Category Archives: Weekly Update

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians’ Boxshot

Another week that went as planned !

I did the rolling credits screen, nothing special, just the classic stuff.

I then did the ending scene. The ending is very low budget (ie: there’s no 5-min CGI movie), I just worked with sound FX, music & dialogues ; but considering that, the result isn’t bad, it could even be seen as refreshing and original. At very least, it should be a bit surprising..!

I also got the boxshot finished by the talented 2D artist hired a few week backs. You can see it above. Pretty awesome, right..?

So next week, I’ll do the intro scene. I’m not sure I’ll able to do it all in 1 week. There’s a bit more elements to create than for the ending scene. But we’ll see..!

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Noisier Than Before!

Pheeeew, 3 weeks ago, there was 40 sounds in the game, now there are 450 !

I nearly have my ears bleeding¹, but now I’m finally (almost) done with the Sound FX !

It’s a bit strange to hear the difference ; now, there’s growling, explosion and whzzzz everywhere in the combats, and it makes wonder how I didn’t miss all that while beta testing the whole dungeon a couple months ago²…

Anyway, now my planning just dropped under 2 months of work, so you should be able to enjoy all that soon. I guess it means the release date for end of September is still viable, although I might take 1 week of holidays in August to avoid my head exploding during the final rush. My planning also doesn’t account for the many little things needed on release (like setting up the payment stuff, packaging the game with an installer, etc.), so it might delay by 1 more week. It’ll also of course depends of the accuracy of my predictions for the final tasks I have to do.

The next one is to create the ending & the credits ; I hope I’ll be able to do all that in the incoming week, although I’m not sure it’ll be possible or not, as I’ll have to complete the little scripting engine I created, so it’ll be able to handle the special stuff I want to do for the ending sequence…

Same as usually, we’ll see where I stand in 1 week, cya !

1. I’m from the South of France, we have a slight tendency to exaggerate over here  ↩

2. ok, I know why ; it’s because there was already all the sword sounds & a few grunts, so the battles were far from being completely quiet, and there were also the great ambiance tracks to accompany me during the exploration ↩

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Dare to Jump ?

I’m back on track ! (or almost)

Start of last week has been a bit hard, as I was still sick, but after a few more of days of tests & tries, I finally managed to understand what I should do for the sounds, and how to do it !

So now a good bunch of mobs already have their correct sounds, and in a couple of days, all should be done. The mobs are a lot more convincing & frightening now that they yell, scream & grunt all the times..!

I also added a few other sounds : for the inventory, the force fields, etc… Once I’ll be done with the Mobs, I’ll do the sounds for the spells & abilities, and then the weapons, and it’ll be all done, and it’ll allow me to do a new gameplay video.

On another aspect, I got the armor loot created by a 3D artist freelancer, so that’s 1 thing less to do.

That’s all for now, cya !

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Slash & Big Slash

Ouch, last week I got sick, so I wasn’t able to work for the best part of it…

I got some kind of bad throat-ache with fever & all, and right now I’m still not 100% healed, but fever is gone and globally I’m almost alright so I’m ok to work today.

Nevertheless, last week, I started to work on the audio improvements. Footsteps are now much better. Throwing items does a woosh sound, and a poke sound when they touch the floor.

I also started to look into mob sound. I had hoped to find some game ready sound library, but actually, the existing ones are very low quality, so I had to get a more advanced library ; quality is much better, but I’ll have to adapt (or remix) the sounds so they can be used in game. Overall, I guess it’ll be better for the game, but it’ll take a lot more time than planned initially to manually handle each sound creation. I’ll try to do all that this week and see where it goes.

That’s all for now, cya !

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I’m on Fire !

Woh, last week went exactly as planned !

So 1st, you can see on the screenshot above the new Scorch visual FX, which is pretty neat ! And you can also see the slash effect for all the melee attacks (some attacks produce a bigger or smaller effect). This allowed me to create the 1st gameplay video of the game. Check the previous post if you want to watch it.

For the 2nd part, the story, it hasn’t been as much easy. One year ago, when I was thinking about it, I imagined a ton of stuff, but it’s pretty hard & long to put all the stuff in the game, especially without creating specific 3D models & environments to match the story details. So I did the bare minimum to get a little story going on, all that with dialogues and a few notes (and a tomb with a dead body ). My 1st hope is that the players won’t think “oh doh, it’d have been better to not have anything at all instead of this”, and my 2nd hope is that the players get slightly intrigued and curious to know how all that will end.

Building the story into a game is very different than writing a book. I wrote a couple of books, also short stories, but in a game, the story telling is much different and requires a lot of visual support, so it requires a lot of effort & thinking to put all the elements together, even when there’s not much to tell.

Anyway, it’s done now ; maybe I’ll polish a bit some details after the Beta Test reports, but it probably won’t change much.

This week (and possibly a part of the next one), I’m going to work on the sound FX. It is long due, as they didn’t change since the Alpha 1 ! If I can manage to do everything I want, this should greatly enhance the game atmosphere (and will deserve a new video! ).

Cya next time to check how all of this will have turned out !

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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..!

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.

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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 !

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 !

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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 ).

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 !

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