Another week goes by, another update. This week’s update will be divided into two parts. The first one and the second one.

 

Fountains

As I was telling you last week, we have changed Okhlos’ level design paradigm. I am now making chunks, that hold information about how many enemies the chunk will hold, the hazards and the little houses. Making these chunks has become a completely pleasant activity (at least for now). It’s like building dioramas. The bad thing is that it takes time (just like with dioramas).

Click to enlarge

Basically,  between drawing sprites, modeling and making little roads that are consistent within the chunks, I created a new hobby for my self. All I need now is a display that keeps the prefab spinning all day and to put it in a showcase (years of painting miniatures).

 

Anyway, this lead me to touching up the fountains.  The fountains had been hastily made, with the idea that I would eventually have to touch it up. Besides, putting the fountains alone made them look odd, so I had model some benches taking into consideration the fact that fountains were a meeting spot in ancient times.

 

First I start with the model.

 

I take the mesh to Unity. As with all the other textures, I use point as the filter mode, so as to give it the pixel-art-look.

(These are the typical settings we use on the textures so that they can be shown in all their pixel splendor )

 

Then, I add the animated sprites with 2DTollkit.

 

Some of you may recognize some of the characters in these fountains. It’s purely coincidental.

 

The gif’s resolution is not the best but you can see the animation very clearly. Also, some of the gifs are at double speed. Definitely there is some room for improvement on my gif capturing skills.

 

Events

This week, so as not to lose the habit, we were showing Okhlos at a little event in Argentina. There were very few attendants, but the people who had the chance to test the game were delighted with the mechanics. How the mob moves and destroys everything in its way was something everyone pretty much enjoyed. Based on what Schell says about games having to start as toys, I think we are off to good start. Moving around in the game is fun in itself, without taking into account any of other extra mechanics. While we were there we had the chance to see that some people didn’t quite understand the tutorial, so, besides promoting the game a little bit, which is always welcomed, we managed to use this event as a mini playtesting session.

 

The second event we “attended” was MicAtlantica. We weren’t technically there, but Okhlos was, to the rejoice of everyone attending the event. MicAtlantica is taking place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

 

You can see a list of all the games in the event here. We are delighted to be able to be part of it, even if we are not there physically. Just being one of the ambassadors of the Argentinean’s game industry is quite a merit in itself. So if you are in Spain, go play it and tell us what you think!

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Ahoy there! This week, I will introduce you to one of the more important changes that we’ve done to the game so far.

Here is the thing: After a careful planning and analysis, we came to the conclusion that developing 12 levels will take me (Art only) a year and a half. The cost was too damn high! Also, in a few playtesting sessions we found that players didn’t seem to fully understand the objective. In addition, we found that the challenge in the mechanics was not sooo much fun.

So, the problem was: Making levels took an incredible long time and effort, and  creating different challenges for every level felt inconsistent (like we glued a lot of different things altogether). What’s the solution? We don’t know for sure, but we found an easy way to test a new system.

Basically, using cities divided into small areas and building them up procedurally. Each world (we call each city a world, Delphi, Sparta, etc. would all be different worlds) is composed of two to five areas. You have to complete (usually, destroy) an area, in order to advance to the next one. When you reach the final area you will face the god of the world, and after you defeat the god, you will advance to the next world (Tebas, Sparta, Athens, Vegas, etc.).

This is a chunk. -Say “Hi” chunk. -Hi chunk

Each area in turn is composed of chunks. Each chunk will have data on the type of enemies that it will hold, also if it has hazards and environment stuff.

This is not only to help us deal with level design far quicker, but also pushes us forward to be able to take a lot of design decisions. The end result with this approach is that it gives Okhlos a much more arcade feeling. That’s incredible good. It feels faster, more challenging. Also, it gives us the power of infinity in the level design. That could be a lot (or absolutely zero). But definitively give us a game which is fun to replay,  where you can find new things in each playthrough. And that is amazing.

This is ye olde static delphi.

This could be the new Delphi, or not! It will always change! Science!

 

This could give you an idea of how the cities are gonna be. It’s composed of 3×3 chunks. Each chunk has 10×10 tiles. Each tile can have anything (enemies, props, houses, shops, hazards, etc.).

 

Well, all of this makes a tremendous change in the game, but we are quite enthusiast about this. We see a lot of potential for this decision, and the current build we are developing, looks amazing. As always, thanks for reading!

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After the Okhlos tour,  we can now focus on what’s important: the game. At least for now, it’s incredibly difficult to cover all areas of game development, being only two guys (plus we have to do things like writing this update :P). So, this week, I kept my original plan of making Ares’ minions.

 

Ares was the first god we had. I chose him because in the early prototype phase, we needed a warrior god, a melee oriented boss. So Ares was the logical choice. Then we had the semi bosses, which we knew had to be sons of Ares. Ares had a lot of sons, but we focused on two of them: Phobos & Deimos. Phobos being fear, and Deimos being terror. These two concepts were strong enough to give us some interesting mechanics for the semi bosses. Also they sounded cool as hell.

Here are a few sketches of Phobos & Deimos. I think I don’t need to tell you that you can click in the picture to enlarge it.

As you see, I searched for a grimy look in Deimos, but the challenge was to not be too Hades-like. It was important not to relate Deimos with Thanatos (Death), who isn’t even sketched yet but will surely be in Hades’ rooster.

We ended up with Deimos having a white and red robe, to follow Ares’ palette. He will be more of a ranged attacker. Phobos in the other hand, was easier to design. We took him to a primal, more savage conception, with lion hair, and fire eyes. He will be more melee oriented.

The cool thing is that each of them, represents a part of Ares. Ares will have area attacks, and melee attacks as well. So, in the Ares battle, he shows the two facets of their sons.

Here are in context, Phobos, Deimos, Ares, an Ares minion, and a philosopher.

 

Finally, the stage has to have a lot of enemies! So we designed some cyclops and a few warriors. The good thing about this, was that we had the main animations for the ordinary cyclops, so adding some Ares clothes was not much of a problem.

You can see the comparison between two running cyclops, to see what we had to do to animate them.

Also, we introduced our first rock thrower unit! He runs, throws rocks, and dies. Doesn’t seems like much, but he can incredibly dangerous if he is in the right spot.

Below are the rest of the variations of the common units of the level, alongside Ares.

As you can see, this was all fun and games, but there is a problem. The decided to make A BIG CHANGE in Okhlos… This is driving us crazy, but we think it’s a tremendously good change. What we are changing is… [CLIFFHANGER!!! DEV BLOG POST WITH CLIFFHANGER! SO ORIGINAL!] Check out what’s the big change next week.

 

To finish, we want to say thanks to the people of Bundle In A Box, for nominating Okhlos for the Indie DEV grant. It’s a big honor for us being nominated. Also, if we win some money would be incredibly cool.

If you don’t know about the dev grant, basically, any person who buys a copy of the strategy bundle, can choose one of the nominated games for the grant to give them some money. The games are not in the pack, they just receive some help from the users. Also, only the most voted game will receive the money.

We are not only doing this for the potential money, (which, surely, isn’t much) but in this way, we can reach more people, and they can get to know Okhlos.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!

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We were working hard to get to the IGF, unfortunately we couldn’t get a stable version on time, also there were a lot of visual things to change, so we decided to give it a try the next year.

One of the things that pushed us back, was a shader problem. We were using transparent sprites, so as to have fade out effects and the like, and that turned out to be a bit of problem when we tried to make the sprites emit and receive shadows. It is not trivial to calculate how a transparent object deals with shadows so that took a while to deal with. Finally, yesterday we did find a work around for this (which ended up being quite simple, our solution was having double sided planes on the sprites and switching shaders). Anyway, this is how the sprites look with the shadows on:

(Click to enlarge the picture)

In the screen, you can see two light emitters: the torch and the ambient light. You can see how the first philosopher receives the light from the torch, how the three characters emit shadows and how the background sprites receive shadow. All the complications we had, fixed in a marvelous picture.

This is a vine version, (I’ve just downloaded the app :P) :

And finally, the incredible youtube version, of a classic day in Delphi:

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This our last update before the IGF’s submission deadline. We are focussing all of our efforts on being able to reach Saturday with a working version of Okhlos. This is practically our wallpaper: http://t.co/hZUONGu0ri

 

We still don’t know if we’ll be able to submit a version of Okhlos, because we think that it’s better not to send anything at all than sending a poor version of the game. We’ll always have next year (and Paris).

 

To illustrate this short update, here is a graphic representation of the feeling around here.

That’s one of Apollo’s arrows, reaching a poor philosopher. We would be the philosopher, and the IGF would be the arrow. I have the pathological need to explain the obvious.

 

Next week we will return to our usual updates! Full of joy and uninteresting facts.

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