A new year started. We can now talk about Okhlos’ development in terms of years. Many things happened throughout the first year of development, good and bad. While it usually is a good idea to recap the year we found it too cliche, so we did something else and took the time between last update and this to rest.

The result was this update about a topic I usually hate: logos.

Nowadays, designing a logo seems to be about following a series of strict steps. A lot of logos are very similar to each other. Looking at a small sample of logos, we can see the following characteristics.

• Letters with gradients.
• Broad strokes to make the title stand out.
• Leters in perspective.
• Metallic.
• Illustrations framing the design
• Constrast between colors (mainly primary colors)
• Vector friendly
• Easy to read (this is not the case)

Some excellent designs came out from following these guidelines. Even Gravity Fleet didn’t escape from them (although that doesn’t make it a good example). But there have also been lots of logos that are very formulaic.

Many of you know my background. I am an illustrator, not a graphic designer, so I have enough of an aesthetic sense to realize when something is wrong but it would be hard for me to find a way to fix it. So I end up fixing it by trial and error, which is both costly and tiring.

We have a mini-rule for a lot of our deicisions regarding Okhlos: doing the opposite of what we did with Gravity Fleet. Taking that into account, I decided to not priorize readability above everything else and focused on making the logo in a pixel art style that went along with the game’s aesthetic, at the same time making it a nice image by itself. I didn’t follow guidelines for design, readability, color contrast nor anything like that, simply an image that says “Okhlos” and that the splash suggested the game’s context.

I started the most obvious way, by making stone letters.

This is the first draft. Perspective, stones with some cracks and the design inside the letters that have a little Greek touch. The romboid-shaped “O” were something that I ended up taking from my research on different fonts.

These are some of the fonts that I researched. From this list I took various characteristics that suggested Greece.

Found the characteristics, I started scribbling different ideas about a more polished logo. With ornaments, styles and other embellishments.

The problem with these approaches was that the letters , although they were made out of stone, didn’t have much weight. Somethign was missing.

I decided to made the letters in 3D, change the font and play around with the camera to make it look like something stupidly huge seen from ground level.

This brought me to this next version, which let me start the pixelation and gave me a clearer vision of what I was working to acomplish.

To make the 3D I ran into a series of problems. Mi idea was to take my strokes from Illustrator to Max and work them there. They were horrible hours of trial and error, checking what could be imported into Max, because almost everything that I exported from Illustrator was rejected by Max. Finally I found a way to save an .ai as a Legacy (Version 8 ) and that solved my problems using Max to extrude the shapes from Illustrator. After that, it was all camera effects.

This is how it looked on Max. The image above shows the first part of the work where I start drawing over the letters, separate them and correct some imperfection, etc.

Once I have this as a base, I started pixelating this but at double the resolution I should, making me waste some hours. Finally, I ended up with the 3 options that I show next. Although none of them are finale, they are close to what we believe could be a good logo/splash for Okhlos, always taking into account the idea that we want it to work more as an image than as a logo.

This one, after a lot of failed tries that I haven’t posted (from all the stages of design, there are a lot that I think should not be seen by humankind), is the one that had that illustration component that I was looking for. I cleaned up the rocks quite a bit, take off the lines (that in this case makes it more readable) and added a few city things in the background.

Although I think that unfortunately we can’t close the chapter on logos, we are closer to what we are looking for.

Any feedback is welcome! And yes, the name from the update it’s inspired by this song.

Last week Roque wrote a little bit about heroes in Okhlos. Today I will keep on writing about them. Why? Because heroes are a key part of the game.  Getting the right heroes in your mob can make difference between drinking spiced wine over the ruins of mount Olympus and getting squashed like an insect under Zeus’ flip flops.  Not only that, heroes will make each mob different, will make you play in a different way, will let you build up different strategies. Heroes are everything.

There are several ways to get heroes.  As it had been said, some heroes may be found while exploring the levels and other through the hero market. Yet other heroes you will only find after defeating certain enemies: for example, you may be able to free a hero from the clutches of an evil monster and then add them to your mob.

Another things that makes heroes different from the rest of units is that heroes do not die.  They can be knocked out, yes, even the mighty Heracles can be sent out of combat by direct blow from Ares, but unlike regular people Heracles will rejoin the mob when you start the next level or when certain other conditions are met. So heroes are somewhat immortal but can still be temporarily disabled and leave the poor helpless leader alone at the mercy of an enraged cyclops.

There will be lots of heroes, so we divided them into five categories:

1) Super Units.  These heroes are an enhanced version of the regular unit types.  Hero warriors will be much stronger and hit harder than regular warriors, hero defenders will be much tougher, and hero slaves will be much more … err … enslaveable? Well no, hero slaves will also be much better as units than their regular counterparts. Heracles, who was presented last week, would be a perfect example of this, as he is the über warrior.

2) Kings. Rulers increase your mob limit. At game start, your mob can’t have more than 50 members, without counting animals and heroes. But the kings increase that number.

Take Lycaon for instance. He was king of Arcadia, quite a big shot at his prime. So much that he thought he could fool Zeus. To do that he devised a cunning plan. A cunning and incredibly, ridiculously twisted plan. He invited the lord of Olympus over for dinner and, to test if he was really all-seeing and all-knowing, he chopped off one of his own children and served him as one of the dishes. The god of thunder noticed this and was not very happy (he is a picky eater). He immediately turned Lycaon into a wolf-like creature and killed the rest of Lycaon’s children (he had like fifty of them, which may be why he thought that the best way to test someone’s omniscience was to serve them one of his kids but still…).

Currently in the game Lycaon increases your mob capacity by 25, which is  a 50% increase from your starting value. He is the king that gives the highest increase in mob capacity so far, but this comes with a high cost: when Lycaon enters the mob, he will immediately kill 25% of your people. So… yeah…

3) Healers. Do you remember Asclepius from last week? Well, he was a healer. He is THE healer, actually. The demi-god of healing and medicine. Nobody does it better. But there were many others that were also versed in the ancient mysteries of medicine, and this category is where they belong. Like Hippocrates.

You may remember Hippocrates from oaths like the Hippocratic Oath that doctors all over the world take and uphold, even up to this day. Not only was he the greatest physician of his time (and you could say he kept on being the greatest physician for centuries, since his teachings were regarded as perfect and for a long time no one even dared to seek further improvements), he was also a badass. He was imprisoned for his then radical views on medicine, and held captive for twenty years (during which time he never backed down and instead spent the time writing medical treaties). He was the Mandela of medicine but bald, and he could heal more units at the same time. So if you have an injury… if no one else can heal you… and if you can find him… maybe you can hire… Hippocrates (cue in theme music).

4) Unit Enhancers. These heroes just make other units, usually of a certain kind, be better at their stuff. So, like a super unit that makes other units neat units. For example:

Leonidas, king of the Spartans. He is remembered for leading the fearless 300 Spartan warriors that almost managed to single-handedly stop the huge invading Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae (and for lots of internet memes after the Zack Snyder movie was released). In Okhlos, Leonidas is a warrior enhancer: he increases the damage output of all the warriors in the mob like, a lot, but at the same time he reduces their defense. All warriors thus become very lethal killing machines under his command, but they may end up having supper in hell after the fight if they are not careful (they will not be).

5) Special Abilities. These heroes are the cream of the crop. The best of the best. The awesomest of the awesome. The … ok, you get the idea. These heroes each have a unique ability that is what separates them from the rest of the crowd. Not a even a programmer that has learned to code using Pascal can fit them into any category other than this generic random mix of a category that is Special Abilities. One example of a hero that has a unique special ability was Oedipus, with his cloning. Another one is Perseus.

Perseus is a another mythological figure that you may recognize from the movies. He was the main character in Clash of Titans for instance. And he killed poor old Medusa. Perseus was one Zeus’ sons (one of his many, many, many offspring) so he had that to his advantage. But he was an illegitimate child so he had… issues… with his father’s wife, Hera. Let’s say that Hera was not fond of the fruit of her husband’s escapades. Among the various wondrous items Perseus got during his adventures and travels (think half the table from the DM handbook!), he had Hades’ Cap of Invisibility. His ability in-game comes from this item, because he is able to turn the whole mob invisible to enemies until they attack (it’s an artifact, its powers are ill-defined at best).

And this is it for now. There will be more heroes, of course, hundreds! But we have to keep some surprises from you. So we bid adieu to you all until next week, when we will talk about paternity tests in the age of haruspices and meddling lightning gods.

For the last three weeks we have been “on the road” with Okhlos, doing a little show and tell / playstesting session at a local nerd fest known as Toronjapalooza, giving a talk about the history of CoffeePoweredMachine and independent game development at Buenos Aires’ largest tech exposition, Tecnópolis, and finally some more playtesting at the EVA 2013 (Argentina’s Videogames Expo). They have been extremely busy and tiresome days but also very fun and exciting. And they were also the first time we showed Okhlos outside our offices. And we learned a lot.

ToronjaPalooza

The first day at Toronjapalooza not many people played the game but most of the ones who did were kids. The youngest one was a four-year-old and the oldest ones were around twelve. We have designed Okhlos as a game that we (basically hardcore gamers with two or three decades of gaming on our backs) would like to play, and we never thought about how someone so young would approach the game, so those were uncharted territories. In addition to this the test level we had put together was ludicrously difficult to beat (mostly my fault, I tend to do that, sorry) so I was fearing an epic disaster. It wasn’t. Instead what happened was that the kids started playing the game in a different way that we had anticipated. The youngest one took to exploring, ignoring all the enemies, the hazards, just walking through the map, focusing on going through obstacles and asking the names of the trees (we had a larch). Others started a small competition to see who could get the largest mob. And one of them not only managed to complete the whole level, but when he found out that that was the only level we had made so far, he went on and finished the level again, beating Apollo’s godly ass a second time.

(Click to enlarge the picture. We put this sentence in every picture you can enlarge and still you dont get it? If it has a little hand, it’s clickeable!)

Tecnopolis

The second stop in our tour was Tecnópolis, where we presented a talk entitled something like Making Games for your Boss, for the Audience or for Yourself: the History of CoffeePoweredMachine. I say we, but It was actually Roque who gave the talk (I just sat the there with José Luis while Roque spoke and cheered him on). But we did spent quite some time working on the content of the talk, trying to put down into words (and slides) what we have learned the past few years working on our jobs in the industry, on our previous game Gravity Fleet and now on our beloved Okhlos. The talk may not have the greatest talk ever but it was a first experience and good one at that. It was also a chance to show a little of the game to more people and we even got actual people asking actual questions after the talk! In case you really want to know how the talk went out, it’s up on YouTube. And it has ENGLISH SUBTITLES! Spanish subtitles also, but I think you don’t care about that:

Another great thing about that week was the conference that took place during that time. On the main stage there were speakers like Zach Gage, Nathan Vella, Ron Carmel and Tim Schaffer and we had a chance to chat with them, to tell them what we were doing, asking their advice and simply hanging around these cool people. It was amazing.

This photo is from the party that took place the friday after the talks:

Sad to say goodbye to all our new Argentinian friends! Thanks for making us all feel so at home! pic.twitter.com/j1Fo3En1RT

— Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) October 26, 2013

EVA

(Photo by Flauros Geek Photo)

And after that came the EVA, were we sat down with a notebook and a controller and showed the game to the people around, which was mostly fellow game developers and hardcore gamers. Everyone we met was very enthusiastic and we got quite a lot feedback from just a couple of hours of playtesting. The feedback was very useful, especially since it came mostly from people with game development experience and knew how to pinpoint specific issues, but at the same time we approached the playtesting with something that Ron Carmel had remarked in the talk he had given last week. We focused on how people played the game, on why did they do some things differently from what we would do. Why they would see things about the game in a different way than us. Sometimes the feedback they gave us shed some light on this, sometimes it was about completely different things, but we tried to keep our focus on that.

 (Yet another awesome photo by Flauros Geek Photo)

One thing I discovered that was pretty interesting in this regard was seeing how a person who has just played the explains the game to another. Let’s say Joe sits down a plays for a while until Lady Marie Von Teslette comes around, then Joe tries to tell her what the game is about and how you play it. I realized that paying attention to what Joe says is a good way to see which things made the most impact on him, which things seemed more important to him. In addition to that Lady Marie Von Teslette gets to approach the game in yet a different way, that is not either Roque or me trying almost desperately (and almost futilely) to tell her how awesome, interesting and special the game is, nor is it just the game on in itself. It is a bit closer to having a friend tell you about a game or reading something in a blog, which how most people end up coming into contact with a game.

And lastly, another thing I realized these last weeks, perhaps the most important thing, is that it’s great to watch people play your game, have fun, get excited about it. It makes it all worthwhile.

We are working hard to get a prototype ready before the IGF deadline. This is taking up most of our time, leaving us with little time to write new amazing and exciting updates. But, at the same time, we don’t want to stop posting updates. It’s fun, it keeps us motivated and getting some feedback is an important part of the development cycle. So we decided to resort to this: posting a bunch of pseudo random screenshots, along with some even more pseudo random comments.

This particular set of pseudo random screenshots are the result of some tests I’ve been carrying out, using different shaders, and also some  good old fashioned fooling around with Unity’s camera effects. Most of the stuff you see here will not be in the game’s final version. They are tests, weird stuff. So posting them here is also a way to put them to rest. Of saying goodbye to them. Farewell, random test!

So, without further ado, here they are. Pseudo random screenshots.

Smoke in the Stone

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Basically playing around with fog here. The grey tint gives it a smokish look. Perhaps we can use something like this if a whole city or area is burning. Or maybe the ancient Greeks had smog too.

Ye Olde Delphi, or the unavoidable need to try a sepia filter

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It just had to be done.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Okay, maybe not so loud since it is a screenshot with no sound whatsoever, but it is indeed a closer look at some of our favorite Greek mobsters. Plus, check out the pecs on that warrior. Someone has been working out!

The Snake Mode

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Or the mob’s conga line if you prefer.

Fisheye Mob 

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Testing some more camera effects. Here another of the classic ones. I don’t think this will make it to the final cut, though.

A Lighting Test

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Just a single philosopher, in the middle of nowhere. Plus Unity’s editor thingy up there in the corner (that’s the technical term for it, don’t let anyone fool you).

The Shadow Mob

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Booo! They are dark and evil… You know, I kind of like how they look. I am thinking we could keep one of these guys as a hidden character and name him Niatsabes Euqor…

Under Medusa’s Shadow

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Testing an overlay effect with a frame from Medusa’s death animation.

Medusa’s Mist

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More crazy medusa-induced effects.

Conga Line, Part II: Someone shouts “B”

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And as a bonus a merry group of Carmenmirandesque medusas of different sizes try to join the party.

The Brightest Day 

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And still quite some time until someone invents the sunglasses.

A Poor Old Man in the Snow

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Life can be tough sometimes. This was a test using a snow shader  (something that would have allowed to create a snow level without changing a whole lot of textures) but it didn’t work out very well. Okhlo’s style (low poly, sprites, pixel art) doesn’t lend itself very well to something like this.

Dusk At Delphi 

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Both Roque and I agree that this was the best of the lot. It was the result of testing different shaders and playing around a little bit with the scene’s lights. If everything works out the way we plan, be prepared for more dynamically lightning in Okhlos!

When we first started discussing the game’s idea with Roque, and the word mob was mentioned, another word come into mind: “empanadas” (because we were hungry, and we always eat some delicious emapanadas on Fridays). But immediately after lunch yet another word come into my mind: flocking. The algorithm that mimics the coordinated movement of bird flocks or fish schools (http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/) seemed like the way to go. Sure, people were not going to behave exactly like fish or albatrosses, but the three rules that govern the flocking algorithm, separation, alignment and cohesion, were going to be more than useful to determine how the people in the mob behave.

The three rules of the boids: Separation, alignment and cohesion

Being the lazy programmer that I am … errr … I mean, the efficient programmer that I am, and trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, I set out to seek flocking algorithms implementations on Unity. Soon I came across this neat little set of scripts on the Unity Wiki: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Flocking. It was very simple to implement and the use of a centralized controller made it very efficient as well. It allowed to create a mob of several hundred boids at a very low performance cost. So I used this as the mobster’s behaviors’ foundation stone. Our early prototypes were all done using a modified version this algorithm.

And so everything was peace and quiet, months went by and the game grew until one day the algorithm was not enough. The game’s needs had changed and it was time to write a new super efficient yet flexible and versatile flocking algorithm … or search the web again. So I did the latter and this time met Unity Steer: http://arges-systems.com/blog/category/unitysteer/

One of the older prototypes

Unity Steer proved to be very flexible, you can add or remove different steering behaviour to get different results easily. It seemed just what we needed. But this came at a performance cost. My good old MacBook started to suffer when a couple hundred boids were added.

What I did then was a fiddle around for a while with the different behaviours, to see which combination worked best (and because it was fun to do so, wiiiii, flocking!!!) until I found something I liked and then merged the behaviours together. The next step was doing some more optimization, taking advantage of the mob’s specific characteristics, removing a little bit of this, merging some of that, profiling, adding a little bit of that, profiling again, checking imdb to settle some arguments about Willem Dafoe’s career, removing some more stuff and profiling once more. You know, the usual mob optimization process.

The Cubes are Back

When it was all over, several hundred boids were moving smoothly around the computer’s screen, doing their boiddy things, aligned, separated yet cohesive. The boids were ready to be integrated into the game, to spark some life into those pixelated and angry Greeks. Pure beauty.