Category Archives: Development Diary

Elven Queen Beast Flooding Acid

Another week that went well : I did everything planned !

1st, I created the 12th level : it has been a bit hard, but once again, I’m happy with the result. It feels special & different from the previous levels ; its exploration is a bit challenging but without being too much confusing either. I even got some inspiration back for a pleasant puzzle ; it’s time based, so it requires a bit of dexterity, but actually, like most puzzles I created so far, it requires mostly observation to understand how to solve it.

I also designed the 4 boss fights. It has been a bit tedious, I didn’t have much inspiration at 1st, but after a couple of days thinking, I ended with some pretty decent fights. The last boss of 3rd tier (ie: in level 12) will be particularly challenging !

While I was thinking about the boss design, I integrated the final assets produced by my environment artist (it was mainly statues, keys and a few props), and now it’s (almost) all done.

And that not all for this week : I even updated a couple of ugly visual fx ; the new versions look much better, and it shows I’ll have some work in that field once I’ll be finished with the dungeon creation.

Anyway, now, with 3 tiers more or less finished, the dungeon has about the same size than the one of Dungeon Master or the one of Legend of Grimrock. It looks pretty nice overall, and I begin to feel anxious wondering what the critical reception will be. I doubt the game will get much famous, but at least, I hope it’ll make happy a little bunch of people !

Ok, so now I’m going to take a break from Dungeon Guardians. For a couple of weeks I’ll be working on the Steam release of my tennis game. I’ve got some big stuff to do, but hopefully it’ll go fine. It’ll be a lot less creative than working on Dungeon Guardians, as it’ll be mostly technical stuff (except for the Achievement design), so it should be easier & more straightforward than the work I did in these past weeks.

I’ll still post during that time, and once it’s done, I’ll be right back on Dungeon Guardians, although I’m not sure on what part I’ll be working then. Maybe I should extend the existing talent trees, so I could test the 3rd tier, or maybe I’ll jump directly into the level design of the 4th tier (ie: levels 13-16). I’ve got some nice ideas for it and I’m impatient to see them taking form. Right now I’m still not sure I’ll go to a total of 20 levels : I worry a bit it’d make the game a bit too long. Testing & more testing should answer that question…

Anyway that’s all for now, cya next time !

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Elven Beast Puppy – Yeah, it’s a puppy, the adults are noticeably bigger ! ;-)

Ouch ouch !

Another difficult week, where things didn’t turn as expected.

1st, I couldn’t resist to look into the Steam release process for my tennis game, and I did all the little things required : the store page is ready with all the screenshots, descriptions and whatnot. Now it just misses the big things : adding achievements, handling online account between Steam & ManaGames.com, and packaging the game for Steam.

I also had to handle the new update of my tennis game : update the OSX, linux & Desura versions ; write a newsletter.

But all this took me time that I didn’t spend on Dungeon Guardians !

And on that side, I had to do the integration of the 4 third-tier bosses, and it took me longer than expected, as the assets needed a good bunch of adaptation ; the good news is that I made mob variations using different skins, so I also have got additional mobs to guard the last boss of the zone ! It’s always nice to have variations as it allows to introduce what a mob type can do through a weaker version, so the 1st learning fights won’t be too hard and will get the players ready for the more serious stuff.

Anyway, now I already started to give abilities & spells to these new mobs, but it’s still not finished, especially as I still didn’t design the boss fights. Hopefully, I’ll do all that this week, including creating the 12th level ! I didn’t start but I gathered ideas about it in the last days.

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Gnome Warriors Lurking in the Dark

I finally did it !

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

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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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

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.

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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 !

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Level Design with Stencil & Paper

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

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 ..!

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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 !

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..!

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).

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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 ).

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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.

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Hopefully Temporally Loading Screen

Already the 3rd Weekly Update !

Unity Roadblocks

So last week was spent on testing & tuning everything to build up the 2nd Beta of the game.

I quickly ran into a couple of roadblocks brought by Unity.

Unity is the game engine I’m using to create The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians. It’s a great engine at 80%, an ok engine at 15%, and the last 5% are “what the heck is that?!?”. So last week, a lot of my time has been wasted on the last 5%. Mainly, I ran into a limit that makes it impossible to have the whole dungeon active at the same time. I still can load it all in memory, but I have to activate only one part at once. Moreover, activating/deactivating parts is slow like hell.

So far, it was working ok, except for my save/load system, so I was forced to put a temporary loading where stuff is activated/deactivated till everything is ready for play & available for save. So now, the game takes nearly 20 seconds to load on my PC, instead of less than 5 seconds.

The good news is that Unity 5 should be released before Dungeon Guardians, and it’ll remove the limit that gave me headaches last week, which means I should be able to update and get back to a fast load time (else, we’ll get near of 1 minute when all the 20 levels will be there).

The other roadblock¹ I hit is that there’s no automatic way to save/load the current state of animation of the new Unity animation system. In Beta 1, I was still using the old one, but I partly moved the dungeon creatures to the new one as it offers some interesting features (mainly: reusing animations on different creatures). Anyway, I had to find some ruse to make the save/load work for it, and it ate some of my time as well.

Beta Testing

It’s official, Beta testing my levels take me much more time than planned, almost 1 full day of work per level, while playing normally requires around 1 hour per level. There’s always stuff to fix, small bugs, tuning to do, and boss fight to balance, so all in all, it’s pretty slow.

Moreover, I changed a bit the save/load system, so I had to restart a playthrough from the 1st level. Fortunately, the tuning needed for the 1st 4 levels wasn’t too big, as they didn’t suffer much from the changes since the 1st Beta.

Anyway, Beta 2 is all done and the result is pretty nice ! There are 8 levels now, and our party Toons get enough abilities & talents to make the gameplay feels more or less complete, so it’s getting pretty close of the final result (although there’s still a ton of new abilities & talents coming in next Betas, so the game will still get better!).

See you in next post for more details & screenshots about the Beta 2 as a whole !

1. more of an hiccup actually ↩

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