#wyvrn

[searsage]

Puffin

Marathoning .. take finish for artfight.

Please do not use/trace/reference of/repost my art without my permission.

[syuzaki]

Quick Camilla drawing hope u like it :)

[roksim]

Well, that was hard!

[reil]

"First person pinball". I have created a VR monstrosity. It's beautiful.

[reil]

Have you ever played pinball and thought "I want to be the ball. I wish I could play a VR game where I was that little ball being flung around"? No? Well, I made it anyway. Video to come soon.

[reil]

I made a final trailer for my SteamVR game, WyVRn! I'm hoping this one captured not just the changes to the final aesthetic, but also better captures the humor in the game, and the different gameplay aspects.

You can find the game on Steam Early Access at this link, or by searching for "WyVRn" on the Steam storefront.

If you're the sort who wants a presskit, you can find that here.

The game is largely finished now, but I'm planning on adding a few side-levels and updating the sound system before the release this winter 2019!

[reil]

Progression and 'Teaching' the player

You can see here the objectives for WyVRn's 'Musou' mode--stuff you'll have to overcome in order to build up to the 'boss'. On the left, you have a simple spawner. It makes enemy units that fight your units. If you kill it, it starts making your units instead. It scales up to the second from the right, which has a personal shield, a laser, and grants invulnerability to other objectives. (The rightmost one is just an example of that shielding.)

No Skipping to the End

The middle one and the one to its right were actually the designs I started out with. When you put someone on a dragon and give them really strong magic, you get this situation where a player can just fly over everything, go to the end, and snipe it from afar, which is optimal, and also boring. Having boring options is fine, but the optimal gameplay should also be the most fun gameplay.

The laser keeps players from advancing without their army backing them up. If the player just goes up and starts spamming AOE stuff, they'll get fried. To rule out sniping as the default option, I gave the spawners a small barrier. I didn't want it to be totally ruled out, so I made it small, and attached to the laser. This lets the player 'distract' the shield with their own spawned units (like in Dota or LoL), so sniping can still be done, but only if the player's army has progressed until that point.

Teaching the mechanics

So this, combined with gates that were protected by shield projectors, I had a way of keeping the player from just jumping to the end. This let me impart a semblance of gameplay flow to a level in a game that otherwise gives astonishing freedom of movement. But stepping back, it was obvious that was a lot to take in at once. So introducing the player to stripped-down mechanics was key.

First the player gets to see the bare spawner, protected only by the units it produces. Then they see the laser, and gets to associate the antenna design with pain (and likely their first failed mission, if the red line isn't enough of a hint). After that, they see the shield dish, and learn to associate the dish shape and yellow color with barriers. This helps the player realize what the shield projector is when they see the double-dish with a line pointing to another barrier.

This way, the player gets to learn about the turrets piecemeal, rather than being overwhelmed. They even get to play a bit with getting up close and using AOE spells or sniping from afar with the first two stages, before the promise of actual failure or death starts to steer them towards working with their army.

[reil]

WyVRn Trailer, and Gamedev on a Budget

First things first! That song I made a few months ago is now in use (in a slightly tweaked and shortened form) as the BGM for a trailer for my game, WyVRn! Check it out, then keep reading after the break:

People have brought up the topic of bought or publicly available asset (like music) to make gamedev easier. Indeed, I used some royalty-free music for some videos before I decided to make everything my own work. Assets from other, random sources wouldn't come together in a cohesive way. To get a real, cohesive feel, there needs to be someone custom-tailoring everything. Music, models, textures everything. And since there's no money behind this project, that leaves me.

So here's another thing I made with my own produced music. It's a tutorial video.

It's one of four videos, each a minute in length. In a perfect world, game mechanics would have been taught through gradual introduction, through perhaps some gated rooms or some other conceit, with perhaps a voice to guide you through the process. But, as mentioned before, there's no money behind this. I don't have the time to code stuff that isn't the core gameplay yet. I don't want to pay a voice actor, and can't voice act to my own satisfaction.

Voices are still off-limits for the tutorial video for the same reasons as they are in the game, so that nudged me towards the pseudo-silent movie setup. I made some music to match. It's not period-correct at all (subtitles vs intertitles, aspect ratio), but this is a fantasy world, and the aesthetics of it fits well enough with the steampunk magic thing, I think.

I've always been interested in seeing how technical, and financial limitations shape a game in a way that could be seen as integral to the game's style later on, like Silent Hill was affected by draw distance, or how many "indie games" are aesthetically shaped by what they can do with a small-to-nonexistent team for graphical assets. It's been neat to realize this is one of the first obvious ways my constraints have shaped the style and presentation of my game so far.

Sorry if this seemed rambly. This is the first real time I'd posted about this process in anything more than a couple sentences and a video clip, and my thinking pattern can be, at best, considered series of tangential segues to nothing in particular. You can see a couple other clips of early development on the youtube channel.