06 Dec 2021Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 7: Rebirth

It has been two years since the release of Doughlings: Invasion, our love letter to the timeless classic Space Invaders. After delivering Mayhem Brawler to the iiRcade platform, we've started porting our previous titles on the system, where our classic reimaginations will feel ri

It has been two years since the release of Doughlings: Invasion, our love letter to the timeless classic Space Invaders. After delivering Mayhem Brawler to the iiRcade platform, we've started porting our previous titles on the system, where our classic reimaginations will feel right at home. While in this process, we took the opportunity to tune up Doughlings: Invasion a little along the road as well! Today, we will be talking about how Doughlings: Invasion is changing and what to expect from the title's upcoming update. Buckle up!

What's New?

The regular play mode will turn into the "Campaign" mode and receive multiple additions and balance changes. The most prominent of these new features is the level selection. After defeating the specific boss of that level, players can choose and play that particular section at will. If you've failed to defeat every Queen during your defense against the alien waves, fear not! Upon finishing the current level, the previous DNA tree will be fully upgraded for that specific character. Naturally, selectable levels will be separated between the difficulties.

Another addition is that players will no longer hold a fixed life the whole playthrough. Instead, Morpheus will commence his resistance with a certain amount of lives at the beginning of every level. We believe these implementations will give Morpheus the upper hand on his journey to save his people..

Those who want to experience the authentic way of playing this fixed shooter have the Arcade mode at their disposal. This mode will play just like the original version of the game with minor tweaks and changes. Players will need to save the imprisoned Doughlings and conserve their lives to withstand alien forces until the bitter end. Along with new modes to experience, players will find new mechanical and balance changes. We will be sharing a detailed patch note for those who want to learn what is new in the update, so stay tuned!

This Day We Fight!

As the Sensational video game company, we in Hero Concept love the timeless classics of arcade gaming. Restoring the retro vibes and giving players that nostalgic feeling while making innovative approaches is our passion. We believe, Doughlings: Invasion is a one-of-a-kind experience as a fixed shooter. Due to this title staying true to the classics, it caused an unexpected difficulty for the newcomers. By addressing these issues, we feel the title will shine out brighter than ever.

We can't wait to hear your thoughts about the latest version of Doughlings: Invasion! Be sure to let us know about your resistance against the fearsome and colorful invaders. Until we meet again!

See you around space Doughlings...

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27 Oct 2021Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 6: Inspirations & Fun Facts

Hello! It sure has been a while since we've done one of these. Welcome to Doughlings: Invasion's 6th developer diary. We will be having exciting news about Doughlings: Invasion in the upcoming days. But today we would like to talk about the design inspirations and some fun facts

Hello! It sure has been a while since we've done one of these.
Welcome to Doughlings: Invasion's 6th developer diary. We will be having exciting news about Doughlings: Invasion in the upcoming days. But today we would like to talk about the design inspirations and some fun facts about Doughlings universe. If you want to read other dev diaries as well, be our guest!

Where It Comes From?

Where Doughlings idea comes from could shock you a little bit. In the 1970s there was a Tv Cartoon called "Barbapapa" ( www.barbapapa.com if you are curious about it) In this show, Barbapapa (also name of the species) could transform into anything they want. On those days some of us in Hero Concept was just a child waiting for cartoons on the TV in the morning. So, some of us were raised with this TV show and this made a huge impact on Doughlings creation. Also, Superfrog from Amiga, 90's Worms, and Pokemon's Geodude affected the design of Doughlings too. With those nostalgic elements, we create a cute creature with lots of love.

Our first game's journey was a little bit strange. At first, we just re-skinned a basic brick-breaker game and then we put different elements on it. For example, we added Show Off's. And those Show Off mechanics changed our perspective a lot. We designed Doughlings universe by uniting lots of different genres. But this design process also brings some limitations too. For example, our little friends don't have legs. So when we want to make a beat'em up the game this will limit us because come on... They are Doughlings not a bunch of Geodudes.

In Doughlings: Arcade we didn't want a designated enemy or so much violence factor so Morpheus was "healing" his friends by shooting them with a cure. But in Doughlings: Invasion... Our friend has lots of enemies and Morpheus gonna kick their butts.

Barbapapa, Super Frog, Worms and Geodude

Fun Fact Time!

Doughlings are made of just water and flour. Because of that, you can see a lot of Windmills in the Arcade and Invasion.
Because they are made of flour, they worship "Wheat Deity". At old times there were lots of temples for Wheat Deity but they are most likely a ruin right now.
They have enough technology to observe other life forms in the galaxy but they prefer to keep it simple and live a natural life.
In Doughlings universe, their planet is flat. At old times some Doughlings said it's not flat but round. When those Doughlings who want to prove their theory went to the edge of the world they fell into space.
Their population grows by mitosis. When a Doughling comes to a certain age multiply itself and 2 independent Doughlings will live their lives.

We are very excited to hear your thoughts! Hope to see you soon at our next development diary.

Original post

01 Jul 2019Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 5: Controller

Hello and welcome to the fifth developer diary for Doughlings: Invasion. We wrote some cool stuff at other dev diaries. So you might want to check them out too! Today we would like to talk about controls of Invasion and our point of view to controls. Control Them All Unlike the o

Hello and welcome to the fifth developer diary for Doughlings: Invasion. We wrote some cool stuff at other dev diaries. So you might want to check them out too! Today we would like to talk about controls of Invasion and our point of view to controls.

Control Them All

Unlike the other dev diaries for Doughlings: Invasion, today we talk about more technical stuff. Unity's input interface wasn't enough for us, so we write it from scratch. Because when we were developing Arcade, that interfaces caused a little bit of trouble to us. We don't want to limit our players. The players should choose to play with a gamepad or keyboard setting according to their gaming comforts. Making a control friendly game was a little bit complicated in Unity's interface.

We wanted this control friendly situation in Doughlings: Invasion too. We learned a lot about control mechanism and how to improve them for more "player friendly". We tried to give the freedom we wanted for the players. By the way, that doesn't mean Unity is a bad engine but what we want was more complex then Unity's input interface.

Technical Stuff

The hardest part was approaching to inputs. They are really important in a videogame because those inputs define how player interact with the game world. So we entered a pre-research phase before start coding. Another difficult part was gamepads doesn't have a standard. Yeah, they look alike but their control mapping could be really different. So we had to find controllers and inspect their mapping to support them for our game. What we try to do in Arcade was, when a player touches something on Gamepad, it has to be functioning. So mapping those controls was another important phase for us.

On Windows we support X-Input and for the consoles, we support their native input interfaces. Also on Windows, we support HID devices too. We wrote Joystick interfaces in C and C++. It took 1 week for implementing inputs for each platform. So it takes lots of times, lots of testing and lots of feeling of success.

We are very excited to hear your feedback. Hope to see you soon in another development diary for Doughlings: Invasion.

Original post

11 Jun 2019Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion – Developer Diary Part 4: Multiplatform

Hello and welcome to our 4th developer diary about Doughlings: Invasion. We talked about visual approach, design approach and sound design so far. Today, we will talk about multiplatform development. We hope that you can find something useful in this dev diary. Where Were We? To

Hello and welcome to our 4th developer diary about Doughlings: Invasion. We talked about visual approach, design approach and sound design so far. Today, we will talk about multiplatform development. We hope that you can find something useful in this dev diary.

Where Were We?

To talk about our knowledge and experience about Doughlings: Invasion we have to talk about our first game Doughlings: Arcade first. In the begining, we didn’t develop Doughlings: Arcade for another platform. The multiplatform concept was a little bit hard for us. Then we started to work on it and developed the game PC > Xbox One > Nintendo Switch > PlayStation 4 order. Each platform has its unique difficult parts to make a game.

Probably one of the most difficult thing was platforms’ close source policy. When it’s not an open source system flow of information reduces drastically. So we found information online from the devs questions who did games on those platforms or some information from the official documents which platforms give us. But every document writes for their own system and as a Unity based studio sometimes we had to use unorthodox methods. So we could say, Doughlings: Arcade was our practice ground for a multiplatform world. We learned a lot from Doughlings: Arcade experience and this experience made everything easier when we start to develop Doughlings: Invasion.

What Did We Learn?

When we start to develop Doughlings: Invasion we did Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL) first rather than coding. This way ease the pain a lot. Another thing we learned from this process is every platform has their own save/load system. For example, PC and Nintendo Switch’s save system is not that different because both of them writes the data to storage. But if we talk about Xbox One and PlayStation 4 then we have to include cloud system. Because of PlayStation’s policy, only PS+ members can access the cloud system and non-PS+ members save to the local storage.

Another thing optimized was every platforms’ Achievement systems. For example, in Steam, you can add achievements as you like, but in Xbox One you have to calculate G-Points, in PlayStation 4 you have to think Trophies. In Nintendo Switch you don’t have to worry about all of those things, because Switch doesn’t have an Achievement system.

Conclusion

Every platform has its own regulations. Not knowing those regulations and trying them the first time is always a little bit of hard experience. But we stood strong and embraced everything that we had to do.

We are very excited to hear your feedbacks. Hope to see you soon at our next development diary.

Original post

08 Jun 2019Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 3: Music and Sound Design

Hello and welcome to our third development diary. We mentioned the design and visual approach so far. Today, our topic is Music and sound design. As you know sounds in the game are one of the most important things. If you don't have proper sounds and music every masterpiece game

Hello and welcome to our third development diary. We mentioned the design and visual approach so far. Today, our topic is Music and sound design. As you know sounds in the game are one of the most important things. If you don't have proper sounds and music every masterpiece game could be a disaster. So... Let's begin,

An Old Tune

We received lots of feedbacks from Doughlings: Arcade about sounds and music. We did 3 different songs for 3 different worlds. Estimated playtime was 10 hours in Doughlings: Arcade so players heard the same songs so much.

In Doughlings: Invasion there will be 5 different worlds and 10 different music and Invasion playtime will be around one hour. So players will not hear the same music as Doughlings: Arcade and feel of repetition will be minimized after that.

Another topic that the community complained about was sound effects. Players said "the game is too loud and noisy" because of giggles, laughter and other sound effects. In Doughlings: Invasion we are using more subtle sounds so players can play without disturbance.

An Old Friend: MOD

We want a different approach to music in Doughlings: Invasion this time.

When we think about what can we do about music, an excellent idea comes to our minds. In Space Invaders enemies were getting faster when their number was decreasing and this was bringing so much tension in the game. So we said "Hey, why don't we take this mechanic and speeding up the music too?". When enemies are increasing their speed the music will be getting faster too and the player could feel more tension in their bones.

But of course, this idea brings some problems to the table. Because of the current audio technology when we want to increase music's tempo without changing its pitch we lose quality. So we had to find the solution from older days, from arcade days. We took aid from MOD / XM system. It was a little bit archaic technology but it still works perfectly. Actually, it works because of one wonderful person. Claudio Matsuoka has modernized and uploaded on GitHub and when we reach him for coding of acceleration input he did an amazing job and updated. So thank you, Mr. Matsuoka, for your amazing efforts!

What this MOD system does is really simple actually. Amiga players will know, there is a format called MOD. In this format, you were adding short sample audios and tracker were playing them slow or faster. The icing on the cake is about MOD, it plays them real-time and they are editable so we can edit and make accelerations. MOD helped us so much about making this process smoothly.

Of course we also needed a composer who could use this archaic technology. Our friend Gencay Burnaz has agreed to work with us for the game's soundtrack. Gencay composed hundreds of tunes with Protracker in Amiga 500 era. We couldn't think of another for this job.

We are so excited for your feedback. Hope to see you soon in another development diary.

Original post

29 May 2019Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 2: Visuals

Hello again! Last time we talked about design approach of Doughlings: Invasion. This time we want to talk about how we approached the visual side of Invasion. Let’s dive in and see what changed since our first game Doughlings: Arcade and affect Doughlings: Invasion! What We Did A

Hello again! Last time we talked about design approach of Doughlings: Invasion. This time we want to talk about how we approached the visual side of Invasion. Let’s dive in and see what changed since our first game Doughlings: Arcade and affect Doughlings: Invasion!

What We Did

As we said in the previous blog, the concept of Doughlings: Arcade designed in the mid-’00s and graphics made in 2012. So it looks like a little bit archaic. Of course, we love graphics of Arcade, because we put our love and long sleepless and lots of coffee nights into it. But making graphics in 2012 brings some problems together.

In Doughlings: Arcade there were 90 playable levels but only 9 backgrounds. So players feel repetitive backgrounds a lot and complained about it. Also at one point, every level took 15 minutes to complete so they saw the same background a lot. Arcade was like an illustration and airbrush techniques were used. Because of that, we change this situation in Doughlings: Invasion.

What Are We Going To Do

We approached Invasion's visual style more modern. Using more "cartoonish" visual style for the appeal to modern standards. We removed highlights and show more borders of characters. Doughlings: Invasion seems like more "comic". We are using the Parallax scroll technique so the player can feel progress and depth more. There are 5 backgrounds for 5 different levels.

Also, we changed the GUI too. We simplified it because Doughlings: Arcade was close to mobile style but Doughlings: Invasion is purely designed for consoles and PC. GUI shrank a little bit especially HUD, so we can take advantage of the screen more effectively.

Choosing a character and enemy style was very challenging for us. Because the game is an arcade shooter and has tons of action. Norse mythology comes to our aid and inspired us about our beloved enemies. Our personas come from many different subcultures. So you will find many hidden references as you progress the game.

We are very excited to hear your feedback. See you soon at our next development diary.

Original post

28 May 2019Developer post

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 1: Game Design

Hello! It’s been a while since we published a dev diary but we are making our second title these days and we want to talk about it. Our second game will be in Doughlings universe also and we named it Doughlings: Invasion. A bold name isn’t it? This time we tribute another arcade

Hello! It’s been a while since we published a dev diary but we are making our second title these days and we want to talk about it. Our second game will be in Doughlings universe also and we named it Doughlings: Invasion. A bold name isn’t it? This time we tribute another arcade classic; Space Invaders. We implemented new mechanics and visuals to an old friend. Why we choose Space Invaders is quite simple, we did a tribute to an arcade classic Arkanoid then we thought about it, what else we could do? Space Invaders has the action and tension elements we wanted so we choose to develop an arcade shooter game.

We Learned

First of all, we learned from Doughlings: Arcade A LOT. Of course, we were in the game industry as individuals like decades. But as Hero Concept it was our first game, our first baby. We want to tell you a brief story of Doughlings: Arcade then how it affected our second baby Invasion. Doughligns: Arcade designed in the mid-’00s, so as you figured it is a little bit aged idea but that doesn’t mean it’s an “old” idea. We just waited to meet the right circumstances to develop it. Arcade was designed in the mid-’00s and graphics of the game are made in 2012 and we able to start it’s coding in 2017 so it was a long journey for us. After 2008 the mobile game industry is blasted and this blast forced us to make some changes in game design elements because after 2008 games are evolved and changed in design.

What is changed in the game design since the mobile game blast? For example in Doughlings: Arcade we separated every level in the game so the player had to play a level then exit then had to select another unlocked level to play. In Doughlings: Invasion we returned to our arcade roots. We listened to almost every feedback that reached to us, analyzed it, thought about it, talked about it and in conclusion learned about it.

We Took Action

One of the most complained topics is playing a level over and over again. Some of you can think “what is the problem playing a level more than once? It increases its replay value, it’s a good thing for you”. Yes, you are right, this little mechanic increases the game’s replay value but the problem is at leaderboards. Because if you make a level replayable some players just grind for the score. This causes a problem among the other users in the leaderboards and makes them unhappy. So in Doughlings: Invasion we changed this system.

Leaderboards will still exist (because who doesn’t love leaderboards?) but the game score will be counted at the end of the game, not in every single level. So that means every player has to finish the game in order to be listed in Leaderboards.

Also, we implemented a “permadeath” system so if you run out of your lives then you have to start over again. Doughlings: Arcade has estimated 10 hours of gameplay but in Doughlings: Invasion we shortened it to 2 hours. So if players want to increase their score or just wanted to play in harder difficulties (we have 3 difficulty levels: Normal, Hard, Insane) that will be a shorter replay period.

Another important thing is Achievements. In Doughlings: Arcade players could earn almost 95% of the achievements by just finishing the game. In Doughlings: Invasion we changed it a little, so now the achievement system is not about grinding. We wanted to make our players proud of their hard-earned achievements!

And We Cook

In Doughlings: Invasion players has to be always on alert. You have to stay concentrated in order to not getting shot. We did choose our personas according to that gameplay style. In Doughlings: Invasion personas have to be “fighter and aggressive”, so we inspired from a lot of subculture elements. We also recycled skillsets from Doughlings: Arcade too. For example area of effect damage or Gunslinger’s cross-fire come directly from Doughlings: Arcade. This situation gave us much more flexibility for creating our games and makes easier the whole character making the process.

We are very excited about your feedback. See you at our next developer diary soon.

Original post

Doughlings: Invasion

Updates & announcements

Doughlings: Invasion Version 1.2 Patch Notes

New Additions

New Modes

Tweaks and Changes

Rearm Yourselves!

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 7: Rebirth

What's New?

This Day We Fight!

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 6: Inspirations & Fun Facts

Where It Comes From?

Fun Fact Time!

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 5: Controller

Control Them All

Technical Stuff

Doughlings: Invasion – Developer Diary Part 4: Multiplatform

Where Were We?

What Did We Learn?

Conclusion

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 3: Music and Sound Design

An Old Tune

An Old Friend: MOD

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 2: Visuals

What We Did

What Are We Going To Do

Doughlings: Invasion Developer Diary – Part 1: Game Design

We Learned

We Took Action

And We Cook