Today is the last day we work on Titandrum as a university project. It’s all over.
So what actually happened in the last couple of days with the game. The big thing was that we got the majority of our sound effects delivered. This was a big step for us and means the game feels far more tactile to play and ew can now continue to iterate on audio design.
We have a great bunch of people doing sound for us, a good friend and some other students who have joined the project. We are very grateful to the hard work of these people getting so much done in such a short space of time.
As far as development of the game goes we have been adding things here and there to make the game feel better to play and be a unique experience.
A lot of this came down to our UI and UX design, overall we wanted everything to be accessible as an in game asset which means our menu’s are completely diegetic.
Design wise we have tried to embrace squash and stretch into everything we do, from the environments to the characters. We hope this will be unique to us and are happy with the result because squash and stretch is really quite hard to achieve in games.
What does this mean for the future of the game though, as unsure as we are about the future we know we would like to work on the game more to see it fully realised as the game we want it to be. The time frame of school was never going to see Titandrum through to completion.
We think the game is unique and interesting, and feedback from players has always encouraged us to explore this game more.
Yeah, we went there. We stayed together in small flat sharing one single bed for warmth. Just kidding we sent Sam over there for a week because we don’t like him.
Here is his awful account of the events:
PAX was holy moly great, truly a sight to see. If you could see it, wow you would be amazed, hence I took no photos. I want to remember PAX with rose tinted glasses so I have provided no actual evidence of me being there with our game.
Overall, not many people were interested in our game, those who did play seemed to enjoy it. Our issue was not promotional material and a lack of enthusiasm, both of which can be attributed to Sam’s laziness and personality, exampled here:
Awful. We did make some promotional posters which look pretty rad, check it out:
Dang son that’s awesome!! Wouldn’t it be awesome if they were printed, yeah it would, thanks Sam.
To summarise the whole Melbourne International Games Week Twenty Sixteen was really fantastic for networking and talking to developers, it was not so good for the game.
It has been a long time since an update on this blog, and while we have achieved a lot we have been getting our affairs in order for our own future as a team and what exactly happens after school..
All that aside, what have we got:
- UI updates
- Audio Development
- Expo’s and Playtests
- Studio Development and development licensing
UI Updates
We have put a great deal of thought and energy into designing a (mainly) diegetic user interface that is both clear and fitting for our style of game.
We began with the main menu as this is the first instance where the player interacts with the game. Straight into the splash screen we have made a fun squetchy title that is pleasing to look at and sets a mood for the game. Moving to the main menu this area is designed to teach the player about how the game functions with regard to simple player movement in an environment where they cannot fail / die.
Particular attention was paid to the icons of the characters, making those clear and keeping them consistent across all levels and menus.
Audio
We have finally managed to start working with sound engineers and composers to get some sound for the game. After a long period of little luck with audio we are really happy to have the help of some really talented people.
Conventions
We have had experience with conventions in the past, however this game has never been put to the test in such a way. We quickly realised that the game was not suitable in a convention environment using the current menu UI and game loop. There ended up being too much for the players to do and navigate before they could actually play a match. We have taken this into account and will be improving this before we have a real test at PAX Australia.
Studio Development
One of the major things that has held us back with our time management is setting up our studio on the business side of things. This is an arduous process and requires a lot of menial tasks which chew through the limited time we have.
A great many frustrations have arisen because of this and demoralised many of us when things have not turned out the way we expected. The prospect of earning money from a game, particularly one made through school has left us in a position of insecurity, many of us worried about whet the future holds.
Needless to say development must continue, we are in a position where we are readying the game to be shown to people which is exciting. We hope everything will turn out better than some of our other circumstances.
UI IS GREAT. This week's progress has been quite slow. Other than focusing on the ui, we have had a number of playtests to really get the handle of the direction of the game underway (It is also to a point where it’s quite fun for us to play :D). We also got a bit of verbal feedback from hosting a playtest on the weekend using the MDS open day to our advantage.
Hayden
In some of the previous blogs, I’ve talked about the addition of a shared camera mode. This week I finally made that a reality. Oddly, this wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought to implement. There were several components to setting up this shared camera. Firstly, allowing the camera to track the player positions, as well as zooming in and out based on the distances between the titans. Next, rotating the camera to attempt to keep the action on the screen. Lastly and possibly the most difficult part, making the movement make sense at weird camera angles (a lot of which I was testing out in week 2).
Tracking the player’s positions
This aspect is rather simple, as I simply find the average location between all the titans in the level and set that as the view target of the camera. I also ignore any titans that have exceeded some arbitrary maximum distance from the centre of the action, which is currently just the centre of the universe. The camera is then placed a distance from this view target, which is determined by the maximum distance between two (non-ignored) titans. The distance is then clamped between arbitrary min and max values, such that we don’t zoom way too far in or out.
Rotating the camera
As the titans can be on any planet at any location on the planet at anytime the camera needs to rotate to ideally keep all the titans in view. With 2 or less titans this is mathematically possible, however, with more titans there’s no way to keep all players in view at all times, without restricting the player’s movement. Thus the system currently averages the up vectors of all players, if the resulting up vector isn’t facing in the general direction of the camera, the camera will rotate itself such that it does.
Movement
The movement is tricky to work out as it doesn’t follow the standard move forward in the camera's forward vector, neither does it use tank controls. When you move from one side of the planet to the other the movement direction needs to switch, but if you start on the backside of planet the movement needs to go in the most logical direction. Moving forward is done by blending the camera’s forward and up vectors together based on dot products between the titan’s up vector and camera’s forward and up.
Claire
I’ve mostly revisited a lot of the previous animations that I have created for the game and have tweaked the timing of them, resulting in hopefully a more intuitive and better feel of the gameplay. One worth noting for example is the grab animation, initially when a player misses a grab, the timing feels off and they remain stationary a little awkwardly before being able to move or execute another grab.
David
T O R N A D O
Matt
Continued work on beartrap spent the week learning how to use blender in preparation to animate Character with the Beartrap. Re-rigging and animation of Bear Trap in blender took longer than expected due to my unfamiliarity with the software. I now have the knowledge to help Sam and Claire with character animation if the need arises. So the week for me was primarily a skill-set building time, although not much got into the game that the skills learnt will pay off in the long run. I also spent time learning blueprinting to kill the titans on contact with the bear trap and implemented it myself. After playtesting this friday it has become clear how rewarding the bear trap can be when used with the grab action and that traps like this are an enjoyable and contributing part of combat and navigation mechanics.
I also Created Stylized icons that match the buttons for all the Placeable planet items, planets and planet editing tools, that are being implemented in Alistair's new object select menu.
Made a few pages of concept art for titan combat but more particularly concepts for titan traps: like a ballista, spike, siege tower, plane, mousetrap etc.. and powerup concepts aesthetically since a lot of talk of adding power ups happened this week, powerups where the titans get halos and horns, wings etc. Most of this concept art is just to show the group to demonstrate a possibility and will not be committed to the game or mechanics.
The end of alpha is just around the corner, we are at a crucial time of trying to find the fun factor of our gameplay. Radical tests and experiments are what we need now.
Salad
More UI updates this week, with some work towards some minor gameplay aspects. Work was also slowed down a bit due to a number of critical bugs that I discovered along the way.
Titans now get properly damaged by planets with the damaging tag set. If the titan touches the surface (raised terrain is safe) then they will be launched a couple of times off the surface until they run out of ‘hp’, when the titan has no ‘hp’ then they will die when they touch the surface. This method allows the players to recover back onto land before death as being instantly killed feels awkward and generally hurts the gameplay. If the titan has touched but survived damaging surfaces recently, they have a smaller chance of surviving as their ‘hp’ does not recover till they die.
The first implementation of dashing has been added too. For a short period of time the player can get a small speed boost at the cost of tighter turn rates and the inability to defend against attacks. As they are dashing, they can do a small impulsed attack similar to the Belly blast attack when had from our previous iteration. We are adding this in the hopes that it will help the players close the gap between each other if one decides to run away.
Work was also done towards a UI scrolling system that hayden initially started working on, but left aside as it wasn’t working correctly. The animation and scrolling works correctly now but still feels kinda awkward, so we’ll need to iterate on the animation a bit more. There was also work done towards it allowing us to use dynamically in multiple sections of the game.
Some critical bugs were discovered during working which would have caused the game major issues if not discovered till later. Saving files and modes out had almost no sanity check and would wipe a directory clear if a blank name is saved. Steam integration also broke in unreal 4.12 and stopped us from being able to build out the game. This was solved by disabling the systems that used it as we don’t really use the functionality of it yet, we will re-enable the systems if we are able to get onto steam greenlight.
Hayden
The movement of the titans in the game has had constant issues and has been iterated upon many times during Titandrum’s development. Thus, I have iterated on it once again. Previously, the movement was using a hybrid of unreal physics simulation and a hard coded control velocity (handling the players movement). This was so that we could apply gravity as a force on the simulated body and apply impulses whenever the titan received a hit. Now, the movement is entirely based off of a hard coded velocity (i.e. no Unreal physics simulation). Forces are applied as a change in this velocity over time and impulses as an instant change in velocity. This fixed many of the annoying problems I was having with the movement, such as titans bouncing off surfaces, weird jump arcs, inability to stop the titans easily and other minor bugs. However, it did open a whole new can of a single grotesque and infuriatingly figgity worm. The worm, being a fabrication of the tight binding between control movement and external forces/impulses, has been temporarily brought down due to some merciless ad hoc code.
The combat system of the game, once again has been a continuous topic of many discussions typically resulting in a few sighs and ‘arrghs’. This time around I’ve noticed a distinct lack of effect in the moves of the system. Although, the titans may fly away as a result of a well landed punch to the face, there has seemed to be a lack of any actual consequence inflicted. Thus, I decided to get ragdolls to work to give theses moves a stronger feeling of impact. This vastly improved the feel of landing a hit on the opponent and caused the gameplay to exhibit a little more comedy.
I also fixed up the re-spawning system, enabling the use of a respawn timer, such that the players don’t instantly respawn (for objective-based game modes). Currently, when respawning you start to spectate an opponent.
Finally, we came to the realisation that our combat system could exhibit a similar fighting style to that of the great sport known as wrassling. It fits our character design almost perfectly and enables players to control the location of their opponent (through grabs and throws), which is much needed in a game where you defeat your opponent with the environment instead of through bashing their skull in. To have these kinds of moves we needed some kind of root motion (i.e. using the skeletal meshes root movement to affect the player’s capsule instead of the skeletal mesh itself). Unreal’s character movement has this by default; however, due to our odd gravity demands we are unable to use Unreal’s almighty character movement. Thus, i’ve made it work with our system by taking the root motion input from the skeletal mesh and applying it to the capsule by adding it the velocity of the titan’s movement.
Claire
It’s more or less the same thing this week, since I’ve been tasked to create an asteroid that will be circling planets as environmental hazards as well as tweaking some existing animations and creating new ones.
Of the animations, the highlight is a new animation for the ground slam (butt first and matching the new physics system we have implemented to the Titans’ arms), it is designed to be blended with the new falling animation I have implemented last week. Considering that there is a short period of stun straight after the ground slam impact (you will notice at the end of the gif), an animation representing said stun impact is also currently in the works to accommodate that.
David
I did some research looking into games that we could potentially draw inspiration form. So far one of our biggest inspirations has been Super Mario Galaxy for its incredible design and gameplay. Upon analysing their environments and enemies it becomes apparent that what they have is actually quite simple. Most of the obstacles or environmental hazards are just copies of each other, just skinned differently. We could easily apply this ideology to our game as we need to be able to populate the environment quite densely. One of the major environmental effects we have in our game currently are the volcanos. I decided to create a water based counterpart, a geyser which was an idea that was bounced around a while ago. Creating this was quite simple as I used the water footstep effect as a base. All I needed to do was make the effect more intense and explosive. Here is the result.
I began work on creating a tornado particle effect which would be a great environmental hazard. Matt did some research on vector fields which I picked up and continues on with. There is not a lot of information on this subject so this whole process so far has been a lot of trial and error. I ended up following a guide on simulating a tornado within Maya, and using that as the vector field in Unreal Engine. The video I followed had no audio so it was quite difficult catch everything that they had done. Due to this I ran into quite a lot of trouble at certain points which made this process so much longer than it could have been. In the end I got there, mostly.
Making the vector field work in Unreal Engine was a completely different story. I couldn’t find any relevant information on this so I went in blind. After trying out different things I managed to get the vector field sort of working. It is capable of influencing the particles but not in the same way as it simulation did in Maya. I believe the fault lies in the vector field itself, I will need to look into alternative methods of approaching this.
I also did some general fixes and improvements on some of the particles effects. One huge thing I overlooked initially on some of the particles was whether or not they were using local space. Considering we’re working in spheres this would mean that particles on the bottom of planets would go the wrong way.
Matt
I returned to production after illness on Wednesdays week. And started off by discussing tornados with David.
I then moved into set dressing the planets and really pushing my assets to see what can be achieved with them visually and how much variety can be achieved. By clipping and positioning assets can be combined to create interesting results. And posted this screenshot on social media:
Drew 10 pages (A6) of thumbnailing concept art depicting planned assets, combat concepts and mood design for new and proposed group ideas (physical art available on request)
New this week are platforms. The game needed more verticality that players can jump on this adds more complexity to navigation which will prove effective in the future for gamemodes like race and capture modes and prove interesting for combat. I decided to contextualize the idea of the platform in the first example below a floating town, other variants are planned but this is what we have for now. The platforms are open and the ability to decorate them has been kept in mind as you can see in the examples both trees and houses are compatible in this build:
Sam
More animations were my tasks this week, making adjustments to existing animations and refining the blends between the animations. After discovering the wonderful power of blend settings we can now make our animations transitions smooth and appealing.
On the more conceptual side of things I have been contributing to how we design out combat system to work in such a way that is fun and utilises our unique environment, and I think we are getting close. We have tested a multitude of ways to do this however none of them have achieved the particular feel we desire.
This week has been heavily dedicated to making the game feel fun, something we consider pretty important when making a game, if it’s not fun in one way or another what’s the point really.
Salad
This week I focused on creating more options for us and the users to customise the game design with modifiable game modes. I added extra functionality to the base mode and created the base settings for a brand new default type called race. The default goal for racing is to beat the opponents by flying to certain planets or objects that are lit up. Once you reach the end of a route enough times you win. The gamemode can be modified to allow users to decide what path the players take be it planet to planet or objects. Lap times are recorded and and be saved for future use. In the next week I will be looking into getting the structures of the gamemode system and the UI for editing and modifying them.
Hayden
The movement of the player plays a critical role in the combat system of a game. We’ve been finding that due to the ease of flying around freely in titandrum the scale of the combat was too large. The close in interactions between the players where they’re forced to think strategically and player skillfully to defeat their opponent are currently too few and far between. To scale it back in I’ve been rethinking the movement capabilities of the titans.
First and foremost I just straight up removed the current flight system. Replacing it with a simple ground pound maneuver, where the titan stops in mid air and slams downward rapidly before colliding with the ground and sending any other titans in the vicinity to be blasted away. This new method of ground slam felt way more satisfying, especially when combined with the new volcano spring:
To handle all the different abilities of the player I have simple action system, which employs and queueing approach to dealing with human input. However, until now this system was only really usable in C++. Since, the combat is huge focus I’ve exposed this system to UE4’s scripting system (blueprint) to enable the artists to test out and implement new combat features.
Another major focus right now is the camera system. Ideally, we would like to do a shared screen, since split screen isn’t a particularly nice format, especially on smaller monitors, and networking is still a long way off. To achieve a shared screen we first have to get round the issue that the movement relies on the camera being locked to the titan’s rotation. My first attempt is as follows (the gif doesn’t show so well, but there’s some major issues around the planet’s poles, where the movement sometimes locks to a particular axis):
Also the planet switching logic has now vastly improved:
Claire
The first portion of the week was dedicated to creating another asset for our library of environmental hazards, with the first day or so used to make a flaming boulder (with fellow team artist David providing particles for it).
I have also applied the smear frame effect created by Sam last week to give the boulder a little bit more oomph when it is whizzing around the level.
Later during the week I have started to learn how to use Blender to animate the Titans (basically taking a fair portion of workload from Sam, who was previously in charge of animations entirely). So far I have created two new animations for the Titans, one to indicate the Titans stopping in their tracks and another being a new jump loop animation to replace our older one.
David
Continuing on with making things explode, the first section of this week was dedicated to creating a particle effect for the boulder that Claire had made. The boulder is meant to be a projectile that is meant to be thrown toward an enemy so I decided to turn it into a giant flaming ball. Instead of simulating an explosion again in Maya I decided to just reuse elements from the explosion particle effect. Alongside the fire I wanted the boulder to create a trail as well. Borrowing from what I have learnt off making the ribbons for the black hole, I made a single ribbon effect that followed the boulder. It took quite a while to get the values looking right however it still is not one hundred percent what I initially envisioned. The trail does not start immediately, it fades in so there is a weird gap between the trail and the boulder. The fire sort of covers it up so it is not a big problem. Here is the trail by itself.
The rest of the week I spent on foot step particle effects for various terrains. I started with the water effect. This look the longest to make as I had troubles getting the water to look like water and not an energy explosion. Most of the troubles revolved around materials and textures, after several iterations I managed to get it looking quite nice through the panning materials.
The next foot step effect I made was the dust effect for normal terrains. This was super simple to make as it only had to emitters with materials borrowed from other particle effects. I may come back to this one to improve on it.
The last foot step effect I made was an ice effect for when the titan is sliding along ice surfaces. The particle consists of two main parts, the ice dust that flies off and the ice that gathers around the titan’s feet. The ice dust was quite easy to make, originally it was quite static so I added some velocity/life values which gave the particles more of a curved path. I had a hard time getting the ice that gathers to look, decent. The end result is passable but I may come back to it if I ever get any ideas.
Matt
Poor Matt has been bed ridden for most of this week :(
Sam
Making elements of the game feel good has been my goal this week, we have been told by a lot of people that we need the make the game fun and feel good, that is my focus.
I started by making tweaks to the jumping which initially felt floaty and didn’t make the player feel as if they are in control. Now it is much more weighty and means that the player always sees some of the planet when they jump rather than going far off into the outer atmosphere of a planet. It is a small change but took a lot of changing numbers until it started to feel like we wanted.
I also looked into some of our screenshake effects and made some appropriate changes to the amount of shake you get from jumping which was far too much as you can see from the image below.
I have had a lot more access to the combat blueprints this week to test out new combat features, nothing really set in stone but changes are on the horizon.
A lot of these changes spawned out of playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, this game taught us a lot about how our game should play and the things you need to do to make a spherical map work. While I didn’t achieve as many of my goals as I hoped I feel more confident about how to approach the development of this game which was previously very daunting.
This week began our first step into the Alpha phase of development for Titandrum. It has been a rocky road to get this far and it has been a challenge to figure out our direction.
But enough from me I will let the team members explain what has been going on this week and the new stuff that is happening.
Versatile Salad - Programmer
This week I focused on creating more options for us and the users to customise the game design with modifiable game modes. I added extra functionality to the base mode and created the base settings for a brand new default type called race. The default goal for racing is to beat the opponents by flying to certain planets or objects that are lit up. Once you reach the end of a route enough times you win. The gamemode can be modified to allow users to decide what path the players take be it planet to planet or objects. Lap times are recorded and and be saved for future use. In the next week I will be looking into getting the structures of the gamemode system and the UI for editing and modifying them.
Hayden - Programmer
The largest issue we have currently is the lack of a decent combat system that is simple yet deep. Thus, I’ve been prototyping a few different ways we could do the combat. The main aspect to the combat is the interaction with environment hazards. An example of this is a giant worm that erupts through the planet’s surface and gobbles up any titans in its way. Due to this the combat therefore should be a method of controlling the opponent's position or movement such that they end up in the path of something destructive.
In my exploration I looked into an entirely physics based combat system, very similar to the game Gang Beasts. To achieve this the titans use purely a skeletal mesh for their movement. The skeletal mesh blends between physics and the animations built by the artists. The most important aspect of this, is ensuring the titans can stay standing. Applying an upwards force to the hips or chest to counteract gravity works well. However, due to the lanky design of the characters keeping them standing is like getting a heavily intoxicated person to walk down some stairs. It appears there’s a reason why the Gang Beasts characters are design the way they are.
Claire - Lead Artist
One of the biggest features we wanted to implement in Titandrum are environmental hazards that would hopefully add a layer of complexity and challenge to the players, and like the game’s overall theme, we want these hazards to be bizarre and sort of left-field (on top of more recognizable ‘gaming hazards’ such as boulders).
As per usual, I’ve made a quick high-res sculpt in ZBursh before retopologizing it in Topogun, with all of the textures done in both Blender and Photoshop.
Sam, our lead tech artist helped me with setting up the rig and also using splines to control the bones in the worm’s mesh, giving it a really wormy and wriggly animation.
David - Effects and Environment Artist
More environmental effects! We needed more interesting celestial bodies to populate our vast empty space and the first thing that came to mind were black holes! I came across a guide on creating a material that could simulate gravitational lensing which was exactly what I wanted. It turned out rather well but was still quite static as the distortion was not very noticeable from far distances. Instead I decided to make the black hole a particle system and have some effects come out of it. I did some research on spacey particle effects and came across attractors which provided the exact effects that I wanted. I however came across various issues when trying to get the attractor to works as there was little information on the subject. I ended up using a point gravity attractor as it provided the nicest effects. Even with this addition it appeared a little bare so I decided to create a ribbon effect which could spawn from the other particles. Once again I came across an error as the ribbon particle would not spawn. I later discovered the problem was related to the particles being GPU sprites which did not seem to want to work with ribbon data and by using the other normal particle attractors, the ribbons ended up spawning. I had some trouble getting the ribbons to spawn correctly and still do, however this will do for now as it looks decent. I also made an eruption effect for Matt’s volcanos. I decided to use an unused explosion particle effect I made months ago for this. I added some rubble and smoke effects to the explosion to make it juicer. Here are the results of these effects.
Matt - Environment Artist
This week I worked on environment and environmental hazards. As a new environment decoration piece I created one of the long awaited ‘wonders’: the Parthenon, not to be confused with the Pantheon. Wonders where present in the old art style and I felt they added a lot visually and helped the players navigation and positional awareness using landmarks in a sometimes otherwise unrecognizable and easy to get lost in 3D solar systems. But now they are back with the first the Parthenon the animated the building in the same fashion as the other buildings towns when it is stepped on they will destruct and the building will become ruins, the animation itself was inspired by the building destruction in age of mythology. The style matching the style of houses continuing the classical era mythological undertone I am trying to push into the theme.
Secondly volcanoes, an environmental hazard, we haven't decided how they are going to behave exactly so I made them with flexibility in mind. Currently they squash in the same way as trees returning upright afterwards.
Sam - Technical Artist
I implemented a smear frame effect I found from twitter user @MercurialForge I used this to apply to our speedy environmental assets to give them more appealing motion.
From this I learned a lot about Unreal Engine Material Functions, since the Smear Material consists of a function I looked at how this was done and made a few material functions of my own for the water and land aspects of our planet shader. This makes much of what I have done more reusable and more accessible to the rest of the team.
I worked with Hayden to get the physics on the Titans behaving better too, for this I rebuilt the physics asset for the Titans and set the parameters to constrain the physics movement so that they don’t go completely crazy.
With multiple deadlines on the horizon this week many of us took some time to focus on work other than Titandrum. What we have achieved this week has however been crucial to the development of the game and is something we have been needing to get done for some time; menus.
The first most pressing issue about menus is the difficult of gamepad support in UE4. Our programmers spent a great deal of time creating a flexible system which could easily be applied to our menus
As you can see it is currently quite versatile with basic button select and scroll boxes.
To more advanced radial menus, which we intend to make more use of in the future. Ideally the majority of our menus will become radial or diegetic elements to adhere to a holistic UI philosophy.
And lastly we have a little ol’ character selection. As far as the implementation of the menu elements go our programmers did a fantastic job on what is otherwise an extremely tedious process. We hope to iterate on the menus much more in the coming weeks making them intuitive and non-invasive for users.
The deadline for vertical slice is in sight but we took our eyes off the looming stress to create some cool stuff in Titandrum.
Hayden one of our programmers, who is actually more of a wizard, has created a fantastic terraforming tool in the game itself!
Planet creation has been one of our ever present issues with Titandrum, generating spherical worlds in an efficient manner is something we struggled with for a long time. But now the struggle is over. We can create new planets on the fly in a matter of minutes.
And it is all thanks to this:
This is black and white cube map is what creates land on our planets, the white areas on the texture are generated by the player clicking where they want land. Then based on the value of the white area the vertices of the planet are deformed or pushed up, thus forming land.
This map also controls the textures of the land, so whiter areas on the texture cause the grass to show through, and grayer areas show dirt.
The secondary benefit of this is that we now have accurate detection for when the Titans are on land, therefore allowing them to walk uphill onto the land and downhill again onto the water. This is a huge breakthrough for us! For the longest time we had no way of detecting whether the Titans were on the land or in the water.
This means we can apply effects to these different areas, for example splashes while you are in the water, or craters on the land when you hit the ground. This has really freed up our planet creation process to allow us to do all kinds of crazy things!
Since we are proud New Zealanders, Hayden made our very own New Zealand using his terrain tool!
On a side note we also surpassed 256 followers on Twitter, so to celebrate this very important in game development here are 256 followers in Titandrum all scurrying around :D
As the deadline for the vertical slice of Titandrum draws near we have been holding playtests for user feedback about the game.
We had students from other years in our course come down and give us critique. Days like these are extremely valuable and we hope to host more in the future.
One student in particular has been very helpful with sitting with us in a one on one meeting and giving us very detailed feedback about the game, highlighting areas of improvement.
We were also very lucky to have Rami Ismail from Vlambeer visit the school and play our game, which was a very nerve racking experience. He gave us very honest feedback with regard to how the game feels to play, and we are grateful for his input.
With all that in mind we have a lot of changes to make but are confident that we can steer Titandrum to being a game that is fun and feels good to play.
We officially halfway through our vertical slice production! Now we have to slice through the rest of the cake of game development.
The major update this week is visuals, so this blog post will feature the level up in our game art over the last four weeks.
We have made significant upgrades to all of our artwork, characters, environments and animations included.
We are really pleased with how our planets and sky sphere are looking. All the colours are far more vibrant and exciting, with all the effects being applied properly.
New vs Old, we cant believe how far these planets have come. We have also tried to make everything as efficient as possible with the planets, having their textures applied through masks and procedural effects to minimise our workload when making more assets.
The titans got a major upgrade also, their bods are looking much more refined and clammy.
We rendered various maps from high resolution versions of the titans and applied them directly to our colour diffuse.
Look at those butt creases.
We discovered a neat trick to do with vertex normals to make our pure diffuse titan heads look much better than they did by default.
Lastly for the art we have a comparison between animations, this is something we have been doing all the time but we would like to show what our animations look like with and without offsets in Blender.
In terms of gameplay we have been making tweaks to the way the game feels particularly with combat and movement. Imagery doesn’t really help convey this so here is a physics test we did.
This week of development has been all about feedback, making Titandrum feel as if it has some weighty, punchy, snappy action behind it. Two of our artists, Matt and David, have been delving into particle effects in UE4, so here are some of their results!
The Titans pack an epic punch, and send stars flying when their fists collide with their opponent. For that we have this powerful impact effect!
Titans also travel between planets at high speeds, so fast they shatter the earth beneath them. So for that we have this punchy ground smash particle!
Meanwhile the planets are peaceful and tranquil, so Matt developed this fluffy volumetric cloud which appear above the surface of the planets. They even go poof when you collide with them!
In other news we had multiple issues when it came to implementing out animations into Titandrum. As much as we enjoy the effect of the Titans dropping their butts to the floor this is not the desired outcome.
Our final update for this week on the topic of feedback is the little titan supporters are now implemented! and we are super pleased with how these little guys look and feel in the game.
They follow you around and generally build hype as you battle your opponent!!
@thehuskarls | facebook.com/huskarls.studio | Week Ten Devlog
Slowly but surely progress has yielded some results for the development of Titandrum. We are seeing the early stages of some of our goals come to life.
Featured above is one of our bigger achievements over the last week, we have made progress on a level editor and our programmers have had a lot of fun generating crazy patterns in UE4.
All the planets you see here were generated in game through the level editor we plan to ship with the final game, and as you can see by the tiny dots the scale of what you can create is substantial.
A bit closer up you can see there is a baseball bat floating on that planet in the editor, that is currently our placeholder selection icon. We have already looked into options for replacing this icon to something a bit more juicy and appealing such as this:
A quick 3D mockup of what our future selection icon may look like but we like how carefree and happy it looks.
On the subject of carefree and happy our Titans are developing nicely, we have a very happy family of dadbods coming together now, with updated heads and bodies.
The gang’s all there, these four will be the main Titans we are going to focus on implementing to do battle with one another for the stretch of this project.
But, any great brawlers need fans, and our Titans are no exception! Our lead artist has drawn up a concept of the tiny Titan supporters who will cheer on their favourite titan in the game.
This little supporter happens to support Coo the Chicken Titan, notice his little top knot just like that of his favourite brawler. We are really excited to develop these little guys, we hope they will breathe more life into the game and cheer on the player as much as they cheer on their Titan.
Next time we will hopefully delve deeper into animations for this game as they are a right pain, and worth sharing.
@thehuskarls | facebook.com/huskarls.studio | Week Nine Devlog
A delicious Vertical Slice - Devlog Week Four to Nine
After some bitter development battles we are back again with another devlog. Work piled up as it inevitably does, but expect that we will post more about our current development now that our schedules have calmed down.
So where do we stand? The Huskarls are now in development of Titandrum practically full time with a lot of time in recent weeks spent on developing a plan of attack for this project. We have made copious lists of fixes, improvements, features and assets for the game in an attempt to predict as much as possible for the future.
While waiting for new assets to be made our programmers have made a lot of tweaks to character movement, making it feel much better for the player and implementing some necessary features into that system. Features being, engaging and disengaging of characters, meaning the players face each other in battle at a certain proximity. Another feature is head tracking where the character looks toward their enemy to help lead the player around an environment with no real up or down.
Can’t take his eyes off him. Another interesting experiment is ragdoll physics. We know that physics is infinitely fun and makes much of our work easier when it comes to things like impact animations and similar things. For this reason we made a custom physics asset for Unreal Engine 4.
Making this really didn’t feel like work. Currently physics is slightly beyond our scope and grasp so this is going on the back burner. At least we do know how to create an asset like this in future quickly and reliably.
On the subject of assets there are a lot of assets from the art team which are in development, most of which are very crucial to pushing the project forwards. The main hurdle being the vast number of animations required. Fortunately, we made the jump to Blender for our character rigging and animation which has brilliant built in tools to make rigging and animation considerably easier than how we were working previously. One of our artists plans to compile a tutorial on his workflow with this tool.
Last but not least the family of Titans is ever expanding and evolving, our art lead has taken it upon herself to give the Titans a brand new look and some new heads to look around with.
The family grows and they are all our favourite!
@thehuskarls | facebook.com/huskarls.studio | Devlog Week Three
After the first prototype Leap of Faith came to a close we started to work on something new. We found that what worked well for us was to not think of a game idea, but to think of a mechanic idea and let the game emerge from that.
On Leap of Faith our mechanic was that the player chose their own direction and built the game world as they walked. This time around we decided our mechanic would play on gravity.
The game that emerged was one in which the players are enormous titans who stand upon planets which are ultimately very small compared to them. We think this idea spawned out of remembering the Raphael the Raven level from Yoshi’s Island. What resulted was something like this:
We liked the way this environment felt because it presented opportunities for some unique game play. The game play which we wanted to incorporate into this mechanic of gravity was brawler combat. But the combat doesn’t damage these titans, oh no, they are far too powerful for that. Instead the goal is to smash your opponent so far out of the gravity of other planets that they suffocate in the vastness of space.
Pretty grim but we threw a lighthearted style in the mix there too. Initially we struggled with this, we had a hard time nailing down characters which were quite pivotal to the game. That was until on a whim one of our artists drew this:
And we were sold, it was exactly what we wanted without knowing what we wanted. We took these designs and got to work bringing them to life in 3D and animating them. The result of which we are very happy with.
So this is Moo, just one of the titans we hope to implement in this prototype we are calling Titandrum!
@thehuskarls | facebook.com/huskarls.studio | Week Two Devlog
We have spent another week developing Leap of Faith, doing battle with the new issues that arise. We have made progress with the way the game looks by developing placeholder artwork which we hope will represent what the final game may look like in some form. We also conquered challenges that arose from gameplay, iterating on player controls and enemy spawning.
First and foremost, from the art department we have some revised character art and the concept developed for the basic enemy type that will feature in Leap of Faith.
These two characters feature similar motifs with the masks, feathers, arm wraps etc. Our art lead Claire hoped this would ground these individuals to the same culture/world. These motifs will be featured throughout the game to keep everything in terms of the art consistent.
Our two characters have also reached the 3-D world in their initial prototype version.
These two models are our the first versions of the characters. We have learned from previous experiences that it is a good idea to make quick representational version of our final designs. All of us on the art team look forward to putting more TLC into our characters as we push forward with the project.
We have also replaced the default Unreal cubes with our own tile artwork. Matt from our art team did a really awesome job with these. Again like our our characters these tiles will go through multiple revisions, such is the nature of doing battle with game development.
The player is also now locked to the four directions of the isometric tiles, it also operates on a grid system much like how movement in the old Pokemon games works. This means the player will always be at the center of a given tile.
This made movement much easier within the game, especially since the objective of the mechanics is to be precise with placing pathways. Then in future we would like the player to create symbols/patterns out of the tiles they generate. Therefore this grid based movement is essential to achieving this further down the line.
This week our programmers also implemented the awesome interface that runs across the bottom of the screen. This predicts which tile is going to appear next. This is another important aspect we have implemented now to be utilised later in development as being able to predict which tiles will appear allows players to strategically place tiles where they want them.
Lastly we have a rough implementation of tower defence gameplay in Leap of Faith, the towers are in a simple state which work however the player has no way of placing them strategically at this stage. This is something to be conquered over the coming week.
The thing to keep in mind is that game development is a slowww battle as depicted by the image above. But at the same time this image shows how far we have come from a simpler version of Leap of Faith last week, and it shows the possibilities of what the game can be.
@thehuskarls | facebook.com/huskarls.studio | Week One Devlog
Today marked the official start of development on our project Leap Of Faith. We were pretty stoked that this falls on the extra day of the Leap Year, and we are excited to pursue this project and see it finished by the end of 2016.
Here is a quick video of our very early prototype as we gather around and have fun with the features we have!
