Not everything we start working on is a big hit from the get go. But of course, you knew that already.
This week, we had some of the more funny fails.
We implemented a splash screen / loading screen / game menu. That wasn't a fail, actually.
We bought some animations and integrated them. Don't look 100% cool either! What's going on with this animation stuff??!! Argh, can it be so hard?
Ragdolls! The rubber man returns. Or alternatively: Our ragdoll model shows what you might get if you answer spam mails in your inbox that promise "enlargment services".
For those with claustrophobia. Use the telekinetic blast we implemented if surrounded by enemies. It might be a little bit too powerful.
There's also a new image of modular cave pieces we did this week. They'll probably be shown in next week's episode if we manage to integrate them into the game.
Here's a new model that came out of our modeling pipeline: a Sarahul bow and dagger. Everything the Sarahul have is pointy, like their eye slits. It's a big part of their overall design and art style.
We're not quite happy with the main character yet. It'll get a new head. The body is fine, but it will probably be used more on townsfolk with toned down colors.
Daniel created a new clothing concept for us, which will be created and implemented in the next cycles.
Finished developing a plant randomizer this week. There is a cave system in our tutorial level with plants in it. Every plant looked the same and so the cave looked super sterile. We ended up making variations of the plant in slightly different stages of development. And a script that took a random model of the plant variations, rotated them and scaled them a little and now every plant looks differently.
Here's what it looks like. It's a little bit dark though.
Julian left for holidays so he worked double shifts.
We implemented animation concepts to better judge how animations feel in the game. Does this animation for that activity look good? Or does it look lame if watched 100 times?
Rough animations for terraforming, telekinesis, area telekinesis, telekinesis throw were implemented. These animations will be replaced by smoother animations as soon as we know how they should look like.
Fire fairies indicate that you stored a fire element and have it active. Don't worry, they're only temporary and will be replaced by a better effect.
Logic behind the magic system was programmed. We changed the mechanics slightly for better playability and fun in combat.
We're testing the new mechanics with fire magic and implemented a fire blast and enhancing objects with fire magic.
Rocks enhanced with fire magic explode. A little too violently.
Sarahul now ragdoll, too, when they die.
Sarahul lose balance when you terraform under them. For too long in the current build.
We played a lot of multiplayer matches this week to record footage to our brand new video overview. The video shows what Son of Nor is about and what players can expect from the game.
What do you think?
After playing all those matches we ended up with a long list of things to fix and improve and Julian did a lot of that already. Namely:
We try to explore the visual style of Son of Nor further this week.
We now hear several comments after being featured in the press that our game's visuals look old and dated. Is it the visuals? Or is it our unfinished animations? Or what is it? We realize that we cannot compete with top notch AAA teams that have dozens of pro artists. We only have 4! But then, how do we convey that we're an indie team that would like to make an awesome game that also looks great? What style would fit our game, be fun, and be achievable for a team like ours with a reasonable amount of time? Others in our team think we CAN compete on visuals and are working on proving it. Exciting times...
For this week, we put together some styles real quick. Which one do you think looks great? We'd like to hear your opinion to help us in our internal discussion. After all we're making the game for gamers, not only for our personal pleasure :)
So, after you've watched our Dev Diary, we invite you to voice your opinion here: Facebook Poll
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Of course, you can also voice your opinion here. We're listening!
The next 2 weeks are going to be special. Adrian (US), Ricardo (Ecuador) and me Chris (Switzerland) came to Austria, more specifically to Julian's place in Innsbruck to talk about next steps, project planning and intensively work on Son of Nor together in one room.
This is what happened during the week.
A new 3D artist joined our team from Germany. Ruben has a lot of experience in making things look awesome and he's working on a new version of the player character. Apart from that he's got some environment tasks on his todo list.
We're also testing new animations Ruben added after rigging and weight painting the character.
After getting to know each other for the first time in real life, we installed a motion capture system in Julian's appartment. We're playing around with it to see if it could help us adding more animations faster.
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So, we're trying out iPi Soft's MoCap software (http://www.ipisoft.com/). It promises to be markerless so you can avoid expensive equipment and markers. You need 3 cameras from different directions and you have to carefully place them, reduce any background noise behind the actor and calibrate the system in a lengthy process. It works well for an image based mocap system, but it clearly has its limitations. Best would still be to have an empty room or studio that's well lit.
We first tried it outside but one needs a flashlight to calibrate the system, and sunlight was way too bright. The software didn't find the calibration signal from the flashlight. We set it up indoors, removing a lot of furniture from Julian's living room. It's not the solution to all problems. It's inexpensive (compared to normal marker-based mocap systems) but difficult to setup nonetheless. We'll see how easy it'll be to clean that mocap data as it produces a lot of jitter in the areas no camera can see (behind one's back).
Coming back to the art style discussion. Art Style 6, the style that looks a little Borderlands-ish, was one of the more popular styles, together with the original style we had until now. After having lengthy discussions internally we came to the conclusion that the art style was not really the root of the problem, the problem why the game looked old and unsatisfactory. The main problem was our lack of attention to detail. Any style will look bad if we don't go the whole 9 yards and add details with care. We tried to escape the problem and redo the art style in the hope that everything will look good in another style. But we probably did so only to land in the same spot a few weeks down the line.
The important thing is to make the world look more like a living place. We have no real plants to cover up the transition between rocks and the ground. The ground is flat and uninteresting, no grass to move in the wind. The rocks look nice but are very noisy. Our other models are functional but they don't have a style. They all look clean as if they were just built a few days ago. Lifeless. Without character. All the little things that matter. We decided to first explore our current art style more since it was popular too, to see if we can push it further. Add more character to the models, the content.
Thanks for everybody spotting this, pointing it out and giving us helpful advice on how to push on.
Despite the fact that we're still having our crunchy dev weeks at Julian's place and having fun, playing board games and cooking, we managed to squeeze in some great updates this week.
Julian coded a new obstacle: quicksand. It's very rough right now but the principle works. Now it has to be made pretty.
The run animation looks quite good by now!
The jump animation needs some tweaking but comes along nicely.
We made canyon walls that look great from afar and from up close. Finally we seem to be getting the hang of how to do rocks... It took quite some time.
I don't know how many of you tried a Kickstarter campaign already but it's nearly killing us. Videos should be of such high quality in order not to make a sleepy impression and it needs to show one highlight after another. At least the videos we liked were pretty well thought through. I'm not talking about industry veterans who merely show up and immediately get millions. But what do people of whom I haven't yet heard show to catch my interest. Of course, the normal production process should not stop either, resulting in double shifts for me and Julian. Not to mention all the stuff you need to polish and build into the game to make it shine. Well, at some point I'm sure we'll be able to write up a very nice post-mortem, too. Be it of a success or a failure, we'll see. Currently we do everything we can to hopefully turn it into a success, hehe. Wish us luck.
What else happened.
We're experimenting with the camera's focal length to convey the vastness of the desert.
We created and implemented another rough jump animation.
There are now killer vegetables in the game. Carrots are what Sarahul's nightmares are about.
Lols aside, the vegetables are for a farm area at The Edge. People have to eat something.
Alex finished the blockout of the "Mirror Room" in the wind temple and Julian programmed the logic. Time to test, model and integrate assets.
Daniel created concepts for the Mirror Room.
We're preparing our Kickstarter campaign and we're shooting a ton of in-game and real world video. In this dev diary, you can see some of the bloopers ;)
