srbilyon

Dev Log #9

Added 2021-06-27 22:59:45 +0000 UTC

It's been a very busy few months as the team worked hard to meet some internal deadlines!

Because of all this extra work, we've managed to really tighten up in a lot of areas, especially on the animation clean front, as well as making some game design changes as we started to look at how to balance certain parts of the game's combat and AI.

Game Dev Things that you don't really think about heavily until you do:

Balancing

Often you'll hear or even encounter moments in a game where you're like "This AI is broken", "This is too easy", "This ramped up in difficultly super fast"

One of the revelations I've had recently is how quickly a couple of changes can greatly alter "challenge", as it has been a seesaw when it comes to changing things on the player versus the AI that can make the player characters very powerful or quickly make the AI overwhelming.

This has (and will remain) an ongoing chore to balance, but it's a very interesting exercise if anything. It's also made certain points in the game design appear weaker, but also demonstrated which areas are working well.

Sound Design and Audio Mixing

You might have seen this recently, but we where on the lookout for a Sound Designer and finally got one about a month or two ago, Kingaroo! He jumped right in and swiftly produced a bunch of sounds for us to work with and we were eager to implement!

This was the moment that started the course of how many things about sound design you REALLY don't consider. Sound variation, mixing/overlap, effectiveness, repetition, duration, etc.

Even from a programing standpoint, it's easy to say "Oh yeah, just play this sound effect here, one line of code". And then you realize, oh wait, exactly where in the code?

Footsteps? There isn't a "walking" update that just happens to know how every individual character "walks" in relation to their footstep's cadence.
But wait! You can call sounds from the engine's animation timeline! So now you have to code up events that work on the animation timeline. You add some sounds.
Then you test out those sounds by walking around in game and you're like "This sounds pretty repetitive". The sound designer gave you multiple types of footsteps for each foot, but your code only takes one clip, so now you have to go back into the code and program logic to randomize.
You do that and test. Great! It's randomizing, but the footsteps are kinda loud? Well! Now you need to probably apply those sounds to an audio group, or a mixer group.

Now you've got to go back into the code and setup something that allows you to pass in the audio group you need to use. You also need to setup the mixing group in the engine. Fine! I'll do that.

But you're still not done because:

What if you need to know the type of surface that a character is walking on?
Can you hear the sounds once you add in music and voices?
What if you need to add effects, like echoes?
What if there's like 10-20 characters that are walking at the same time? What does that sound like?

And then you just walk away from the computer and lie on the carpet for like an hour.

Animation Progress:

The animators have been hard at work, and I'm happy to say that we've just wrapped up cleaning and coloring of over 115+ animations! This includes animations for 2 of Breeze's forms, Shorty, Lid Kid, Coal, Hume, Sodo, Pile, and Cumuli!

We've definitely optimized the pipeline a lot, and learned a lot of do's and don'ts about our process, some that will probably save us some time and effort for the future!

One thing that this might do is having us modify some character designs slightly (probably more-so on the sprite side) to accommodate for this, but we'll see when we get there ~

General Game Visuals

I'm really happy to see the progress on the visual side of things! They're really coming together! We'll be testing out some things in the near future to probably optimize this process because right next, texture are getting kinda big...