Tag «screenshots»

The Sky of Bronze – The Game

As was promised in the last blog post, here’s a short article about the project we worked on in 2018 (mostly): a turn-based survival game as part of an app about the Nebra sky disk. The sky disk is a bronze circle with 30cm diameter and probably the oldest depiction of the known cosmos. It was found by treasure hunters in 1999, here in Saxony-Anhalt, and is now one of Germany’s most notable archeological discoveries.

The sky disk, as shown in the game

The project was an idea by MotionWorks, a local animation studio known for the Marco Polo series and games, and of course for a lot of other projects. MotionWorks’ plan was to create a mobile app that would teach children and teenagers about the sky disk in a playful manner: with short films, 360° pictures, puzzles, background information - and a game. So they approached us for a commission and we said yes, because educational games are satisfying to make, and because the regional and historical relevance of the topic appealed to us a lot - after all, the sky disk was found close to where we live and work.

As we only created the game and not the remaining parts of the app, we worked in parallel with other local businesses all under MotionWork’s lead. For example, codemacher was responsible for programming the app and making sure that people can use it on-site in Nebra via GPS. I.e., whenever you reach a certain hotspot in Nebra, a new animation would play. The Sisters of Design created the website and even a booklet with a comic, crafting instructions and an Android code for the app. It looks gorgeous and has a goat (the unofficial mascot of the whole endeavor) key ring pendant as a gimmick. MotionWorks themselves animated the clips and invented the story and characters: main characters are the two children Mimo and Leva who serve as guides through the whole app.

We created a game concept about village life and traditions a few thousand years ago, when the sky disk existed for quite some time already and was now worshipped and sacrificed. Thus our game does not really cover the disk (other than using a picture of it here and there), but the Unetice culture, which came around 1,000 years afterwards. This way, our game could reuse graphic assets from the rest of the app, as the animations followed a Unetice family trying to prevent their people’s demise.

Primary goal was writing a concept that would not be yet another color matching game, with bronze stars and moons in place of the jelly beans maybe. Instead we eventually envisioned a survival game on a small grid-based world, strongly inspired by board games, and this level would change constantly both through actions by the player (e.g. uncovering the board tiles, cutting trees, hunting animals) and by random events (e.g. forest fires, flooded lands). The player would walk around to gather resources like wood, meat and fur, and trade these against tools and - most importantly - bronze jewellery. Starting as a pauper, with this bronze players achieve higher and higher ranks: becoming the chieftain is the ultimate goal of the game. Such a high-score system was fitting, as hierarchical structures were established during the bronze age.

The hardest part of the game was to make the workload manageable. For example, we planned to have several mini games which would simulate the gathering of each resource. Only after creating a few prototypes for them it became clear that the amount of mini games had to be cut down to one. Instead of hunting animals with arrows in a “Angry Birds”-like fashion and similar gameplays, we settled for an abstract Minesweeper-inspired game that we could reskin for each activity (fishing, rabbit hunting, tree cutting, etc). Although this sounds like we betrayed our original goal, make no mistake: the mini games are only one part of the sky disk game. The player has to explore the world, plan their path, interact with various traders, sacrifice items to the gods, and so on - all before running out of time.

Just like in the app’s animated movies the protagonists are the Unetice children Mimo and Leva. The player plays one of them, and during the game, every few rounds a randomly chosen event happens. This was done via “collectible” cards featuring short stories describing the world and life back then. To some extent the cards also help to give the player a sense of progress, as they follow the four seasons over the span of one year - the game starts with spring and ends with winter.

Apart from being a cool project overall, it was nice that the app was showcased a bit more officially than usual. Because it has a regional impact (i.e. relevance to the region) it was funded by the county Saxony-Anhalt and by the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, and thus it was presented at the state chancellery in Magdeburg (the capital of our county) and later again at the Ark of Nebra. The Ark is a modern-looking museum serving as starting point for a walking tour to the look-out at the top of the ancient Holy Mountain - where the sky disk was dug out in 1999.

The Ark of Nebra

When the app was completed it was uploaded on Apple’s AppStore and Google’s PlayStore. We'd like to thank MotionWorks for the opportunity to work on this project - it was very interesting to learn about the sky disk after having seen it (or rather a copy of it) in the Landesmuseum already, and a joy to create something meaningful yet fun.

If you want to talk with us (and other enthusiasts) about our games and/or game development in general, visit us at our Discord!

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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The bpb:game jam 2016

At the first weekend of August 2016 we once again visited Berlin in order to take part in a game jam hosted by the bpb, the Federal Agency for Civic Education. It was a special jam for us, as we were actually invited by the organizers, and the theme was a lot more serious than we're used to: "Flucht und Vertreibung" (Escape and Eviction).  We didn't really know what to expect, other than that travel expenses, hotel and food would all be paid by the German tax payer. (Thank you all!)

The whole event went from Friday till Sunday, with Friday being reserved for an unconference. It started with everybody introducing themselves, which took a lot of time as there were over 50 people! We knew some of the participants already: they were fellow indie developers. Nonetheless the introductions were very interesting, because - and this is another uncommon thing for our jam trips - around half of the people weren't game developers, but came from various fields, mostly pedagogics. The youngest participant was 16 years old, and I dare not to estimate the age of the oldest person in our group.
The only gripe was the pretty low ratio women to men. Unfortunately this is common, but at least it was higher than at most game jams.

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The more interactive part of the unconference were the 'sessions', where people suggested various discussion topics, all in accordance to the main theme, and then do group debates. I suggested "Sprachbarrieren" (language barriers), and thus a few of the participants, including Jana and I, talked about apps for language learning and our experiences with different languages, and how we could use these as gameplay mechanics.

The second session for us was about "Perspektivwechsel" (switching perspective), and here the discussion started with the split-screen camera technique in multiplayer games, but soon got more serious and went from the literal interpretation of perspective to empathy, and how we see others, and games that actually let us "live" different roles; consciously or subconsciously.

Overall these debates prepared us well to get into a more serious mindset, as right afterwards we got instructed to come up with game ideas and discuss them in random groups. I still think the idea of a "Refugee Go", maybe a tad cynical, would be an interesting take on the location-based gaming: the idea was to force the player to literally walk at different places in a real city where they have to fill out virtual forms (in real-time, i.e. with a lot of waiting). The idea was to let players empathize with a refugee in Germany who tries to apply for asylum. As you'd play it with a smartphone only which then demands permanent attention, it would also be a bit like Tamagotchi.

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It was new to Jana and me to not discuss our ideas directly with each other, but alas, Jana was in another group. There she formulated the concept of a card game with instructions on each card for the players, and they'd have to run around and solve the tasks.

In the end we found together again. After a few years of jams we became a solid team and apart from a small collaboration now and then we somehow became unable to try new constellations. ;) Some lively discussions later about what our jam entry should be, we settled for a compromise we were actually both happy with: "Visa Runners", later named "Die Stimmung kippt!" (The mood shifts!).

Visa Runners is the prototype for a multiplayer mobile game with real-world interaction, a bit inspired by Space Team. At the beginning all the players connect their smartphones with each other. Afterwards everyone gets assigned a randomly chosen profile of a refugee-seeking person, with character traits like gender, age, birthplace, skin colour, education, etc.

Visa Runner Profiles
Then the real game begins.

The players have to flee to safe countries and get a visa as fast as possible. The countries are represented by QR codes lying around in the (preferably big) room, on tables and maybe even hanging on the walls. In order to get a visa you have to run to the QR code and scan it with your phone. Then you get a few days of visa - so you need to renew this visa very soon and very often. (A "day" is a second long in our game.) To make it harder players get a day less each time they try to seek refuge in the same country. If you overstayed your visa you need to get a new one as soon as possible, because you lose if you're without shelter for too long.


Yes, the game gets unfair quickly. Intentionally so.

To underline this, every few seconds a tabloid issue appears on one of the phones - usually it's a (mildly) exaggerated headline about refugees or foreigners in general. These headlines affect all players, so the one who sees it has to tell the others (or can choose not to). For example, if there are news about "black men attacking a puppy" all players with the traits "dark skin" or "male" will get minus points in that country (i.e. less days of visa). At some point, a country will refuse visas to certain persons, and those have to flee to other countries.HeadlineThe game ends when only one person is left.

Here's hoping we made a game that captured the theme of the jam. I wish the end result were more functional, but for a prototype it worked pretty well. The funny thing is: when we presented our game, it dawned on us that we didn't even need the prototype, as we were only running around with our Android phones, yelling what we're doing currently. It could have been a theatre play...

The first day of actually programming the game was hell, as I had to download the Android SDK first (to be able to actually build games for smartphones), then try to get a certain plug-in from the Unity Asset Store running. It was very badly documented, and I needed hours to find out how it actually works. But after that we finally got the multiplayer part running, and implementing the gameplay was easy enough. Thankfully the plug-in for the QR code scanning was much less of a hassle.

friedrich_qr
We were very impressed by the games of the other groups, some of them had a team size of five or even more. You can find (German) descriptions of most of the entries at the official wiki - ours is here, even with a downloadable APK.

Overall the first "bpb:game jam" was a success for us, and we think it also was a success as an event. Thanks to the bpb for organizing it! Here's hoping we will be able to take part again next year.

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TRI – The AMAZE-ing update released

TRI 0.2.1 update

We are pleased to announce that the new update 0.2.1 for TRI is live and can be downloaded now. As already said before, this will be the last version with the low price of $4.99 only. We currently scheduled version 0.3 (the STORY update) for end of May, and that one will come with a price increase!

0408_Amazeupdate

Now, for the AMAZE-ing update we have some new stuff, especially worth mentioning two new levels. The first one let's you walk on walls and ceilings a lot, and has windmills and a glimpse on the floating ghosts (the Kami). The second one re-introduces light rays and acid pits. If you already owned and played the TRI alpha, for your convience you can play the new levels directly - but don't miss the enhancements in the other levels! For example, we added the monk in the tutorial level, mainly for demonstration purposes (as he doesn't talk much right now).

The monk appears

And you can finally run now. This was the feature requested by most people so far. :-P Unfortunately, this changed the balance of the gameplay a bit where it wasn't wanted. On the bright side, if you have to walk up a long wall you will need far less triangles now, as you can run quite a while on the wall after leaving a triangle until you fall down again. (Just try it!)

The complete changelist for the AMAZE-ing update:

  • Fixed NullReference in output_log.txt regarding save files
  • Fixed the feedback functionality (via F11), should work always now
  • Added possibility to use/activate/pick stuff with Left Click
  • Fixed rotating box in level 7 ("Reluctance")
  • Changed savestate fileformat, saves from 0.2.0a and before not usable anymore
  • Removed GUI key statues in the top right corner for the first level
  • Added possibility to sprint via Left Shift key
  • Improved visuals/gameplay of some of the levels, changed tutorial a bit
  • Added option (in tab "Performance") to disable fullscreen antialiasing
  • Fixed a glitch with climbing on slopes
  • Fixed the minor issue of antiwalls playing sounds even when not activated
  • Added two levels, introducing (again) light rays, acid and autosave
  • Added an NPC with simple behaviour for demonstration purposes

You may wonder why we call this update the AMAZE-ing update. From April, 24th to 27th we will be in Berlin, visiting the AMAZE IndieConnect! We will meet other indie developers and give a talk about why and how to limit your game in a healthy way. So, if you want to talk to us in person, this might be your chance. :-)

And now for some more screenshots of the new TRI levels:

tri2_screen_20130420_132312 tri2_screen_20130420_132107 tri2_screen_20130420_135738 tri2_screen_20130420_141246

Me Against The Mutants: post-mortem

Before we began to create "Me Against The Mutants" we had other ideas for our 7-Day-Roguelike Challenge entry. All a roguelike needs is a turnbased gameplay with a walking player and some enemies – and then you add things. Things like different zones, the ability to break walls, end-bosses, etc.

So our first real idea was about a prince who has to be protected by several amazons. You would play the whole group, and while amazons are good at fighting, collecting items and other stuff, the prince would be a whiny weakling with no skills at all. But as soon as he dies your mission fails, so you'd have to use the amazons as his wardens.

We liked this idea very much, but unfortunately it transformed into a full 7-day-roguelike and even beyond, and we had to plan for something with a much smaller scope.

We knew we wouldn't have much time during that week, so after some rethinking we scratched the concept and went for a simpler approach: the player is in a world full of radioactively contamined mutants and has to use "infinity fields" in order to reach places and get rid of enemies. Why was that easier? Because it means focusing on a single gameplay mechanic (the infinity), which we invented a year or two ago but never used it for anything. This way, we could concentrate on the basic mechanic of roguelikes not just by making a simple clone, but rather by adding something new to the genre which hopefully doesn't need so much work.

Of course, it was much work and there still were problems. No matter how small the focus of a game is, the whole thing at least needs some time to become an actual game. However, the technical hurdles of "Me Against The Mutants" were bigger than anticipated. Even though I already tried the infinity mechanics via smaller prototypes, I never implemented it with entities other than the player. When all the tile-based movement of the player finally functioned inside an infinity zone, it became clear that the current implementation would not work with the enemies. A big modification of the code was necessary, and for some hours I even lost all hope to get it to work again as error followed error every time I tried to compile the project.

In the end the whole thing was worth it, although it cost me a whole day – not only the player could create infinities and enter them now, but also the world and its inhabitants were able to do so. Thus the idea of the radioactive zones was born, and now the player had to be careful not to walk into a "natural" infinity field unprepared.

One decision we reached very early was to make the game realtime instead of turnbased, i.e. NPCs and monsters can move and act all the time. We are still not entirely sure if this was a good decision (as it is a downer for many fans of roguelikes), but somehow it makes the game more dangerous and it complements the infinity fields.

As "Me Against The Mutants" is very small in focus, there is not much variety; in my opinion realtime helps to tighten the gameplay in this case. Would it have been turnbased, people would get bored of the pretty obvious AI very fast.

Learning from our first 7DRL "Pitman", balancing issues were less crass this year. I will never make a game again were a fight could go on for hours because both parties are too weak and too agile so one combatant would never hit the other (which happens in "Pitman" quite often). Hence the mutants all have their basic damage and the player has his basic damage, and both cannot be zero (only very low). There are also much less stats – and in hindsight even with six important values only (Attack, Defense, Speed, Health, Mana, Stamina) not all of them make sense ...

For instance, a varying speed of the player isn't much of an issue for the gameplay – even though having different speed for every character was one of the reasons we wanted to have realtime gameplay!

It's also essential that the self-created infinity fields don't exist forever, so a tactical course of action is desirable; but I was never quite content with the approach of using mana. If it drains too fast, the infinity isn't much fun; but when it drains too slow, it doesn't make much sense in the first place. Either way, automatic mana regaining was needed – which made the mana refill containers I placed in the world useless in the end.

The differently coloured slimes are another part of the balancing act. As the game has no concept of the player's progression level (it is far too short for that), we invented another way of changing the player's various skills: slimes. In the beginning, when we thought we could add much more things to the game, the slimes would be large radioactive pools and change everybody around them. They would have been the real reason for normal creatures suddenly being mutants. As we never really had a plan how exactly that would happen and also not the time for elaborate mutations, the slimes became the simple, but double-edged swords they are now. They can boost the player or make him weaker or both – the effects are random, but don't change per colour, so every red slime in the world does the same. Of course, sometimes the God Of Randomness decides that every slime colour has to have mostly negative effects, so this gameplay mechanic really could benefit from a little bit more thinking.

The slimes are also one of the reasons why there are bunnies outside the contamined building. The little rabbits were planned as creatures not yet mutated but with the possibility to do so. As the game progressed only slowly over the week, it was clear that they would regress to decoration.

But they also serve as a tutorial – the player can approach the bunnies, hit them and even backstab them without having to fear them to counteract. In fact, the whole outer region, the grassland with the forests, was planned to be a dangerous zone but instead it is now an interesting contrast to the mutant-infested building. Somehow, it promises some kind of peace and happiness this way.

On the other hand, our roguelike is missing handholding at the beginning, and some people were really not sure what the game was about and how to control it. Sure, they could have read the instructions at the start of the game or below the embedded SWF, but never one never should expect something like this. Nonetheless we like that the game is even more about exploration this way, and the first "Aha!" moment when you get into the building is really fulfilling.

 

About the graphics: pixel art was an unconquered field for us. We mostly dabble in the third dimension, so concentrating on single dots instead of polygons was a small challenge for Jana's skills as an artist. Nonetheless we were eager to try it, and it also convinced us to make a full game with pixel graphics some day, as they are neat and have an abstract style which can make forget the lack of detail. And even though retro pixel graphics already are widely used in the indie gamedev scene, the pure form of the pixel still can produce novel looks and an interesting atmosphere.

Conclusion

What went right?

  • learned a lot about 2D pixel graphics
  • game was finished within time
  • interesting gameplay mechanic, even worked as intented
  • small scope, lots of fun
  • used Flash, which works on all desktop computers
  • sound and music!
  • featured on freeindiegam.es and rockpapershotgun.com, woah

And what went wrong?

  • stupid coding problems
  • not much time
  • balancing still an issue
  • very sparse in content and variation
  • some people are confused about what to do and how to do it in the game