Eyes Align – Presenting the Game

Over several weeks, I have prepared a five minute presentation to showcase the game.
It is structured in a way to show present the audience first with the premise and story of the game, then proceeding to quickly explain the mechanics. The last part is dedicated to explain the art style with real puppets and the finale is used to tie back to the introduction.
I’ve used music and audio from the game in order to set a mood for the presentation.
 

Causality

Hi I’m the producer and lead AI programmer on team Yggdrasil that is currently developing the game Causality.
Attack the world!
Our boss is no fun if the only thing he does is walking around. So in order to remedy this we tried to come up with some fun challenging attacks and patterns.
The animations where recorded in motion capture so all I had to do was write the code to make it work in game.
I used a finite state machine for all […]

Win Screen

I spelet skulle vi använda oss av en vinstskärm, när spelaren vinner så ska spelet bytas till en vy där spelarna ser ett antal orcer som sjunger i kör, beroende på hur många orcer spelarna rädda kommer spelarna få olika antal vinstslut.  När denna scen var slut skulle spelaren ges alternativen att fortsätta till nästa level eller gå tillbaka till huvudmenyn. Tanken från början var att när man räddade orcen skulle orcen ställa sig upp och gå in i en […]

Crafting

Efter att spelarna ha huggit av orcens skadade lem behöver spelaren bygga en protes, efter det kommer spelarna behöva sätta på en protes på orcens avhuggna kroppsdel. Innan spelarna kan sätta en protes kommer spelarna behöva skapa protes genom olika material som finns runt omkring spelarna.För denna process behövde vi skapa ett craftingsystem för spelarna. Till en början tänkte vi ha olika kombinationerna av olika material som lågt runt omkring sjuklägret, vilket skulle ge olika typer av proteser som t.ex. […]

Ugn

I spelet ska spelaren använda sig utav en ugn, denna ugn ska användas för att kunna värma upp en protes som läggs in i ugnen. För att kunna värma upp protes måste spelaren först värma upp ugnen och det gör spelaren genom att slänga in trä in i ugnen som sedan bränns upp automatiskt för att ge värme till ugnen. Tanken bakom varför spelaren ska behöva värma upp protesen är att protesens metalliska del ska bli så varm att den […]

Kamera

Spelet kommer använda sig av en isometrisk kamera vy. Eftersom spelet är ett lokalt multiplayer spelet kände vi att det var passade att använda en isometrisk kamera vy som påminner om Magicka och Diablo men med en mer inåt zoomad vy. Detta fungera bra till att både visa spelarna och miljön i spelet. Det var diskussioner angående om vi skulle ha en kamera i stil med lego harry potter, där de använder sig också av en isometrisk kamera med en […]

Characters and animations – Part 2, MakeHuman and Motionbuilder

Time to continue where we left off! We have the animations, now we just need some characters to put them on.
With the time we had for this project, and the amount of characters we wanted to have in the game it seemed unrealistic to try and make the characters ourselves. Fortunately, there is a great free software we could use to ease this process for us; MakeHuman.
With this software one could design a character to ones liking (including adding some […]

Characters and animations – Part 1, Motion capture

I have been wanting to write about this subject for a while, but had not gathered my thoughts around it enough until now since there is so many things I can say about it. I finally decided to split it into two parts, starting with motion capture.
In order to make our feel more alive we needed a lot of characters in our game. The characters we needed were split into three categories; Survivors, Rescue Workers and Civilians. The survivors are the […]

Eyes Align – Dialogue Changes

Balancing dialogue to be both interesting and a challenge, while also providing the player with many choices is quite a difficult venture.
The dialogue mechanic of the game was at the start meant to be something far more complex than what it turned out to be (see the blog post Eyes Align – Development Week 4 for more information); our huge ambitions were dashed upon the stones of reality.
So what happened exactly? Branching dialogue, using the hub and spokes approach […]

Last post!

Dear lord, it is time for the final post!
So – the last character in our game is the Raum, and just as with previous characters the Raum used to be a living person who was turned into a demon. This particular demon is inspired by the goatman, so it crouches and uses a ramming attack.
This is actually the character I am the least satisfied with, because of several reasons. It is supposed to have a hunchback, but after having […]

Eyes Align – Narrative Structure, How it Changed

In my opinion, the most difficult part to get right in any story is the middle: The story needs an introduction which grabs the reader’s, or player’s, attention and a fitting conclusion that either wraps up lose ends or creates new ones to keep the reader wanting more. The middle, however, serves as the majority of the script and fills out the world, the characters and the conflict.
At the start, the middle was loosely defined as a chain of events; […]

Making objects in blueprints

During the end of the production our game map was pretty empty. To add variation and lighting to the scene our graphical artists made a couple of assets to clutter the scene with. To make them more versatile I worked on them a bit in blueprints.

I made lamps that changes the emissive amount on the material together with the light sources. The pictured work light can also have it’s head mount adjusted so you can angle the lights. I made […]