Hello everyone and welcome back to yet another Design Blog.

We have had our game in its best state yet allowing us to get the most important feedback to date from in person playtesters.  We also made some touch ups on previously completed work and introduced more new assets and tools for the player. There's a bit to cover, so lets dive into the bigger pieces.

Brick Textures

I made the decision to wrap back around to trying to create a tile set for the bricks in order to break up the monotony of seeing the same brick pieces in the foreground non-stop. The problem we ran into the first time around was a poor style of implementation causing pieces that didn't flow well together due to my lack of understanding on how to properly handle a tile set for a game with 3D models. However after more time spent thinking on it, the orthographic look to the camera system makes it effectively a 2D game, so following the method that 2D games use for their tile sets started to just make sense. 

The way that we wound up handling this situation was creating a texture map with all 16 variants of the brick work that we will be using in the game. From here I had our 3D artist take it into Photoshop and break the Albedo, Normal, and Roughness maps into their individual layers and split them up. This gave us 16 total textures for each brick. This will allow us create more interesting levels to look at and help break up the repetition of a single block on the entire map.

Level Design

We have recognized there is an issue with our level testers being able to test out individual rooms due to the procedural generation of our layout. In order to combat this I asked one of our programmers to set up a "test scene" for us that allows the level designers to simply drag and drop the rooms they want to test. This should allow the upcoming levels that we have to feel better handled and is something that I should have considered much earlier on in the project. Players have expressed some issues with movement and a large part of this has been due to the inability to quickly test levels and ensure that quality.

Squiggmar

Our resident end game boss is finally under development. Thanks to our 2D artist we were able to have some interesting concept art to work with when deciding the look of Squiggmar we have a very grotesque creature that feels truly alien to the castle.

We had a number of interesting baselines to work with depending on exactly how I wanted the player to feel about the creature. Due to the more fantasy nature of our game the alien didn't feel like quite the right fit. The cartoony style also doesn't lend itself to the strength of our 3D modelers. This made the Monstrous an easy choice. The shape of mouth makes it extremely unnerving and due to the talent shown by our animator, the plethora of eyes should be extremely interesting to see in motion.

Tentacle wise I felt like all 3 were solid and initially thought about a mixture of the three. Because of how players associate visuals with different mechanics I decided against it. All tentacles from Squiggmar behave in the same way as each other, so having a variety of tentacle types pushed against this design philosophy. I wound up choosing the vampire squid tentacle design due to its more monstrous nature. The mouth style tentacles were a very close second but fell short when I tried to imagine it in the game with the 2D perspective we provide the player.

Seraph

I wanted to show off the Seraph's animation this week. Our animator did a fantastic job with bringing it to life. I had decided early that it need to have a very uncomfortable feeling to it and should not feel like something you would ever reasonably encounter in the real world to really dig into that fantasy element to the game. The way the claws tuck inward as the eye flaps its wings, the clear motion on its wings providing a controlled flight, and most importantly the way the eye moves achieved this in spades. The twitchy, rapid scanning of the eye feels amazing to look at and the quick blink helps solidify that this creature is focusing in on you as the player. It has proven some interesting challenges with regards to bringing its animation into Unity but I am actively working to ensure that it gets in place as it is too awesome to not have.

Skeleton Lancer

Our skeleton lancer is utilizing the same base model as our skeletal archer in order to provide a smoother process with animating as well as modeling. That base model has been dressed up quite a bit differently. The Lancer is wearing metal plates and carrying a very noticeable and pointy spear with him. The shield helps to show the player that this enemy will block attacks from the front. This can be stopped by using certain spells and attack patterns to knock away the shield and go for a big hit.

The above is the skeleton fully modeled up. The tears on the clothes use a transparency effect to let the bones peak out from underneath. The shield and spear holding rust as the lancer's body decomposed to leave them with just their clothes and bones.

Playtest

During our playtest we got to see a lot of really interesting bugs that are large priority fixes. Things like the shop stealing exponential amounts of money from the player when purchasing upgrades, movement issues like wall jumping and platforms pulling down on the player with unexpected force, and enemies dragging from across the entire castle to hunt the player down in overwhelming numbers were clear bugs, but more than that was seeing just how unintuitive the game really is. Players are not clear on what is going on when they enter the mines for the first time, the shop for the first time, or how to handle combat. Introducing these should help immensely with the player's sense of confusion and hopefully create a better environment for the player to experience.