The One Where The Team Makes A Prototype
As I sit here feeling bad about being a week late on delivering a devblog… I realised, why not share WHY I’m a week late? A bit of an explanation but also maybe a bit of healing for myself :D
Currently, the team is working extremely hard to deliver the Alpha version of our game – For us, this means the entire game is playable from beginning to end. We know there will be bugs, balancing issues and probably many other problems, but it means we can get a really good sense of exactly how *Fun* the game is, and where the biggest issues lie.
But before going into too much detail about that, I figured it would be good to take a step back and explain a bit more about our game development journey – specifically from the game developer lens.
Each week there will be another blog released highlighting the different phases of how we’ve been working to bring Fading Echo to you all. So let’s start at the beginning.
Making a Prototype
Back in early 2023, the first Fading Echo prototypes were created. There were two big goals; create something very fun, and create something very visually appealing. In order to do both of these sincerely it was decided to deliver two builds instead of one (to rule them all). This came in the format of: A gameplay prototype, and a visual prototype. Both created in Unreal Engine, the team worked together (but also separately) to deliver something special.
The idea was that if we could make both a beautiful game, and a fun game, then we had a much better chance of making a beautiful, fun game. Seems simple, right? Well, here is a bit more information on how we handled that.
Maybe one day we can do a documentary, or an art book, showing how the game has changes over the years. I’m filled with nostalgia and warmth looking back at these old builds (but that could also be the heating and endless tea).
Each milestone we would focus on one component of the game and ensure core issues and questions were addressed, they were all documented. (GP = Gameplay)
The Gameplay Direction
This was the earliest version of One’s water form, a simple blue square that left a trace of blue circles behind the player. We tested different systemic reactions to see what works; we had to find a way for the reaction to be fun in both exploration and combat.
To save time, we used the inbuilt Unreal character model and basic shapes for enemies while we prototyped to see what would work. The enemies had to be fun on their own, but also connect to systemic reactions.
The Visual Direction
From the beginning, we always wanted to create a world that was beautiful but played with player’s expectations. The world should be intriguing but a bit intimidating. Using Unreal Engine, we wanted to challenge ourselves to really push how we rendered our world and made the game look different in both the assets we make but also the way we represent them on the screen.
The original art prototype was far more realistic than what we have – we relied on mostly assets we could purchase online as opposed to now where we have hand crafted every aspect. We tried to figure out what the scale of One is in relation to the world. Defining a reality where the character is powerful in her own right, but still a small part of this much bigger world.
A big challenge we knew we had to solve was how we would represent the different fluids in the game. Water is notoriously difficult to represent both visually and with physics, so we had to know that we had to solve that before embarking on a multi-year project based that is largely focused on the concept of water.
Once this goal was accomplished, we sit down and review – is the game we are making worth making? It might seem like a simple question but it takes a lot of reflection and putting aside egos to be sure. Is there a market for it? Is it unique against other games? Is there enough that is familiar? Once we feel like we can confidently say YES to all these questions… well, then… we make a game!
More to come next week 😉
The Emeteria Team
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