Ahoy there!

 

These last weeks we’ve been working hardly (or hardly working) on the enemies of Okhlos.

A lot.

Like, really a lot.

 

One of the most enjoyable things in Okhlos is fighting enemies. Early on, we figured out that one of the cornerstones of the fun and variation in Okhlos is to have enemies with very different mechanics. So we started establishing which mechanics were interesting enough to explore. Besides that, we have to put the mechanics in context, so we have to do a lot of research to determine which enemies will appear, when will they appear, and keep them coherent with the rest of the whole.

 

So we established 21 mechanics that we think are cool. But! Besides that, some of these mechanics can work with each other! So suddenly, we had a lot of new stuff that we didn’t think of! Basically, we have 21 behavior archetypes and a lot of combinations to do. We still don’t know how many enemies Okhlos will have. But I think that we’ll have plenty of interesting challenges.

 

So, besides the behavior, we have the sprite part (my part, the cool part). I’m actually making a lot of tests to see how they look. Trying different palettes and different sizes for the monsters.

 

One of the things I did was remaking some of the old enemies. Here you can see some of the progress.

 

 

As you can see in the image above, the Prophetai and Hosioi have their eyes covered, which makes them darker and gritty, because of Nolan.

The Nemean lion found a stash of steroids.

Also, the Hosioi now share the size of the Prophetai, because the Prophetai now summon a different creature!

 

Here are some enemies.

Here you can see:

-Some ideas for the Posidon’s stage creatures.

-A warrior that protects himself with a shield, and a color variation

-Some satyrs. One of these is based  on this guy.

-Some centaurs. They will focus on the mob and trample them.

 

Finally, I want to finish the post with some unjustified screenshots!

The Calydonian boar

The Nemean Lion

Some Hephaestus’ machine

And the three of them together

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Hi there!

This week we decided to try something different. Not only to give a breath of fresh air but also because we don’t know how many people will be reading the blog this week, that the GDC is taking place. So, we thought of making a compilation of all the amazing “lets play” of Okhlos there have been so far.

We haven’t made an oficial trailer yet, so this seemed like a good opportunity to show you a little bit of in-game footage. Of course, all of these videos were captured from a very early version of Okhlos (from version 0.2.x to be accurate), and you will see there still is a lot of work to be done. But even so, if you are one of those following us that haven’t seen the game in motion yet, here is your chance!

Having said that, in no particular order, here they are:

MegaPiemanPHD

@megapiemanPHD

 

Gaming Faster Than Light

@GamingFTL

 

8BitNinja

@The8BitNinja

 

The Mr. Dudepuppet

@dudepuppet

 

And last but not least,

Kotaku

http://kotaku.com/imagine-pikmin-but-with-greek-philosophers-1510025170

@Papapishu

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Hello there! Another week, another update*.

This time, we talk about the mob-size indicator, whom you may remember from a few weeks back, when we talked about some of the changes in the HUD.

The HUD , by the way, is still undergoing dramatic changes. Not everything ended up looking particularly pretty, but we are focusing on usability before beauty. We can always add some lens flare over the sprites in order to give them the J. J. Abrahams cool vibe later.

Back to the mob-size indicator.  We were reviewing the latest version I had designed when Sebastian suggested that the image representing your mob switched dynamically, depending how many people you had.  We immediately thought that it was a terribly cool idea. We love putting random, dynamic things in our games (100 unique phrases for Gravity Fleet’s main menu window, your welcome). So we embraced the idea, and put it to work.

Here are the first images we came up with, but it’s very tempting to do a LOT of them:

 Full disclaimer: After reaching 100 people, I ran out of ideas, and things started to get weird…

 

 

 

 

 

The guy from behind is doing the “Benedict Cumberbatch photobombing” maneuver.

I ran a 4 shorter for this to be a cool reference.

The mob is going to give this guy the Cacofonix-treatment in any moment.

We are kinda obvious sometimes

I haven’t done the majority of the kings yet, so picture this but with a few more crowns.

Overcrowded!

 

Well, that’s it for this week! Stay tuned  for next week’s update!

 

*Where available

 

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Yes, I know, inception is putting an idea in the head of someone and not precisely recursion, but nowadays is a recursion synonym. And the other option was naming this post “Yo dawg, I heard you like prefabs”.

(All THE IMAGES ARE SCALED DOWN. CLICK THEM TO OPEN THEM IN A NEW WINDOW)

Well, this week we are going to talk about a problem that, although we finally managed to solve,  had us trying lots of different solutions and has given us many head aches, a problem named Nested Prefabs.

Unity’s prefabs are instantiable objects. The problem is that these objects can’t be placed inside other objects, without losing the reference to the original object. It would be like a Flash MovieClip, but the main difference is that the MovieClip allows children to maintain their original reference.

Why did this bother us so much? Well, each stage in Okhlos, is composed by four chunks. Each chunk is, in turn, composed of different buildings. And each building is composed of different props and structures.

CHUNKS

This is a chunk. The main component of the chunks are buildings, but they can also have other elements like hazards, enemies, props, etc., and some of these can be completely randomized.

BUILDINGS

The buildings are composed of a main structure and different props, also some other decorations which may be sprites or the like.

PROPS

Props are the weakest destructible elements. They usually have a small structure and some sprites.

 

The following image will perhaps better illustrate how these things, chunks, buildings and props, fit together.

As you can image by now, when we add this hierarchy to the prefab’s problem you end up with three o four levels of lost references for each chunk or building. At first we simply tried to deal with this without resorting to any kind of nesting of prefabs, but it came at a high price. Basically, we had to redo every chunk and building a couple of times.

What we do now, is use a script we named Building Holder. That script holds a reference to a prefab, and instantiates it on runtime.

This reference points to an object of GameObject type, thus it can be either a GameObject in the scene or a prefab. What we found out when we started using this was that if the reference pointed to itself, when we hit apply, it stored a reference to the Game Object in the scene, not to the actual prefab.

You can see it (kinda) more clearly here:

The green line shows how the reference points to the Project view (to the actual prefab). The red line shows the object in the Hierarchy view (which is the scene view, what we don’t want to happen). And the blue lines show the objects’ structure (chunk, building, prop).

To set the reference point to actual prefab and not  the instance is fundamental to be able to modify a building without having to modify its instance in each chunk (or to put it in other words, to be able to modify a building once instead of gazillion times) but luckily we now how to do it.

 

Finally, a few screenshots showing some chunks together:

 

And closing up this week, a tree destruction .gif!

 

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These past few weeks, we’ve been working on having cool ruins to replace the buildings when they are destroyed.

This was not easy. In the first place, we don’t want to have stupid amounts of geometry going directly to your video card. In order to maintain the low poly look, we have to be resourceful in how we show the destruction.

While doing this we had to resort to nested prefabs (which we will cover next week. Spoilers!), deal with a lot of trouble we had with the .FBX and with the project order in almost every fracking level of it.

Well, here is the thing:

First, we had these nice little buildings, each one in its own file.

That was cool, except for the fact that when we decided to add the ruins, some of the buildings shared the destroyed version. So, duplicating the ruins in each file would have added useless geometry, and not doing it would have been messy (and my little OCD bug would have killed me).

We didn’t have an satisfactory way of doing it. So we decided to put the meshes in a few .FBXs. Doing this would mean less file access, and putting the same ruins to share models would save us a lot of polys. And everything would be tidy.

In our organized wall society, we do not tolerate new ideas.

So we ended up with only two or three files in this fashion, using only two or three textures per file. I think it is pretty optimized, but not perfect. I really wanted to optimize everything. I… have… to optimize… more…

 

I’m implementing all the solutions in the city of Delphi and when everything is working, I will do the same on the other cities.

As almost every modeler using Unity knows, I have to work with both the modelling tool and Unity to really know how it’s going to look. So, here is how it looks in Unity!

(Click to enlarge!)

Well, next week we will talk about a really bummer, which is… NESTED PREFABS!

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I have to stop using so many music references for the titles. But they are an easy way out, and I’m lazy!

Anyway, very briefly, these past weeks we’ve been finishing up the design of most of Okhlos’ HUD and windows. We had to make a lot of hard choices, and we are still changing a lot of things that aren’t closed yet.

(Our previous HUD vs. the new one. Click to enlarge!)

It’s hard, because you have to anticipate how the player will interact with the given information, so you have to guess a lot.

The most significant change was adapting everything to a 1 on 1 pixel aspect. Every element was 2x in the original pixel art work. We decided (actually, I didn’t consult Sebastian and went on with it without telling him until it was finished) to make everything 1x, meaning to respect the pixel art as is.

This is the Items Thing (technical terminology). It’s function is to show you the keys assigned to each item and tell you if anyone in your mob is carrying one of those items.If you don’t have an item, it will be shown in gray.  The image you see is here is the one that will be shown if you are using a joystick, we didn’t do the keyboard graphic yet. And as you can see, it’s much prettier if you treat each pixel as a pixel, instead of scaling them.

This is the story of the basic buttons. At first, we used to use the Dalek font (don’t know the relation between a Greek font and Dr. Who) and the sprites at 2x. Later, we switched to a more pixel-friendly font. Finally, last week, we took them to the actual size.

Here you can see the mob count tab, that shows the number of people you have in your mob , how it was and how it currently is .

The “1P” in the first  image is a sign of how much more we were focused on multiplayer during the early stages of development. The second attempt added the mob’s rage bar. This bar basically shows how rampageous your mob is,  increasing when the mob smashes things or tramples enemies, and decreasing over time. Finally, I made the third option last week, it’s not final yet, but we decided to show a mob icon/graphic, and separate the bar from the mob count.

(click to enlarge!)

This is the pause menu. This may be the most important window of all. Here, you will see all of your units, heroes, and the mob modifiers. If you have a hero that gives you +10% attack bonus, you will see it here. It’s faaar from finished yet but we think that is important to keep it as simple as possible. Too much information will ruin the window completely, it will frustrate the player when navigating it. So we will try a lot of mockups to see how we can best convey all the information.

And keep in mind that things can get a little crowded.

Yeah, that’s too much information. Feel free to feel overwhelmed by clicking the picture and pressing F11 (In chrome and in PC, don’t know in other systems).

As always, we love your comments! You can reach us in Facebook, Twitter or right down here! We try to answer all of them! (Please stop sending us nude pictures)

Well, as John Green says, Don’t forget to be awesome!

Roque

(Yeah, I know, I never sign the posts, I suppose that I’m very hipster lately)

 

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