10th Weekly Update : More Level Design

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Gnome Warriors Lurking in the Dark

Gnome Warriors Lurking in the Dark

I finally did it !

Last week, I managed to do everything I had planned to do..! :-P

So the 11th level came in shape pretty nicely. It’s much more compact and straightforward than its 2 predecessors, but still it should make the players feel disoriented pretty often, even if actually they won’t be really lost.

This level has the highest number of secret passages, mostly to allow to easily walk back if required, but also to provide extra gear.

I even got some inspiration back for puzzle, so the one I created for this level is simple and elegant without being too hard : it just requires a bit of observation and timing.

So only 1 new level this past week, but I did the update for my tennis game as planned.

My Steam developer account has just been cleared, so I have a thousand little things (and some not so little) to do to publish it on Steam, but I think I’m going to try to finish the 3rd tier of Dungeon Guardians (ie: create the 12th level and do the 4 boss fights for level 9-12) by beginning of next week.

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9th Weekly Update : Level Design & Lighting Challenges

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Beware the Cave Troll !

Beware the Cave Troll !

Pffff, again, I had trouble to work this week ! :-?

Moreover, the Level 10 design turned out harder to handle than what I had expected. So the week ends with only 1 new level, but the result is at least satisfying !

Let me explain in details. It all starts with the initial game design I made when I began to work on Dungeon Guardians. I didn’t want the players to pick up torches to light their environment, unlike many other First Person Dungeon Crawler. The reason is simple : if we spend the whole game holding a torch, the lighting is more or less identical for the whole game. So by not allowing the player to pick up torches nor lanterns, I control better the atmosphere and its variation through the whole dungeon. It also allows to build more beautiful and impressive scenes.

But there’s an advantage to holding torches : it drastically limits the distance we can see (if there’s no other lighting source), and it feels slightly oppressing to know we could run out of light and end up all lost in the dark if we’re not careful. So I decided to make 1 level that would feature these perks. But I still didn’t want to provide torches : it’s not really possible to predict how many the players would need, as each player progresses at their own pace, so I’d have to put a ton of them, and then the fastest players would end with extra torches to use in the following levels. I didn’t want to do that for the last level either, as I wanted to bring variation earlier in the game. So I had the idea to create the light field : when you walk into it, you get a light spell on your party for 8 minutes. Like this, you get all the advantages without the inconveniences.

So I did all that, and boom, I got the confirmation of my initial choice : constant lighting really doesn’t look that great ! So I had to do some more thinking… :-?

Mainly, I managed to get some better shadowing, so the contrast on screen is better, and the dancing shadows bring some life when we move ; the light from spell slowly pulses so the lighting isn’t totally constant ; and I put a bunch of blue crystals in the caverns so it brings contrasts, while still making the light spell needed, as the crystal light is very dim.

Mines - With Light Spell

Mines – With Light Spell

Otherwise, that Level 10 contains the most challenging labyrinth so far, and I probably won’t make anything harder in the game. Even with the map, it might prove difficult not to get lost, as there are some up/down tunnels. For fierce explorers, it might be a nice challenge, but for more casual players, it might feel a bit too hard, so I have hidden a map at the start of the level. If anyone has trouble exploring it, I’ll give them the location of the map and it’ll get much more bearable… :-)

That’s all for this week ! Next week, the objective is to do only 1 new level, as I’ll have to spend a couple of days on my tennis game to do a small update.

Game Design Analysis : Might and Magic X Legacy

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Might and Magic X Legacy - Cover

Might and Magic X Legacy – Cover

I just realized I didn’t tell why I was doing these game analyses !

Mainly, it’s to put down my ideas about other First Person View Dungeon Crawler games, which helps to situate Dungeon Guardians with its similitudes and differences. I think it’s also interesting to see that even with a common base, these games can feel very different depending of what could feel like small game design choices, but actually lead to noticeably different gameplay.

This time, we’re checking Might and Magic X Legacy, released just a bit short of 1 year ago. Might and Magic is a cult Dungeon Crawler series, which got its up and down. The down mostly came after the 7th episode (which was already seriously less good than the 6th).

Unlike Dungeon Master (DM) and Legend of Grimrock (LoG), it’s not real-time but turn based. The good point is that it lets you play at your own pace. The down point is that it creates less tension than real time fight and it feels less dynamic. Both can also be seen as advantageous when you just want to relax (although even in turn based game you still can feel pressurized from time to time ! ;-) ).

But there’s also another major difference : M&MX, just like its ancestors, doesn’t feature an unique deep dungeon ; instead, it offers you an open world with numerous small dungeons and a few medium ones.

From these 2 characteristics, it means there’s no dungeon offering any memorable nor challenging exploration. Once in a dungeon, you’ll never feel lost, and except for a very few exceptions, you won’t even feel confused about what to do or where to go, especially as there’s no puzzle (with a couple of exceptions) and the secrets appear depending of your party abilities and not of your own observation skills. And all that without taking account of the automap.

On another hand, exploring the outside world is more engaging. And the where-to-go challenge comes up when you have to decide what is the next dungeon you want to go. As there’s no level indicator, it means you can end up in a too hard dungeon. This raises another issue:  you can’t play without quick save & load, as it’s impossible to escape a started combat, which is for me a mood killer.

But it’s not that bad, because of another bad point : the game is quickly too easy, which means you’ll rarely have to worry about getting in a too hard fight (if you play in the normal difficulty).

This brings us to the combat system. So it’s turn based. You need 1 or 1 and half healers (because often 1 healer can be paralyzed/asleep/stoned/etc…), and although there’s tank build, there’s no tanking in the way of World of Warcraft (and Dungeon Guardians ;-) ) : there’s no aggro building. You still have a few “attack me during this turn” spells, but most bosses are immune to them, so actually the tank doesn’t need to have much more HP and armor than other party members.

Might and Magic X Legacy - In Dungeon

Might and Magic X Legacy – In one of the 1st Dungeons

The combats themselves, once you have digested & understood the numerous abilities, are actually simple, easy and mostly straightforward. No, in M&MX, the difficulty comes from the resource management. This means that the difficulty comes from the choice of using or not HP & Mana potions during the fights. Almost no fight can be fatal as long as you have enough potions to go through it. This is even more true as it’s a turn based game, so you have all the time in the world to analyse the current situation and choose the most pertinent ability correctly. So to sail through the game, you just have to understand how much potions you can use in each fight. The number of potions is limited ; you can buy some from shops, but it seems they don’t reappear afterward. But you can also buy limitless rations, that allows you to sleep after the fights to recover all your HP & Mana.

As 1st, you’re short on gold, but after a while, you’ll get a ton of it. So the difficulty comes from resource management, but you get more or less limitless of them after a while ? So yup, there’s not much difficulty anymore after 25% of the game done.

There’s an hard mode, but this one is just too hard to newcomers ; you’re expected to already know the game to pick it (although you aren’t told so in the selection screen), but once you know the game, it is also too easy as you just know how much potions & rations you need to go through the dungeons & world. Plus, still, after a while you just get a ton of money again.

The combats aren’t really boring nor too repetitive, though. There are enough abilities, effect variations, kind of mobs, and special events to keep things interesting. It’s just that without time pressure, there’s not much doubt about what to do, nor doing it quickly enough.

So that’s a bit a pity as the game itself is pretty nice. Discovering & exploring the world and its dungeons is captivating. The character levelling is nicely done (but not great). There’s a ton to do and see, even though the story holds very little interest, which is a bit annoying in a game with such a big world : it builds very little implication in the player, roaming all around, jumping from dungeon to dungeon without caring much about the goals. Ending is nice enough though, as the background of the story is well exploited.

There also are a bunch of riddles in the world, and a few dungeons made of only 1 puzzle to solve and nothing else, plus 1 dungeon made of several puzzles but without any mobs nor real exploration. Puzzles were mostly annoying for me, and I guess riddles are decent if you’re into that kind of thing.

Visually, it’s shockingly ugly at 1st ; the 1st city is painfully horrible and technically it feels like we’re back in the early 2000’s. Following cities aren’t much better, but the world and the dungeons are usually well done with a good artistic direction.

So in short it gives : interesting combat system plagued by its easiness after a while, simplistic dungeon exploration partly compensated by open world exploration, average puzzles, unequal visuals & atmosphere.

So all in all, this is a game that is bigger than the sums of its parts and offers a nice adventure, despite all its shortcomings.

8th Weekly Update : Level Design & Unexpected Events

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Crystal Cavern

Crystal Cavern

This week, I finally managed to do some level design !

The 9th level is now almost finished ; it features the new cave & mine environment. I also created a simple but atmospheric underground forest. The result is likely the biggest level so far. I’m still struggling to find the sweet-spot between accessibility and challenging exploration, but hopefully this level will be interesting to discover without completely losing the player.

My inspiration for creating puzzles is getting a bit low, but I managed to do a decent one.

The missing parts are some triggerable props to open a door (I’m waiting them from the environment artist), and the boss fight, which I’ll take care of once the whole zone of 4 levels will be done (it’s easier to proceed by layer like this).

Unfortunately, this week has been also the theater of some terrible events in France, that let me very shocked & sad, so I had great trouble to work for a couple of days, thus I was able to do only 1 level and not 2 like I had hoped.

On a brighter side, my tennis game has just been greenlit by Steam (on the same day than the attacks!), which means that in the incoming weeks I’ll have to take a few days off from Dungeon Guardians to take care of its release on Steam.

Goal for next week is to create 2 new levels ; we’ll see if I can reach it or not !

Game Design Analysis : Legend of Grimrock

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Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock

If you haven’t read the Game Design Analysis of Dungeon Master ,  you might want to get a look at it before reading this one.

Legend of Grimrock (LoG) was released almost 3 years ago and brought the grid-based movement & first person view Dungeon crawling back in the spotlights. Its sequel has been recently released.

LoG has often been presented as a homage or even a remake of Dungeon Master (DM). Its main gameplay strong point is its puzzles. There are a good bunch of them, very evolved and clever. But as I wrote in my DM analysis, DM wasn’t really puzzle based. Moreover, the dungeon exploration is a lot more straightforward than DM ; it features a more linear and less mystified progression which requires none or only very little backtracking or roaming (except for 2 or 3 levels) ; the whole progress is made even easier by the auto-map system. And as LoG’s modern 3D engine lets  you see more than 3 squares away, you almost never feel lost for the whole game.

Another weak point is its combat system. It’s very simple and basically requires you to strafe-turn-strafe-turn non-stop while waiting for your attack cooldowns to reset. Even worse, if you have mages in your party, you have to enter complex rune sequences while you’re strafing & turning. It’s like that for hours till you beat the game. If you don’t strafe & turn around, the monsters will kill you very quickly.

Presented like that, it seems to be very close of DM, but actually, DM’s combat was better :

  • melee weapons actually had 2 or 3 different attacks, so you had to think a bit and try out to find which one was the best in the present situation ; it wasn’t a lot better than LoG, but still it was more evolved and a bit less boring & repetitive over the course of the game
  • it also required complex rune sequences to cast spells, but as mana was pretty limited, we could cast much less spells, and often had to prepare the spells before the fights, so it was less annoying

Anyway, personally, I think this kind of system is really outdated, and today it’s possible to create more engaging & less repetitive combat systems, either by going in a more arcade direction, or a more tactical one (like Dungeon Guardians ;-) ).

Another weak point is the story and its background. There’s not much going on there. But in the dungeon crawler genre, it’s not really penalizing.

But there’s a last severe weakness : the ending level(s). Without spoiling much, let’s say it felt out of place, rushed, and not satisfying for the gamer (ie: no real sense of achievement).

And still, LoG is a good game (great some people might say if they didn’t get bored by the combats). Mostly because except its puzzles, it has another very strong point : a great atmosphere, brought by a finely mastered artistic direction. So globally, we still get a good adventure in an oppressing dungeon.

So in short, that gives : awesome puzzles, so-so exploration, boring combats, weak ending, impressive visual & atmosphere.

Note : just to make things clear, I’m not here to bash LoG ; I just wanted to analyse its strong & weak points, to see how it’d possible to make an even better game..! :-)

Ok, now that analysis is done, I’ll be able to try LoG2 ! From what I read, it seems to be still heavily puzzles based (which is not my cup of tea) with only a few enhancements on the combat system, so I’m afraid it may still get boring after a while. I’ll likely write my analysis about all that in a few weeks…

7th Weekly Update : Holidays (again!) & Indie Stuff

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Level Design with Stencil & Paper

Level Design with Stencil & Paper

Ok, so last week I didn’t work on Dungeon Guardians again… I needed holidays ! :-P

And also, I had to work on some other stuff ; antispam for the Forum : it gets a ton of spam, it’s a real pain in the *** to stop 100% of them, there’s always a few ones that pass through the different protections. I also did a small update for my tennis game & its tournament system. This is kind of stuff we have to take care of when we’re Indie developer. I’m always switching hat to handle the different aspects of the game development and the business around it.

Anyway now it’s ok, and I’m ready to do some level design today ! Above, you can see what the 1st step looks like : I get a stencil and scribble on paper some lines for the corridors, some circles for most of the rooms, and some more defined shapes for a few important rooms. Once I have that, I switch to the in-game level editor and refine the layout, which means the final result is always a bit different of the initial paper design, sometimes it’s more than a bit.

That’s all for now, and Happy New Year ..! :-)

Game Design Analysis : Dungeon Master

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Dungeon Master Atari Box Art

Dungeon Master – Atari ST Box Art

Dungeon Master - In Game

Dungeon Master – In Game

 

I first played Dungeon Master on my Atari ST when I was a teenager back in 1990.

It was the 1st realtime first-person view RPG Dungeon Crawler game ever, so it was a total blast..! :-P

Although I played it twice till almost the end, I was never able to finish it.

I played it again in early 2009, this time with the punctual help of a walk-through and managed to finish it for the 1st time.

And I just replayed it once more a couple months ago, mainly to get inspiration for the puzzles for Dungeon Guardians. And to my big surprise, there’s almost no puzzle, per se, in Dungeon Master ! There’s something like a dozen of puzzles in total, for 13 levels, and almost half of them are more tricks than puzzles, as they are more about understanding a mechanism than solving a enigma. But in addition, there are also a good bunch of plain text riddles, which is a simpler gameplay concept.

But there are also a lot of “intriguing” zones, where it can get hard to understand where you have to go, what you’re expected to do, and sometimes requires some backtracking. And in that way, the dungeon itself feels like a puzzle, and managing to explore it feels like solving it. This is what is quite unique about Dungeon Master, even by today standards, even when playing for the 4th time, it pours an aura of mystery.

And as I’m not a big fan of puzzles, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere I’m hoping to recreate in Dungeon Guardians. I’m still designing puzzles, but the complex ones are only to get extra gears & bonus.

Except that, Dungeon Master partly got old. Of course, technically, but also for the fights. They require almost no thinking nor skill, so they get boring after a while, especially the long ones.

But overall,  I think it’s one of the rare games of the 80’s that still offers a gameplay that has not been totally outdated by some better modern games. And strangely, this is partly due to technical reasons : a few years after its release, games started to switch to full 3D movement, instead of the grid-based movement, and although it brings new interesting gameplay, it doesn’t completely supersede the old square by square grinding which keeps its own charm. Another technical point is that in DM, we see 3 squares away ; by today standards, it’s a very short distance. But it helps a lot building the oppressive atmosphere, getting us lost.

That’s all for this classic. In future posts, we’ll check more recent First-Person-View & Grid-Based RPG Dungeon Crawler games ! :-)

6th Weekly Update : More Unity Roadblock & Holidays

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Built-in Map Editor

Built-in Map Editor

Ok, this week didn’t go exactly like expected.

In the 9th level of the Dungeon,  I want to create an underground forest. To do so, I bought a Tree pack on Unity Asset Store. They look very good, but their texture mapping was really sub-optimal : a lot of space was wasted.

Wasted space = lost VRAM = less total textures = lower visual quality.

So I decided to redo their texture mapping. 3D pipeline is not exactly my speciality, thus I lost the best part of a day to set everything till I reached a satisfying result.

Once that done, it reminded me that I didn’t check since long time how much RAM the game was needing to run. Last time I did that was for Beta 1, in last September, and the game needed about 450MB. That was quite reasonable and in part with my objective for the game to use 2GB at maximum. According to Steam Hardware Survey, there are 2% of players with less than 2GB of RAM, 10% with 2GB, 14% with 3GB, and the rest ( = 74%) with more than 3GB. For me, it’s important that at least people with 3GB be able to play the game, so the game using 2GB should ensure that. If I can manage to stay under 1.6GB, that would be even better, as it might allow player with 2GB of RAM to launch the game ; although people with such low system RAM might not have a good enough GPU to run the game, so it’s not a big concern.

Anyway, I checked Beta 2 RAM usage, and it was at a massive 1.7GB ! As the Beta 2 is bundled with less than half of the game content, that came at quite a big shock ! 8-O

After some in-depth checking, I found out it was the creature Animations that were taking more than 1GB : it turned out that with the method I was using to assign animations to creatures, Unity was duplicating the animations instead of sharing them across the creatures like expected. Of course, Unity documentation didn’t have a word about that matter. Once again, I had a big issue because of Unity basic shortcomings. Like I said before Unity is globally great, but it’s trapped with plenty of deadly stuff like that.

Fortunately, Unity introduced a new animation system with its 4 version, called Mecanim (also plagued with a bunch of stupid issues, but I had already solved most of them a few months back). This new version didn’t have the duplicated animation issues, but it means I had to upgrade all my creatures to the new system. I had already planned to do so, so the system was already in place & working, but it meant I had to spend a couple of long days on integration, while I already had more than enough of it in this month.

Once I upgraded all creatures (30% were already using Mecanim), the animations RAM usage plummeted to less than 100MB, which lead the game to need only a bit more of 600GB. Things got back on track, and the 2GB objective should be relatively easy to keep in line now !

So after that, I took a break and as today, I didn’t work on the game for more than 3 days in a row, which didn’t happen since long time..! :-P

But it makes me eager to get back to level design, and hopefully, I’ll get the energy & time to create a level in the next few days (I may take again some break for New Year ;-) ).

So as a little teaser as much for you than for myself, I put a screenshot of the built-in map editor. If you’re into level design, you’ll likely enjoy it, as it’s really fast & simple to create a level (except for puzzle mechanism which requires to understand a few advanced stuff).

5th Weekly Update : Creature Integration (bis) & 4th Environment

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Cave Patriarch Casting Fire Breath

Cave Patriarch Casting Fire Flood

Last week was spent mostly integrating new creature assets into the game, still for the 3rd part of the Dungeon (ie: levels 9 to 12). It’s now almost done, it just misses the 4 bosses, but I’ll do them later, when the levels are finished.

I also integrated the 4th and last environment, the Dark Crypt, which will be featured in the final levels of the game.

With that done, I have not much integration to do anymore, and it’s good news, because I’m getting somewhat bored by it. It’s slow, it’s long, and it’s not exactly exciting as the creativity needed is pretty low, and over the past few months, I already spent nearly a couple of months doing that.

In last April, after have finished the 2nd Alpha, I did a planning to know how long time it’d approximately take me to finish the game, and I totally underestimated the asset integration part ; I thought it’d take something like a couple of weeks. Now, it’s clear it’ll take me a bit more than 2 months, and it means the game won’t be finished before end of April instead of end of February as expected (I also slightly underestimated over little stuff  ;-) ). Anyway, it’s nice to feel I’m getting closer to the end, I’m getting impatient to see the final result !

Now, I’m going to focus back on the level design and create 4 new levels within next couple of weeks (or a bit more if I take some Xmas holidays :-P ).

4th Weekly Update : Menu Design & Creature Integrations

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Menu Design Test

Menu Design Test

 

Here a small & quick 4th weekly update.

As I worked quite a lot to finish the Beta 2 in the past few weeks, I really had to speed down & rest a bit, and thus I worked less last week.

Still, I managed to try out a menu design I had purchased a couple of months ago. As you can see in the screenshot above, the buttons look great, but it feels like they don’t integrate well with the 3D background. So maybe I’ll have to hire a 2D artist to create a more tailored solution for the menus.

Anyway, after that I started to integrate the creatures for the levels 7-12, the 3rd zone of the game. This zone will have 10 new creatures (not including variations) and 4 bosses. Integrating them means mostly grunt work to put them in the game, handling texture importation, animation setup and other boring stuff like that, but also the skill & ability settings. This one I do it in 2 steps ; 1st step, I just do something very quick, usually re-using existing abilities ; and then I’ll do the 2nd step later, a bit before or when I test the levels, adding abilities and their respective FX. It’s better for the creative process as it gives me time to think about what special stuff each new creature should be able to do.