DevBlog: Introducing Milly Games
Concept Art
Hi, my name is Iskander (@mapledaflap) and I am the 2D artist at Milly Games.
I love to come up with art that results in interesting reactions from others, to come up with stories people can relate to and to create content others can learn a thing or two from. The rest is a byproduct of my interests for entrepreneurship and marketing. I may appear a little bit curious at times, probably because I am.
For the next 1 ½ year I will be working on our game with five other people named ‘Argia & Iluna’, which name is still under consideration.
So what have I done during the first five weeks of development?
We, the people of Milly Games, separate the tasks we have to fulfill in so called ‘sprints’. Every sprint consists of 60 working hours per person (yes, we are working our bums off!). As for now, we are in the run for the third sprint out of seven. During these sprints we went through the following processes:
Brainstorming:
Defining your new game is possibly one of the most difficult things that needs to be done during game development. There are many questions you will have to ask yourself. What is going to be the most interesting aspect of your game? Will it translate in a game that is fun to play and how are you going to translate it with gameplay mechanics? What are people going to see on the big screen while playing the game and will this visualization translate well?
Some days we came up with great ideas while a couple of days later we already had to kill these so-called ‘darlings’. A game concept can change incredibly fast during just a short period of time. Fortunately it is all for the better. Nobody wants to work on a project that is not meant to turn out well in the first place.
As for now, we are doing pretty well. We have a pretty detailed worldbuilding document containing a descriptive narrative. We also have quite an amount of charts for the game design and code development. Not to mention the enormous Scrum (planning method) schedules hanging on our walls. We have even moved to a much bigger location during the second sprint!
Researching/Defining the mood of the game:
One of the problems we had to think about was how we could possibly transfer this rich narrative just by playing this co-op game, without production-expensive cutscenes and dialogues. Using the in-game environment combined with gameplay turned out to be the best option to achieve this.
After playing and analyzing multiple renowned art games I was able to create our own Style Guide (which we will probably will let you read more about some other time). This guide is meant to keep our production scope at a minimum while the result, the in-game art, still has the potential to be effective and efficient.
“ Inspiring surroundings can alter a person’s mood. If you want to alter a person’s mood, you will have to be inspired by your surroundings and make art of it.”
Conceptualisation of the Character Design and Overall Mood:
And our first conceptual character sheet was created! This character, ‘Argia’, is supposed to represent one out of our two main characters so far. The patterns (pixelated top-right) were not created by Milly Games and are just there for future reference.
This one-page design represents our experimentation with mood and colors, just like we have done for our character. This one was meant for the colors of the game environment. These color palettes would transfer into another one in-game as the current emotional state changes. These palettes are plotted over a random level flow.
Planning & Game Design
Hi there, I am Mathijs (@mathijs750), the main game designer at Milly Games. I also do some graphic design and the IT related stuff like maintaining the websites. Denise and I are also the two scrum / schedule people. During the past weeks we mostly reduced the game’s scope, so our deadline in May is more achievable.
The past weeks I’ve been busy with setting up all the website related tasks, like domains and email addresses. I also set up a slack bot so we can see you interactions with @Milly_Gamedev faster. So feel free to hit us up on twitter :)
The biggest design related task I worked on this week was making a more focused vision of our main mechanic. We are looking at how we can use the emotions of characters to overcome challenges in the game. Right now that means I’m working on an emotional model to represent all the possible emotions of the players. For the next two weeks, one scrum sprint, we are going to prototype the mechanic and emotion system. After that we are going to refine the mechanics and work towards a game level in which these mechanics can be applied.
One new tool I’m testing out is a wiki. In theory this will make all the research we do more searchable. This also provides a good central point to keep the game design document. We may do a tutorial if the wiki works out for us.
See you next week.
Worldbuilding
Hi there! Lotta (@lolilith) here, main 3D artist at Milly Games. I also do some concept art, narrative and research. My first blog post is about how I made our narrative documentation.
Our game concept relies heavily on narrative. This is why we need a solid world design document. Without it, we would fall into never-ending discussions, ever adding and changing the concept of our game. While changing ideas can be a good thing, we can't have too much uncertainties if we want to start some actual production.
The last two weeks I focused on getting our ideas together and making a final World Design Document. On top of that I did some concrete character design documentation. We had a lot of ideas, and I found out they didn't all fit the big picture.
Barren lands inhabited by nomads and some young cities near rivers and oceans were the settings we had in mind for our background story. We pictured two clashing cultures, their conflict fueled by their gods. The goal of our game would be solving this conflict, by teaching two young gods to co-operate. This seemed a pretty solid base, until we tried to dive into the details. It turned out we all had different interpretations on the role of these gods, their personalities and the tone of the story. When this started to seriously work against our productivity, I decided to set some things in stone.
My approach to this task was a simple, but tedious one. I asked myself some very basic questions, and elaborately wrote down the answers. Not just any answer, but answers that connected the world to our main theme. The two cultures had to be each other's opposites, so for each defining element for the nomads, there had to be a contrasting element for the townspeople and vice versa.
Nomad culture was based on equality and teamwork, city culture was based on individuality and freedom . The results were put down in some nice bullet-points and lists. I personally love to order text by color, to make it easier to find the right information in a text. This can really help make long texts readable.
My approach to the character designs was similar, though I weaved some extra layers into their stories. One of our vague ideas was that the conflicting cultures were a metaphor for fighting parents, and the playable characters weren't only trying to prevent war, they were trying to keep their family together. This seemed dissonant to the main theme at first, but it did add a strong motive for both characters wanting to learn to work together.
Checking for light/shadow
Hello there! My name is Abe (@manwithajawharp), I am the main developer at Milly Games. My role is to translate the ideas of our designer, Mathijs, into playable prototypes for testing. I manage rendering (shaders and post processing effects) and optimisation as well.
One of the mechanics we want to use in the game is the disability for one player to move into the shadow and for the other to move into the light. Although conceptually not too difficult, it turned out to be quite a challenge to implement.
In my experiences with problem-solving, I learned that correctly formulating the problem, is half of the solution. So when I realized that – while looking from the light's perspective – any object that is occluded, is also in shadows. With this knowledge I was able to render the player as seen by the light, analyse the resulting image and yield a value describing how far the player is in shadows.
With this algorithm it is possible to determine very precisely how far each player is trespassing into the other's respective region. It is not perfect, though, as the aforementioned texture is rendered by the GPU and the analysing is done by the CPU, which can cause a bit of lag on lower-end graphics cards. It works fine for prototyping purposes, but eventually I will have to either transfer the whole algorithm to CPU (without losing too much performance or precision) or find a solution to the bottleneck problem.
Other stuff I have worked on in the past weeks are some post processing effects like light shafts and a general game manager to keep the Unity project as organized as possible (code-wise at least). Explaining how I tackled these problems will make this update unnecessarily long, so I will probably give a more in-depth explanation in a later post.
Research and planning, whoop!
Hey all, I’m Denise (@dfeeleus). At Milly Games, I focus on planning and scrum together with Mathijs, audio design with our awesome lead audio designer and environmental storytelling. What I’ve been up to up to now is not the most exciting stuff, since planning and scrum are pretty much the biggest time sinks at the start of a project, so this phase has mostly been a lot of planning and research for me.
The upcoming time I’ll be more focused on testing theories I’ve gotten during these past weeks and doing some more research. After that I’ll be able to dive into actual building and play testing some narrative - and storytelling stuff!