Dev Diaries: July update & Neurotron re-visited

Pardons for being away from the blog for so long! I noticed that there were no dev diary updates during June, so we gotta fix that right away. I've been tangled in real life hassles such as moving into a new apartment and dealing with stuff related to that.

But during this time game development has taken steps forward. Our graphics artists Dalton Costa and Sean VandenBerge have worked hard on the game, creating assets and content for the players. Our topdown horror shooter finally has an official name -- ENEMY REMAINS.

A new enemy type I rigged and animated for our upcoming horror shooter.

I've been releasing new playable builds of Enemy Remains on our Patreon. It's been great to hear early feedback of the gameplay and how the game runs on different computers. We're gonna need a lot more data before we release the game publicly however.

Earlier games have suffered somewhat from lack of testing and quality control, and it's been hard to get people to accurately report how the game works. We've reached out to our friends and family with earlier titles on both PC and Android, but testing a game properly is a real job in game development. We've had gameplay issues in games like Kalaban which should've already been fixed in internal testing, but endured months and even years after launch.

New lab environments feature lightning traps in addition to the earlier laser traps and mines.

Working full indie on your game has its pros and cons. Pros definitely include retaining full creative control over your product, and the freedom to make it represent your vision. On the downside you have to rely on revenue share model to get the game done, having to search for income from somewhere else and using voluntary testers in place of actual quality assurance people.

Looking at the game now, I don't think people realize just how many steps we've had to take in order to get the game looking this good and playing this well. I started learning Unity in February 2017, and before that I had zero experience in working with C# script. I had opened the editor once or twice, and deemed it un-usable for the projects I was working on.

Now, don't get me wrong, Unity is a great tool and I love using it now. I think that all changed with Unity 5. Before that I remember the free version having only spot lights and no area lights at all, for example. I looked at the editor in 2014 and thought that it looked like a toy with no commercial use. I gotta say, the team behind Unity has really made some great updates during the last few years.

I'm not that big of a fan of aggressively changing the UI with every update, but at least stuff is being added and new features added. At some point I had to stop updating Unity to the newest version because I feared the older code wouldn't work. Once we finish this project, I'm going to have to jump to the newest build of the engine again.

In other news, Ben Hull from Alien Seed Games has been remastering our old game Neurotron. The title was originally released as a demo on GooglePlay, but the game was never completed. There were talks of doing a PC port of it back when we had released Kalaban, but never got around to do it. Currently, the progress on this version is looking good.

Of course it's still early in development, and will take some time before it will have all the necessary hero powers, and gameplay that was originally in the demo. There is surprisingly a lot of depth to the game, even though it was a touch screen title.





Above is the announcement trailer for our horror shooter, and a new playable build will be added on Patreon soon. Join today and get exclusive access to all the newest updates!


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-Harri J.

Friday Dev Diaries: Dreams of spring

Good Friday y'all! The spring is here, and summer is coming. Here in Finland the weather has been really strange lately. Week ago the sun was shining, and people were wearing shorts. This morning there was snow in Southern Finland.

There is this thing here called the "backwinter", which means that once all the snow from the winter has already melted in Finland, and you think that summer is finally coming, the weather decides to give us a full doze of hailstones and sleet. It's always a surprise and keeps people on their feet, especially folks that have to use a car daily.

Of course weather like this is perfect for game development if you don't have to leave your home. With all this social distancing it is important to take care of your mental and physical health though. For me, hiking and walking are some of the things that I enjoy doing, and I put in so many hours of screen time a day that a balance is kind of hard to achieve.

The only thing I'm really missing is seeing my friends freely, and being able to socialize normally. For a person who does a lot of monkish work with writing and game development I'm used to abnormal life style though.

When I need motivation for my work, I go for a walk, do some cooking or baking, or cleaning. Anything besides staring at a screen gives you new things to think about.

And speaking of game development; there is a lot that has happened with the Kalaban sequel project. It's taken huge leaps forward, and there are a ton of new features in the game now. I have programmed ten different weapons into the game, and finally pulled some of the maps together. Most of the work has been on gameplay, and there are lot of different bits and pieces but no full structure yet.

There are now deadly traps like mines, lasers and spinning wheels of blades in the levels. I've also added wooden crates containing random loot, and tons of other details. There is thunder, rain and environmental hazards like fire and glowing green fungus which hurt you. The game is really shaping up to be a real experience, with lots of fun things thrown in.

This time I've done things completely differently than in original Kalaban. Back then we started with story and scripting for it. Gameplay was programmed while working on the story structure and level design. And now gameplay has been first, and story will be implemented later on, once we have the maps together. The budget we have by that time will decide what capacity the storytelling will be implemented.

From the gifs above you can see the spinning wheels of death, and new plant topside map with lightning, rain and creepy monster tentacles. There are also stationary enemies like the body of a tentacle monster, which spins around and tries to hurl its projectile at you.

We are also updating the Area 51 Defense game currently on Steam. There's going to be major performance fixes, and a few nice gameplay fixes. Looking forward to getting people playing the new version.

Have a nice weekend you all, and stay safe!


- Harri J.

Friday Dev Diaries: Purification plant in progress

Hello there!

Since our last update, I have created at least three new playable scenes. They're all work in progress however, and we will continue work on them until the whole Act 1 is ready. Me and our environmental artist Dalton Costa have been busy churning out new assets and map pieces.

The biggest new area is going to be the water purification plant, which will consist of multiple different maps in the game. We're in the progress of building the first map of it now, and seeing how the assets will look in the engine.





I've also been updating the enemy AI code, its animations and attacks. There will be some specialist code needed for the boss enemies in the game, and that's what I'm going to tackle next. In Kalaban there was only a couple enemies with firearms, but in the sequel there will be more.

You don't want the enemies to feel robotic killing machines in the game, but instead make them fun and challenging foes. No matter how hard, there must be a strategy for beating them. This of course is a matter of gameplay balance, level design, enemy placement and the attack style of the enemies (fire rate, animations, etc).

It's a lot to take into consideration when you're not simply making a game full of mindless foes. Even the mindless foes must have strength in numbers, and special enemies among them to spice things up. For example, I have always enjoyed the Fallen minions in Diablo II, where there are shamans sprinkled among them. The shaman will resurrect fallen foes, until you take him out.

I haven't gotten into the special scripting part of the maps yet; secret areas, story triggers, traps - but I'm looking forward to it. I enjoy creating new fictional words, be it on paper, in text or in video games. During the last three years I've gotten pretty familiar with Unity, and there are a number of incremental steps which needed to be taken in order for a project like "Kalaban II" to be possible.

One of the biggest has been the rigging and animation of the human / humanoid characters. It used to be such a challenge for me, and when I made prerendered graphics in the past I had to use all kinds of workarounds to do simple animations. The finished sprites usually looked fine, but they took a number of hand-crafting and polish which just wasn't optimal in the long run.

 


One thing that you can be pretty comfortable with modern engines and tools is the fact that the visual fidelity will just be there. With the right lighting, tweaking of post-processing effects and just generally acceptable or above level assets you can create really impressive scenery.

People who on the internet are constantly fighting and bickering about "what's the best engine for 3D games and game development in general", but I think it's a matter of getting intimate with the tools that you're using. When you know the basic "do's and do not's" you can be pretty comfortable with content creation.

Of course there is room for improvement and optimization, but that's something you should really do constantly. We'll continue with our work, and hope that everybody's having a great weekend!


- Harri J.

Friday Diaries: First version of survival mode

Hello!

I just added several things to the current build to make the first version of survival mode completed. The game now has weapon pickups, spawning enemies, health pickups, and death screen when both players are dead.

I've tested the game with one player, and tried it out in two-player mode briefly. I still need to run through with both players to see that there are no bugs left in. The game is now also available for Mac and Linux too, so go grab it!





If you have either Mac or Linux, I would love to hear your feedback on how the game runs on your computer. Every bit of feedback helps! I have tested the game on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it ran well on both systems, but it's always tricky to create a game for multi-platform release.

The game has two monsters at the moment, the first one being the placeholder wolf monster borrowed from Kalaban, and the second is the new frog man "Mangler". I'm not planning on bringing the wolf monsters back as a stardard enemy in Hybrid Children. They might be included as an easter egg, or some special NPC like "Puppe" was in Kalaban.





One of the things I would still like to add to the survival mode, currently, is making it even more fast-paced. I did up the monster speeds as I got all the essential code running. You generally want to make it easy and relaxed when you're first adding all the stuff in. Some even make the enemies disabled when they're building the basic block of a game.

The effects could run by faster, player could be faster and bullets could fly faster, etc. That's my take on creating a good survival mode like this. The game does get exponentially harder now, as it counts the number of enemies that have been spawned overall, and now tries to top that number by spawning more enemies constantly.





The pickup spawns required some extra work that had not thought of before. In Kalaban the random items drop from monsters, and that is much easier to code. And maybe I should've used that method for this too, but now the items spawn to specific locations. I've always been intrigued by deathmatch maps, and that's the sort of feeling I was going for, just in a really contained arena.

Next up I think I'm going to start developing the actual map design. This first survival map is just a test run for the visuals, so it doesn't give you full picture of what the game is going to look like. Not to mention important things like scripted events are completely missing from the game now.

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That's it for this week! Stay tuned for future updates, and go our game at Itch.io or Patreon and support our development.

Have a nice weekend, everybody!



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-Harri J.