underVillage

Development diary for the game #underVillage, being created by Matthew Wills and Jason Sampson

[undervillage]

Hey everyone, underVillage is going through some cosmetic changes, which I’ll be ready to share sometime soon.

In the meantime, since I know you’re hungry for some art(!), please enjoy some free gamedev assets you can use to spruce up your own projects: https://www.patreon.com/matthewjwills?ty=h Thanks for your support! Matt

[undervillage]

Goodbye

Hi Jason here.  Just a quick note I’m leaving the game and Matt may look to re-incarnating it in some form in the future.  I wish him luck!  Good luck to the other gamedevs  and artists that follow us.

[undervillage]

Hi Jason here.

Above is the startup screen for the WebGL based Character Preview we’re working on.  I’m using a particle effect with one of Matt’s hand drawn flame animations to create the flame.  Do you like it?

[undervillage]

Teaser

Hi, Jason here.  We’ve been working hard on making a WebGL build that we hope to release to the public soon.  This will let you randomly generate your own underLing , recolour it, take selfies and post them to Facebook. This will be a bit of a teaser until the full game is complete.

We have a few more things to do to make it nicer looking, including some backgrounds you can select and a few more icons instead of our placeholders but it’s nearly there. You can see I also have Facebook integration working with my development account.   

You may notice the shadows on the Facebook snapshots.  We’ve encountered a performance issue on some systems, so have had to turn shadows off. Hopefully I can resolve the performance issue to get the shadows back, since I really like the shadows on the photos.

Once we can host it at a better location and get Facebook to review the app, then we will release to the masses.  There is no timeframe for the release yet, but we’re trying to have it as soon as possible.

[undervillage]

Asset test scene

It's working!  My asset test scene is now fully functional.  The character above was created using the test scene.  Now Matt can test out all of the assets on an in-game character, selecting the body part to change the asset, colour, sheet name, etc. 

In addition to the tester scene, I have load and save of characters working as well! I had a very productive weekend, one more item completed and closer to an alpha build!

Note: This test scene is not intended to be in the final game, but I thought it worthwhile to show some more tangible progress toward being able to test out all of our assets.

[undervillage]

Asset debugging

Hi,

Jason here.  I realised late last week that I didn’t do my regular Tuesday update, and by the time I got the time to actually consider doing an update it was well into the weekend.  

I’ve been working on a lot of things lately, prepping for alpha but also getting some bugs fixed and tools for Matt to be able to test all of our sprites. The screenshot above is an example debug scene that I’m working on.  There are buttons so we can select and cycle through all of the body part assets, and eventually display the name of the sprite that was last changed.  I’m not a UI designer, so this is meant to be more functional rather than aesthetically pleasant.    

These debug buttons are not expected to be in the final game at this time, I just wanted to share how we’re dealing with testing all of the character assets Matt has drawn.

To get the character debug working more efficiently, and more importantly to be able to load/save characters, I’ve changed up the character generation method internally.  The body parts still manage their sprites, but a character generator is now employed to do the randomisation and asset selection from the asset bundles.  This means I will soon be able to load/save characters in the game, another one of my alpha build goals is close to fruition!

The character actually does move on the screen, so we can see animations and such.  Using this I was able to sort out some somewhat inconsistent sprite layering behaviour and a few other niggly bugs.  I have also experimented with the movement of the character, adding a bit more weight and momentum to the movement.  I think it feels a bit better now, but will have to test it out in a game scene to verify.

One final thing you’ll see is a link to a share button.  We have plans for some social media integration, being able to capture and share screenshots of your characters.  

[undervillage]

Quick post

Just a quick update on this past week and half

* Tidy up of Stats and Skills system after more consideration of last weeks post. Stats work great, skills are stubbed out as I have nothing yet to use the skills on.  I’ve done a fair amount of testing, but need to look at some concurrency tests to make sure multiple events/messages received/sent simultaneously are handled properly. 

* Arm animation *finally* changed to something a lot less bad than what I had. This was actually corrected to start working on a teaser/trailer for the game. Matt has written a script for it, just a matter of getting it all together.  This’ll take time as some of the stuff he wants requires me to have more of the alpha features completed.

* Importing, as I type this, an AI package that I want to try to use for the NPC behaviours.  If I can link this up and get it working over the weekend, I’ll have about half of the alpha build target features I want in place.  

Until next week, cheers!

[undervillage]

Good progress

Hi all,

Just a quick update on some progress from this week.  First up is a screenshot below of the prototype walls dreamingofserenity did for us.  I’ve reapplied the old UV to this model, so it’s far from ideal right now. At some point in the future we will re-evaluate whether we apply a better hand drawn UV or use a solid colour, either with a bump map as well.  For alpha this will suffice though.

On the code side, I’ve put together a functional stat/skill system for our first alpha build.  I set out from the start to build something that could hopefully be easily extensible and reusable on other games, and I think I’ve achieved that (mostly).

I have a “stat manager” class (publisher) that acts as the interface between the stats and the rest of the game components (subscribers). From there I can instantiate stats/skills programmatically with a few lines of code for each.  Perhaps down the road I’ll change the instantiation to be more configuration file driven, that will be ideal for maximum re-usability.

I’m using Unity Events for intra-system messaging at the moment, so I expose a method for other systems to send messages to the stat system, and of course expect the other systems to expose a similar interface to receive any response message.   Internally, between the stat manager and stats I’m using c# delegates & events.  I may have over-engineered this part of the solution, but it will be easy to unwind if I find I don’t need the flexibility of delegates.

The messages could be queries for current stat/skill levels, or in the case of skills, a request to “use” a skill.  Thus, I have the flexibility to have the subscriber to determine how it interprets/uses the stat/skill data or have the skill/stat do it itself. The manager takes no part in the stat calculations, it simply handles the stats and the messages to and from them.

After talking to a co-worker, I’m probably now going to use more of the subscriber determines “use” model, expecting that the subscribers will cache the stat values they need and then operate on those cached values to determine end result and report back whatever the stat system needs to keep stats up to date or level up. This will keep intra-system messages down to effectively updates when stats/skill levels change or need to be updated. (thanks Felix!)

I have the stat system also linked up to the character generation system, allowing us to have the assets affect the character stats.  The beauty of this that it took less than an hour to implement and test, so I’m happy with that result.  As an example of assets affecting character stats, different species mouth parts may affect a food consumption stat (e.g. characters with human mouths eat more than bug mouths).  

Whatever we do with body parts and stats, it will take careful balancing, as conceivably the procedural generation of characters could end up with some very unbalanced, stat-wise, characters.  Whether we do this or not is still up for discussion, or even better, feedback from our readers! (*hint hint*).

That’s it for today.  Again if you like what we’re doing, please hit the Like button and if you’re not following us yet, please hit the follow button too!  We appreciate the support and feedback.  

[undervillage]

Big update

It’s been a long month here, but I think I now have some news that I’m (Jason) happy to report.  In short,  it’s gamedev time!

First is the above concept wall tile that dreamingofserenity did for us.  I’ve not put it in game yet, but I’m definitely happy to see something better than my boring cubes.  It’s designed to be tilable so it should do well for caverns.  Still have some ideas we’re exploring but hopefully will get this into the game with some sort of UV soon.

Second is that I now have a big stack of paper work that covers the following:

* A pretty complete backstory, describing character origin and setup * All game mechanics to reasonably good detail, including first time play through and subsequent play through mechanics, resource management/storage, house building and crafting, farming/hunting, combat, skill/stat leveling, mini-games, breeding, status effects and NPC behaviours * Stats and skills system, including leveling and aforementioned status effects, with the possibility of the body part species type having an effect on character skills. * Classes and key methods for getting it all to work together * Events and Messaging for game play events and triggers.  

Most importantly from all that paper is I’ve identified what will be in our first alpha build that I want to target to have completed within the next month or so.  This will include the following

* 1-2 player directed autonomous NPC behaviours that exhibit key capabilities of NPCs to interact with the environment (e.g. tend the fire, collect wood) * 1-2 character stats (e.g. Health and Food Consumption rate)  * 1-2 skills (e.g Melee and Resource gathering) and leveling * 1-2 spawnable items (e.g. monster, resource or new quest) * Build 1 structure at a player chosen location (e.g level the terrain, build location to store fuel for the fire or a house) * Collect/drop/deposit/use resources * Melee combat * Save/Load of Player and Resource storage states 

I already have a start on several of these like character stats, building, collect/drop resources and melee combat from a previous attempt.  I think I can re-use most of that code.  So the new stuff will be the behaviours, skills and leveling, spawnable items, some aspects of structure building and load/save.

I will focus on delivering these core examples in a way that will let me expand/modify all of them to ultimately deliver the final game.  There will be heaps to do like procedural world gen, animations, rest of the behaviours, stats, skills, structure crafting and such.  Plus we’ll have all of the extra touches like dealing with the occluding walls in the way we really want them to work, lighting and special effects, mini-games, etc.

[undervillage]

Special post

In preparation for tomorrow’s update, I’ve crafted a parody version of the song “Business Time” from New Zealand’s fourth most popular comedy folk duo, The Flight of the Conchords.  Thanks to Jemaine Clement and Brett Mckenzie for such great material to work with!

“Gamedev Time”

Unity, tonight were gonna make code You know how I know? Because its Wednesday And Wednesday night is the night that we usually make code Monday night is my night to watch TV Tuesday night I go and update Tumblr But Wednesday, we make sweet weekly code

It's when everything is just right There's nothing good on TV You haven't had your regular beta release update So you are not unstable, oh good, it's all on

You lean in and whisper something agile in my ear like You might want to refactor, or you've got a feature release in the morning I know what you’re trying to say, Unity You're trying to say, oh, yeah It's gamedev time, it's gamedev time

It's gamedev, its gamedev time I know what you're trying to say You're trying to say it's time for gamedev It's gamedev time, ooh It's gamedev, it's gamedev time

Then were in the computer room upgrading the build server That’s all part of the gamedev, I love gamedev

Then you sort out the asset store updates That isn't part of the development process, but its still very important The next thing you know I'm in the office You're downloading that buggy old build version You got from bitbucket I checked in several days ago You know the one Unity, the one with the fatal exception

I remove my clothes very, very clumsily Tripping sensuously over my pants Now I'm naked except for my socks And you know when I’m down to just my socks What time it is

It's gamedev, it's gamedev time You know when I'm down to my socks it's time for gamedev That's why they're called gamedev socks It's gamedev, it's gamedev time

Making code, making code for Making code for two, making code for two hours When its with me, Unity, you only need two hours Because I’m so efficient

You whisper something agile like, sprint complete? I know what you’re trying to say, Unity You're trying to say, oh yeah, sprint's complete And you tell me you want some more Well, I'm not surprised but I am quite sleepy

It’s gamedev, it’s gamedev time Gamedev hours are over, Unity It’s gamedev, it’s gamedev time

Original Writer(s): Bret Mckenzie, Jemaine Clement Copyright: Sony/ATV Tunes LLC, Chrysalis Music

Used under Fair Use.

PS:   No statements in this parody should be considered true or reflective of my game development process. I, especially, don’t do my game development in just my gamedev socks. My family wouldn’t like that if I did.    *smile*

[undervillage]

Very little to report for updates this week, as I’ve been struggling balancing life with gamedev this week to get much of anything done.  

dreamingofserenity​ has provided a great concept model for 3d walls. I look forward to getting a good UV for it and then into the current build to see how it looks.

I’m still trying to wrap up the design of the underlying classes and systems, and it’s hard for me to judge right now how much is left to do.  I feel like it’s close, but as I dig deeper I realise how much more I have to design, even on a basic level.  I do think I have the stats/skill system that can link up with our species types pretty close to being “done.”  I believe I have reasonable understanding of how character generation and game events like crafting, combat and such will interact with the stats/skill system, what messages and the content of those messages minimally need to be passed, so I’m making some progress.

Hopefully next week I can show some screenshots of the new walls, and perhaps some architecture diagrams if I get brave enough to show them off.  

[undervillage]

Recommended resources (and a minor update)

Hello again, Jason here to write about some of the resources that I’ve found useful as I’ve been working on getting up to speed on gamedev.

The first is an article on Gamasutra by John Warner, who listed his top 5 things he learned as a Unity developer.  They all seem good, but his first is the one that sticks out for most for me right now as I’m planning the development. That one is really about designing for re-usability of code in other projects, which we have plenty of ideas for after we complete this game.  The article also recommends use of co-routines, relying less on Update(), and more use of callbacks/delegates which I’ve already made use of in my first major refactor.  

The second is the book I’ve been reading, the Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.  It’s not a game specific book, but has been really useful for me to refresh my development knowledge.  

Finally is the book Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom.  I’ve not read most of the book yet, but the parts I’ve read have been really useful to help put the concepts from the Pragramatic Programmer into context with actual game use cases.

Other than that, it’s been a bit of a slow week development wise for me.  I’ve acquired a stock sound library available from the Unity asset store to give me some sounds to work with until we can get our own created.  I quickly threw together a script to play footstep sounds when the character walks.  This was more of an exercise to start getting familiar with the audio system, so there is still much to learn and do.

Apart from that, I’ve spent most of my time thinking and planning for the stats, skills and features we’ve included in our game narrative and game play description document.  As mentioned in our interview I linked to last week, I wanted to consider how the character assets we have built can be used for more than just aesthetic purposes.  

So far the idea is to use the species types to affect character “skills.”  Some species may have bonuses for some skills and negative modifiers for others.  I think I’ve got a reasonable start on it, but need to work the details through with Matt.  In any case, it’s enough that I can start planning out metadata requirements for asset bundles and the associated class requirements to go with them.  

I have to say the document has really had the intended effect, and it’s helped us pull many of the game mechanics and even story together collaboratively. If you’re an indie starting on a game and haven’t written even a simple story narrative and described how you think the game will be played, then I suggest you do so.  I think it would be beneficial even if you’re a solo developer for your own purposes, and if you can share it with a trusted friend to see what they think then all the better.

[undervillage]

Interview

Hi everyone,  Happy Tuesday!  Jason here again for my regular update.

I’m very excited to share with you today a link to an interview of Matt and I about underVillage that was posted last night on IGDA NZ website:

http://www.igda.nz/an-interview-with-undervillage/

Pretty exciting times for us, so please check it out!

On the development front, I’m very close to having a reference document that includes all of the major components of the game.  We just have a few more items to hash out, one or two story “logic issues” to rectify, and I think we’ll have something I can start planning the rest of my development to.

Finally, we have @dreamingofserenity helping use out on 3D modelling the some new wall assets. He’s also from the Wellington area and, like us, is learning his trade.  

[undervillage]

Matt here - Happy #screenshotsaturday everyone! Today I am showing off [spoilers] every pair of “Ghost Type” eyes in the game!  That is 100 pairs, with blinking animations - there are 400 more all done and ready to go for the other underling types too! Also, here is the template I use if you’re curious : http://sta.sh/01du8plydx4u In the future, I’d love to implement community assets - I sort of envision each artist creating a pack of their work (The “John Smith Pack” for example) that they can sell as an expansion to our game.  I know paid mods have come under fire a bit lately, but I’m definitely invested in supporting artists making content.  What do you think?

[undervillage]

Two questions: 1) Do you foresee needing to expand your team? And 2) will you be working on other games after this one?

Hi, Matt here:

We’re still really keen to get some music in to the project (we’ve asked about 4 people now since January, who were all reasonably keen but nothing has come of it just yet); another 2D artist to help me out would be awesome and help make the world weirder and wonderfulerer (but its optional); a 3D artist to build the environment would make life much easier (making the cave floor and walls 2D has generally been problematic) and might help me with animating some of the worlds bigger enemies better; and a business associate to help us plan a long-term way to maybe pay all these people one day would be great.Most importantly, I just want people who are passionate about it.  It’s not a project with any money in it, nor will it be until we have a reasonably polished demo.  That’s just the nature of how I started making it.I can tell you that it is super easy to make new eyes and mouths!  Anybody who is keen to give it a try should talk to me.And I have a *ton* of other games that I’d love to make.  I started posted the #underVillage hashtag on twitter back in January to pitch this idea, but before that I had #FairyJoust and a few others that never got off the ground.  If people wanted to start a second project with me off to the side of this one, I’d be all for it.

[undervillage]

Documenting and Blendering

Hi Jason here for a late update.  

This week has been mostly about making some progress on some much needed documentation.   You’ve seen Matt’s New User Flow from the weekend, I now need to incorporate his flow into a document I produced that explains all of our game mechanics and how they’ll (hopefully) fit together. This will form the design guide for our game.

Other than that I’ve been putting my Blender skills back to use. I’m working on some new wall objects instead of the boring rectangular ones I used for mock up.  I want to get Matt some UVs to work with so we can make the caverns more interesting.   Someday, for kicks, I might just model up a 3D version of an underling.  This does NOT mean we’re switching to full 3D game. I just would like to have a 3D underling to play with, and maybe print out on someone’s 3D printer. :)

Until next time.

[undervillage]

Hey guys, Matt here. I thought I’d talk a little about the NUF (New User Flow/Tutorial) so you get an idea of how the game should hopefully start. The storyboards along the top are the opening cutscene, which I’m going to leave totally optional to watch, booting up if you leave the intro screen hanging for too long.  I don’t really wanna cram a narrative down your throat, even if it is only a minute long.  As you can probably piece together from my scribblings, your four underlings were originally slaves to an Underlord - huge, beastly variants who crave constant attention.  After escaping, the gang stumble across a poor dead underling who kindly donates them a scarf and torch.  Once the gameplay starts, you pick which of your villagers is... you!  The playable one.  And they are magically imbued with a scarf, a torch and some authority.  The game world instantly pans out to a bit of a broader view, all obscured in darkness.  You’ll be prompted to light a cool looking campfire - right now its a skull, but it might take on a more shrine appearance in the future; which will become your permanent base of operations.  Its your centre, your Dungeon Heart, your brother-from-another-mother - take care of it. A brief tutorial will explain how the Campfire needs to be kept alive with resources and where to get them.  You’ll have 20 minutes of life in the fire, but enough nearby goods to bulk that out to a whole real-time hour - that should be plenty of time to get to work building other things! Because its your first time around, the tutorial will already have 3 houses half built and an empty site for a fourth.  Each villager will guide you on how to finish building their home and add some flourish - one constructing the base, one adding the walls and one adding an item that imbues the house with an attribute.  Once you’ve assisted building all three, the real adventure will begin in going out, exploring and finding the ingredients you need to build your own home from scratch. Lets break down those parts of the house: The base - This is a plod of land ready to build a house on.  The tutorial will have this ready for you, but in the future you’ll need to tend that land yourself with a plow or some kind of rakefish. The supports - Between 4 and 6 support beams are required before you can build the house.  These can be made of the ribs of a giant beast, sticks, carved stone and more - they’ll ultimately provide more hit points to your house if you get good ones. The walls - Once you have the base and supports, you can add walls.  Bricks, stones, skin, meat... Whatever it is, it’ll make your house more interesting and hopefully a little warmer.  The house is essentially liveable once this is done. The roof - A skull, a giant onion, a mushroom cap - these things become the roof of your house.  Maybe in a rare encounter with an Underlord you acquire his head - put it on your house to tell other underlings you mean business.  It might start rotting and attract a hoarde of flies though. Finishing each home in the tutorial will give you a recipe guide for building said house again, but there’s (hopefully) some freedom to mix and match design elements.  This is all really going to rely on the crafting system and how it works in the final game. Aaand thats it!  Build a home, make it nice, don’t wander too far from your village unless you want to get eaten and make sure you’re ready for when your old Underlord comes sniffing about for you...