Category «Concept Art»

A picture blog for our new game

As some of you may already know we currently work on a new project, which was named "Morituri" for some time but has now the title Behind Stars and under Hills. Its prototype is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the MDM.

Behind Stars and under Hills will be a Dungeon Adventure with detective elements and animal people. It puts emphasis on story and atmosphere, on interaction with NPCs (dialogues) and exploration. While there probably will be fights (of low complexity), those won't be the main focus of the game. Instead, players have to find hidden ways and items, translate scriptures, talk to the inhabitants, trade with them, circumvent and/or find ways around dangers (like enemies and traps), and use the light by placing torches.

There are no real hard facts to announce yet (hopefully soon though), but we started a picture blog for the project, especially for the prototype we currently work on. You can find it here. We post everything visual, i.e. drawings, scribbles, animations and screenshots from the game and the level editor. Our intention is to link the blog whenever we post those pictures on Twitter or Facebook, so people don't see a single slice of the game only, but can inform themselves more about the look of the game instantly. It also makes it easier to follow the project as long as we don't have a dedicated website.

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https://behindstarsandunderhills.tumblr.com

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TRI – preparing cut scenes and new levels

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Now that most of the levels are made (but not yet finished), Jana is preparing foxes for the cutscenes. They will tell the story of friendship and why the monk wants you to go to the "magic world" and use the triangles.

1. Everything starts with a story board

Before Jana began to animate the scenes, she was sketching the plot sequences of the back story. You won't see this story in one go, which means she needed to decide how to cut the backstory into small pieces of mini stories. The way the foxes and the monk are displayed in the pictures will be important for later news articles.
We will not tell you the story now. But maybe you come up with your own interpretation! :D

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2. Fleshing out the foxes

After these fast sketches Jana took every pose of the monk and the foxes and drew them in detail. The dynamic of every pose is very important for later use.

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3. Testing animatics

First she colorized the sketches to test how they would look animated and which parts of the fox, like ears or tails, have to be in separate pieces to be animated. Jana did the animation in 3dsMax, so we don't need to render videos, but use real-time animation instead.

Watch here!

4. The final art style

The final pieces of graphics necessary to animate the characters are done in Illustrator. Jana is using the sketches a basis for the colored cel shading art.

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5. Real time animation

This is how the foxes are animated in the finished style. At the moment we are looking for a voice actor to read the story, so that it will feel like a fable or fairy tale.

Watch here!

6. Leveldesign

Friedrich recently finished one of the last levels. Just have a look at the screenshots (the scene doesn't have an art style yet, so it's all test-textures). Sadly, we are not sure yet when the next update with the new levels will be released. It needs to be tested and polished a bit. Bit hey, it has portals and trees.

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And a very small and quick sneak peek on the last level of TRI. You gain the ability to reflect solid rays there and walk on them:

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(Of course, this is very alpha right now.)

We hope you enjoyed this news article, and don't forget to vote for us on Greenlight. ;-)

The AMAZE-ing update

Hey TRIanglers,

we are preparing for the next updates - a minor one in April, and a huge one with more features, characters and levels in May. So let us show you what we're working on for the next triangulations.

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Running - Yes, we took your wish seriously to be able to run and implemented it into the game. But we also added dexterity, to prevent you from rushing through the game. I think otherwise most players would rush through the levels instead of taking the time to explore all the hidden places we prepared. What do you think?

TRI O.S.T. - Some of you were asking if we are going to have a soundtrack. Yes! Our composer Ludwig is going to create a whole soundtrack for our game and make complete songs from the little snippets you currently hear in TRI. The current trailer song will be included, too.

New Feature - Players that know TRI from its first version will know the upcoming feature - light rays. The April update will have new levels, at least one featuring light rays.

Pricing - This wil be the last update for the convenient price drop of 50% off. In May we definitely raise the price due to the new content.

Why AMAZE-ing? - We are going to participate in the first festival for us this year - the AMAZE INDIE CONNECT. If you are in Berlin, Germany from April the 24th-27th you can meet us there and other Indies like Nicklas Nygren (Knytt), Sos Sosowski (McPixel), Vlambeer (enough said), Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Claims Everything), Michael Brough (Corrypt), Ed Key (Proteus), C418 (enough said, too), and many more :D

Last but not least - here is a peek on the next character - the mysterious fox.

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TRI – #3 Doing the big Reset

Tri screenshot testing

Yes! We are still alive! TRI got a new haircut and for the very first time of the TRI production process I can be sure of this: The first huge goal – making a convincing and playable demo/prototype – is nearly within reach!

But why exactly did it take so long to just tell you that we are still developing and working on our game?!
In the last feature article I wrote about design decisions and story, the latter being the main reason why we just stumbled clumsily around instead of getting the thing done (plus the Indie Buskers jam to earn some money).

Sometimes you have to make things too huge and uncontrollable, so you can get back to the point where the gameplay elements were simpler and more straightforward; elements that are actually needed to present your game and don't obfuscate it's purity. Especially too much focus on story lets you neglect the gameplay.

Remember that we already knew what the game would be about. We had this rough idea of a rudimentary story and the game elements were already finished and represented in a prototype. But how to start with the development? We planned the first level the players will visit in the game: A huge canyon that separates the poor people's quarters from the halls of the rich aristocrats. We tried to tell a story with the level style and asked ourselves most of the time: is this level design convincing? Would that make sense? Not for the players to use the triangles, but for what kind of usage those halls and rooms where built by their inhabitants long gone or dead. Our goal was to build a believable, non-linear world without test chambers and buildings that didn't look like game levels BUT a setting that could have been used by human beings to live in.

What become of our over-ambitious canyon level and why did we put this monster in the archive folder? I hope I can give you some learnings with this article, to prevent you from making those mistakes that ate so many weeks of development time.

Canyon Level Top

1. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid!

We are just two people – a programmer (Friedrich) and me (Jana), the graphics artist. We love 3D and first-person games. After resetting the level we already had, we decided to focus more on the level design that is REALLY needed to play our game.
Keeping everything extremely simple to achieve all the goals we have with our game basically means: down-scaling.

To check how complex your game should be: Make a level and monitor how long it takes to design, model, texture, fill the thing with gameplay and test your level. Multiply it with the number of levels you want to have in the end and check if you have the money and time to develop it.

What we want to achieve with TRI is an awesome, playable, mostly intuitively to understand game that looks good. But our emphasis lies on gameplay. That means that we design everything for you – the player – to look nice and fun to explore, but it won't have high-end cutting-edge graphics. It won't contain super non-linear level design. And most parts of the story will be told by the environment and books to be found in the world, and not by elaborated NPCs with facial animations.

The decision we made was somewhat hard, but necessary:

>> Learning #1: Everything that takes too long to develop, design or playtest should be cut out!

And additional: Everything, that is no fun at all AND needs to much time, should be outsourced or replaced or crossed out.

2. Recycling is good for you AND the player

This brings us to another learning we earned after fighting with the big-ass monster room:

>> Learning #2: Reuse as much textures and models as possible.

In our canyon level every second room had another texture design. The first had blue tiles. The second violet, the third was yellow. Did you see that our canyon had green textures?
At this time I couldn't see those greyish “coloration” of first-person games anymore. Most of them try to look photo-realistic but with a monochrome filtering. I wanted to have fantastic, colourful-looking, varied level textures. And that's what I did! I guess I tried to use every colour in the rainbow wheel, to present them in our game.

Bad idea! For many reasons:

- The game looked like a drunken clown.
- When I needed to adjust the coloration I had to adjust EVERY texture in this area, which was extremely time consuming.
- Players got totally distracted from everything while the whole world was a freaking highlight.
- There was no colour left over to be used as a colour-code for lights or special game objects.

What did we do for our current level? I'm just using two colours: Yellow and violet. Both are added in Unity, not in the texture itself. When I now decide to change the look, I just change the materials, which is so convenient! The colours are very monochrome with this technique and I'm not fully satisfied. But players can concentrate on the gameplay and I can later change everything much easier this time.

This is the reason why you should use prefabs (reusable game objects) as often as possible. Although many of them can or should be just placeholders at the beginning. As early as they exist, you can use, discuss and change them as you like. It's time saving and you keep up a clean and harmonized look.

3. Better Zelda than Skyrim

Zelda always got great level designs. But the more I read about level design, open world, sand box, Minecraft, etc., I began to hate level designs that looked like games that much. This led me more and more to the canyon monster level we build. The problem is that this kind of “realistic” levels totally limits your imagination what cool things a player could craft, enjoy, build or experience. Because we always pondered if an element we just added is logical or convincing.

But after building new levels without any restrictions or logical architectural building backgrounds we had more fun making those levels, and faster too! The approach of being realistic is even more stupid when you remember that you are creating triangles and walk on the walls – how realistic is that? Of course you should not break the rules you are building in your little world. But it's always better to not getting stuck in realism. Especially with photo-realism and a team of two!

>> Learning #3: Build the worlds you like. Just try to be consistent.

TRI - demo level

4. Consolidate your workflow

Although we are just two people working in one room next to each other, we had to define some rules to improve our pipeline and teamwork. We are now using a local SVN repository for TRI. SVN is a program for file sharing and version management. Which means that we are not just sporadically exchange some assets and stuff from time to time; instead we share everything, instantly. Since we established this we just have to update our repositories and start Unity in order to work with the latest version. A real time-saver (although there are some quirks with Unity), even for a small team.

We also decided to use a grid for the rooms. No strangely modeled rooms with thousand subdivided edges, but the rule to make every vertex divisible by 0.5 units. Sounds very rigorous? Again, this helped us to make more clear and harmonious designs. Restrictions like this help saving time, also for texturing. And players are more secure in those levels, because they intuitively know how they can place their triangles, or how far or high they can jump.

>>
Learning #4: Simplify and structure your workflow. Little rules can make things easier.

TRI Demo level

5. Testing!

One really big problem we had with our first/last level: We didn't test it enough. Friedrich built one room after another and I was blindly texturing them, eager to just getting things finished. We planned to let testers walk the rooms, when everything was finished …

>> Learning #5 Test as early as possible!

I know that testing the game is something very basic. You should know this as a developer! We knew this from our last games Pitman, Tumblox and The Sun Is Deadly, which were all too hard at the beginning. And I learned this through the game jams we regularly participate in. But with TRI it seemed that I needed to learn this again. Texturing and filling the room with little decoration gimmicks makes sense, when the players was successfully sent through the whole testing area.

To explain our strange behaviour this time I have to admit that the whole gameplay was just available for Friedrich (SVN was already there, but only used by him) and most parts of the gameplay were not integrated into prefabs. Having the game components (light rays, switches, character controller, doors, etc.) as easily to place game objects made things so much easier.

Again: keep things smaller, even the level structure, game elements and possibilities. That doesn't mean that you should add one collision box one after another in a cubical level structure. But it was more fun since we decided to be creative in the restrictions we set for ourselves. The game is better structured and far more understandable since then.

I guess the most important learning is:
>> If working on the game is no fun at all, it's time for a down-scaling!

And what is the next step for us? We TRI to present you a huge demo and more wordplay this June.