Friedrich: Apart from more improvements to the game's scripting language (which was renamed from gompl to slang.gd) I primarily worked on the "skeleton" main story by writing and scripting the most important quests. Which means the fifth chapter can now be completed, but it's missing a lot of dialogues, player tasks and puzzles on the side. Of course all this will be added later on, but at least Johannes proviced new graphics for the swamp characters and I already implemented them. On to the chapter VI and VII! Oh, and last week I forgot to mention that I also a new trailer for the Trailer Tuesday Show; so a few days ago I extended it a bit for another showcase. Everyone wants "exclusive" stuff, hmmph. The upcoming week is gamescom week, so the next devlog will probably be a bit late again.
Jana: Next week is gamescom, and I finished up some meetup schedules and pitches for the event. But I also managed to work on the temple level a bit more, where I replaced all the old textures to look similar to the dwarf fortress (Ha!) design Patrick already did - just some clicks with Friedrichs tool (yes to self-programmed tools!). The setting is not finished yet, the colour palette needs some retouches and the lighting is not right, but I’m happy of how the architecture turned out. In said temple you meet a group of exravagant people whose dialogues I wrote. For that I found a page that assists me with rhymes (rhymezone.com) – expect crap – and also a huge fun for localization later. But right now I enjoy writing them – heavily infused with watching „Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead“ (recommendation if you like Shakeperean nonsense).
Patrick: This week I worked on the cave where the big fortress is located and on the swamp grass, but that's not finished yet.
Don't forget, if you're interested in talking to us directly - about Mops & Mobs our something else - visit our Discord!
Friedrich: It's quite some time since our last "weekly" devlog, mostly because we were on vacation. Still, I continued writing characters for the main quest (chapter 5) a bit, but everything has a loose end for now. I also played through the last parts of the current plot line again, in order to do some recordings, and of course I noticed several script bugs and level imperfections that I tried to fix along the way. And the forge level finally has map descriptions! Moreover, during some free time I got the itch to add support for arrays to the scripting language (gompl) that we use in Mops & Mobs. They are never really needed for our level and dialog scripts, but during some more complex scripts I sometimes thought it would make sense to execute several dialog nodes in a dialog graph at once. Arrays would make this a bit easier.
Jana: We're in the home stretch for the story! We pushed through the final story points to get everything into place. There's still a wagonload of quests and lines to write, but we want to be able to play through the entire main story soon-ish. For now, it's mostly a rough skeleton to give us an idea of where we're heading by the end of the game. Then there's everything else that keeps me from actually working on the game: I put together a super-rough trailer for a really cool showcase — if they use it, that is, because I was already quite a bit past the deadline. And gamescom is coming up next week, so I also prepared some more meetings and materials for that.
Patrick: After over a week long vacation time I came back to the project and did some plumbing, which basically means I filled the open parts in the swamp level with walls and ceilings, finished the columns and ceilings of the swamp inhabitants' architecture and lighted the dark areas with flickering torches. I also started to put a new path into the level that connects the fortress and the huts so that we have now a way to enter the upper part of the swamp. The whole swamp level comes more and more together now. That's cool! The next phase would be polishing and shaping things here and there so that the quests in this level can shine.
Don't forget, if you're interested in talking to us directly - about Mops & Mobs our something else - visit our Discord!
Friedrich: After a re-evaluation of the next story chapter's quest line, I'm finally back on track, mostly. I'm writing new characters and quests, and while they're still pretty rough, I think I found the right direction going forward - especially with Jana's ideas for the last chapter it should all fit together. I plan to add some puzzle elements to the game that are a bit more than the usual button combination riddle, and already prepared some functionality for them. The final form is still TBD though. And there's now a debug menu that lets the tester teleport to each NPC in the current level - an addition that became important in the new level due to its verticality. Jana and I also recorded a new dev diary, where we talk about the dither effect, additional localisations for the demo, and atmospheric soundscapes (which is why our voices are not always perfectly audible, oops).
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Jana: I think we love trees, they play a role – at least a very visual one – in nearly all of our games. Why shouldn't a game set in a dungeon not have trees, too? Patrick already made some nice trees for the game and in my level (end content time!) there is an important one as well; it doesn't quite look like it yet. The long and short of it: I'm working on the final level, its new color code, a tree – oh, and on the Dark Dwarves living close to the area. Now excuse me for the boring screenshot that doesn't show anything interesting from the level nor its new color.
Patrick: I continued to work on the huts a bit more. They are now all a little bit different from the outside and inside and I could really imagine to live there for some time. The next big thing on my list is the giant fortress of the inhabitants of level 4. I made a lot of concepts and kinda all go a little bit in the direction of Mayan architecture or have some elements of it. Friedrich wanted a bit more brutalistic style so I still try to find a way between those two architecture styles. At the moment the walls are more like giant chalk stones that are crafted of one singe piece. The columns and balustrades will be similar to it, more big pieces instead of smaller pieces like in the previous levels, but I still want to incorporate some Mayan elements. That's next what I have to figure out with the texture and the 3D geometry.
Apologies for not posting here more often - we really should get back to that. The truth is that we do not get much feedback here, so most of our game updates are currently posted on Discord, where we reach our small community directly, on the Steam forum and on IndieDB. But yeah, Discord, Steam and IndieDB are owned by other people, and this blog is actually ours. And it's also very long-lived now, which is pretty cool and it would be sad to let it die just because of convenience.
For a few months now we post weekly updates of Mops & Mobs. The basic idea was to let each team member (Jana, Patrick and myself) write a few sentences of what they achieved the last week and then collect that, add a screenshot, and post this small dev log on the game's Steam forum. As Jana created an IndieDB page for Mops & Mobs, it also made sense to use the articles section there for this (with the additional benefit of having a site to host the screenshots). And finally, just posting the updates on Discord was a no-brainer anyway. But of course feeding three different platforms is already a bit exhausting, and I'm not automating this in any way, so I didn't even think of this blog.
Still, a little update here is in order. This is what the latest entry of our dev log looks like (yes, it actually spans two weeks, because life got a bit into the way).
Dev log for the weeks from 26-05-25:
Friedrich: So this is another two-week devlog entry, because we had some off-time for a few days (no laptops during the weekend :O), and in the second week I got pretty sick. Still, I did some stuff. I gray-boxed the fourth level and did some more quest plans for it. Right now I try to make these plans more concrete, which somehow is more difficult than ever, probably because my own standards raised during the process. Other than that I added small bits to the levels, wrote dialogs, added a quest, and fixed a few bugs. One big change to our project was switching the extension of our dialog files - don't laugh, this was much more involved than it sounds, and it was necessary because I got very annoyed how Godot would always reformat the JSON dialogs and pollute our commits this way … Finally, I made sure that the demo will soon have an additional localisation. I hope next week I'll be back on track.
Jana: In preparation of gamescom I sent out some material for our group exhibition, followed by the pitch deck for potential publishers. Fingers crossed we eventually draw attention to a cool supportive publishing team. The other big task was planning: I'm working on the character arcs for two of our main monsters, Wyrmheimer the dragon and Odette the lich knight, while also creating a character with Friedrich (writing) and Johannes (art) who you'll meet in the later chapters. And who has quite the story AND look AND involvement – so agreeing on a look is quite the challenge.
Patrick: The only thing I made (modelled and textured) the first week was a mysterious stele. You need it to get into … a special room. That's all I can say. I was a bit down that week so I was going to make some 3D stuff at the weekend. Do you like digging through walls? If yes, then I made the perfect thing for you in the second week … a super heavy drilling machine! It rumbles, it puffs, and it'll soon be blazing its way into the depths of the dungeon… known as Level 4. :D I've also started working on this particular level. Friedrich created some cool level block-out for me, which I now have to fill in with nice looking 3D models.
Let's see if I can cater our official blog with the weekly dev log too. Would be nice. Oh, and there's a second AND third video now, with the fourth one coming soon:
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That's a lot of Mops & Mobs to digest, I guess. If this is TL;DR for you, just be assured that we're still working on the game, that we're still motivated, and that we hope to finish it this year. Which might be a tad too optimistic.
This is the seventh entry I wrote for the TRI dev log on TIGForums. You can find the previous parts there. From now on I will post the entries here, too.
Yes, we and our project TRI are still alive! After a pretty long break at the end of 2012 we decided to move the game into a different direction, especially regarding the style. The story changed, too, but this is not quite as relevant, as the story and plot we thought of were never an integral part of the alpha versions. In the current pre-release we even removed any hint of story, because we want to add NPCs later, and concentrated on other stuff this time.
The pause in the last quarter of 2012 was mainly for doing contract work, to get some money for food and shelter - but it also gave us time to rethink some design decisions we made regarding TRI. The main concern was to make everything easier for us to create content, which means:
simpler textures– mostly just quadratic tiles
We combined this with a shader to look up the tiles – fed with the tile texture atlas and a noise texture, the walls, floors and ceilings don't look too much like repeating patterns.
Currently this shader works fully with Direct3D, but is a bit broken in OpenGL – because of a bug in Unity3D 4.x there are ugly artifacts visible for everyone on Mac or Linux. This will hopefully be fixed some day ...
random tiles on the walls
simpler mapping – standardized box mapping will do in most cases
This is done in the 3d modeling program (3dsMax). Additional customization of the mapping is done only when necessary.
Of course this means that for more sophisticated architecture the textures have to be carefully chosen, so for example it doesn't show too much seams on curved walls.
visible seams - will be fixed
simpler level creation– try to stay in a grid of 1x1x1 meters initially
I wrote a MaxScript tool for 3dsMax in order to have vertex snapping on a 3D grid. It's a pity this isn't built in, as my solution is quite prone to errors (often, undo doesn't work) and unintuitive to use. But it's better than nothing. I think in Lightwave this functionality is called Quantize.
The tool allows us "to go into detail": by clicking on a button you can half the unit, so it the unit 1m becomes 0.5m becomes 0.25m becomes 0.125m ... etc., thus everything really will be in a grid. Of course there are exceptions, like round shapes.
3D vertex snapping tool
simpler level export –click a button in 3dsMax and the stuff is in the game
Another tool for 3dsMax is an exporter which automatically exports all the objects in the scene as a complete FBX which is used as the level geometry in Unity3D. Having a fast pipeline is awesome.
The exporter prepares certain objects specifically for the game. For example, there are surfaces in the game where the triangles don't stick, so we assign them a particular material. Every submesh with this material will be exported as its own gameobject, and therefore can be easily recognized in the code.
We can add some keywords to the name of a mesh so it gets treated differently when exported. For example, adding "$Export:Bridge" to the name will remove the object from the level and export it as a separate file named "Bridge.FBX", or adding "$NoExport" won't export this object at all.
export tool
simpler mission design– the main goal of every level now consists of collecting three keys in order to open a portal to the next level
With just three symbols in the top right corner of the ingame GUI, everyone knows what they have to do without much explanation (ideally).
Even though the premise of collecting three statues sounds kind of boring, it actually freed us from having to think of overly creative, but in the long run unnecessary mission goals. The goal is clear and creativity can be spent on the level design and puzzles.
The pacing is slower now and the learn curve for the player was decreased, because single levels are often dedicated to single gameplay elements. They are also less confusing as it is more clear what to do next; we reduced the elements that look interactive but really aren't.
collect statues = mission goal
All this simplification resulted in a better consistency of the looks and the gameplay. The new art style can be tweaked quite easily by changing a few colors, the ambient light and the global fog. Improving the gameplay and layout of a single level even after texturing and mapping it became easy. With the new limitations, we can predict the ideal size and content of a level much better and we're more confident now when creating the level design.
We also built a tutorial mission which will introduce the player to the world, so it contains a show-jumping course for learning the basic controls, but will also be the start of the story, as NPCs will give the player motivation to actually move through the levels.
tutorial parcours
Right now we get mostly positive feedback, especially regarding the level architecture. But not enough people are playing the game – let alone buying the alpha version. The trailers we do might be big turn-offs, as creating the triangles seems tedious. It's actually fun and feels natural, but how can we tell the hard to convince trailer-watchers? We probably need to make it more clear that TRI's focus is not only on puzzles but also on exploration.
