Hi fellow managers!
First of all, I want to celebrate with y’all that Spain is the football World Champion! As almost any Spaniard, we are super happy about this, and it feels extra special because we launched a football game this past June, so it has felt super cool to follow our national team to the victory while working on Early Access content for that game! This is for sure something we will remember forever.
Challenges!
Ok, so this championship has given me the idea to write about CHALLENGES: hurdles and obstacles that we have found ourselves during the development of this game. As you may imagine, developing videogames isn’t a straightforward job. Yes, there is a production plan, organization, and things tend to keep on track as our awesome producer, Carlos, planned for us. However, there is always quite some wiggle room left for certain tasks that might take more than planned, unexpected delays, or (Dark Lord forbid!) having to scrap a whole system because you’ve realized it’s not as fun as you expected.
User Interface/User Experience
I’m glad to say that the latter hasn’t happened in this game (YET). One of the biggest culprits tends to be UI/UX. We are never happy with how our UIs look and feel. Every so and so someone on the team points out flaws and it gets scrapped and turned into a newer, better version. I think that having cycled through this process several times in our past games has refined our expertise in the field, because so far we are happy with how it’s looking in this game and we are just tweaking stuff here and there to make some menus more user-friendly. We would love to have your feedback once the Demo is out, as we’re sure there will still be many things to polish!
The Final Boss
This project’s Final Boss is optimization. We have never made a game with so many characters, monsters and props on scene at the same time. If you’re new to game development, every 3D object in a game is made up of polygons, which are planes “stitched” to each other. The more complex the 3D object is, the more polygons it requires to give it its shape. Characters, besides being complex organic objects, also require animations and more extensive code than other objects like benches, cauldrons, traffic signs… All of which increase the requirements to have good performance.
And by far, the most common type of asset in the game is characters, especially Visitors.
How do we overcome the hurdle of hundreds of Visitors ruining performance? We do something called Animation Instancing. It is a process in which I, the animator, and Beto, the tech-artist, have worked together to make all this processing load a lot lighter. Essentially it is a system that picks up all the animations made for each Visitor and runs them, scanning the position of every vertex at any given moment during the animation and saving its position and baking it into a file to read from. Now, when a Visitor starts an animation it just has to reproduce the location of those vertices rather than having bones simulating the movement of each body part for each individual Visitor.
(yes, our default Visitors are all baldies!)
More monster teasers!
And just for the sake of it, let me tease you with a few new monsters that you will find in the game!
Freshly summoned from a far away dungeon plagues with the darkest souls on earth, the Mimic always brings a surprise to those who stay near for too long.
The Oni is a terrible Japanese monsters that won't hesitate on unleashing their fury. Make sure to keep them well fed and entertained, as these brutish beings will be well behaved under good conditions. Sometimes releasing them for a hunt will be necessary...
Straight out of Transylvania the Vampire is our most stylish creature! Don't let yourself be fooled by their nice words, as they are all a ploy to get close to you and turn you into a fellow vampire after feasting on your blood!
That's all, folks!
Hope you enjoyed this, more technical, devlog! We will keep showing you more and sharing news, so stay tuned to the next devlog!
Don’t forget to wishlist the game and be welcome to our Discord server to have a chat with us, the community and be notified of our latest news!
Cheers!
Ro