve the overall experience" is bound to be a good start.” I think that quote best summarizes the entire article. Its about determining whether the puzzle should be there or not. It focuses on the “why” of the puzzle rather than the how. 

The below links are more great articles from http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/ that I have not read, but will be reading.

- High-Level Storytelling Design

- Goals and Storytelling

- Puzzles in horror games. Part 7 (Note: this is a 7 part series on puzzles/story telling and this link contains links to the other 6 parts)

Adventure Developers website which has since closed its doors is still available through Wayback Machine and has a good number of articles that you can still read. I have not read any on there yet, but plan to and when I do, there will definitely be another blog post about them.

I plan to do a twitch stream tonight to talk about some of my new ideas and directions for our Gopher game, based heavily on what I have read in these articles.

[demergostudios]

Our First Twitch Stream

We just finished our first twitch stream this evening and I had a blast talking about our up coming game idea, and all the different possible directions we can take it. Most of this first stream covered the background of the idea, what we think is the core gameplay mechanic and then the different directions we are thinking about taking the game. It also covered everything we have on the game up to this point.

Check it out on our twitch channel or archived on our youtube channel.

We will be live streaming on twitch as frequently as possible and blogging here too. We hope to see you hanging around sometime soon!

[demergostudios]

New Beginnings...

Hello fans and followers!

It has been a while since we last reached out, but this long period of silence is over. We are back with new ideas and a renewed push to make Demergo Studios a success once again.

Our first game Function.Repair was a resounding success for us! While it did not provided enough funding to launch the company, it did provided many of us with full-time jobs out of college so that we could continue to work on games in our spare time.

The team has shrunk in that time as many members have found other interests, hobbies, and projects to work on. The studio is down to just me (my wife helps out on ideas occasionally), but my hope is to start growing the team once again as the game progresses. I will continue to refer to Demergo as we, because its more than just me, its a group of ideas and a vision about video games that is more than just about what I want or envision. Its about what the company stands for and that is Great Gameplay, a Fun Story, and the Thrill of Adventure.

Beginning now, you will see more frequent postings on all things Demergo and about our new game. One of the main goals we have with our new project is to be as open and revealing as possible. We want people to ride along with us on our journey to create a fun and engaging mobile game. We want you as fans and viewers to be able to see the tough decisions we have to make on things like monetization, keeping or cutting features, and on maintaining momentum on a self-funded and self-motivated project. We plan to hide nothing, showing our discussions around all story, gameplay and other key features.

You may ask, how do we plan to do that?! Our current thinking is to use Twitch streams! Anytime we sit down to discuss something, a twitch stream will be running. Anytime we are developing or building something out, a twitch stream will be running. All of the videos will be archived to Youtube for viewing after the fact too. We will also have a public Trello Board where you will be able to see the progress we make on tasks and whats in store for the future.

Thanks for reading and we hope you are as excited about these new beginnings as we are!

Todd