Hey gang!

It’s been a while since we last talked! (Actually… we kinda talked last week.)

Last weekend we had the great honor of showing off Okhlos’ at the EGX Rezzed event in London! Well, actually, we weren’t there personally, but the game was! It was an amazing opportunity for Okhlos and we want to give a big thanks to Dan Da Rocha, Cissy, and Dom for taking care of our little game during its trip to England and for helping us make this happen! It almost felt like we were there ourselves!

We also wanted to thank our Swedish friends at Glitchnap (who were at EGX Rezzed showing off their own game, Sentree) for offering to babysit Okhlos and keep an eye on it. Even though we didn’t up needing their help thanks to Dan, Cissy, and Dom, the gesture itself and the willingness to help meant a lot to us! You guys are amazing!

And one last round of thanks to the EGX Rezzed Leftfield Collection staff for selecting Okhlos and inviting us to show our game at their event! We were very proud to present there and to be surrounded by so many other great games! If you happened to see the game there, please let us know! We’d love to hear your impressions.

Well, our British adventure and all those thanks aside, at the end of the day this is still a Devblog [citation needed] and we have to spend at least a little time talking about the nitty-gritty – the hard and dirty business of game developing. This week we talk about verbs. In particular, all the great new ones we’ve introduce into our game!

(To tell the truth, these verbs have been in the game for quite a while now, but Sebastián made me realize that we’d never actually talked about them here!)

The idea of adding more verbs actually came from Daniel Benmergui. He was trying out our game and playtesting it yet again (poor, poor fella) and he told us that while it was good that we were tweaking and balancing the elements we already had, there still weren’t enough things for the player to do. There weren’t enough verbs!

Daniel began asking us hard questions. What actions should the player be able to perform? Should there be more of them? If so, what should they be? Finding the answers actually took a lot of time and work, but we think we’ve got it right with these new verbs.

Please note that we are  not talking about the current verbs in Okhlos, only the new ones!

Attack!!

This may seem pretty obvious, but there’s actually a catch to this one. We already had an attack action before, but it was linked to moving. When you moved the mob, the mob would automatically attack whatever it ran up against. With this new approach, now the mob can move without attacking and can attack without moving. This creates interesting new scenarios and options that we couldn’t have had before! (Yay for us!)

Protect yourself!

The complementary opposite of the previous verb – this verb makes your units block attacks! Defending yourself from an attack makes everyone in the mob all stop at once, which might make them easier targets for a little while, but at least the enemies’ attack will hurt a whole heck of a lot less!

I have to admit, the animations for this one are real cute. :3 You know what wasn’t cute though? Going back through all 100+ units in the game and designing a brand new blocking sprite for each of them! It was torture! D:

Disperse!

Disperse! Finally! All the new verbs are cool in their own way, but this one is my favorite. This action makes all the units scatter and spread out. You can use it to escape, to attack several enemies at once (so cool!), and for a couple of other things we’ll explain below:

In previous updates we talked about plagues and poisons. In order to stop them from spreading through your mob and infecting everyone you’ll have to disperse your units until the compromised members heal themselves or die off.

Up until we thought of the disperse action, philosophers were the only units that could recruit more units. Now, however, everyone can! This is actually how the earliest prototypes of Okhlos worked – every unit could recruit more units – but back then it felt a bit too chaotic to us and it seemed that players would have a hard time knowing who they were recruiting. However, we’ve reconsidered our opinion since then and we’ve come to two conclusions:

1. Being able to disperse but still having to grab each unit one-by-one felt pointless and overly complicated.

2. Chaotic is good enough for us!

We adapted the negative units to this change in the recruiting mechanic. We’ve nerfed their negative effects now that they’re harder to avoid.

The sense of chaos feels good, it feels right for the game, but we’ll probably have to work a little more on letting the players know what units they’re adding to the mob in the middle of all that mess.

And those are our new verbs! What do you guys think? Please let us know, we’re always happy to hear your feedback!

Thanks again to everyone who helped us with Okhlos’ little trip to London, it was a great formative experience for our growing game!

See you all next time!

This post was written – poorly – by @rokentronz and soundly beaten into proper shape by @pfque_

It’s that jolly season once again. That magical time, when families gather merrily around the repository  and share amazing tales of commits of old. Yes, it is changelog season again.

If you remember our last changelog we had left off at  Version 0.4.0. There have been four versions since then, leading to version 0.4.4., the version we sent to the EGX Rezzed, but we are going to sum them all up here for dramatic reasons.

The biggest addition in these versions was probably Atlantis, something  you may have guessed from the last series of posts and we won’t repeat here. However, a lot of other things found their way into the game while Atlantis was resurging from the depths, and here they are. Without further ado, we present you the changes from versions 0.4.1 up to 0.4.4. :

Hero Cages

Once in a while, while you are travelling through the monster-infested streets of Delphi, Ephesos or Athens you may run into a cage made of reinforced bronze. What is inside the cage? A random hero eager to join the mob if you destroy the cage! What are you waiting for? Free Adromeda and let her wreck havoc with the rest of the gang! Let Galen loose and wait for the healing to begin! The power is in your hands!

More Units

Roque has put his mad pixel art skillz to use and now he have new female defenders, warriors and philosophers!

Color Tint

Back in the old days, units in the mob would change their color like chameleons. Then they didn’t. And now they do again. We use the color tints basically for feedback. When a unit is attacked it is painted red for a couple of frames. If it gets infected with the plague (Plague? Which plague? Well, keep reading below and you will find out). And if they leave the mob, they get greyed. It’s an instant feedback and very hard to miss. For the win.

Lifebars

Units have always had a certain amount of hit points. Bad guys would hit them and they would lose hit points until eventually they would die. So they have always had a health stat that could be represented with the ubiquitous health bar. However, we never liked the idea of having to micromanage each unit, so that is why we chose not to show the life bars. You shouldn’t worry that much about individual units, you should care about the mob as a whole. Also, having a health bar per unit would mean that there would be a zillion health bars onscreen, making everything very cluttered. And it was this way until quite recently, when Roque had the idea of showing lifebars of the units but only when their health is below a certain threshold. What this does is give you a very quick feedback of the current health status of the units in the mob. And how cluttered the UI becomes, corresponds to how worried you should be about them. If you see only a life bar or two, they won’t bother you too much, and you wouldn’t have to worry too much either. But if the screens starts getting filled with lifebars, then you are in trouble and should start looking for some healing pronto.

Slow Motion Effect

Because Okhlos is so next gen. Or so 1999. I am not sure. But the certain thing is that now when the leader dies, it will trigger a cinematic slow motion effect that will let you locate the new leader more easily in the middle of the mayhem (and if a leader died, chances are there was lots of mayhem going around).

The Plague

We’got a new hazard, the plague, which damages units and spreads throughout the mob if the units are too close to each other (much like you would be expect from a plague). If we are to be accurate, the plague is not technically a hazard, it is more like a new status for the units, the plagued status, that can be triggered by some hazards (plague infested chunks of meat spread throughout the map, for instance) but also by the attacks of some enemies. The idea of the plague came up while we were testing some changes in the core mechanics, and it eventually grew until becoming a full fledged feature as it is now.

Pathfinding System for the Enemies

– Is there a house between you and I? – said the cyclops – That will no longer stop me from clobbering you. I now have the ability to go around it!

The Phantom Mob

We have a new item! We have been calling it the Phantom Mob item so far, although it has absolutely nothing to do with the Phantom Menace (we solemnly swear that there won’t be any Jars Jars. Well, we swear there most likely won’t be any Jar Jars. Disney has been making very tempting offers…). Back to the item. What it does is create a squad of phantom units that join the mob temporarily. You use it and … BAM! You now have a bunch of spectral guys ready to kick ass for you. At least for while, until they return to the aether from where they came from.

 Lots of new Voice Effects

Yup. You can now listen to the mob roar, cheer, scream and yelp as they go around doing mob things. Gordon made a bunch of them and he keeps on making even more so get ready to listen to the sound of the mob in all its glory!

 And the rest of the changes that do not deserve a separate paragraph (mostly because if they did, this post would end up way too long, much like this title)

• Units now jump a little when they join the mob (it would seem they are very enthusiastic about the prospect of an becoming part of an angry mob).
• More juicy on prop and building destruction.
• Tutorial stage completely revamped.
• The way to stop Apolo’s special attack has changed (much more intuitive now).
• The mob now has an onscreen stats showing the accumulated attack power, defense, speed and HP of all the units.
• Hero presentation FXs.
• New minimap graphics.
• The camera now gives you a little more room in the distance in which you move the mob.
• Enemies now hate props a bit more.
• The mob no longer has an onscreen stats showing the accumulated attack power, defense, speed and HP of all the units.Artemis has a new special attack.

In addition to this, as always, there was a fair chunk of bug fixes, tweaks and minor additions that we won’t even mention, plus a couple of big changes that deserve a separate update so stay tuned for them!

Finally,  do you remember that Okhlos was going to be showcased at the EGX Rezzed, as part of the Leftfield Collection? Well, that is happening right now! So, what are you waiting for? Go, go, go!

So we had a couple of days off this week, thanks to Carnival (yes, that’s totally a legitimate and valid reason!) and I took off to spend them in the rural and wilder part of the country. While I was there I started drafting up the first few mini-bosses of the game.

We already had the designs for the monsters, but I took on the task of translating them into pixel art, and when you do that they usually change a lot. Drawing and illustrating are very different from creating something through pixel art. They are basically two different languages, and you have to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one if you want to do good work. You also have to realize that things are going to change a lot going from the concept art to the sprite.

I worked on three mini-bosses that will all have very similar mechanics. They are the Manticore, the Sphinx, and the Chimera. Here are the sprites I made for them:

NOTE: Keep in mind, in order to fully enjoy them in all their pixel glory, you should open the images and see them in full size.

The Manticore

As you can see, the body started off looking more like a greyhound’s, so I riffed off of the Nemean Lion to give it more shape and complexion.

The wings were a real pain. I thought I could just use the wings from the Harpy, but I soon realized that the two creatures keep their wings in very different positions when they’re idle and relaxed, so I ended up having to change them a lot. I started with white wings, changed them to black wings, and then somehow ended up with a completely different set of bat-like wings.

(Luckily, I was able to recycle that set of white wings and use it for the Sphinx. Otherwise they would have been a huge waste of time.)

The tail was pretty straight forward, as was the cloth that adorns the Manticore’s body.

As you can see, we took out the horn for the final version, as people would not stop pointing out that it looked phallic. (We are obviously very mature and professional here at CoffeePoweredMachine…) We also changed the face a little and we think it’s a bit more badass now, although maybe it looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln?

The Sphinx

The Sphinx came together pretty quickly. We had planned from the beginning to use the same body for all three mini-bosses so that we’d only have to make a single running animation for all of them, and as such we just took the body of the Manticore and gave it a palette swap for the Sphinx. We also recycled some of the wings that we had discarded earlier while making the Manticore, so all I really had to work on were the torso, the jewels, and the snake.

The torso was by far the most difficult part here. I had to decide where the torso would emerge from the body, how the arms and shoulders would be angled, and I had to create a lot of other small details that were ignored – or rather, neglected – in the first draft. We used Artemis as a base for the size and proportion of the Sphinx’s torso.

We ended up scrapping the Sphinx’s arms altogether and just made the wings pop out from her shoulders.

I also had to raise the snake-tail a bit more as the wings were covering it up.

Finally, I just threw a lot of jewels on there, because, you know, reasons.

The Chimera

Similarly to the Sphinx, the Chimera came together pretty quickly, mainly because the body was already done.

I struggled on two points with this creature:

The first was the head. The fire mane is going to take quite some time to animate, and working on fire has always been my kryptonite.

The second thing, as you might be able to tell, was the tail. I wanted to use the same snake as I’d used on the Sphinx, just to save us the time of animating another one, but it looked really boring. My second attempt didn’t come out much better, if you look on the sprite sheet it’s really rather ridiculous – it’s just a regular lion tail with the head of a snake.

In the end I went back and stuck to the original concept, and I ended up with this weird Rockewellian [~obscure art joke] snake-tail.

Final results

And ta-da! This is how they turned out!

This post was written in a hurry by @roketronz and then, as always, it was edited and proofread by @pfque_!

We are thrilled, exhilarated and ecstatic to announce that Okhlos has been selected to be part of the Leftfield Collection 2015, and as such will be at the EGX Rezzed event in London, next month. One of the biggest events in Europe! Handpicked to part of a prestigious collection! Wow! It’s such an honor not only to be part of the collection, but also to do it among such amazing games as the ones chosen this year. You can see the full list here and check for yourself how awesome the games are looking!

As for our part, we are working right now on a exclusive new version that will be playable at the event. It will have tons of new content and we will try to have as polished as possible. We are adding new enemies, new hazards, new hud and even new mechanics we have trying out. We aim to have to best version so far, in order to give everyone at the EGX the chance to experience Okhlos at its best.

So remember, if you are in London from March 12 to 14, go and play Okhlos at the Leftfield Collection!

Read More

We’ve already discussed Atlantis: here, and here, and here! We should stop milking the same old cow, and we promise that this will be the last update about Atlantis for a while (we still haven’t talked about Poseidon, but that’s another subject altogether!). However, there is one thing we have yet to talk about. The Hazards. Those things that sometimes annoy you, sometimes kill you, and other times make something else kill you because you were avoiding the hazards in the first place.

The hazards

In the hazards department, Atlantis will have:

Whirlpools

Whirlpools attract nearby units and then, after some swirling, hurl them violently.  We haven’t finished working on this hazard yet, so they might change a lot, because we still have no idea if they are fun or not.

As you can see in the .gif below, we are having some issues with what we like to call z-fighting (boring people calls it Z write order * booooring *). The reason for this is that, as we said in a previous update, the water material is transparent/vertex lit, and the whirlpool material is a custom shader by 2dtk called BlendVertexColor. Evidently, they don’t get along quite well, and when they are moving, they often forget which one is above the other (Oh, you! Silly shaders!).

Anyway, we haven’t solved this yet, but we all trust in Sebastian’s expertise with shaders.

Seaweed

The seaweed reduces the units’ speed when they walk through them (which can be soooo annoying).

We already got a glimpse of this at Delphi, where you had a different kind of difficult terrain hazard – the mud patches – and they proved that they can generate a lot of fun situations!

Greek Fire

The legendary Greek Fire was said to burn even on water. We took this, stretched the definition a little bit , and we ended up with a perfect fit for Atlantis. We were then able to put fire hazards literally everywhere in the sunken city and have it completely justified by the setting!

One of the little twists that Okhlos’s version of Greek fire has is that even torches are made of it so if destroyed they can transform into a hazard! Touching the fire will, as expected, burn you and your units in a nasty way. So, DON’T touch the big green fire!

Well, that’s it for this week, and for Atlantis for a while!  I have no clue what we’ll talk about next week!

Hey gang! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

We’ve been super busy here doing a lot of planning for Okhlos and we now have a much clearer road-map for development going forward, including dates and milestones we want to hit. Let’s hope we manage to stick to them!

Our last update – Water in Okhlos – seems to have been pretty popular, and we couldn’t be happier about it. We’d put the update up on Gamasutra as well, apart from up on our website, and it was featured on the front page!

Today, in Atlantean Problems Part Trois, the Revenge we’ll talk about the enemies you’ll encounter in Atlantis. If you’ve missed Part I and II of our ongoing Dev Blog feature on Atlantis, you can catch up on them here and here.

The enemies

Being the brilliant and original developers that we are, we decided that our visual theme for Atlantis is – you guessed it – aquatic! The enemies for these levels have thus been redesigned accordingly in order to transmit that watery vibe.

Atlantean Cyclops

These are the basic melee units for Atlantis. They’re violent and their devastating blows mean a world of hurt for the mob and its leader. (Hint: that’s you!)

We used the original base of the Olympian Cyclops (from earlier on in the game) to design the new Atlantean Cyclops, which made the whole process far easier than it would’ve been otherwise. The club still looks kinda boring though, so we’ll probably end up redesigning that as well.

Atlantean Gigantes

These Atlantean giants, while also melee units, will strike with powerful area attacks that will hit the whole mob at once. Gigantes means giant in Greek, and it’s where the word Gigabyte comes from.

Nymphs

The Nymphs are a new unit we designed specifically for Atlantis! As you can see above, they were kinda tricky to design, and we went through quite a few different iterations before we arrived to a version we were truly happy with.

Being forest spirits, Nymphs are usually linked to Aphrodite, and in the game they’ll be making the most of their charm as they run around and convert pedestrians into enemies!

In the animation above you can see that between our original draft of the Nymph and its final version we’ve added two extra frames. These give a little more air time to her skipping, and make it seem more natural and relaxed.

Mermen

These Tritons/Mermen shoot water blasts!

As you can see, our first iterations of the mermen were fishier and less humanoid, but the combination of blue and green made it very hard to see them against the background of the stage, so we ditched that design altogether. We haven’t animated the water blasts yet, but they’ll very likely shoot out from the weird staff the Mermen are holding. (And not from their mouths, although the idea is very tempting.)

Lamia

Careful – the Lamia will devour pedestrians and will poison units in your mob! You’ll have to be quick about dispersing the mob when that happens, otherwise the poison will spread onto other units and soon the whole mob will be doomed!

Truth be told, we haven’t integrated the Lamia into the game yet, so we don’t really know what to expect from them right now, but between them and the Nymphs, no pedestrian is safe! It might be a good idea to grab them as quick as you possibly can before they’re eaten – or worse – charmed to fight against you!

So this is it for this week! We hope you’ve enjoyed this little insight into the enemies you’ll be encountering in Atlantis. Next week we’ll have Part IV of our Dev Blog feature on Atlantis. It’ll be our last update to focus on this game world, and we’ll be talking about the perils and hazards that inhabit it. We hope to see you then!

As always, this article was proofread and edited by you friendly neighborhood  @pfque_!

Happy New Year and welcome back! This is our first update of 2015 and we hope you’ve all had a great start to your year! Here at CoffeePoweredMachine the work never stops, and we’re still chugging away on the Atlantis levels, which we first showed you in our last update.

Back then, when we introduced Atlantis to you, we also talked about its ornaments and it’s foliage, and you guys gave us a lot of great feedback! Thank you very much for all your thoughts, we’re going to keep working hard on those details to make sure it look just right!

Okhlos’ water

The composition of the water in Okhlos is quite simple: it’s a plane.

The water is above the actual ground of the game… duh.

It’s a plane above the actual ground of the level, so the units, buildings, and enemies never interact with it. The ground is the one that posseses all the physics components, so it still handles all the collisions itself. The water is just a mesh child of the ground.

The water has a transpartent/diffuse material, and there isn’t much more to it than that. We don’t reduce the opacity of the texture, we just change it in the materials settings. This gives us much more control, and, since we’re working directly on the final look as we make changes, we can just do it all within Unity instead of having to export out a texture for every tweak we want to make.

“Agua” in spanish means water :P

As far as water within other objects goes, all the water in streams and containers was made in 2DToolkit, which makes animating it so much easier and gives us far more versatility.

As you can see from the picture above, almost all the water streams for the objects are made using sprites. We animate them frame by frame. 2DToolkit has an incredibly useful pipeline for this kind of work. We still need to export the sprites, but we change their sizes, shapes, and orientations very quickly, and we can see the results almost immediately.

This fountain has 8 different sprite animations, just to illustrate the versatility of our system.

The only real problem we had with this approach was that we had to change the material of the water within the objects to differentiate it from the water plane. The water has an Additive Vertex color material, which is why it almost seems to glow.

The cascading water, as we mentioned before, is a sprite animation, but the ripples are produced using Unity’s particle system.

It’s actually a pretty simple effect, it’s just a looping particle that throws instances every now and then.

With just a few tweaks we can apply the effect to a character. We just need to change the Emission from Time to Distance, and the simulation space to local.

The buildings

The buildings, fortunately, were pretty straight forward to make. We added some moss and a strange glowing pattern that we thought exuded a certain Atlantean look.

We added the obligatory moss, following in a looooong tradition of water levels.

As for the edges of the level, we got rid of those old fashioned mountain bases and we replaced them with water walls that have ancient Atlantean runes! So cool!

Oops… this update ended up being a little long, didn’t it? We still have at least another update to write about Atlantis, talking about enemies and hazards, but there’s also so many other things we want to talk about! We’re still not quite sure what we’ll focus on for next week, but stay tuned, it’ll definitely be exciting!

See you all next time, and happy new year!

As always, this article was proofread and edited by @pfque_!

Hey! How’s that we are not writing about Atlantis? That will have to wait a little longer (as it happens with almost all things this time of the year). Instead, we wanted to share what we thought were the coolest moments of this year.

A huge thanks!

First of all, this year we were overwhelmed by the amount of support we received. By our supporters (fans is a such a strong word!) and our colleagues. We usually post all this stuff in three different places: our blog. TIG, which is an amazing forum for developers, and IndieDB. We got so many wonderful comments, helpful feedback and lots of cheers from these communities.

Also, lots of tweets, shares and a plethora of nice words from our friends. We really got the chance to see the best part of the industry this year.

Best of 2014

–We started our year with a full press coverage in RPS and Kotaku

-We had major HUD changes (and we are still making more!)

-We had our own take on prefab inception

-We had a good amount of Lets Play

–Gordon joined the team as our musician/sfx guy/Canadian friend

–We made things harder

-We now have a cool Trailer

-The trailer’s making of was featured in Gamasutra

– We turned down three different publishers offers! All of them included upfront money, so it was very difficult to say no! (and we didn’t  write an update about it)

– We received private funding! And now we can eat! (and we didn’t write an update either)

-We added Sparta, Ephesos and Atlantis to Okhlos’ world roster!

-We went to a lot of events!

-The last part of the year, we worked very hard on improving the gameplay! (We are preparing an update about it!)

-We met and chat with Adam Saltsman and Rami Ismail (and they played Okhlos!)

So, in short, it was an amazing year for us, and we hope that 2015 will be even better. It will definitely be the year we release Okhlos, so at least, we can expect that we will live interesting times.

Thanks again for reading, and liking, and tweeting, and sharing the love!

Hey gang!

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the core mechanics of Okhlos and we’re experimenting with quite a few things, some of them a little weird. It’s quite intensive, and coding for all these tweaks and new ideas has been taking up a lot of Sebastian’s time, so in the meanwhile I’ve been designing Atlantis, one of our new game worlds.

We know three basic things about Atlantis: It was circular, it was fictional[citation needed], and it was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

People tend to imagine Atlantis as an underwater city, since it sank into the Ocean, and we’re running with similar imagery. We’ve ditched the circular part, and are working with the idea that people kept living on it, despite the humidity.

Decorations and ornaments

As we’re running with a water theme I did a few quick google image searches to help me set the mood. I think we ended up with some good design constants for the city:

I still regreat not using the dolphin

We’ll have a lot of coral and ferns around the buildings, and tridents as ornaments on the roofs and higher floors.

Foliage

We’re having an ongoing problem designing the foliage and we still haven’t decided how to address it.

These are our current options (any and all feedback is welcome!):

• No foliage.

As a soaked, inundated city, there should be no foliage. This is a simple approach, and although it makes sense it’s a bit boring. It definitely lacks something.

• Rocks, Ferns, and Coral Everywhere.

This option adds quite a bit to the visuals but is rather messy, to the point where it’s not pleasant to the eyes. (Keep in mind, the bamboo is a separate element, and not part of the foliage we’re discussing here.)

• Ferns and Coral only

This last option still adds some flair, like the option B, but we took the rocks out of the equation. It looks better and a bit less cluttered, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.

We’re going to try a few other things for the foliage and we’ll come up with some more options, but we welcome your opinion on the matter. If you want to see Atlantis within the context of the game, there’s a few screenshots below!

These screenshots were taken from the No Foliage Option

This is it for this week, but there’s still a ton of things about Atlantis that I’d like to talk about in the near future! We’d love to hear your feedback about this new game world, so please let us know what you think!

This article was proofread and edited by @pfque_!

Hey guys! These last few weeks have been very busy for us here at Coffee Powered Machine.

We’ve shown our game at three (3!) different exhibits in just as many weeks, and let us tell you – after almost a whole month without weekends, we’re exhausted! We’ve been so busy we didn’t even get a chance to put up an update last week.

The events were great though, and we got a lot of great feedback from the people who tried out Okhlos at the various shows. We now have a ton of data to work with as we head back into development. Thanks to any of you who came out and gave our game a shot! Seeing you guys play the game and talking to you has been incredibly helpful.

As you might remember from our last update, we had been talking about implementing a new control scheme for Okhlos. We had proposed three different schemes: the non-zero option, the alternate keyboard option, and the mouse option.

We got a chance to test out these different control schemes at the various exhibits and have learned a lot from our experiments. Below you’ll find a short break-down of each of these exhibits and what we managed to learn.

The Events

These were the events in where we showed Okhlos.

EVA

EVA is short for Exposición de Videojuegos Argentinos, or Argentine Videogames Expo. It is the principal videogames event in Argentina, and it’s mainly oriented towards developers.

We exhibited Okhlos 0.4.1 during EVA, the same build we sent off to the IGF, and used our original control scheme.

The biggest problem with this build was that the players didn’t realize they had to keep holding the second analog stick in position in order to attack. The QTEs also proved problematic as it’s hard to push the face buttons when you’re supposed to be holding the second analog stick at the same time.

MEET THE GAME 2

Unlike EVA, Meet the Game is more of a public event where people get a chance to meet developers and try out their games. One of its goals is to facilitate one-on-one interaction between developers and players. It’s still a small event but there’s a lot of potential in the format and we hope it’ll grow.

We showed two different versions of Okhlos at Meet the Game, each one sporting a different control scheme. We showed one with the non-zero joystick layout (scheme 1 in the chart above) and a second one with the mouse layout (scheme 3). We were particularly interested to see how people would feel about controlling the game with a mouse. We had only tested the mouse internally up until that point and hadn’t had a lot of time to tweak its controls.

Thanks to Marisol Estevez for the picture!

We found out some very interesting things.

Players had an easy time with the non-zero joystick scheme, and had no problems attacking enemies throughout the demo. They used the second analog stick to adjust the position of the mob whenever necessary and had no trouble hitting the face buttons during the QTEs. It’s still far from perfect though and we’re still very tempted to eliminate the QTEs altogether.

What really amazed us though was how positive the reaction to the mouse scheme was. People really liked it a lot! We were told it felt quite intuitive, which is great! The only problem was that we didn’t map an action to the left mouse button, which, as it turns out, is what players naturally tried first and wanted to use. I guess using the mouse just makes people feel like they’re playing an RTS!

TRIC VI

I still don’t know what this event was about. It was some kind of scientific or academic tournament endorsed by the IEEE? Maybe it’s just because I’m the graphics guy but I really didn’t get it.  It wasn’t as cool or as crowded as the other events but we managed to test out the keyboard scheme nonetheless.

Seeing how the attendees (all two of them!) reacted to the keyboard controls we concluded it was a very good control scheme for the game. We changed it a bit from how it’s shown in the graph above – instead of using the Del, End, and Page Down buttons for items we went with the 1, 2, and 3 keys which are much closer to WASD. We realized not all keyboards have Del, End, and Page Down buttons close to the arrow keys.

Thanks Yiyo Flauros for the picture!

Overall, we gained a lot of data from each of these events. I think we almost nailed the keyboard control scheme, but it seems Okhlos still has some game-mechanic issues that we have to resolve before we can perfect it

To the drawing table, again

We had a long session with Daniel Benmergui on Friday in which he helped us test out and think through some of our base mechanics. We tried some quick changes, analyzed the flow of the mob, ran through our challenges, and at the end of the day we asked ourselves whether our game is robust enough as it stands right now or whether we have to keep working and tweaking its mechanics.

The conclusion we came to was that that we need to keep exploring our base mechanics. We have a cool concept but it’s just not enough. As Daniel said, we need to start thinking in verbs. In the current build you gather, you run, you attack, you solve QTES and you use items. We need to add more verbs to that. And as for removing QTEs, that would make our gameplay even simpler than it already is, so we can’t really afford to just yet. Not until we’ve built something more robust.

It was a great experience talking with Daniel and we came out of it with a huge list of changes we want to make. We’re thinking of removing any unnecessary numbers, changing a great part of the HUD, axing the bureaucrats, reducing the options available in the market, and changing the dash. That may seem daunting, but I think one of the things that Daniel helped us corroborate is that doing something original, something that hasn’t been seen in any another game, is very difficult, and we’re on good track to making it happen.

We also had an interesting experience with our sound designer, Gordon, @jouste  and @Nelsormensch. We had a video chat with them while they played Okhlos, which was a little weird but very cool! We weren’t sure if we should be looking at them or at the screen – they had to turn the laptop around for that – but once it started we were able have a good conversation, even in my rusty English.

Their suggestions were very similar to Daniel’s on most things, but they were nonetheless very helpful. Talking about your game always is! We’re very thankful for their feedback and now have plenty of work to keep us busy for quite a while!

That’s more or less it! I will continue to work on new worlds for Okhlos and Sebastian has already started conducting weird experiments with the mechanics. We’ll see what come out of all that and we’ll let you know!

This article was proofread and edited by our new collaborator, @pfque_!