Category Archives: Development Diary

30th Weekly Update : Little Things

Posted on by
Teleporter in Maze

Teleporter in Maze

What the heck I did last week..?

Oh yup, a bunch of little things !

Mainly, I updated the gear icons, so now there are different icons depending of the quality of the items, which gives some nice visual hints in the inventory screen.

I added the list of Keys found in the level when watching its map.

I added a slider to control the music volume in addition of the ambiance volume (depending of the speaker setup, their volumes have a tendency to not scale in the same way).

I added keyboard shortcuts for all the abilities, so 80% of the game can now be played using only the keyboard. I also created the menu to change all the bound keys.

I lost some time because of some Unity bug : screen was too dark when using DirectX11 in a non-native resolution. Fortunately, 2 days later, they published an update that fixed that.

I did a couple of fixes in the levels from Beta tester reports.

And probably a little series of other very little things I have forgotten about..! :-P

All in all, it was a decent week of work ! :-)

This new week, I’m planning to add the few missing visual FX for our party : strike effect for all the auto-attacks and other melee attacks, and a small fire effect for the Elementalist’s Scorch. Then maybe I’ll do a short gameplay video. And once that done, I’ll write the story elements (ie: mostly dialogues) ; I already did it for the first 5 levels, but not afterwards, as it was not vital to allow Beta testing of the whole Dungeon.

FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmailShare

Advices for 2D/3D Artists looking to work for Indie game studios

Posted on by

After my busy days looking for 2D artists, which were even busier than when looking for a 3D environment artist 1 year ago, I feel the urge to write a few advices for all 2D/3D Artist Freelancers, especially the ones looking to work for Indie game studios, by answering ads they found on Internet.

Basic Advices

  1. Indie game creators are poor, or relatively poor ; if they don’t have money at all, avoid to work for them, except if you need to get some experience ; and if they do have money, don’t expect them to have AAA budget
  2. when asked for your portfolio and a quote, actually link your portfolio and give a quote
  3. if you really don’t have time to give a quote (and that’s understandable, no problem), then at least provide your hourly rate, your location, and the price for 1 of your creation that somewhat matches what the ads was researching, so your possible future clients will have some idea if you’ll fit in their budget or not
  4. in your answer, specify if you’re full-time or part-time freelance, and how many years of experience you have (1) in general as an artist, (2) in game industry and (3) as a freelance
  5. prepare a list of references : once I want to hire you, I’ll demand the contact emails of a couple past studios who hired you, so they could recommend your work to me
  6. if your quotes or hourly rates are negotiable, or lower with the volume of work, specify it
  7. if you don’t have experience working in the game industry and looking to get a 1st job there, offer to do a test asset for free and then accept to work on low budget ; personally, I don’t have the time for that, but I’m sure a lot of Indie studios would be happy with such agreement ; check the background of the studio, though : if they don’t have any released game, or only poor games, it might not be the best place to acquire experience
  8. Do not offer to work on a hour or day basis if you’re asked for quotes ; in that case, the studio wants to pay a fee agreed upon for a set of tasks, not hire a temporary employee
  9. If you link to a game page to show your previous work, then detail what you did for this game, else it’s extremely not useful

Portfolio Advices

  1. do have a portfolio (there are a bunch of artists who just send a few pics by attachments 8-O )
  2. a blog is not a portfolio
  3. dropbox is not a good portfolio
  4. deviantart is a good portfolio ;)
  5. do have a portfolio with your best work : I won’t presume you’re able to do better than what I see in your portfolio
  6. show your best work 1st ; don’t let me browse through dozen of experiments or old creations before seeing your best work, because I might not do it
  7. if you have a lot of stuff in your portfolio, try to provide direct links to your creations relevant to the job offer
  8. theme your creations : so I won’t lose time trying to look for the kind of stuff that interests me
  9. do not have a portfolio with only a few pics linking to categories with more pics : seeing the homepage, I may think your portfolio is only these few pics, not click on anything and go away ; at very least, write the category name on each picture
  10. date your creations : so I’ll have some idea if you get better with the time
  11. if you want to work in the game industry, you need to have some game ready assets ; doodle, illustration and unfinished stuff can look nice, but they don’t tell me enough about the final product I’ll get if I hire you ; this is a major concern ; most 2D artists who contacted me have _zero_ game ready creations ; this only make sense for concept artists ; anyone else should be able to display finalized stuff
  12. If you even want to raise more your chances to get hired, create game ready assets for different styles : the most requested style is probably the cute cartoon style all mobile games use since a few years ; so you may want to start with that, but don’t end there ; I create game for PCs, cute mobile stuff doesn’t interest me ; so if possible, also create game ready stuff with scifi and/or heroic styles ; these are pretty standard style and you’ll catch the eyes of game studios a lot more ; if you do good scifi stuff, I’ll probably see you’re able to produce good heroic stuff (and vice-versa), but it doesn’t work for cute cartoon vs mature style
  13. if you never worked for game studios before, create game ready assets during your free time ; you don’t need a ton ; only 3 or 4 assets might be enough ; be sure to specify you created them to show your skills and that’s the level of quality your future clients may expect
  14. One advice especially for 3D artists : in addition of the date, specify the constraints of your work (ie: max 2000-polys), the target (mobile, PC, console) & the game or at least the studio who hired you for that creation  ; if you’re showing terribly low poly assets, but you say it was done for mobiles in 2010, then I’ll understand why. Without further indication, I’ll just assume this is your idea of “top” art and I’ll dismiss your candidature right away
  15. Do not prevent right-click ; I’m not going to steal your artwork, but I might want to see it in different sizes, or even maybe saving it in a folder with your name & details, for future reference

Resume Advices

  1. if possible, have a resume with your portfolio : it helps to know who you are
  2. in your resume, list the companies you worked for, with the dates ; if not all, at least the most important ones (by reputation & work amount)
  3. don’t forget to detail your education as well

 

Ok, hopefully these few advices will help some artists to find a job more easily… :)

29th Weekly Update : Hunting 2D artists !

Posted on by
Customize Party

Customizing Party

As planned, last week I created the whole process to customize our party when starting a new game. And as expected, it wasn’t too hard. You can see the result on the screenshot above ; the options are limited so unlike other RPGs, creating your own party won’t take you hours, forcing you to make decisions you have no idea about because you don’t know how the game works. Here there are not much bad choices, and if you pick them (ie: using the wrong specialization for the party member’s role) then you’ll get a notification, giving you the chance to pick something else.

Except that, with the nice help of a Unity user (Nifflas to name him), I found out how to upper mix in real time a stereo track to a 5.1 output, so it’ll be more efficient than using different version of the same tracks : it’ll save space in the game bundle, in RAM, and it’ll work correctly on 4 & 5 speaker setup as well, all that for only a marginal CPU cost.

Also, Dungeon Guardians finally got its official difficulty levels, which are : Stroll, Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, Impossible. Plus a custom setting where you can set even more precisely the difficulty parameters. With that, everybody & anybody should be able to find a difficulty level fitting their taste ! :-)

So with the party creation done, I finally was able to list all the 2D assets needed for DG, and start to look for one or several 2D Artists to create them. And that, that was an adventure in itself ! :-P

So I posted an ads on Unity forum and another one on ConceptArt, and in the following days, I got about 60 answers..! 60 ! A lot of them weren’t too good, though, but a few were very nice ; it has been hard to choose, but finally, I think I got the right artist to polish DG’s visuals. We’re in the final steps of the hiring process now and in a few hours the position should be officially filled.

The only thing is he’s not sure how long it’ll take him to do everything, but hopefully, I’ll be able to post some of his creations on this blog within the next few weeks, so keep tuned ! :)

28th Weekly Update : Quiet Week

Posted on by
Inside the Mines

Inside the Mines

Last week went by very fast. Or kinda.

At least, for Dungeon Guardians, I didn’t do much. I did 1 very important thing, though : I fixed the final phase of the final boss fight ! At 1st, I created a slightly special setup, but just standing in the same place & fighting the boss for a while was enough to kill him. Now, everything makes senses, and if you don’t look your surroundings & understand what’s going on, you probably won’t be able to kill the boss (and beat the game :P ).

Except that, I noticed Unity3D didn’t have anything to handle correctly the playing of stereo music over a 5.1 speaker setup, so I asked the musician to do a little mix up to get a 5.1 version of all his tracks. Result is much better and now we feel surrounded by the game atmosphere ! :)

At end of the week, a particular event arisen : I found out that my tennis game’s 3D Models & Textures have been stolen by a tennis game recently released on iPhone ! This kept me quite busy these last few days. I’m trying to get Apple to remove the game from their store, but they’re not very reactive (which is understandable, as it needs checking to avoid mistakes & false claims).

So I didn’t start to work on the party creation process ; I designed it in my head though ; it’ll be simple : we will be able to select a full standard party, or create one choosing a few predefined characters, or create our own. Each characters will have only a few characteristics : sex, probably race, class & specialization. The party will have 4 slots with : tank, healer, 2 dps ; and the game will ask you what character to put in each slot. So it should be relatively simple & fast to implement. I just have to get to it. If no more bad news come in, it should be done before end of this week.

Cya next week to see how everything is going ! :)

26th Weekly Update : Beta 3 is Ready !

Posted on by
Big Boss Fight

Big Boss Fight

After a week of crazy work, the Beta 3 is ready !

I’m still always amazed by how long it takes to test, tune & fix the small bugs when playing a new level for the 1st time ; so the week has been very busy, because I really needed to finish the Beta 3 now, both in term of motivation, and for my planning, as I need to work a bit on my tennis game this new week.

So, what’s to say about the game at this point ? I’d say it’s pretty amazing ! I just hope other players will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it, but the result is really close of what I had in mind 4 years ago when I first started to think seriously about this project : putting World of Warcraft combat experience within a Dungeon Crawler game. The game could be better, they always could, but at its current state, it’s already very convincing ; for me, it’s close of what I felt when I was playing WoW (although there are tons of small and big differences, we’re very far of a clone, for many obvious reasons).

So now, the Beta 3 will go to the Beta testers (I might look for a couple new ones soon, so stay tuned) and we’ll see if they can enjoy it or not.

And my planning is finally telling me there’s less than 3 months left of work… It might mean I’ll be able to release the game for end of September, and stop pushing the release date farther and farther away. :)

 

25th Weekly Update : Tough Beta Testing

Posted on by
Force Field

Force Field

I did start to test the whole dungeon..! :-P

But I did only 7 levels, and only barely as there’s still a little bit more to test in the Level 7.

Why only 7 ? Because I got a tons of little bugs & other stuff to fix and tune. I also improved a few things, like the Force Field effect shown in the screenshot above, or adding an indicator when an enemy interrupts one of our Toons ability, or adding another indicator to show when we’re attacked from sides or the back (which is quite helpful when there are several groups of enemies around our group).

I improved the average dps stat info so now it includes Hit Chance, Critical Chance, Expertise and Haste, which is very helpful to decide what enchantments to favor on your gears. In the same idea, the tooltip to compare 2H-handed weapons take into account the current gear equipped in the off-hand, which makes much easier to decide which set-up is the best.

I also fixed some complex bug about delaying mechanism actions, tuned the skills system so the Stamina skill gets a bit more interesting for spell caster classes, and so on.

The result is that now the game feels much more consistent and near release state ! Visually, it looks really nice, so I might finally be able to do a video (sound FX are still seriously lacking & GUI still needs serious visual improvement, but we’ll get there! ;) ).

Hopefully, it won’t have much bugs left now and I’ll be able to finish to Beta test the Dungeon by the end of the week. Although I’ll have to switch back to Steam & my tennis game soon so I may not have the time to finish the Beta 3 this week…

Let’s see next week how all that will have turned out ! :)

24th Weekly Update : Final Boss !

Posted on by
Fireball in hallway

Fireball in hallway

I still didn’t start to test the whole dungeon…

Ok, it becomes a running gag, but at start of last week, I got the energy & the mood to do the final boss fight ! I thought it’d take me only 1 big day, but actually, it took me almost the whole week ! I had planned to do a bunch of little things to make it special, and each one of them took some time to put in place. But at least now, this fight will really feel special, with a series of perks unique to it !

I also upgraded a few visual FX, including the fireball seen in the screenshot above, and I set up the music & ambient track system, on whose our talented musician Robert Engstrand is currently working on !

So this week, I’m really going to test the whole Dungeon ! I just have 1 little thing to do before : upgrading the visual FX for the wand projectile ; it should take me 30 minutes and then here I come, shiver monsters, as my sword will shine ! :-P

23rd Weekly Update : Talents & Potions

Posted on by
Druid Specialization

Druid Specialization

I still didn’t start to test the whole dungeon ! :-?

Instead, I got taken in the Druid & Elementalist Talents ; it took some time but now they’re all set up and well working. The result is pretty nice and I’m eager to test all this through the Dungeon. With 4 specializations done, it’s a big step toward finishing the game that has been accomplished !

Also, I added a couple of new potions : they provide respectively Haste & Critical bonus for a short time. I hid a couple in each level, a bit like Easter eggs… :P

In bonus, I also set up a new decal shader so spider webs and other transparent textures can catch shadows, which avoid an annoying visual bug I had since a while..!

So now I’m ready to jump in testing the Dungeon from start to end ; or almost ready : I’ll tune a bit 1 Boss & check the save system still work 1st, and then I’ll be good to go. If there’s not too much issues, it should take me the whole week.

22nd Weekly Update : Intense Talent & Ability Design

Posted on by
Warrior Talent Trees (1 Tree is still missing)

Warrior Talent Tree (1 Specialization is still missing)

Last week I worked well, but a bit less than hoped, as the Talent System is actually still in need of tuning, enhancing & a bit of debugging ; so it went slower than expected, but we’re getting there ! :)

So I finished 2 Specializations of the Warrior class (the last one for the Paladin will come later), and almost finished the one for the Healer’s Druid specialization. Unfortunately the last one for the Elementalist Mage is still unchanged, and it’ll require some extra work to create the visual FX for its couple of new abilities.

The Warrior Tree will also need a couple of tuning so balancing Specializations will be more interesting (ie: the player should have the possibility to go for 50% on Protection and 50% on Man At Arms, without be too much impaired). But the result is already very nice, and now the whole Talent System is very close of final state, so it feels like the game is getting closer and closer to be done.

This week, I’ll finish the Druid & Elementalist Trees and then I’ll start to Beta test the whole Dungeon, which should take about 1 week if there’s not too much glitches & issues to fix.

21st Weekly Update : Nearly Empty Week

Posted on by
Tomb in Level 19

Tomb in Level 19

Pfff… Last week went even faster than expected, which means I barely had time to work on Dungeon Guardians… :cry:

I did only a few little varied improvements (including buffered input mode allowing to press the key several times, a crash indicator, better Mobs movement on stairs), and then gave some thoughts on the final Boss fight. I still can’t wrap my mind on how exactly it’ll happen, but I’m getting there.

This week, I’ll try to finish the 4 Talent Trees that were already 50% done in the Beta 2, which will let me test the whole Dungeon on the following week. At least, that’s the plan ! ;-)

We’ll see how it goes soon enough…