Developer Diary - Fantasy Side Project
quad damage
Hey all!
We (Gavin and Jamie) have started a small side project as a way to learn new skills, give purpose to our personal work, and generally explore ideas. We have been actively posting on social media about our progress and/or experiments and figured a home for all of them may be a good idea so we can elaborate and have a better archive.
General Concept
A fantasy action adventure game that hooks into our basic influences as well as giving a change of pace and style from our daily work. We've thrown around the term "Dungeons and Dragons by Disney" - to give a quick description - and are looking at our common inspirations and interests (Classic RPG, high fantasy, Zelda, Paul Bonner, etc.)
End Goal
For the most part, this is a "Lets see where this goes..." type project. We have been friends for a decade now, worked on Bioshock Infinite together, and have always bounced ideas off of each other. With the availability in tools (specifically Unreal) - it's a great time to make some of those ideas real. The loose target, right now, is to have a single playable level showcasing combat and traversal, a missions worth of enemies, overall art direction, and functioning weapons/tools/skills...basically a vertical slice for what 2 guys can handle.
Mood:
Unlike most projects we take on, this will not just be art, and will largely be two artists using parts of their brain that usually just sleeps and eats cookies. Namely exploring Blueprints, some coding, overall game design, and generally finding the scrappiest way possible to make good looking stuff with a small team.
Moss Shader - to have overgrown environments that we can make in a more procedural way
Environment Blockout
Goblin Sketch 1 - Exploring different looks for a basic enemy
Goblin Sketch 2 - Exploring different looks for a basic enemy
Animation Tests Using Mixamo as a possible solution for prototyping -
Some Basic Traversal Tests
Starting to work on a HookShot
Rocky Cliff Pack
We (Gavin and Jamie) have started a small side project as a way to learn new skills, give purpose to our personal work, and generally explore ideas. We have been actively posting on social media about our progress and/or experiments and figured a home for all of them may be a good idea so we can elaborate and have a better archive.
General Concept
A fantasy action adventure game that hooks into our basic influences as well as giving a change of pace and style from our daily work. We've thrown around the term "Dungeons and Dragons by Disney" - to give a quick description - and are looking at our common inspirations and interests (Classic RPG, high fantasy, Zelda, Paul Bonner, etc.)
End Goal
For the most part, this is a "Lets see where this goes..." type project. We have been friends for a decade now, worked on Bioshock Infinite together, and have always bounced ideas off of each other. With the availability in tools (specifically Unreal) - it's a great time to make some of those ideas real. The loose target, right now, is to have a single playable level showcasing combat and traversal, a missions worth of enemies, overall art direction, and functioning weapons/tools/skills...basically a vertical slice for what 2 guys can handle.
Mood:
Unlike most projects we take on, this will not just be art, and will largely be two artists using parts of their brain that usually just sleeps and eats cookies. Namely exploring Blueprints, some coding, overall game design, and generally finding the scrappiest way possible to make good looking stuff with a small team.
Moss Shader - to have overgrown environments that we can make in a more procedural way
Environment Blockout
Goblin Sketch 1 - Exploring different looks for a basic enemy
Goblin Sketch 2 - Exploring different looks for a basic enemy
Animation Tests Using Mixamo as a possible solution for prototyping -
Some Basic Traversal Tests
Starting to work on a HookShot
Rocky Cliff Pack
Replies
I will keep an eye on this
Little breakdown ? plz
Playing with some Wall Jump functionality, we have a wall run made but I feel like this approach could be better for opening up gameplay spaces / constructing puzzles:
Spent most of last night retargetting a bunch of animations to use for combat and traversal - nothing super interesting to look at yet, but should enable us to have a better looking set rather than just my shitty attempts at animating :P
The rubber dong flopping around is just a Polycount easter egg.
Working out the basics of a health and damage system. I'm currently looking at converting this to a component system versus just a shit ton of variables floating in BP. While it works, its really heavy to copy it from one character to another and is really error prone.
Player Damage and Death
Enemy Damage and Death
Enemies live or die, but seemingly don't take damage.
Hero can die but does nothing at death. Less of a problem right now...
subbed.
A running idea we have is that the player character has a gauntlet which grants them magical abilities...similar to Gully from Battle Chasers, Darksiders, Infinity Gauntlets, etc. The first go at implementing something that gauntlet would do is a magic shield. So - I've set this up to block incoming damage. Obviously, I need to work on rotations and such, need to get a better way to have you just not constantly blocking, etc. At the moment, the shield drains a set number of energy/magic points, then is unusable when you're at zero...will most liekly make it so that, as long as the shield is up, it drains magic then dies if you hit zero points.
@Generalvivi Nice to see ya around these parts dude
And.. Here are some other things i've slowly been working on .
Push Block.
Pickup object in C++
Ai sight detection - Green line means he can't see us. Red Line means he can see us and comes after us.
Ai Patrolling - This will be the default "I don't see no stinking adventurer" idle state. But will be slowed to a light walk and constrained to a smaller area.
Thanks to everyone who commented so far.
Keep going Gav. These stuffs look great.
Started working on another gauntlet spell, just a ranged attack summoning a magic bow and arrow. I imagine this would be the equivalent of just a regular ranged weapon but rolled into the magic / tools of the gauntlet, could also use it to hit high up switches or trigger puzzles.
It looks like you guys are learning new stuff and having a ton of fun, there's a very pure and childish vibe I'm getting out of this! Which is what games are all about!!
@everyone
Thanks for the encouragement to all the rest of you.
Here is a sketch for our hero on the side project. The only armor is the gauntlet and pauldron and a bit on the boots. The rest is leather/cloth
more modest
as for the character I like the modest version, would be nice to see some leather on the legs as well, something like this maybe?
Small addition, but added the ability to cycle through spells by pressing dpad. It'll make it easier to just test stuff, but also blocks out the functionality of the gauntlet changing "slots"
p.s. Pumpkins are easier than making a big creature or whatnot for first tests
I've lost track of the amount of games projects I've undertaken. I feel like each time I take a lot from it. But I've never finished one.
I've also got plans to undertake another one in january for the purpose of learning.
Regardless, been plugging away at an inventory, crafting, and loot system...which has proven to be way more involved that I expected. Interestingly, my very first art job was creating UI - but that was years ago, and things have gotten way more complicated. Especially when you're scripting the stuff you make. Even though we've tackled basic traversal, combat, spell effects, etc. I feel like this is the first time I need to step back and actually consider what's being done - because of the questions it makes you ask. For combat - you hit stuff, they hit you, and there are variables in between (do you dodge? get stunned? do combo attacks? etc.) With UI, I'm finding that I need to even ask "Will we have money?", "Would you buy things or just pick it up?", "How do we want it laid out, multiple pages? All in one?" - and with that, it's really cool to have a basic ui, but I can see it quickly becoming a "cart before the horse" type scenario where I wouldn't want to invest too much in one direction if it isn't what we want. SO. Getting the basic UI down and will be refocusing on more art and gameplay type things - this is essentially more to unlock:
Looting Objects
Storing in Inventory
Crafting Items From Inventory Items
yeah, the biggest issue with design is not what you can do, but rather should do it. and usually less is more, keeping the design philosophy focused.
I think youtube is fine even for shorter clips, look at this for example. hes doing pretty much the same thing only in videos, they are usually around 1-3 minutes at most. you guys could probably squeeze 2-3 gifs together to match that.
Doing this sort of work raises a lot more questions - like I mentioned earlier - and really is a big part of why I/We wanted to start something like this. Setting up little quests, figuring out "how" the character will do something is connecting me to the side of game development that originally drew me in - "making games." While I love making art, and am confident in my abilities there, this is a whole new ballgame and starts to give purpose to the art work. Setting up the quest starts revealing other things - Do we have talking NPCs? Do we have non-linear quests? What sort of characters inhabit the world that aren't just future pincushions?
The possibilities are endless (given enough time), and while they're just baby steps into other disciplines, it's a super humbling learning experience.