Dream Harvest

Our journey as indie developers creating Failure, an RTS game set in a digital network where you indirectly control your units by manipulating the world.

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - August 2017

A post shared by Dream Harvest Games (@dreamharvestgames) on Jul 11, 2017 at 2:57am PDT

This month has been filled with it's fair share of ups and downs from the business side of things. Firstly, the funding we were supposed to be securing at the end of May unfortunately never came through due to the other party changing terms at the last possible minute in such a way that would have put the studio at too much risk upon release of the game.

The good news is that we're currently in talks with a very very large publisher about funding the rest of development and giving us the support we need.

We’re also working with a consultancy firm called By The Horns, whose sole purpose is to help us find funding for the game and studio.

Even without any funding work on Failure: NeuroSlicers hasn't stopped or slowed down and we're now currently working towards a solid build for Insomnia 61 up in Birmingham as well as our approaching Closed Alpha test which will be launching (hopefully) around the end of September.

In order to get involved you're going to need to join our Discord Server and show us how excited you are about the game by getting involved with our community. 

We're being super selective with this first round of testing as we really want to work with those of you that are super vocal about the game. 

It's all about your input, your ideas and your passion for Failure: NeuroSlicers that will help us create the best possible competitive online RTS on the market. So come join us and have your say!

Justin

Code:

Time to write another one of these again (is someone actually reading this? ;-)

Let’s start with the boring stuff, level loading. Not really anything interesting to write here, currently the levels contains way to much stuff that shouldn’t be part of the actual level and should be separated from the level. This should make our life easier as currently it’s pretty easy to break things when the team are not careful. Also it’s needed so we can have a nice loading screen, a level intro animation, such as the mockup I created a few months ago:

We started working a bit more seriously on the menu UI. I guess I should start by sharing a concept of the deck builder.

Quite a bit going on there and some stuff has to be changed to be actually usable, but you get the idea. 

We’re still in the process in properly defining the UI and all the UI elements so I won’t show anything that is currently in-game, except the background of the main menu as it’s not really UI and looks nice:

I also wasted a bit of time with my new Vega Frontier Edition (liquid cooled). It’s really nice to have a GPU with 16GB of RAM, but I haven’t really used it for anything useful yet (and somehow I expect that this won’t change in the foreseeable future and the whole thing was just a big money sink), but it’s really nice to get rid of my old 290x Crossfire setup and replace it with something much quieter.

Beside all that stuff I was also looking if I can find some Raspberry Pi like mini computer to run the whole game backend and game server on so we have something small we can take with us when visiting events. Considering there is quite a lot of stuff that has to run on that thing I concluded a Raspberry Pi would not be a good solution due to the limited amount of RAM.

After wasting a lot of time and not really finding anything, at least nothing that had the specs that I wanted (which were mostly 4GB of RAM) and were available, I decided to get an ROCK64. I don’t have it yet (should be shipped tomorrow, so when you’re reading this it should have been shipped). I’ll share my findings in the next newsletter.

I guess I’ll have some fun with it and add a few useless features to the server. Maybe attach a e-ink display to it, just because it should have some kind of screen to give status information and a normal TFT is not as fun.

Anyone has some other cool/interesting/useless ideas what other ‘stupid’ things I could add to it (don’t forget it’s actually meant as a small portable server for the game), feel free to contact me.

Until next month,

Sven

Design:

The focus of design has been on Levels this month.

Level design provides an interesting challenge, since each level needs to put all the game's systems at their best light. Some would argue that it's better to go the other way around - the game systems supporting the levels/world, but that's another topic. In Failure, the levels are relatively small compared to traditional RTS games, which achieves our main goals of short matches and constant action:

However, we're making an RTS, which means that the levels also need to provide plenty of tactical and strategic decisions for the players: Will early aggression pay off on this level? Can I get away will expanding my resource generation a bit further and where should I place it? What avenues of attack/defence are open after I secure the level objective? These are just a tiny fraction of the questions that we want players to be asking themselves while playing on our levels. That's on top of all the tactical decision of each battle.

I briefly mentioned Level Objectives and I want to talk about these a bit further. Every level of Failure will contain a set of objectives, which players will have the option of going for. Notice that I said that they have the option and are not specifically required to. Players can choose to ignore these if it suits their strategy. The choice is here is important, since we want players to create their own play styles and not force anything on them. By doing that, we create more varied and interesting matches. If we had an objective that was a must have every time, most games will play the same - go for the objective ASAP.

But then you might ask: "Why have objectives at all? Let players fight on their own terms", and many RTS games have done just that with various degrees of success. We think that objectives provide us (the devs) with a powerful tool, which not only brings a fresh and unique feel for each level, but also helps us (as devs) solve problems that exist somewhere else in our game systems.

For example, let's say that stalemates are common on a particular map. We can easily create an objective which breaks the stalemate by having the winner of an objective bombard an area of the map. We can basically apply this principle for any problem we face and are unable to solve any other way.

These is a lot to this topic of Level Design (such as level progression, pacing, balance, dynamic terrain and more) that I don't have the time to go over it here. Rest assured though, we're trying our best to make these as exciting and enjoyable as possible.

Milcho

Art:

Quite a considerable amount of UI work to showcase this month with our first lot of menu UI concepts done in preparation for our first pass implementation of the game systems.

There are a number of UX issues with the above such as a number of different styles for button designs and inconsistent positions of common elements but this was done in order to see different options. Our first implementation of these will be in the demo we're showcasing at Insomnia at the end of August.

In addition to UI art, we've been working on a variety of new level environment designs and level layouts along with global and secondary objectives; specifically seeing how we can have objectives in levels that are very closely tied to their environments and give players a multitude of different battle experiences and challenges to overcome when playing against other players. Here's some of the concept art:

Last but not least, we've been trying to rework the Failure: NeuroSlicers logo; specifically the typography (the illustrated elements will come later. Here's what we settled with for the time being:

Until next month,

Loic

Music:

Hey everyone, Dan here. This month, my friends Pete and Natalie visited me to record some electric guitar and piano parts for the new Security Sector level music that I'm working on.

A post shared by Dream Harvest Games (@dreamharvestgames) on Jul 25, 2017 at 7:57am PDT

My friendship with Pete was born at school over our mutual enjoyment of games – Bushido Blade (Justin Edit - Hell Yea, amazing game!!!) competitions on the original PlayStation were a particular favorite – and that enjoyment has stayed with us both into our 30's. Natalie, who Pete is married to and who I met in my teens, is also an avid gamer and the two of them together have amassed a ludicrous amount of gameplay hours across just about every computer and console format that I can think of; even some of their holidays revolve around games, such as Eurogamer Expo and a recent trip to the arcades of Akihabara, Japan.

For a long time, I've promised myself that, when I started writing my first computer game score, I would invite the two of them to perform on the recording, so they could be involved with games in a way that they haven’t experienced before. It was a fantastic feeling to fulfill that promise as we pitched up in the studio and set about recording some ideas for Alpha Gate.

A few days before the recording, I received a barrage of texts from Pete about how he can't really play guitar and how he was feeling a little nervous, so it was great to see him take to the parts so quickly and naturally. We recorded a few percussive effects, some strummed material, some finger-picked material and some off-the-wall stuff that I could work into unusual, glitched patterns later on — for those of you interested, it turns out that the most musical pen for bouncing upon guitar strings is a Staedtler 0.6 pigment liner.

Natalie, as well as recently picking up the violin, has some low-key mad piano chops, so we recorded a synth line and a rhythmical pattern on a distorted piano to overlay Pete’s guitar part. The synth and piano elements will later be worked up to pulsate throughout the base-state of the music — fading in and out to create a sense of unease; we also recorded a couple of ideas for some of the more action-oriented states, which will inevitably receive a good dose of roaring modular synth too.

Until we meet again,

The Dream Harvest Team

[dreamharvestgames]

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - June 2017

Justin - Creative Director

Hi lovely readers, I hope you've been enjoying the summer weather we've been having.

This month I've been working on wire-framing our menu and game systems. This is everything that happens outside of matches including our contract system.

What's the Contract system you say? Well, this is something that's very much still in the concept stage, but in theory, it’s a mission system that allows us to deliver both narrative-driven objectives for each of the levels we'll be launching with, training missions for each of the scripts, daily/monthly events and more. It’ll be wrapped up in a cool narrative package that will hopefully envelope you in the world of Failure: NeuroSlicers and your role as an unstoppable Slicer in the NeuroNet.

With this system, we'll be able to give you a constant flow of evolving narrative, cool progression based rewards for completing contracts that allow you to customize your avatar and scripts and allow you to grow your character as you spend more time in the network, but most importantly will allow us to expand on the game even after full release in super interesting ways.

We'll have lots more to share in regard to this system and more down the line, but for the time being, here are some amazing fun to look at wireframes (I promise, they're fun to look at 😊)

Until next month…

PS. Don’t forget to join our Discord Channel if you want to discuss anything about the game with us; we'd love your input.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

Yay, another time to forget what I did last month.

From what I can remember, I mostly focused on porting our game server from C# to Java. In case that seems like a stupid idea to you (because you think C# is much nicer, which I agree) let me elaborate a bit why this was necessary.

First, the original server was never really intended for production use and was mostly a prototype to test the network functionality, so it had to be redone. This open question is why do it in Java instead of C#. There were a few reasons for this:

The rest of the backend systems are already written in Java which was mostly done because a lot of frameworks only exist for Java.

After doing some benchmarks comparing Netty and DotNetty I concluded that Netty was performing a lot better than DotNetty (with the same load Netty used 10% CPU vs. DotNetty which used 25% CPU and quite a bit more ram). While this would, in many cases, this doesn’t really matter that much in most server applications, our game server is meant to handle a lot of concurrent games, therefore, network performance was really important.

<bias> I assume it’s easier to run Java than .net on servers. I should mention here that I worked as a sysadmin for a long time and I’m used to running Java applications. So, I’ve got a lot experience doing that but very little running .net applications. </bias>

To annoy Milcho.

Slightly off-topic: does anyone know a good Raspberry Pi alternative (or some other cheap computer) with a lot more ram (something like 4GB+)? I was trying to find something simple/cheap where I could install the whole server backend + game server for testing and having something we can easily take with us when going to events. If you have any good suggestion contact me on Twitter: @i_gamedev

Milcho - Lead Designer / Gameplay Programmer

Salutations, “I am here, ready to enlighten you, but are you ready to be enlightened?” 

I don’t know why you thought this might be an actual quote, but it definitely isn’t. I make up things all the time. In any case, let’s go over what’s been happening in the gameplay department of Failure for the last month. 

First, we’ve always been planning this massive meta-game on top of the RTS that’s we’re making to add a whole different layer on which you can focus on. The first few weeks of the month involved figuring exactly how that system might work and how it would integrate with our other systems. We got pretty far, but as game development often goes, we’ve put that on holds since it was too awestriking and dangerous for the rest of the team. We’re going to revisit it in a few months and prototype a few versions to get the best out of it. 

The rest of the time I spent thinking about how much I like doughnuts and how to get them in my diet without my dentist going after me with a stick. During that time, I also started prototyping a new and improved resource systems for the game, which was a huge task. We’re talking about changing something that has been fundamental for a game that has been around for almost 3 years and making sure that everything works in the aftermath. The main reasons for this redesign is to reduce the effect of snowballing, making sure that players that are losing a match have a chance to come back from possible defeat, though we also want to make sure that our matches stay within the 5 - 10-minute length. So far, it’s going great though and we’re definitely on the right track. I’ll update you on its progress next month. 

Speaking of next month, I guess that’s when I’ll be talking to you again. Until then, make sure to keep your doughnut intake healthy (whatever that means for you).

Loïc - Art Director / Designer

This month I’ve been focusing on polishing our UI and feedback, along with work on the new deck system.

In term of preproduction, I wrote and sketched concepts for all our nine environments and subsequent levels, tying the specific objectives of each level to the themes of the environment it takes place in. 

These are just quick prototypes of possible levels and are in no way the final look, layout or colour/theme scheme, but this is all part of our process.

Kelvin - VFX Artist / UI Artist

Yo! More UI going on this month! We really had to figure out a type of UI frame/theme to use. We wanted it to be modern, stylized, and minimal. Both Loic and I had to work together, throwing sketches back and forth, to get to the iteration that we are at now.

There were tons of iterations beforehand but we got to this. We've designed a pattern for the background of the frames also that connected organically but with strong and strict lines.

Another exciting thing we added is the notification system! There are times you're focusing on a part of the map and you don't notice your buildings being attacked. DO NOT FRET! I worked with Milcho on this system that will notify you when something is being attacked and which direction it's in! It's extremely helpful and will really help you on your game.

Adding to the notification system, we added a very, very simple change that shows feedback on your units being attacked. When a unit is attacked, it should flash white now. Simple, but awesome 😊

I also worked on an FX this month! Woo! It took a bit to get it right, but once you spend tech, the tech fragment will shatter in this cool flash of glitchiness! It's a very small part of the screen, but it turned out very nice.

Amelie - UX Researcher / Writer

So, what happened on my side since the last time, well, mostly to be honest holidays 😊 I drafted some wireframes for the deck builder and some other menus before leaving and while I was gone Justin polished those and the guys discussed it, made some improvements and I came back only to have to say "Wow that's awesome! Let's put this all in and test it!" So, Georgia was really cool, I encourage everybody who likes mountaineering and good wine to visit, trust the French girl even just the wine is worth it! 

In Georgia every time you drink, someone makes a toast, it's tradition and if it may seem a little funny to us (especially because the toasts can be really long) they take it really seriously. And then, if you drink often I mean, you get used to it and you learn to enjoy it, you know to learn to be grateful for something in your life every day (or 4 times a day depending how much you like their wine...) so here is my toast, despite Creative England really not getting how video games work and putting us in a really shitty position, and our boss being really rather britishly cross you know... the team is still there 😊

Everybody is still super motivated to make a good game, we're not here for the money we're here for the passion of creating an experience that we really hope you will enjoy and remember. So, to passion and to the sleepless nerds in this team who make this game come to life! Cheers bros!

Writing wise I had made a good start on the faction’s motivations and identity, I also worked on our main character background, started to imagine what brought him to become a slicer...

So now that I'm back I have loads of testing to do, and my objective for the next week will be to take the time to read the mountain of level design the team has produced, see how the maps objectives can fit into mission stories and last but not least nail the first version of our intro narrative!

Daniel - Composer

Coffee shops. Who would have thought that the music of Failure NeuroSlicers would sound like coffee shops?

Now, re-read that first sentence in the voice of Christopher Walken and you begin to enter the rabbit hole of strange that I've entered since the last newsletter. While 'the rabbit hole of strange' sounds like a particularly psychedelic category of pornography, I'm in fact referring to a world of sound that surrounds most of us each and every day: the inner workings of our electrical goods.

By using an induction coil pick up (a device similar to the pick-ups on an electric guitar), I've been able to record the electronic signals of just about the entire contents of my house and — to the concern of some patrons — most of my local shops. It transpires that many of our electrical goods are host to wonderful, bizarre and, sometimes, frightening sounds; many of these sounds can be very rhythmical and full of unusual accents and musical phrases. By 'frightening' I don't mean that our devices are low-key telling us to worship Satan, but that they create sounds you wouldn't expect (particularly the payment terminal at my local coffee shop). If you happen to have an induction coil mic and nothing better to do, try recording a PS4 while you turn it off from the system menu — it really is hours of fun for all the family.

By recording all of this information with the coil pick up, I've been able to transcribe the rhythms of some electrical items and assign those rhythms to different musical instruments to create sonic fragments that cross the boundary between natural and man-made — much like the Neuro Net. For some of the less rhythmical recordings, I've been able to alter, distort and pitch the electronic sounds in Pro Tools and create some interesting instruments (my favourite so far is the synth I've created from my beard trimmer). It is this blend of natural and un-natural, of 'above the line' and 'below the line', that will form the music of Failure NeuroSlicers and, sometimes, that will even include the sounds of my local coffee shop.

Until next time.

Bobby - Communications Manager

I'm used to being the behind the scenes guy for Justin and the team and, on occasion, the doting fanboy of Failure: NeuroSlicers as it evolves. Watching the team work, extremely, hard makes you want to try and do more and one of my tasks is to try and identify community opportunities, specific to the game, and connect with a wider audience; not just from game genre perspective, like RTS, but think about the style and story of the world that will pull fans from all areas of the gaming community to keep them up to date with what's going on within the game.

I'm hoping those already reading this will be subscribed to all our various communication channels, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our newsletter but sometimes these can be dependent on, you, the community to scroll by it in your news feed, which, if you're like me subscribe to a lot of feeds, and will sometimes miss content as it becomes, what I like to dub, a complacent channel we go into autopilot when using.

How to prioritise communication channels? It's a daily thought for me. How many users are subscribed to each channel, what to publish to first can be difficult as it's a changing landscape but recently Discord is becoming more and more popular with the gaming community because of its real-time forum nature. The younger generation these days, the millennials, are used to instant messaging, they don't want to wait for emails or a post reply, they want to know someone is on the other end of the window ready to engage and that's why we're going to start pushing a ton of content there on a daily basis.

It's a great platform with so much control, not only with chat but voice too. We get asked about Alpha testing all the time and one of our recent meetings play testing came up. As you can imagine we're a small team and everyone getting time together across multiple time zones can be tricky so if it's something you'd love to get involved with please come and join our Discord group. We'll be approaching active users who really want to get their hands on an early alpha build, help playtest and provide valuable feedback to continue to evolve the game leading up to its release.

Also, share, it's so important to us we get the game out there and you're all instrumental in helping us do that.

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - April 2017

Justin - Creative Director

It’s been bloody mental here at Dream Harvest this month and the rush hasn't even let down one bit!

I had the clever idea of wanting to demo Failure at three events this month while trying to move to a new house half way across the country. What could go wrong? 

I type this update currently surrounded by boxes and acoustic foam as we had to fly out to Croatia the day all of my studio equipment was delivered by the removal firm and since getting back on Wednesday morning it's been full steam ahead while we prepare to move into our new office, did I say new Office? 

Yep, so we're finally going to have a place to call home, next month, as the funding from certain sources come in later this month, yay!

We'll be sharing more about our new Studio setup, including lots of photos and videos as we move into the new space. I'm super excited to finally be working with a large portion of the team in the same building rather than online and this will allow us to pick up the pace on development immensely as several members of the team move into full-time work with Dream Harvest.

Anyway, for now, I wanted to share some of the feedback we received from the three events we went to over the past month:

First up was the monthly WeGeek event. This is always a fun little event held at a number of the WeWork offices around London. Unfortunately, this one wasn't really the right crowd for us this time around and I made the big mistake of only bringing a single laptop with me so demoing the core focus of our game, multiplayer, was almost impossible. 

The small number of people that sat down and played Failure: NeuroSlicers seemed to really enjoy it, but I very quickly realised that there were some usability and readability issues; things that we actually already knew about, but in the process of fixing for the next two events we were due to attended this month, Intel Buzz and Reboot Develop.

The Intel Buzz event was a completely different story. 

We had quite a few people coming to play the game. I even had to pitch the game with our new teaser trailer in front of a big audience of people in the main hall. 

The demo we were showing off still lacked the tutorial we were building for Reboot Develop and there was still some issues with player's struggling with new game-play concepts that we'd introduced. 

Although Failure: NeuroSlicers is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) at heart there are quite a number of new mechanics and systems which are new to this genre and without a tutorial, the learning curve is a bit steeper than we'd like. 

What we've found though is that once players understand these new concepts they really enjoyed the fresh experience we're giving them with the game. We're even finding players who aren't normally competitive gamers really getting into the matches.

Last up and by far the coolest experience of last month was Reboot Develop in Dubrovnik Croatia. What a mind-blowingly, beautiful place to have a game conference. 

We met some amazingly cool people creating some really amazing games; the quality level from some of the teams in Eastern Europe is amazing.

Milcho and I spent three days at the conference and was happily joined by Amelie and her boyfriend Charlie (who's developing a super cool Portal like first person puzzle / space game) in a great spot which allowed us to really observe people playing through our work in progress tutorial and then play a couple of multiplayer matches, either between Milcho or I or even other attendees. 

We had several people come back again and again over the three days to play more matches with some even telling us that "they could play the game all day!" - it was a really lovely thing to hear.

My one regret was not putting us forward for the Reboot Indie Game Awards as several people came up to us after saying that we would have had a good chance of possibly winning some of the categories or at least being nominated. Well, there's always next year!

Anyway, if you want to check out some of the photos from the event check out the Reboot Develop section of this month’s newsletter where you can see some nice shots of both the Conference and magical city of Dubrovnik.

Until next month - Keep Gaming!

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what happened in the last month? I got a year older, had some non Failure related changes in my life so I was a bit busy outside of working on Failure.non Failure related changes in my life so I was a bit busy outside of working on Failure.

As we had Reboot coming up I was mostly working on smaller improvements and bugfixes as I didn’t want to mess up the build we did for Reboot. Not much else to say about that, nothing really new, just less bugs, minor graphical improvements etc.

While it didn’t make it into the build for reboot I was also investigating some graphical effects for level loading. A good example for the stuff I did is this little test

Also, we upgraded the project to Unity 5.6, so I’m currently looking into existing code/shaders etc. to see if we can make use of some of the improvements that came with 5.6. 

The most useful feature so far has been the additions to the frame debugger as they helped me to detect a few possible performance issues as some stuff isn’t exactly working as it’s supposed to. I'm also looking forward to seeing what Kelvin can do with the new particle system stuff when he’s back working on effects.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Justin had the astonishing idea to sign us up for three events in one month while having an incomplete game. Yeah… you can imagine how that went for the poor soul that had to prepare a build for all of them. Oh, you thought that poor soul was someone else? Of course not.

Apart from my suffering, the rest of the team did a great job of fixing issues and polishing different aspects of the game – UI/UX, VFX, Environment etc. The main feature of the builds was a newly designed tutorial which eased people into our core systems and gave them a good chance to compete in a multiplayer match. 

Plenty of people were able to enjoy the game because of it, which fills me with confidence that we’re making something that not only we enjoy playing, but also and there’s market for it. All-in-all it went smoother than I would’ve ever expected – the only downsides being a lack of sleep and exhaustion. The only thing we need to do next works restlessly until and after final release – it’s all good.

Now that all the excitement is beginning to settle down, we’re planning lots of changes based on the feedback and observations from those events – from small UX tweaks to big system changes. We’re in full production force here, so expect lots of content in the near future. I’ll leave you with the rest of the team now, because (as we all know) people love talking about themselves. 

Loic - Art Director / Designer 

This month the art focus has been on cards for our user interface and polishing our main level to show the game at Reboot Develop. 

so I sculpted on-board fixed blockers to replace the placeholders we had before, with real-time lights that gives much more volume to the center of the board.

I then created more environment assets to have a wider diversity in the city-scape to create a symmetrical layout instead of the chaotic one we had before.

Lastly, I created the Access Node, which is your base building, from modeling to animation so we can emulate the feeling of the player jacking into the level and being ejected or destroyed when the Access Node loses all its Hit Points (HP).

Kelvin - VFX  Artist

Hello all, for me this month it’s been a lot of UI work with some FX fixes sprinkled in. Reboot was around the corner and there was a lot we wanted to get done so that the players could give us feedback on it. Along with some fixes to the Transmission tower FX, I've been doing a ton of UI iterations. 

We built a look for the script cards (both small and large versions), resource visuals, and general in-game UI. The most challenging task, besides reformatting my brain to think of UI again, was creating the script cards. We really had to find the balance between visually appealing cards and the amount of information given to the player. 

I lean more towards giving the player a little bit less information and making the UI more appealing. This way, new players will have an easier time trying to adjust to the UI. You can't give them every piece of information and expect them to look through the UI thoroughly. So by putting less information, the players will be able to adapt to the game easier in the beginning and then look for more detailed information later down the line. 

Also, by putting less information, this will keep the UI looking clean in the long run. Once players become veterans of the game, they need less information on the screen anyway. Although the current UI is still a WIP, I think the route we're going is heading in a good direction. 

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hey, everyone! So this month we focused a lot on the UI and the UX in order to show the best possible version of the game at Reboot Develop. The dynamic of the team was great and everybody was really motivated to iterate on the UX. 

Our main interrogations were mostly about how to fit all that info on the cards that describe the scripts but still keep them easy to read, we need to prioritize information between the mini version of the card that remains visible at the bottom of the deck and the larger version of the card that you can access by hovering over it. 

Other aspects we've worked on and are still investigating are how to make the link between data and territory more obvious and how to make your tech resource really intuitive to read when you're purchasing new scripts. 

What we've got is much better than our previous version, I think, but there are still some tweaks we need to test. Apart from that, we worked on a first version of the tutorial. It was really valuable at Reboot to have this because we can now analyse the data we collected in our observations and interviews with the players and see where we need to focus more or how the steps and pace of the tutorial flow. 

I wrote a questionnaire that our players filled in after playing which also allows us to set our next priorities regarding the improvement of the UX.

Last but not least I started to work on the narrative, this is probably the most exciting part for me. I just love the cyberpunk atmosphere that the team is bringing with this game and the really deep and contemporary questions that we want to broach on in Failure. 

I believe that the narrative is going to be a central part of the game identity and so everybody's expectations are quite high with this, it's very challenging but when we'll get to the nitty gritty part it's going to be very rewarding as well. Maybe the title of the game even will take an even deeper meaning then... 

Anyway, I have loads of ideas. I'm reading Snow Crash at the moment and it's the perfect inspiration, the characters are in my opinion very compelling and the themes are tackled in a subtle way, I'm also a big fan of Ghost In the Shell, the original anime and the comics. Using those masterpieces and others help me organize my thoughts and think about how we want to approach this question of the link between our access to unlimited information and the definition of our humanity. 

When Ghost in the shell came out in 1995, it was a completely different context, the internet was a very new thing, and it's within this context that they questioned the definition of our humanity, through the dilemma of the body and the mind. 

Today we're glued to our phones, we are connected almost constantly even if it's not yet through implants but I believe this relation to information and our ability to verify what is true or false instantly without relying on each other so much creates a whole new environment to look at this same old question. 

We already started to work on an intro and we're going to iterate on that probably ten times before we get it right! I'm reusing the timeline that Anthony wrote for us when he could work on the project and of course, the work done on the factions from David but my focus now is to develop our main character. 

What is his or her motivation at the start, what brings him into this slicers universe and how will this evolve as we progress in our investigation and understand what brought humanity to this state?  Work on the antagonist force as well, our conflict, our controlling idea, the values and the emotions we want to manipulate, oh dear.... there is so much to do I should probably get back to it!

Ciao ciao

Daniel - Composer

This month we say a warm welcome to our latest member of the Dream Harvest Team, Daniel Elms. We’ll let his impressive bio speak for itself because it helps solidify his thoughts on the world of Failure: NeuroSlicers.

Composer of humanist, post-minimal music. Daniel crafts emotive soundscapes from intricate orchestral textures that are bursting with geometric rhythms and patterns; this rich orchestral language is interwoven with the electroacoustic instruments and urban sounds synonymous with his hometown, Hull, which together create a unique voice in the world of contemporary composition. He uses his music to make intimate commentaries on the plight of the individual, and to address the social and economic inequalities of his home, taking inspiration from the ideologies and philosophies of anarcho-syndicalist and progressive literature.

As well as creating music for both expansive and intimate performance venues, Daniel has a large and varied repertoire of collaborative works across feature film and theatre, including: the BAFTA- nominated ‘Ralph’, the Academy-Award-nominated ‘Library of Burned Books’, ‘Plaques and Tangles’ at Royal Court Theatre, and additional music for ‘Taboo’ by Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy, for which he worked closely with fellow composer Max Richter. In 2016, Daniel was commissioned by the British Film Institute to create a new work to celebrate his hometown as part of Hull City of Culture 2017 and was awarded Performing Right Society Foundation’s New Music Biennial Award as part of the commission; he was the recipient of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund Emerging Excellence Award in 2013.

In 2017, Daniel will record and release his debut album of concert material, ‘Islandia’: an album of new music written for chamber orchestra and electronics in which expansive sonic landscapes are interspersed with driving rhythms and expressive textures. His BFI/PRS Foundation commission ‘Bethia’ will premiere as part of Hull City of Culture 2017 and will be performed in Hull and at the Royal Festival Hall, London, with a recorded broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Daniel will also be working on a soundtrack for the computer game ‘Failure: NeuroSlicers’ by game developer Dream Harvest Games, create the score for Abner Pastoll’s second feature film ‘A Good Woman is Hard to Find’, and record and produce various musical artists from his hometown, Hull, as part of City of Culture 2017.

ON FAILURE: NEUROSLICERS

Beneath the awesome visual styling and game mechanics of Failure, there are a lot of pertinent questions being asked by the story that can — and should — be applied to our own lives in the face of recent political, social, and technological upheavals. What this means for me as a composer is that there is a vast amount of content within the game that has the potential to bring relatable questions and commentary to the fore for those playing it and that there is the opportunity to blur the lines of distinction between our world and the world of Failure.

[dreamharvestgames]

Reboot Develop 2017 In Pictures

Milcho, Amelie and Justin went to Reboot Develop this year in a bid to show Failure: NeuroSlicers to the wider European gaming dev community. Reboot is held in the magical city of Dubrovnik, better known to Game of Thrones fans as Kings Landing. Here’s a selection of photos and a video of our experience and the city.

Hope you enjoy :)

Exploring the city on the way to the conference, you can’t help but see the Game of Thrones references everywhere

Reboot Develop was held at the Sheraton, Dubrovnik

We decided to setup the night before the event, just to make sure everything was working. We had a scare when we found a major bug that stopped LAN play...it turned out that if the systems were connected to the internet while trying to join a LAN match the matchmaking wouldnt work. Luckily we found a work around.

It was super busy, with around 1000 attendees this year from all areas of the games industry.

The filter coffee in Croatia was pretty awefull, at least the cakes and food was tasty though 

We had a constant influx of people coming to play the game, some even returning for multiple matches. Perhaps it helped that we were running a competition to win Failure: NeuroSlicers mousepads. All you had to do was beat myself or Milcho in a match. On Day 1 only a single person managed to walk away with one! By the end of the conference we’d given 16 away.

The feedback we received from other developers was invaluable and it’s the reason why we go to shows like these.

Some of the talks were held by the pool!

Our business cards are collectible. If you ever see us at a conference be sure to collect a few :)

Our one regret is not applying for the Indie Awards. Several people came up to us afterwards and said that there would have been a high liklihood of at least being nominated. Perhaps next year!

Milcho has a bit of a sweet tooth and this shop, Captain Candy, had literal bucket loads of tastiness. On our last day we decided to stock up. 

The City is rather breathtaking outside the walls.

This was a super cool Jazz club....though Dubrovnik and it’s bars are not exactly cheap.

We took a trip to some of the islands after the conference.

[dreamharvestgames]

FAILURE: NEUROSLICERS demoing during Intel® Buzz Workshop 2017

We're demoing Failure: NeuroSlicers at Intel Buzz Workshop in London this Saturday 8th April, during the #indiedev showcase - http://intelbuzz.bemyapp.com/2017/london/ come along and meet the team if you're about.

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - March 2017

Justin - Creative Director

What a month it's been. It's almost all become a bit of a blur due to the number of different things I've been jumping around doing... I guess that's indie dev for you!

Anyway, my month started off with getting a phone call from a certain someone asking us to pitch our game in front of an investment board with the possibility of securing some of the much-needed funding we've been desperately trying to get for the past 12 months+. With this in mind, we went into "oh shit what are we going to do" mode.

We had to prepare a 20-minute presentation that went into details about the game but more importantly our potential sales figures, monetization model and other business stuff. Luckily, I'm a bit obsessive about all of this so I'd actually already prepared all our numbers months before, though this was a good opportunity to update everything based on how other similar games had been performing over the past 6 months or so.

One of the big issues with the investment board was only two out of ten members were actually from the games industry so we had to work extra hard to explain things that I'm sure most of us understand quite well, such as what a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game is, or what games as a service is.

It was a grueling 20-minute presentation with another 20 minutes of questions from the board.

To take a bit of weight and embarrassment off my shoulders I roped Milcho into coming with me... and he hates public speaking, which I thought was great. I'd be able to take a breather during the presentation and Milcho could take my place shitting in his pants.

All in all, we think it went well and the feedback has been good, though whether we get the money or not is not 100% confirmed yet, at least not officially.

Since the pitch, it's been all hands back on the demo build for Reboot Develop and it's been another great time getting back to my roots of sound design and writing music. One of the most complex sounds I've had to make for the project has been the Transmission Tower level objective for the Skyline level and it's been quite complex getting each of its sounds integrated and triggering exactly how I wanted, but my god it's sounding and looking awesome; though there's still a few tweaks I'd like to make to the sounds and transitions between elements.

I've also been working on new UI sounds in unison for the work that's currently being done on the player feedback systems. Player feedback is super critical and we'd like to be in a position during Reboot Develop where we don’t need to give any help or instructions to people sitting down to test and play the game. It's an ongoing struggle but we'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I've spoken for too long so will let the others take over from now.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what have I've been doing since the last update? A lot of different things, what comes to mind right now is:

backend server systems

the game server

replacing some old effects with Unity's new "Post Processing Stack"

a new menu system

some fixes to some old systems

helping with preparing the presentation

Can't really write about everything here as it would end up in a big wall of text that almost no one is interested in (if you are, sorry for not writing about everything). So, I'll just pick two topics, which have been part of my focus this month.

Menu system

Never really took the time to work on a menu system with the 'new' Unity UI system (it has been out for something like 3 years, so it's hard to still call it new). But, it was interesting to play around with it and figure out how to best make transitions between different menu screens (hint: good starting point is here - https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-UIScreenTransition.html). As we're currently working on the design of some of the screens - what I've did won't be in the game for some time.

One thing that came out of this was a nice system for Options/Settings where we now have a system which is easy to use, so adding a new option to the menu and using it became really easy as:

This also takes care of loading/saving the values. Getting the values and getting notified about changes is also really easy:

Maybe I'll polish the code a bit more and make it open source, could be useful for others. The whole thing is a bit more complicated than it seems as it involves code generation (using CodeDOM) which has the big advantage that I can generate all the methods to get the values etc. this makes it easy to use and makes sure you can't really do anything wrong when using it.

Graphics and Post Processing

A few words on Unity's new "Post Processing Stack". If you're a developer who is thinking about upgrading to the "Cinematic Image Effects", which is now considered to be legacy, be aware that some stuff still isn't in there e.g. the included Fog doesn't support height fog yet, also it completely takes control over the fog settings, so once you add the "Post Processing Stack" to your project you won't be able to use the fog settings in the lighting settings. Bloom is missing the "High Quality" mode too.

In our case, we had to mix the old effects and the new stack so we don't use some features, like the height fog. Overall it seems nice and should be the way to go forward. For me the most important thing is that everything is now integrated into one 'effect' and it's no longer a collection of separate effects. This alone should make it possible to gain a bit of performance, simply because some steps can be reused for multiple effects. I'm not worried about the missing stuff as I assume all that will be added at some point and if it isn't the whole thing is open source so you can add whatever you want yourself.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Salutations, lots has happened since last time so let's quickly go through it.

Reboot Develop

Reboot Develop is happening next month and we have so much to go through to get a stable build ready. We’ve spent the last two-week crushing bugs and making improvements, like adding unit paths on placement for example:

Upgrades

Currently, we don't have many upgrades designed for our abilities. I've designed at least one upgrade for each ability that we're planning to get in for the develop build. One of them will be on our Artillery building, which will let you launch units across the board.

But that's it from me for today. I hope you got your monthly fix of enlightenment.

Until the end of time, Milcho.

Loic - Art Director / Designer

Following last month’s work on the final look of units, we now have all our in-game playable assets that went from mock-up modelling to their final form, with textures and animations.

I polished some concepts for each of them:

I started concept work on a new environment, the Red Lights District, which you can have a glimpse here:

An additional lead on a Zen Garden environment, where I focused on optimising the number of assets to produce to obtain a harmonious moody enviro at reasonable costs.

I then helped to brainstorm on the UI discussion, focusing on our card system to convey clearly all the information about playable elements, while taking as less space as possible and aiming for a slicker sci-fi look than traditional cards.

We are still finding ideas to compress information in a smarter way, and these cards should soon be very comfortable to read, giving precise information so the player can really understand, by themselves, how the game works, but never overwhelmed or distracted by icons or numbers.

Finally, the next goal is to polish our main environment further, the City Scape, so we can have a benchmark of what the game will look like.

Here is a WIP progression screenshot:

Kelvin - VFX Artist

It's been a really busy month! I've only been able to work part-part-time for Failure, because I'm doing another full-time role elsewhere, so I haven't had much time to check everything off my list. But with the little time I did have, I could create the Transmission Tower's capture FX, the Artillery projectile, and some work in progress Nanite elements.

The Transmission Tower's capture FX was a challenge. We already had an existing FX, but with the addition of Loic's tower animations and Justin's sound design, it really pushed the vision even more. After seeing all the pieces together, we knew we wanted to add even more to the FX, it had to be more epic! While playing Justin's sounds in the background, I was pushing forward with the FX until we got something that felt like it was hitting the field very hard. I'm happy to see where it is right now. We have some adjustments to make to sound and code now that I've adjusted the FX, but I can't wait to see it. I'm also really excited to see Artillery's projectiles flying around the map. The battlefield was really missing something like that, and I can't wait to see what it'll add to the game.

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hello, everyone, I'm the team newbie I guess. So my name is Amélie and I do both writing and UX research, I've been doing UX for about 12 years now, only working in games for the last four or so, and that's when I started developing my skills as a creative writer as well.

For the moment, I'm honestly just really trying to catch up with the number of things the team has done so far and familiarising with the gameplay mechanics and the flow, asking many questions and doing my best to see where the player experience can be optimised. I've written some UX reviews which the team has already implemented or planned to include those recommendations for the next build.

This month I've helped reorganize the information on the Script cards and defining when and how does the player need to access each piece on information about his script, I'm currently working on a wireframe for the Deck builder and very soon I will be doing the lobby. (Read More about the UI Stuff here) 

I love how the team is super welcoming to fresh ideas and suggestions and how everybody is so driven to deliver the best possible game experience, we're all looking forward to this next build and I'll be meeting the guys too in Kings Landing as I go with another very small indie team to present another indie game called Fractal Space, (http://store.steampowered.com/app/435410/), how exciting!

There I hope we can meet a lot of potential players and have them test the game. There is no better UX research than field research, guerrilla style: just have a player sit there and look at what he struggles to understand and how fast he alone adjusts to this new environment. Testing the game in Dubrovnik will give us plenty of material to iterate on the next version of the UI and to validate the stuff we worked hard to do well.

There is plenty more UI and UX improvements that we will be doing before travelling there so this and test preparation should keep me fairly busy, but I look forward to quieter times when I'll be able to dive into the NeuroNet universe and start writing missions and dialogues and find a good voice to fit the fascinating narrative that awaits you!

[dreamharvestgames]

The Many Faces Of UI and UX Design

One of our first design goals for Failure: NeuroSlicers was to create a User Interface (UI) that was streamlined, clean and gave the player just the information that they’d need at a given moment without cluttering or overwhelming them.

Looking To The Past

Other RTS games often, at least in the past, had UI’s that would take up 1/3rd of the screen with unnecessary elements or over the top art that, in our opinion, added little to the immersion and took away the player’s ability to see the bigger picture. This is also why we allow full camera movement rather than fixed angle and zoom.

Very little has changed in terms of UI design for RTS games over the past 20 years; we still see the mini-map, info panel, areas for Resources, Tooltip box and a number of other elements as seen in below screens from 3 of the most popular RTS games from the past few years:

As you can see from the above examples the designs are almost identical and all have 1 very annoying problem; their size and the amount of information being displayed means that only 2/3rds of the screen are viewable to the player and this restricted view means the player will have to move the camera around more in order to keep focused on the action. This is compounded by the limited camera zoom, rotation and tilt that players have access to.

With Failure, we have made it our mission to remove or at least reduce this screen clutter while still giving as much information to the player.

First Iterations At Minimal UI Design

UI design is endlessly complex; there’s an incredible number of things to think about when it comes to the thing that you’re going to be interacting with throughout your time with a game; element positions, fonts and sizes, what happens when you press a button, how shortcut keys are linked to elements, sequences of actions, animations of elements, input methods (i.e. touch, mouse/keyboard, controller, motion, eyes, voice, etc.). The list is almost endless and it’s been the biggest discussion point over the past couple of months. Before I go into details about our plans for Failure’s UI, I’d like to show you how it’s changed over the past couple of years:

The above version of the UI was one of the earliest iterations and boy was it ugly! 

Here we used the top left section to show the available Scripts and their costs. When you had enough Data to play one it would light up. Below this was the data resource pool… no idea what we were thinking with that design. And finally, in the center of the screen was a radial menu design. This appeared when you selected a cell and you would slide you mouse over to the script you wanted to use. 

Several issues were evident quite early with this design. Firstly, you needed to memorize the icons for each Script and what they did (and some we didn’t even have icons for!), the Data Pool section looked really out of place and the overuse of colour really didn’t help things. Also, as we continued to develop the game the layout didn’t fit with the new mechanics that we designed.

This circular menu never actually made it into the game, it was just a mock-up to see how we could integrate the elements from the top left section from the previous iteration into the placement UI. What was quite nice about this UI was that we could see when a Script might be ready; as you gained more data the segments of each script would fill up, though one issue was that you'd only see this menu when clicking on a cell, and once you'd clicked on a cell the UI would occlude your view of the level, so not ideal.

Experiments In UI Overlays

Here's another mock-up UI that never made the cut. Though this time it's an overlay. We felt we wanted to integrate a chat system and mini-map and make the Data Resource a bit more prominent, though through play-testing we very quickly realized that there was little need for a minimap due to Failure having small arena based maps and no fog of war. It was space that could be better used. The other issue we found was that due to the Data Resource Positioning some players never looked in the top left corner.

This was a second mockup that we actually integrated and tested in game, though once again we realised it wasn't the best use of space. It also still relied on the cell selection based menu for Script placement, meaning you had no idea whether you had enough Data to play your Scripts until you selected a cell. Not ideal.

Going Clean with UI

This in-game UI was the first version designed by Ryan Klaverweide (UI Artist from Bungie) when we brought him on board.

Here we have the Data in the center, Function scripts to the right and building Scripts on the right. All scripts displayed their cost in the top right and over on the Building side you can see the units that were associated with each building.

Several things changed here from the previous iterations. We realised how important it was to be able to see each of your scripts at all times along with their associated costs; one thing you can't see in the above is that scripts were given a dark overlay when you didn't have enough data to play them and then became lit when you did. With this layout, we also allowed shortcut keys to be used to trigger each of the Scripts, bound to the numerical keys 1 - 6 (though they could be bound to any keys you want).

With this design, we still had a few issues. Firstly, players still needed to learn the icons in order to decipher each script. We also couldn't find a good way to display the upgrade menus for each script.

At this point, several key design changes happened. First, we decided to separate units from buildings, in effect making them their own Scripts. Previous to this you would build a building and then units would spawn automatically from them at certain intervals; we wanted players to have more control over units, at least in terms of placement, so the change was necessary.

The second major change came from the load-out/deck building - we moved away from the 6 Script Deck onto a 9 Script Deck. The idea being; you would build a deck of 9 scripts in the deck builder before a match and then, using a new resource called Tech, unlock up to 6 during a match. 

This allowed for more strategies during a match, allowing you to build a Deck that could work for a number of scenarios and also helped with match pacing. 

You'll see the Tech resource here to the left of the Data UI Element. You can earn up to 3 Tech and Script / Upgrades cost between 1 - 3 Tech each.

NOTE: Tech is earned through secondary objectives and over time, its used for both unlocking and upgrading your scripts during a match. Data is then used to then play your Scripts.

We were really liking this layout but we soon realized that we had failed to resolve one major issue - understandability and learning for new players. You see, although an icon-centric interface might look super nice and clean it still has a very steep learning curve requiring players to learn each and every icon before being able to easily understand what each refer to. In addition, we found that more hardcore players wanted more information from each of their Scripts before playing them. Things such as health, attack power, territory gain, movement speed and the core abilities needed to be displayed in order for players to truly understand how a script played, what they were good and not so good for. Some scripts even have multiple behaviors or complex abilities that just weren't easily placed on an icon based UI system.

We had to find a better solution.

Re-Purposing Card Based UI Design

So the idea was to take a CCG approach, using cards with additional elements to display each of our Scripts. It seemed like a natural progression from the icon-based approach and allowed for considerably more information to be displayed while still keeping the UI minimal... well in theory.

Above was our first mock-up of how the new Card based system could work. This screen showed your Scripts in a Mini Card format at the bottom. A larger card format with additional stats would be displayed on mouse-over or right-click which would also show the Script Upgrade menu. For Slots that didn't have a Script installed yet you would click (or use the corresponding shortcut key) to open the purchase menu where you could install one of your 9 available scripts. In addition we saw a redesign of the Resource UI elements on the left.

With this first version of the Large (Above) and Small (Below) versions of the cards we were suddenly able to add a tonne of additional information. On the large card we had Attack Power, Attack Range, Health and Armour on the left.  At the top left was an icon to say what kind of card it was (Unit, Building or Function power), the name, Data Cost, a box for additional details and context sensitive info when hovering your mouse over one of the three ability slots at the bottom. Then we had a large area at the bottom to explain the Script’s specialty and finally a button on the far right to open the upgrade menu for that card. The mini card version was just a compact version of the larger card with slightly less information.

The issue we then had was trying to determine exactly what information players would want at any given moment while also attempting to simplify the way we give the player information in order to reduce the learning curve and time players need to be looking at their cards - Failure is pretty fast paced with matches lasting around 5 - 10 minutes each; you don’t want to be spending half that time looking at the UI, you want to be actually spending that time trying to defeat your opponent so it’s crucial that the information on the cards is presented in such a way that you can understand at a glance and make informed choices without having to spend too much time reading through a bunch of stats.

Here’s how we started to prioritize information based on Script Type:

As you can see, not all Script types need the same information on them and with this in mind we had to try to determine how to present each in a clever way.

Here are some other iterations we went through - pretty much everyone on the team had a try at different layouts and feels for the cards as well as information/stat layouts:

This last one is how our Scripts look in-game right now but over the coming weeks we’re going to be taking much of our findings and research and creating something much cleaner that will hopefully meet our design goal of minimal UI that conveys just the information a player needs at a given moment without overwhelming them while also offering the details that hardcore players want from an RTS.

We are still finding ideas to compress information in a smarter way, and the Card-based UI system isn’t the only UI element we’re trying to be innovative with. 

We imagine that throughout the development process we will be tackling a number of design challenges in regards to information and readability, we’ve really thrown ourselves into the deep end with the development of an RTS game, but this process is really showing what the team are capable of and we cant wait to conduct some proper player research with the new UI systems to see how things have improved. 

Justin French - Creative Director

[dreamharvestgames]

Watch our latest dev video with Art Director, Loic Bramoulle as he talks about his previous body of work and how he’s shaping the art and design of Failure: NeroSlicers.

[dreamharvestgames]

Watch our recent Twitch stream for Failure NeuroSlicers with Creative Director Justin French, Sven Herrmann (CTO / Programmer), David Kelly (Writer) and Communication Manager Bob Tilley as we update you on the latest developments for Failure and show you some more awesome gameplay.

[dreamharvestgames]

Check out the Spectre unit - work in progress (WIP) - When a building is disabled by the Spectre's attack, players will temporarily lose territory around that building preventing them from placing any other scripts in the affected area.

[dreamharvestgames]

Join us Wednesday 22nd Feb, 21:30 (GMT), over on https://www.twitch.tv/dreamharvestgames with Creative Director Justin French we've got lots of new content to discuss!

Please pop any questions you might like to ask in the comments below.

[dreamharvestgames]

January 2017 Dev Blog

Justin - Creative Director

Not an incredible amount of things to talk about on my side this month. I've spent much of the month working on streamlining our processes and making sure that we're hitting our key milestones over the next few months. Unfortunately, a lack of funding continues to hindering our full team working full time; this of course means that scheduling tasks and getting features implemented by certain dates incredibly hard, but rest assured things are still moving forward at reasonable pace considering these funding hiccups. We're hoping that by the end of March these will be a thing of the past as we're still in talks with several people about getting the cash flow needed to bring our vision for the game together.

I've also been doing some system design to try and streamline some of our development processes to prepare for complex integration systems such as our dialogue and in game events which are used to trigger everything from sound effects to animations.

I'm hoping to be able to get back to some sound design over the coming weeks as we have several new Scripts to integrated which are going to need some sounds to bring them to life.

One last thing; on Tuesday 31st January I attended the WeGeek event in London Old Street at the WeWork campus and got another chance to show of Failure and get some much needed feedback from gamers and other tech professionals; it was a great evening and we’re going to try and do this monthly. If your based in or around London and want a chance to come and check out Failure and have a go at playing it yourself head over to http://www.wegeekninja.com/ and grab yourself a ticket. I’m looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible.

Anyway, until next month.

Justin

Loic - Art Director / Designer

Following the art advancements of last month, I kept on designing new units and constructs, polish shape language, animation style and the final look of the 3d models. I’m blending robotics code with nature inspired shapes. 

Some of this inspiration comes from the latest advancements in robotics from Boston dynamics for example, and researches on neural network-based AI and combining this inspiration to mimicking nature, and giving us a new artistic paradigm of what will be our modern take on cyberpunk.

The next step will be to test this design in-game and research new directions to improve it further, before we start producing the rest of the scripts at higher pace.

Railgun by Dream_Harvest on Sketchfab

Pylon by Dream_Harvest on Sketchfab

Brute ANIMATED by Dream_Harvest on Sketchfab

FireWall by Dream_Harvest on Sketchfab

At the beginning of the month Justin also tasked me with prototyping a new design for the Failure logo that encapsulated our mantra for the game - that it’s about the players, each of which are going to be entering the game as trainee Slicers and who will become super powerful throughout their journey. This is still very much a wip but gives a good idea of the direction we’re taking it. Loic

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Good Evening…

Yes, I don’t respect time zones, thanks for asking J

Anyway, it’s time for my monthly report which enlightens so many. A lot has happened in the last month, and there’s a lot to come, so stick around or regret it forever. For example, the world is burning, but that doesn’t stop us at Dream Harvest to pump out the good stuff – like this beauty:

For anyone interested in this marvel, it shows the struggles of trying to communicate with a remote team. Since we don’t have an office, and a physical white board, we use a virtual one (www.realtimeboard.com). What I am trying to explain there is a new mechanic called “Invade” which takes effect each time you get new territory. It’s still in the works, but in theory it would open up quite a few new options in terms of empowering your buildings beyond their base stats as well as create more effective ways of gaining territory, making each time you place a building something that needs to be carefully considered. We’ll be sharing more details in regards to this system over the coming weeks and months.

On another note, we’ve been dealing with our main in-game progression mechanic this month. It’s to do with how quickly you unlock your abilities, which then gives you certain advantages at certain stages of the game. For example, do I want to invest my time and energy into getting more powerful/interesting stuff? Or do I want lots and lots of resource which will help me spread all over the map, giving me positional advantage?

There are all sorts of choices to be made in Failure and the thing that we’re most proud of is that we’re going to be teaching players about them in detail with gameplay tools. For me, personally, this is extremely exciting, since very few competitive games take the time to teach their players about the depth of their game and leave them to roam the forums. Not with us, we will have a lot of learning tools already in game. At least that’s the plan.

I won’t hold you any longer, you’re probably hungry. Oh, what’s that? Not everyone feels the same as I do right now? Well, that’s quite fortunate, because I am starving. Time for some Yogurt + Biscuits (don’t judge me).

Until the end of time.

Milcho

Richard - QA and Design

Hello again! Let’s get straight into it shall we? The past month has seen a succinct rise in ponderous beard stroking, mostly due to our work on Tech generation and how to make it fit smoothly with the current state of the game.

Our main goals were to allow the player to have more autonomy over his match progression, this was always going to add complexity to the game but our first iteration... It went too far! Introducing the “Tech Bank”, a Script which loaned the player a tech fragment (4 of which made a tech point) but if destroyed takes it back, crashing your “techonomy”, the banking system at its finest! However, it was somewhat difficult to understand, especially so for a new player, with Tech being a key system we had to stick it in a vault and come up with something new.

The Current iteration is the Temple, on construction you’ll gain 40% of your tech point progress, once the player hits 100% they’ll gain their tech point. This is much easier to explain and whilst it does have less interaction and isn’t as punishable by the opposing player it does simplify tech generation. I’m also happy with how it satisfies our goals of giving the player access to different strategic timings and allowing them the choice of when to expand their Script options (the most important part). We’ll see how this pans out in testing, I’m feeling positive about our direction and the amount of choice the player has with this new addition.

Here’s to another month, I hope you’re all well and I look forward to how we progress. Until then… oh the sign off phrase… Mochtest du mit mir tanzen? I’ll think of a better one next time… Just you wait.

Rich

[dreamharvestgames]

December 2016 Dev Blog

Justin - Creative Director  

Happy new year everyone!

The past month has been really good fun as I got back to doing some sound design for some of the latest VFX that Kelvin has been working on. I also went back over the whole soundscape and gave everything a better mix in order to prioritize sounds that need to be heard over sounds that just add to the atmosphere of a level. Things are starting to sound great and I cant wait for us to be in a position to bring on the composer we have planned.

On the business side of things I'm still trying to raise more funds for the studio so that more of us can go full time; it’s a slow process with lots of emotional ups and downs, especially as just after Christmas I heard that the publishing deal we thought we'd be signing in January wont be happening till late February or early march...if at all – though we're not going to let that effect the studio and game, we're just going to push on and continue working toward creating the best possible competitive online RTS we can!

Loic – Art Director / Designer  

A lot happened on the artistic side this month, with different iterations on our first final prototype of environment, based around the 1v1v1 level: 

An experimentation with indirect lighting:

We started to create final models with animations for the units and constructs including the global objective of the 1v1v1 map, The Transmission Tower:

The brute:

The firewall:

The binary:

The artillery:

These animated and textured models dramatically improves in game readability along with the vfx, but there is still many tweaks that will be done to improve further the global aesthetic of the game, mostly on board elements like interactive blockers, these tiles you can raise as you wish.

Sven - CTO / Programmer  

So, what I’ve been up to last month. Let’s see with all that Christmas and new year stuff my memory of the beginning of December is a bit blurry. I think I was still working on some server stuff and working on some graphics stuff (like the border generation I talked about in the last newsletter.

Recently I started working on the menu UI (Everything you see here is just quick wireframes that Justin put together to get a basic idea of screen / menu content needed). Specifically the options menu, which was build to make it easy for us to add new options without having to do much coding, ended up using lot of reflection. As I’m not a big fan of using reflection (or rather of doing stuff at runtime that could also be done at compile time) I then took a look at generating code with CodeDOM. So now I’ve a nice system in place which uses the Unity AssetPostprocessor to detect when a relevant file has changed (which isn’t great as I really need to know the filename, would prefer to actually detect when a class has changed) which then triggers the generation of code for some other classes.

Right now I’m working on the layout/design which turned out to be a bit more complicated then first anticipated due to the large amount of information we want to show in some screens and the fact that some people still using  screens with a ‘low’ resolution (would be so much easier if everyone would have at least a monitor which can handle full hd).

I hope I’ll have some nice screenshots of the menus soon, in the meantime, here are some quick wireframes that Justin put together; they’re not representative of how things will actually look, but instead were designed to give us a clearer idea of potential information needed for each screen.

Kelvin - Visual FX Artist  

This month I continued on unit attack Fx with the binary and the spectre, which one needed a cloaking FX and create an EMP, that needed to be designed to clearly evoke an offline state on the affected element, that can be a small unit to a big construct.

Then I moved to two bigger FXs, that are the access node (the player's base) destruction, ending the game, and the first global objective, both needed to look massive and powerful on the board.

I then quickly helped Loïc on final asset creation with texturing on the artillery model.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer  

Salutations, fellow gamers.

The last month was mostly made up of my lovely holiday back home in Bulgaria....at least it would have been if it wasnt for Justin cracking the whip and making me work....a true slave driver in the making he is, though it does mean that I have lots of things to share with you lovely people.

Tech Resource

After a lot of playtesting we felt that the single in level resource reduced the number of tactical decisions that players made, especially in terms of when and what scripts to unlock and upgrade during a match. We were noticing that players would often very quickly unlock all their favorite scripts way before they were actually needed rather than unlocking each in reaction to what an opponent was doing. With this in mind we decided to introduce the tech resource.

The Tech resource is currently unlocked over time and there are a total of 3 tech points. Different scripts and upgrades cost a different amount of tech to unlock before a player is able to spend Data, the other resource, to actually play them. We’ve found that with the introduction of this system matches now feel much more tactical and you really need to think carefully about which script to unlock as it can make or break your strategy.

We’re now exploring other ways in which players can earn more tech other than the time based system.

Waypoint System

With the waypoint system we wanted to introduce a way for players to give their units an initial objective rather than purely relying on placement and the AI. We found that during especially complex moment in the mid to late game players would want to have a bit more control over how they use their units to strategically take out key enemy buildings and this was a solution that we felt did not encroach on our original design too much. It’s still WIP and might not make the final game, but more testing is needed.

The Spectre Unit, Cloaking and Harrasing

The Stealth mechanic introduced with the Spectre has begun to progress. Moving towards a simpler ambush version, in which it attacks units out of Stealth rather than targeting the closest Constructs. The original mechanic was very different to other units whilst also requiring either micro or easily abused stealth detect placement to counter. Testing will prove whether the simpler version reduces frustration levels or makes the Spectre's a less satisfying harass option.

And now that you’ve been educated on the matters that are important, it’s time to let you free to wander this world, all the wiser.

Until the end of time,

Milcho

Richard - QA and Design

Why hello!   Well I’ve made it out of bed from between coughs and shivers to send some words to your – must I say – rather beautiful eyes. Now the flattery is over and I’m look longingly at my bed let’s move on to Failure!  

Our focus is once again on new Scripts, with new concepts in their initial phases before the “tappy tappy codey codey” begins bringing them to life... Just so you know, not my words, it’s what Milcho says as he codes. Some are based around increasing player agency over neutral tiles whilst others should add more varied economical options. We’ll start seeing some major changes to our over-all strategy as we move forward.

Other than that, I got a blanket for Christmas, along with a hip flask and whiskey, I guess my family are practical and want me to be prepared for the streets, my thanks to them. To all you fine folks, Happy new years and… damn, still don’t have a sign off phrase, I’ll think of one next time... Just you wait.

[dreamharvestgames]

Meet Milcho, our Lead Designer and Gameplay programmer. He came up with the original idea for Failure and in this video he shares his unique insight into what it takes to make a game like this. Sign up to our monthly newsletter packed full of exclusive content here www.failuregame.com

[dreamharvestgames]

Access Node (Base) explosion VFX and new unit type, the Spectre and it’s EMP attack and cloaking ability. All still WIP. Sign up to our newsletter for more info www.failuregame.com

[dreamharvestgames]

Organic Art Design For a Digital Metaverse

Loic, our Art Director answers a few questions about his history as an artist and what inspires his art direction

1. Tell us about yourself, a quick summary of your work prior to joining the Dream Harvest team. I started my career after graduating from an animation school near Paris, France, working first as a concept artist at Ubisoft on Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

I then decided to do a personal short film called Space Cat Hob, with the help of many friends at Delapost Paris studio.

I then worked in an animation company called Supamonks Studio, as a matte painter, then concept artist, then art director on a mobile game. I then did my second personal short film called Strange Alloy at Supamonks. Since then I've been working freelance to have more nomadic lifestyle.

2. What inspires you as an artist? What has been your source of inspiration? My childhood environment has always been a creative drive, as I grew up in the mountains. I was psyched early on about epic landscapes and insect life. a major inspiration since then has been urban exploration, the aesthetic of ruins and their photography.

3. Do you like playing video games? What are the best or your favourite games? As kid I was addicted to StarCraft for a while, as I Loved the dark and organic visual design of the game, along with its good balance between cliché and innovation world building wise.

I will always remember these cinematics, with the Texan looking ranger road killing a Zergling in the middle of the night in an alien desert, to then encounter a Hydraulics.

It was the encounter between the boldness of shapes of a comic-y game and realistic cinematography that was striking and unique.

My other top games are Killzone 2, The Last Of Us, Ori And The Blind Forest, Metro (both), Dying Light, The Swapper, Limbo and Hyperlight Drifter.

4. As a concept artist, how do you come up with all these ideas? Reference is key, but it's also long term investigative work. Imagination needs to be nourished and educated into maturity.

The desperate quest of "what is cool & innovative" needs to be tempered with consensually for the sake of production, so it's a work of back and forth between looking for unexpected ideas by taking distance and selecting those which work the best for the production.

looking at real life is one way of injecting fresh and surprising idea on the table. looking at quite experimental artists works that haven't been remixed too much yet is another.

5. Is there anything you would like to share about how you do things? What's the best advice you can give to aspiring artists in the video game industry? Finding the good balance between creative drive (craving for an idea to come to life) and technical training to smooth this materialization is key to be efficient in production.

The first can push the second but you have to make sure not to drown in the technical side if your objective is to create something. Feel the force!

Here’s Loic's show reel of animation and art work from the past 6 years.