Darkness Revealed (Last Dive) - An underwater platformer thriller

Last Dive Update 25 - Shaping Act 1's Last Areas

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update, we showed the results of the cavern's development process, the final level in Act I. Today we share the creation process of the Exterior Caverns, an area that you will be able to explore before the final confrontation of the story's first act.

The Exterior Caverns



The two main areas of Act I are the basic seabed biome and the underwater cave system. These two areas host important events that shape Dave's story as he tries to escape from his dire situation. However, there were demands coming from other aspects of the game design that required us to create another area between these two main spots - namely, we needed to provide some variety to the player as he advanced through a big sequence of challenging areas, and we also felt the need to reward him with some new content after he survived a certain story event that we won't spoil for you

With this in mind we started concepting an environment which would gradually introduce the caverns biome. Our first thought was to combine elements from the two adjacent biomes - regular seabed and cave - to form a whole new biome. Our first try resulted in the dark, gloomy environment you can see below.



However, there were problems with this first approach. First, it just felt too deep, far more than Dave would be at this point in the story. Also, it's a little too dark and spooky, which would kinda ruin the shock of entering the cave system that lies right after this area. Call us crazy, but we are super careful with controlling the shades and contrasts of everything that affects story and mood progression!

Because we also felt our first attempt deviated a little too much from the transition role it was intended to fulfill, for our next iteration we gave a step back and tried something that would be almost like a customization over the previous seabed environment. This way, the transition would feel more realistic, and the mood progression would come more naturally.



This new test worked out a lot better. The light setting and mood felt more in tone with the two adjacent areas and the cave's props didn't feel out of place. For the background, we chose to create big rocky structures that follow the same visual identity that can be seen in the cave's interior walls. This would make the environment feel much more in place. Some light and color adjustments and new prop combinations help the environment feel fresh, therefore fulfilling its role of feeling like an advancement landmark, while the presence of elements from the adjacent biomes (the sand platforms, the stalagmites, corals, walls, etc) make it believable and consistent with the game world. Furthermore, the cave wall patterns allowed us to create some pretty interesting backgrounds, so why not?



That's it for today! In the next update we'll show the final results for the External Caverns in game and show the grand entrance for the Interior Caverns!

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UPDATE 26 - A Grand Entrance!

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started working on the external caverns environment. We created this area as a transition from the base ocean to the completely different caverns level. Our intention wasn't to make a completely new environment, but simply to ramp up a certain mood. We also thought the caverns deserved a grand entrance, so we'll be showing how we made that too! Let's get started!

The Simple Solution

As it often happens, our first shot at this level was to create a brand new biome. As it turns out, it kinda broke the mood progression that we so carefully planned. We also had no need for a new biome. The external caverns were a lot more about decorating an area properly to make it feel like you're slowly stepping into a new place. Many times in game development, a complex, development-heavy solution isn't the best one. So we went for a simpler approach and created a mix of the two main levels, with the background cavernous walls being the only new prop. Here's how it worked out in game.



Entering Act I's Final Frontier

If the transition from seabed to exterior caverns is meant to feel like a natural change of scenery, the same can't be said for the moment when the player goes from the exterior to the interior caves. That's a big, dark, unknown place, and Dave is risking a lot if he decides to enter! We needed a big, ominous entrance to the cave that would naturally convey this idea of crossing a point of no return. As usual, we started with some thumbnails just to get a general idea of prop placement and the general size of things.



We liked the idea of the entrance resembling a mouth with sharp stone teeth, as if the player was about to be metaphorically swallowed into a new world. We also liked the stalagmites being placed as pillars or totems leading to the actual entrance in a mostly ritualistic way. And the walls in the back helped convey that this place is big and extends in unknown directions. The mockup below is the result of this effort.



Rendering it into useable assets was a straightforward process, as we maintained all of the things we liked from the concept and worked out some new ones like the whale skeleton in the background (another coherent, appropriate omen of Dave's difficult decision of entering that place). We liked the final result! If feels natural and believable, but there's also something odd about it, as if some of the stones and pillars were just too perfectly placed, like it's some sort of temple or ruins... What is wrong about this place? Well, you'll have to play the game to find out!

That's it for today!

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Looks nice! I like the pixelart of your project.

 

UPDATE 27 - A Much Needed Change

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

For the past few weeks, we've been showing the creation process of Last Dive's environmental art. We showed in detail how the coral reefs, the seabed and the caverns came to life.

Today we'll change the subject a bit: in our newest screenshots, have you noticed that Dave (our main character) has changed quite a bit? Let's talk about this redesign and how it affects the rest of the game!

Why changing?

When we decided to remake Last Dive, we knew a lot of its art and graphics would have to be updated - after all, the original was a jam game. When we started working on the new title we challenged ourselves to expand and deepen the game in all directions, art included. We recreated each and every environment from scratch and implemented a new realtime lighting scheme that made the whole game look better. As an expected side effect, though, our main character's graphics immediately became outdated and subpar with the rest of the experience.

Before redesigning the character altogether, we had to test if simply creating normal and shadow maps for the old character would suffice. For one, Dave looking a bit displaced of the rest of the game could simply be the result of him not being under the same light effects as the scenery. Furthermore, even if a complete redesign was to be made, we first needed to understand what needed to change after seeing him in context - all effects included. So we created all the required lighting maps, applied to Dave and tested how he looked in game.





A lot better, right? Still, not nearly enough, that's for sure. The 2 colors palette obviously didn't fit the new art direction. Also, since we started sharing updates on Last Dive's development, one of the things we heard the most was that Dave, our favorite diver, looked like a caveman! His colors made him look like he was naked, and his helmet was often seen as a dense beard. When the people that will play your game tell you that your deep sea diver looks like a naked, bearded caveman, you know you will need a serious overhaul! It was time to make him look more like the rest of the game's new art.



That's it for today!

Next week, we'll show what inspired us to redraw Dave and the step-by-step transformation of his sprite!

Do you agree Dave looked like a "caveman"and needed a major overhaul?
We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

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UPDATE 28 - A Hero Arrises!

Hello everyone! How's it going?

In last week's update we showed the beginning of the process of reworking Dave's sprite. After adding the new graphics to Last Dive, along with light and shadow maps, we noticed our hero was a bit outdated and in need of a major overhaul. Today, we'll show the rest of the update process! We highly recommend you read the first part before this one, but if you already have, then let's get started!

The Redesign Process



In parallel to all that, we were also creating art to use on our site. The idea of that art was to capture the feeling of playing Last Dive in a single image. While working on them, we had to draw a big version of Dave, which was also an opportunity to define his overall look in detail. We wanted his design to more closely reflect the retro atmospheric diving suits that inspired the game, while also having a color scheme that was compatible with a main character, which resulted in the two iterations seen above.

When we were happy with the character's design, we went on to create the actual sprite that is used in the game. At that point in development, Dave already had a full spritesheet with tons of animations created, and even though his graphics were outdated, the animations themselves were actually pretty decent. So we came up with a way to change his appearance without having to draw every frame again. We did this by working with color change filters and lighting adjustments. We then manually "pasted" the helmet in every frame, and the only manual, frame-by-frame work left was to draw his gloves and boots.



We ended up with two versions of the new concept where the only change was the color combinations. Both seemed solid and worked well, however when we tried against the game's actual backgrounds, the blue version blended too much into the environment, while the red one popped out a lot more, which made us decide to stick to the red and gold suit.



Finally, a gif showing Dave's evolution, just for the show



That's it for today!

Did you like Dave's final look? Got any suggestions to further improve him?
We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

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UPDATE 29 - Designing our First Boss! (Part 1)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In our last updates, we showed our main character's updated looks, and the process of reinventing him. Having a character that was able to navigate both in the adventure and in the thriller sides of our world was a big deal for the game.

Today we'll still be talking about graphics and character creation, but this time showing the creation process of the game's first boss! Scared already?

A First Draft

When our story's first act was written and rolled out for graphics production, we had the challenge of creating a monster that clearly looked like a fish, but also had some very subtle human and mechanical characteristics. After looking at references, we started sketching some basic silhouette and linework studies. If you look from the upper left of the image below to the bottom right, you'll see the evolution from rough silhouette all the way to mostly final linework art.



It took quite a bit of iteration to get it just right. The boss had the human/mechanical feeling we wanted, but still looked a lot like a fish. We wanted its horns to be somewhat mixed with its flesh and not made out of bones. It was also important that its face felt threatening but still had human elements (such as the nose-like protuberance above his mouth). With a final sketch in place we went on into detailing a black and white version, with light and shadows.

Detailing and Coloring

The next step was figuring out the boss' volume by determining its internal shading, which also allows us to increase or decrease focus on certain aspects of his design. The main bone structure, for example, was more subtle on the original linework, but we thought it looked cooler after receiving more emphasis from the lighting, while his face ended up being darkened to make him more mysterious and menacing in a non-physical way. The veins or wrinkles around the eye were also intended to make him look a little more evil. Finally, we also wanted him to retain his "fleshy" look, so we made the horns and bonelike structures really integrate with the body. You can't really tell where bone ends or flesh begins.

When we were done with the B&W version, we moved on to coloring him.



Although being still mostly monochromatic, this red version on the right would already allow us to test the design under the game's realtime light engine, which would give us a general idea of how it would look in the game. This step is important because the realtime light already creates shadow and hightlights on its own, so its important to balance that out in the sprite itself.



That's it for today guys! Next week we will show how we further improved the boss and his final look!

Did you like our concepts for the first boss? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out onTwitter and Facebook!

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UPDATE 30 - Designing our First Boss! (Part 2)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In our last update, we showed the beginning of the process of creating our first boss! After making a bunch of concepts and sticking to a design, we started detailing and coloring a very first version of his design. Today we'll show the rest of the development process and reveal his final design. In case you missed the first part of the creation process, we highly recommend you read it before this one.


One step backwards...



After reaching a first working version of our boss' design (as seen above) we went on into giving him a little more life and interest. We thought he was still too monochromatic. The face wasn't as threatening as we would like. Eyes weren't menacing and it looked too much like he was smiling. The shape of main bone was still a bit off too. So with all this in mind, we went for a second version of it.



In this second try, it changed a lot. The horns were now painted as if they were bones along with that main structure, which now expanded into the tail. But that wasn't really the goal, as it was cool not being able to tell his flesh from the bones. Now it just looked as if he had a carapace all over his body. And even though the face worked a bit better, and he looked more menacing with that new red eye, the teeth just wasn't right. It was too confusing and it still felt like he was forcing that smile.


Two Steps Forward!



So we went for another iteration and mixed up the best points from both versions. This version looked really cool, we managed to fix most things that bothered us and this time he actually had a badass face! Teeth were clearly visible, the face looked aggressive, and the bone / fleshy material all around the character felt more connected and in place. Last step we had to take care of was working out his contrast levels and find a better shading for his skin. And this is what we came up with!



The shading now looks a lot more natural and following the type of pixel art we've been using in our art direction. It also works great with our normal mapping! To finish up we made two smaller fish which will be replicated into a school of fish that follows our boss around. You didn't think he would fight alone, did you?

To finish up, here's the whole development process in a glance! In the gif below, notice how the first iterations require more massive changes, while the latter ones are basically around changing details.





That's it for today guys! Hope you liked our boss' creation process! Got any ideas on how we could further improve him? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 31 - Bossing from Another Angle! (Part 1)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last updates, we showed the creation process of our very first boss' design. Dozens of sketches and iterations led us to the exact mood we wanted for him. Now let's get going because today we want to show you a bit more of the boss' design process! If you missed the last two updates we strongly recommend you read it before this one.



Back to the Drawing Board

With the side view of our boss and of his sidekicks ready, we started the process of programming the first boss battle. While designing his various attacks, we noticed that one of them required the boss to change into a front view while his sidekicks did most of the work. So once again we had to go back into the drawing board and define how our boss would look like in his front view.

This time the job was a little bit easier, since we had already defined his mood and looks. The work was mostly based around interpreting how some of his side view characteristics would look like in another view and making sure his features were symmetric and lined up.

So we started by placing the side view in the canvas and creating guide lines which would help us position his main features in his front view.



It took us a few tries till we determined his general proportions and how his main side features would look like in another angle. Two big decisions we had to make were: how the mouth should be shaped in order to keep his menacing look and if the nose should be tilted up or down. After reaching a sketch which looked somewhat similar and proportional to our side view, we decided it was time to light and shade the sketch so it would be more detailed and closer to the final look.


A Decisive Sketch

When we started lighting up that final sketch we noticed that a couple things were still off. In his side view, the boss seemed a lot bulkier and stronger than in our latest iteration. The horns were also way out, while in his side view it seemed like they were behind that main bone structure and a lot closer to his center. Things like the bosses smile and nose tip were adjusted once again, as well as hiding the tip of his tail, which was looking a bit weird when seen from the front view, even though it was bigger than the main horn and should be visible. So we drew one more sketch (left sketch in the picture below), with some lighting already included.



This time, it looked way better and a lot more like the rendered side view. To finish up, a couple more tweaks were made regarding his nose tip, his smile and his width (right sketch in the picture above).

With this last version it felt we were really close to a final design, just one last thing still bothered us a bit. His general mood wasn't feeling very threatening, it seemed like the side view was way more aggressive than our front view sketch. We noticed that might be happening because of the shape of his head. His cone-like shape wasn't intimidating, to make him more menacing it felt like we had to make his upper side bigger and slowly funneled towards the down side. The main bone structure, which is one of his main side features was also looking very different. It seemed like in the side view it went further out from the body. It also didn't make sense for the tail not to show up in his front view, so we drew it like it was moving, this way it felt natural and understandable, it didn't just hide behind the main bone. So we drew one final sketch which addressed all these issues and looked a lot like the side view version of the boss.



That's it for today guys! Hope you liked our boss' final sketch! Next week we will show the rest of the front view's creation process and a look into his first animation! If you got any suggestions regarding his design, we are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook, so feel free to give us a shout!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 32 -Bossing from Another Angle! (Part 2)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update, we showed the first steps towards our boss' front view. After reaching a final working sketch, (seen below) we will continue today with it's rendering process. If you missed the last update we strongly recommend you read it before this one. Let's get going!



Color and Details

With that final sketch in place we were ready to fully shade, detail and color the boss. We started by adding different shade levels representing light and shadow areas. Then we added his eye wrinkles manually as well as the general dither which goes all over the sprite to give it some texture. With those details done, we made a basic color shading just with a hue/saturation filter. And then finished up by painting the teeth yellow and adding that blueish tone which represents his bone structure.





So there it is! The front view of our very badass first boss! And of course, we couldn't forget about his loyal sidekicks, so they got their own front view too. And here's a special gif of the boss' front view evolution. Watch closely as every bit of detail changes and how it gradually gets closer to the side view render.



And to wrap up this post we'd like to show our dearest fans a very special thing we just finished up working on, one of the boss' first animations! For the past couple weeks, we've been hard at work on creating our first trailer for Last Dive, and today we'd like to show you a quick sneak peek of an animation we did specially for this trailer. So with no further ado, here it is!



That's it for today guys!

Did you like our boss' front view? Does it look like the same creature as his side view? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 33 - Updating our HUD!

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

For the past updates we have been showing our hero's redesign process and the creation of our very first boss. Today, we would like to show some of the work that we did for the UI and HUD of the game - it's being developed and iterated on for months, and now it got to a point where we can share some of our thought process. Although we're not reinventing the wheel here, it's still important to get it right, so let's get started!


A HUD from the Ground Up!

One of the first decisions on how to expand the original Last Dive's difficulty design was to add a HP meter. It sounds basic, but now you have to keep track of your life in order to avoid suffering a slight backtrack (whereas in the original you would never suffer any significant backtrack, even when you played recklessly). Our first shot was the traditional heart counter. Coins and collectibles, and their HUD counterparts, were also added to the game to further reward exploration. Of course the first implementation was using only placeholder art.



When we implemented the realtime light feature that is now so prevalent in our art, the old HUD became all that more obsolete. Since we had to redraw all of that anyway, we also took the chance to make it more thematically appropriate by changing hearts into bubbles. It's not super innovative, but the whole point is that it just informs the HP but doesn't stand in the way. We also added HP shrines at the end of each area, as a reward for beating the difficulty of that segment.



Coins and collectibles were also reworked. At some point, we tried doing the same thematic approach to them. Black and white pearls were created to take those roles, but there was something that made it less satisfying to collect them than collecting coins. We also weren't sure they were fitting the mood very well, so we went for the safer (although possibly temporary) solution of keeping them as coins but reworking their graphics, which made them stay in a pleasant midground between realistic and abstract.





As the game progresses, we might feel the need to revisit those graphics and design decisions, but for the time being, they felt solid enough for us to move on to more pressing matters.

That's all for today guys! Did you like our new HUD elements? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 34 - Storytelling Elements!

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we showed some of our new HUD elements such as the HP bar and some collectibles. Today, we will still be talking about our HUD, but this time more focused on our story telling elements, such as our dialogue boxes! Let's get going!

Storytelling Elements

In its core, Last Dive is a story driven platformer. Cutscenes and visual storytelling apart, the main tool we have to tell our story are dialogue boxes. So it was always pretty important for us to get dialogue boxes that looked clean and connected to our characters somehow.

As a first attempt, we created a pretty simple, appropriately retro-styled box, with neutral colors and text which would work for all characters.



In the original game, we color coded dialogue lines to match which character was talking. It helped greatly with conveying that character's personality and identity. We liked that system and decided to maintain it for the new game. So once again, Dave's texts are always yellow!



To finish up, we decided to change the neutral box and make it thematic per character too. It would help with defining the character's mood and personality, as well as increasing the understanding of the whole dialogue when two or more characters are talking at the same time.




Ground Control to Major Tom

When we implemented the new boxes we started noticing that it was hard to tell apart when Dave was talking to himself or communicating with the rescue crew through the radio. And some of the dialogues in the game just make no sense if you can't tell those two actions apart. So we had the idea of trying a radio themed box. This is how the first implementation looked like.



We really liked the result, it looked like one of those old army radios. But the radio elements were perhaps drawing too much attention and taking a lot of space. So we tried moving the elements into the box itself and making everything a bit more subtle.



This looked way better. The radio box still maintained its personality but without competing with the dialogue or the game itself. We really liked this approach and did some minor tweaks, such as following the art direction of the dialogue box we showed earlier and making its color based on the character.



Phew, making games is hard work! Anyways, some of this stuff might change in the future, so we'll make sure to keep you guys updated. What do you think of our new dialogue boxes? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 35 - Tutorial UI!

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we talked about our HUD's design. Today, we'll show some more of our game's UI design, this time more focused on our tutorial level. Let's get going!

Tutorial (Work in Progress)

Last Dive has some pretty unique mechanics. The original game had a slow tutorial done through dialogue boxes, which is something we want to improve for this remake. One of our first ideas was to create a "Diving Manual", connecting the tutorial to the game's universe by making it seem like Dave was remembering his diving lessons from way back. We also created two icons that activate the tutorial screens in the game, making them not only less obtrusive, but optional altogether. If you already know how to perform a High Jump, then by all means, just do it!



From the first version, we figured the book needed to be bigger to fit more text without sacrificing the size of our pixel art font. So we changed it to address that concern.



This second version felt a lot better but was still a bit off. The left page was kinda useless, the diver's symbol we made up was taking too much space and the elements in the right page felt a bit loose. So we worked on fixing those things.



This last version was working all right for now. Now both pages had useful information, and the pictogram can come in handy to explain the different jump mechanics in a more visual way. The diving symbol was toned down so that it works as a minor decoration element instead of competing with the text itself. We also made a test using a higher resolution font. Maybe some things in the game would look better if we broke the pixel perfect rule in some cases.



We liked this version too! The text is a bit blurry, but that's just due to Photoshop limitations. In the game engine, we could have that look without the blur. The main advantage of a higher res font is that we have a lot more freedom as to how we organize and prioritize information on screen. Space is a really big concern when working with low res fonts, so it was good to see high res fonts worked well without breaking the game's art direction. The tutorial is very much a work in progress, and all of this is surely gonna change. For now, we felt happy enough to move on to other things.

Stop by and give us your opinion on our tutorial screens! We are always hanging out on Twitter andFacebook!

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UPDATE 36 - A First Menu!

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we showed some of our first tutorial screens to wrap the HUD side of our UI's design (at least for now). Today, we will still be talking about our UI, but this time more focused on our very first menus, which ended up setting the art direction for all the other menus to come. Let's check it out!


Pause!

One of the things missing from our playable demo was a pause menu. Despite not being a hard screen to draw, it had to be done carefully as it would set the tone for all other screens to come. Our first attempt was minimalistic, but gave the player access to pretty much everything he needed when playing the game: options for changing video and audio settings; the diving guide as a shortcut to the tutorial and controls screen; and the Fragments of Time submenu, which shows the player's collection of secret memories.




Gotta Catch'em All!

Although Last Dive's story unfolds in a relatively linear way, the gameplay and space exploration are not that linear, and one of the elements that contribute to that is the group of secret collectibles that are present (but very well hidden) in every area of the game. Hence the need for a screen to track this information and give fast access to points of the map where you might have missed something.



Getting the pause menu right was really important because most of the screens that came after were already very compatible with the game's art direction. This was the case with the collectibles' screen. It displayed the game's chapters in a vertical scroll and the major warp points for each chapter in a horizontal scroll. The coin icon shows if you have collected that section's collectible, and if not, you can easily fast travel to that part of the game by clicking on it.

To finish up this update, here's a glimpse of these menus in action!



Did you like our first menus? Anxious to see how it will shape future UI design? We'd love to hear! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 37 -Title Screen! (Part 1)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last couple updates we started talking about designing UI and Menus for Last Dive. Today we'll still be talking about UI, as we show some progress on our main menu and title screen. Let's get started!


A First Placeholder

A couple months back, when we decided to finish a playable Demo for Last Dive, one of the things that was missing was a title screen and a main menu. This far into development it was a weird feeling to have the game start all of the sudden without any screens, so we started working on that.



Our first version wasn't committed to a specific art direction, as it was made before any other menus, just as a placeholder. We made this version with the main concept art we used back then for most promotional stuff, and it was created using high res fonts.

A bit later, after coming up with the Pause Menu shown in this update, we settled for an UI art direction and decided we wanted to use pixel art fonts to match the game's art. This time, we started working on a title screen which would actually be part of the game, or at least the demo.


An Animated Test

Back in the original Last Dive, the title screen was also the beginning of the game. You would see Dave on his boat watching the sunset, and the game would start once you hit space and he jumped off into the sea. We liked this idea and decided to test it for the remake.

The second version of the title screen took place right at the game's start. But unlike the original, this time we made it a sunny day, which matched our first level in the game, the bright coral reef. To fully validate if this screen served its purpose and was fitting the game's mood, we animated a short clip showing the transition from title screen to the start of the game.



That's all for now! Next week we'll show how our title screen ended up looking! At least for now. Did you like the first versions? We'd love to hear! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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Hello everyone! Stopping by quickly just to let you guys know we updated our first post at this thread with new information, development updates, pictures and gifs of Last Dive's current state. Take a look sometime!

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 38 - Title Screen! (Part 2)

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started talking about Last Dive's title screen. Today we will the rest of the development process and the final results. We highly recommend you read last week's update before this one. Let's get going!


Inspirations from the Past

With that second version done, we felt something was a bit off. The idea of having the game start directly from the title screen was pretty cool, but that bright colorful scene just didn't match Last Dive's mood. It was more important for the title screen to sell correctly the game's mood, and for this, the original's sunset scene did a better job. So we took a step back and created low res thumbnails to try different moods for the title sceen.



We started by grabbing the second version's thumbnail and trying three different versions of it. One with the sunset, as in the original game; one a bit more focused in a thriller/horror mood, with Dave's boat sinking and the last one with an almost surreal mood, with weird temple pillars coming out of the sea. We decided the sunset was the proper mood to go for. It feels more realistic and relatable, but still gives players a mysterious and uneasy feel without really telling anything about the game.

We went on into rendering and creating the third version of the title screen. It looked a lot better than the second version and the mood seemed right, at least for the demo. The idea of having the game start off this screen could still work, we would just have to use some kind of creative transition to take the player from the sunset to a shiny and bright day.





Final Details

We made some adjustments to the last render. We moved the first rock back a bit because it was giving us the feeling that it was part of the "game layer", as if the boat was about to anchor there or something. We also adjusted the whole scene's light settings and depth fog, and added a message to guide the player.



At last, we decided this screen would be displayed the first time you started the game, so we could use it as a transition to the game's start. When you launch the game a second time, you are sent into another screen, with a more subtle title and a main menu to choose how to proceed.



That's it for today guys. This version of the title screen is still work in progress and will most likely change for the final game. So feel free to give us some feedback on it! We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 39 - Main Menu! (Part 1)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

This past week was very special for us here at Pixel Cows, because we were featured in Rock Paper Shotgun! Yey! It's very satisfying to see that people are enjoying what we're doing! Hope you guys have been enjoying it too!

In this update and the next, we'll show you the last part of Last Dive's UI development so far. We will show the creation of our main menu and how it was influenced by every UI decision which came before. Let's get going!


Inspiration

Way back, before we even decided on remaking Last Dive as a full game, our lead programmer made some tests regarding our title screen / main menu technology. He created a procedurally generated ocean which would act as a stage to our main menu screens. The idea was that moving through the menu options would move the camera to different parts of this scene, each time showing different islands that 'hosted' each menu option.





When we started working on the new menu for our remake, we decided to stick to this idea. It was a good way to make an otherwise dull screen a little bit more interactive and interesting. When we finished creating our title screen, as seen in our last week's update, we expanded the scene and created other interesting areas which would work as background to other menu options. You can easily tell both pictures below are connected with a slight parallax shift, which helps keep everything connected.





Gimme more options!

With the backgrounds created, we went on into developing the actual menu. This job was pretty straightforward, as the art direction for our UI had already been set a while ago when we created our pause menu. It was mostly based on deciding how many settings we actually needed, where would the options be displayed, and what types of toggles and checkboxes we would use. Below, you can see our current version for the options menu. As to the content it holds, it's merely a placeholder.





Did you like the idea of our interactive menu and the first screens? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 40 - Main Menu! (Part 2)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In our last update we started talking about our Main Menu and the interactive navigation we created for it. Today, we will show the last screens and how they affected the rest of the main menu. So let's get going!


Complimentary Screens

After creating the options screen, we switched over to some complimentary screens that were needed to complete the demo's full experience. We created the layout for the credits and the message that is displayed when the player reaches the demo's end. Creating this screens were also helpful because they work as a template to any other full text screens we need in the near future.





File Selection

When we were done with most of the main menu, we moved on to what might be the most important screen, the file selection menu. It was very important for us to get this screen right. Files needed to be displayed in a clear way and we also wanted to show some completion information to incentive players to explore and find all hidden collectibles in the game.





The first version of it ended up being a bit too cluttered, and it wasn't focusing on the really important information. The delete button is a pretty decisive option, so it shouldn't be this accessible. Hitting delete would prompt a confirmation, but we were still afraid people would hit it by mistake. So it was moved to a more appropriate spot, cleaning things up a bit and giving space to the completion info.





The second version of the menu worked way better. The player immediately has a clear understanding of where he is in the game, as well as what he might have missed. Adjusting information in this screen was also important because we were able to fit more options and still clean our title screen a bit.

That's it for today! Hope you guys enjoyed this update. All of this is very much a work in progress and the main menu will most likely change for the final game. Got any suggestions on how we could improve it? We'd love to hear! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 41 - The Sounds of the Ocean


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

Recently we talked a lot about Last Dive's UI design. We covered dialogue boxes, the title screen, and the main menu. Now it's time to change the subject once again!

Being stranded at the bottom of the ocean can't be easy. The otherworldly deep sea life, the clumsiness of the old diving suit, the insurmountable amount of water in every direction... As sweet as good graphics may be, it is audio that really conveys this sort of feeling.

Our vision for Last Dive is one that can't be imagined without closing your eyes and imagining the sounds around you. For this remake, once the gameplay groundwork was done, we immediately felt the need to start tackling this most important aspect of production. So today we will show a bit of how we do sound effects. Let's get going!




Pixel Cows' Sound Design Pipeline

For those wondering, a 'design pipeline' is just a fancy way of referring to a given sequence of steps that are taken to perform a task. This is what we do to design and produce our sounds:


For any given sound effect that we need, we start by trying to imagine as closely as possible how that should sound like.
Then we search through our company's sound libraries and some royalty free repositories for sound samples that are close enough to what we want to create.
We then mix with other audio samples as needed, and alter it with effects that change the pitch or create a reverb, or an echo. Sounds propagate differently underwater, in a way that we only hear sounds of a lower frequency when compared to the air. This is what makes stuff sound "muffled" underwater, and we emulate that by adding a low-pass filter.
Find a way to test if that sound fits and, if needed, adjust / remake / start over. Otherwise, move to the next sound.

These are the basic steps. Now let's talk a bit about our audio setup. We are true workflow maniacs here at Pixel Cows, so we always make sure we have an efficient way of creating the sound FXs we need and quickly testing it with other audio samples to see if it fits.

Hearing a sample while watching the event that triggers it or seeing how it mixes with the other sounds playing at the same time is an essential part of proper sound design. We only know for sure if a sample is working if we have some sort of visual feedback to go along with it. Adobe's Premiere Pro (image above), despite being an editing software, has been working really well for us. It has all the audio tools and effects we usually use as well as being good for mixing sounds together, and bunching them up with video clips to give us a feel of how it'll play in the actual game.


Creating an Atmosphere

We started the audio development by creating Dave's basic movement sounds, such as jumping, walking, and falling from big heights. These were some of the main sounds in the game and the ones our players would be hearing the most, so it was important to get them right.

Our next step was to give them some sort of context. The original Last Dive had a constant atmospheric underwater sound going on (what is sometimes called a soundscape), and it helped a lot with the game's mood and immersion. It has the goal of holding all sounds together. If this looping sound isn't in the game, everything feels a bit disconnected. Notice the discrete, but essential, atmospheric audio of the ocean in the background of the video below.





This deep sea atmosphere is our main looping background sound and will be present in most of the game, but it wouldn't fit well in the introductory coral reefs. For those, we made a new soundscape. You are a lot closer to the surface in this level, so we added wave crashes and seagulls muffled by the water.





What do you think of our sound effects production process? Got any suggestions on how we can improve? We'd love to hear! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 42 - Perfecting a Sound Effect

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started a new topic in our updates, sound effects! After showing our technical setup and talking a bit of how we create SFX here at Pixel Cows, today we will cover how we iterate on sounds to make them feel just right. Showing exactly what we aim at when creating effect and how design decisions affects the way things sound. Let's check it out!




Getting a Sound FX Just Right

After setting the core elements in the last update, we proceeded to other important sounds, like Dave's damage and death animations. This was divided into two parts, the hit that Dave takes and his feedback to it. We wanted the hit to sound a bit like a cracking bone or his flesh getting ripped. As for his response, we were looking for a muffled scream as well as bubbles coming out rapidly, as if he was gasping in his helmet. Here's a first try.

This was a bit outta place. Dave's scream didn't sound like it was underwater and it was way too close to the hit itself, everything seemed like one sound. We had to make the hit more distinct, emphasising the gameplay aspect of it. As for the "in danger" heartbeat sound, it was a cool touch but a bit too oppressive. Players would be spending a good part of the game with 1 HP, it that sound was always playing in the background, it would be too much.

This version was better, Dave's scream now sounded like it was underwater, but perhaps it could be a bit more muffled. As for the hit, it was still off, it now looked like he was cracking his back, especially because of the animation. So we tried a an approach less focused on bones and more on ripping flesh.

This worked great for us! The hit and scream were connected but you could still tell them apart, and one wasn't outdoing the other. It also sounded way more like Dave was screaming underwater or in his helmet.

That's it for today! Audio is such a big deal, so we will save some more of our work in that area for the next couple updates. Next time we'll show how we did interface and monster sounds, with more vids to go along. Did you like this update? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter andFacebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

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UPDATE 43 - From "Great" to "Awesome": How to Create Effective Videogame Audio (Part 1)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the next couple updates we'll wrap up our talk on sound design for project Last Dive. Before that, though, some important news. As you may have noticed, Pixel Cows has a new face! We've been on the road for almost 8 years now. Since our first days working in a garage, a lot has happened! We will soon be telling a little bit of that story and show how our new logo reflects that. As well as giving you guys an exclusive look into how we're rebuilding our branding.


For now, let's talk sound a little bit more! On the last update we showed how we create and perfect sound effects here at Pixel Cows. Today we'll dive a little deeper. Let's get going!


"Game Sounds" versus "Interface Sounds"

First off, we're gonna focus on SFX's creation from a game design point of view. You have probably noticed that Last Dive uses a semi-realistic approach for sound design. When Dave jumps, you don't hear a "boing!" sound as is common in more cartoonish games. Instead, you hear Dave's leathery clothing moving, and the sound of moving water.

But making stuff sound realistic doesn't attend to all game design needs. When players go out of their way to collect coins, they need a reward. It's not satisfying enough to hear the the clanks of Dave's metalic gloves touching the coins. Check the video on the left.

We then added the "coin being computed" sound (check the video on the right). It's not perfect, but man, what a difference, isn't it?

The coins are an abstract concept in this game. It's not expected that the player thinks that Dave is actually finding coins. He's not reacting as a real diver would: "Oh my, who put these shiny, perfectly-aligned coins here? I'll be filthy rich when I leave this place!" No. The coins don't exist in Dave's world. They are there for the player. There is a great tolerance for its audiovisual cues being more abstract than realistic. Their goal is to be satisfying, while only reasonable feasible. That's where the "semi" in "semi-realistic" becomes more clear. The coin sounds are interface sounds - just disguised so that they don't stand off too much.

The Secret Collectible (obviously temporary name) is another good example. There's a "realistic" sound when Dave collects it. But then there's a satisfying interface sound as it's computed. Players must feel that they found something important.

Note that the computing sound has no intention of being part of that scene. It doesn't exist in Dave's world. It's there only for the player. Besides, it helps making the game more "juicy". Juiciness is a quality that a game has when interacting with it feels good. A combination of many small effects, animations and sounds can make a game feel "juicy". We'll certainly dive further into juiciness in some future update

To finish up this topic here's one last example of gameplay response, this time related to the HP hud. Can you spot the "realistic" versus the "interface" sounds?

That's it for today guys! Next week we'll show the last part of our sound effects production. For now, let us know what you think of the sounds we created in this update. We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 44 - From "Great" to "Awesome": How to Create Effective Videogame Audio (Part 2)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In our last update, we started talking about how design decisions affect our sound effects' creation. The difference between Game Sounds and Interface Sounds and how important that distinction is from an overall game design point of view. Today we're gonna wrap this first pass through sound effects creation. Let's get going!


Adjusting Tones

As you can tell, sound design has a crucial impact not only in the game world but also in UIs and HUDs. As a first test of audio for our UI, we created SFXs for our pause screen. This task was really important, as it dictates how other interfaces in the game should sound like.

For this screen, we only used four different sound effects:

- One for opening the menu and for confirming an option
- A subtle one for when the player moves between options
- One for going back or canceling an operation
- One for closing the menu.

Notice how the "confirm" effect sounds positive, and the "go back" effect sounds negative? They are almost the same, but the confirmations go from a lower to a higher tone, and the negative is the opposite. This helps the player understand how his action affect the screen he is navigating. The more we can convey without words, the more natural the interaction becomes.


Missing Sounds

Curious fact: it's really difficult to list beforehand all the sounds you will need. As you start implementing sounds in the game, you begin "noticing the silences". Things you haven't foreseen end up needing some sort of audio feedback. You only know it's done when you stop noticing the absence of sounds. Check it out:

On our "Sounds to Make" list, the moray would only have the biting sound. The blowfish would have no sound at all. When we started implementing audio feedback in the game, however, their silence felt wrong. When planning your audio work, make sure to leave some margin for such adjustments.

Another example is the secret passage sound. At first we didn't plan to add sound to that action. But discovering a secret must be satisfying, so a "revealing" sound was in order!

Phew! Quite a lot to talk about audio... Hope you guys enjoyed! In the future, we'll surely make another update focused on this topic. For now, time to move to other areas! Did you like this update? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

Awesome walk trough.
I really like to follow you through your Project ^___^
Very interesting *_*

 

Thanks!! Glad to see you're enjoying it!
It takes some time to put these posts together so we're really happy when someone follows our development

 

This is us in a nutshell!


Hello everyone!

It's been a while since we posted something, sorry for that! We've been quite busy working on some none related Last Dive things, such as marketing, branding and our website.

To make up for our absence, today we have a pretty cool quick update focused on some of those things.

For those of you who have followed us for a while, or if you happened to stumble across this thread just now, we'd like to give you a better idea of who we are and what we have been up to these past years!

So without further a do, this is Pixel Cows in a nutshell

Phew! That was intense! XD

If you liked our newest reel and wish to know more about us, our games or Last Dive (our current game in development), make sure to stop by our new About Us page. Tons of cool gifs and info in there! And you can also join a raffle to win a key for Last Dive's Beta test. Don't miss out!

Thanks for stopping by!

 

Looks like you can't go wrong with adding more environment assets into the scene

 

UPDATE 45 - An Emotional Bond with Games

Hello, everyone! How's it going?

It's been a while since our last game update. You might have noticed, but the past weeks we were really focused on some marketing and branding tasks. We updated the look on all our social medias, sections of our site and released a new reel featuring a lot of our past games. We also did some long due work on a About Us page! It has a bit of who we are, what we did and what we're doing. Check it out!

All right, so let's get back to what we're really here for! It's a funny thing, when we think about the design of mood, atmosphere and feeling, usually the things that come to mind are environments and music. Have you ever considered how certain interface elements have a huge impact on how you feel about a game?

Today, we'll talk about a mood/design overhaul that has been going on in the game, and believe it or not, it all starts on the File Select screen.


An Emotional Decision





We don't think that a game only begins when you're controlling your avatar for the first time. It starts the moment you boot up the application, or even before that. Call us crazy, but we like to take an immense level of care with everything that happens immediately after you start up the game!

Who among you is old enough to remember the awe of the 16-bits era? One of the greatest things of that time was how connected and attached you felt to a game. The experience of following a game's news through magazines, not quite knowing what to expect, then going to a store and buying or renting a physical copy, and finally unpacking and playing it for the first time! The mystery and sense of wonder of having an entire world fitting into a cartridge was the sort of thing that made us want to become game developers!

We feel that a lot of that magic is lost nowadays, and we'd like to recover a bit of it.
Be warned: Much of what we'll show here will seem insanely subtle and small, but yeah, we do believe they make a lot of difference!

The first thing is our new boot up screen, shown above. That's the first thing players see. That small animation is all about the mood, and it's also a great way to hide a necessary loading screen


It's YOUR game, not ours

Another important design decision in that direction is how we represent your save file. We see it as an important opportunity to further connect the player to the game. While opening a game, just selecting "Start" and having the game transparently autosave your progress for you is efficient and functional, we thought it didn't fit our style. Consider how different it feels to have your very own save slot! You get to create your own little space in the game by picking a save slot to call yours and adding your name to it, and then watching it get filled with little icons representing items you collected, bosses you faced, etc. The Legend of Zelda games do this very well!

There's also something about your save file being represented as a little rectangle that is 'stored' in some screen in the game. It gives your save a sense of physicality, as something that really exists and is there waiting for you to nurture it. It invites you to invest time on it. And it rewards you by showing treasures, items and coins representing how far you've come. This creates an emotional bond that, for us, is part of the magic.


Designing a Save Slot




You've seen this screen before. It's our previous save slot screen. It was pretty and functional, but we wanted something more connected to the game's concept. As Dave's sole connection to the surface is a radio, we thought so should be the player's connection with the game. For the next attempt, old phones and military radios were used as inspiration.




This iteration was sketchy, kinda empty and a bit too much "in your face", but it helped us nail down some important concepts. The idea of a vintage radio / phone really felt in place, and the radio clock inspired display gave just the right level of abstraction to the information being displayed.




We then created a much improved version, taking heavy inspiration from naval computers and command centers. It was meant to look like an information panel, as if you were monitoring Dave's progress through naval instruments.






That's it for today guys! Hope you liked how we approached the redesign of our file select screen. In the next update, we'll still talk about this subject, but focusing on save points and how we intend to make the player's journey a bit more personal.

Got any suggestion or opinions on this? We'd love to hear! We're always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 46 - Awesome Game Interfaces are all about Magic and Mystery


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started talking about how we intend to make Last Dive a more personal experience for each player. Mostly aimed at the saving system and the file select screen, we worked on specific changes increased the emotional bond with the game. Today, we will show a few more changes still tied to this topic and these goals. Let's check it out!


Adding some more magic!

We really like games that sometimes break the fourth wall, like Metal Gear and Eternal Darkness. We want to play a little with that on our file select screen every now and then, specially with the small map in your save slot. We don't wanna spoil it for you, so we'll just leave you with a quick example. Plus, a gif of the navigation flow of the new file select screen!









Dammit, I'm afraid of what's next, where's the save game option?!?

Besides how the save file is represented, there's also the how the game is saved. We made a deliberate choice towards having Save Points instead of autosave or other methods. This means you have to get to a Save Point to be able to record your progress into your save slot. We can then use it for a few things:

- A reward for finishing a segment of the game: you've made permanent progress
- Foreshadowing a major event. You know that feeling when you get into a room that has no music, just a Save Point and a huge menacing door? That's what we mean

At the start of this task we made a brainstorming session to come up with an object that would work for us. While that object should fit into the game aesthetics, it should also feel a little bit disconnected to the game's world. Save Points belong to the player's journey, not Dave's.





After playing with abstract and literal ideas, we decided to go with the small computer terminal, which was interesting enough and not entirely realistic. It follows the same vintage radio aesthetics of the save file screen, which is good since there is a conceptual connection between these two interfaces.

After surviving dangerous traps and hordes of bizarre sea monsters, it's a relief to stumble into one of these!





Hope you guys liked this update! We know, we know... Sometimes we look like one of those fussy painters meticulously adding tiny dots of color to a painting that already seems done, but rest assured that those things improved a LOT the game's flow and experience!

Did you like the update to our saving system? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 47 - The Different Roles of Animation


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

Before we start, remember we mentioned that "Last Dive" was a temporary project name? Well, we are really close to announcing the final name! We've been using the final name internally for a long time now, and all in all, it suits the game better for a bunch of reasons. We're wrapping up the game logo and we'll be showing everything in our site over the next couple weeks, so make sure to pay a visit!

Ok, on to today's topic: character animation! Instead of the technical bit-byte, which we may show in the future, today we'll focus on the things we like to consider when designing animation.


Animation Types

Animations play a huge part in Last Dive. Of course, if Dave is jumping, his animation must be that of someone jumping - obvious stuff apart, animation must always have a clear design goal (just like everything in game development). So besides making sure Dave looks like he's jumping, what else must an animation do?
For starters, let's talk about two very different sources of design points: Action and Personality.


Conveying Action

Besides illustrating what is going on, action animations have the very important role of conveying to the player the rules he is subject to at any given moment. In the case of Last Dive, however, the gameplay is so radically different from what one would expect from a platformer that some extra context is required to make the game action more intuitive. In one sentence, what makes the gameplay unique is the fact that Dave is moving underwater while wearing a very heavy diving suit. Imagine what it would be like to try to run in a swimming pool - while wearing iron boots!

Most of the gameplay is determined by the amount of effort needed to move underwater while being pulled down by an iron diving suit and held back by water resistance. To make that feel intuitive, one of the very first interactions that the player has with the game is controlling Dave with his armor on, while outside of the water. Can you tell in the animation below which details help with conveying this weight?







Notice that these are not generic 'walking' or 'lifting object' animations. They were made to set expectations about how it feels to move underwater.

Now this is the funny part: once Dave is underwater, the water pressure brings with it buoyancy, which actually make things lighter! So once he's in, the main problem is not weight anymore, but water resistance. Starting a movement or moving at low speed is really difficult (think again on the 'trying to run in the swimming pool' parallel), but once objects receive enough impulse to start moving, they actually move much further away than they would outside of the water. Which also applies to jumps:





Buoyancy makes Dave's physics a lot like that of astronauts on the moon. In that regard, we can see how animation is essential to make the game rules intuitive to the player!

Still on that, a lot of game design is about understanding the underlying state machine that determines rule changes and the transitions from one state to the other (walking = moving slowly, jumping = moving faster, falling from a high place = short delay before being able to move again, etc). Animation makes these movement changes not feel unexplained or cheap, but rather a natural consequence of the game's physics.


Conveying Personality

Personality animations, on the other hand, serve a distinct purpose. They focus on displaying character. When playing games, you usually don't have a character's full background laid out for you, and animation helps telling this untold story in a subtle way. In Last Dive we've been careful when creating Dave's animations. Most of them convey something about the character: what he thinks, how he feels, and how it would feel to be on his shoes.







That's it for today guys! Next week we will have more to share regarding animation and a deep look into Dave's personality! If you liked the design decisions behind our animation process or have any ideas on how we can improve it, please let us know! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 48 - How to Build a Character's Personality Through Animations


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started talking about animation! We focused our talk on the two main types of animation: Action and personality. Today, we wanna talk a bit more about the topic, but this time, focused on Dave's character and how animation helps build his personality. Let's check it out!


Who is Dave (and how animation hints that)?

Let's get something out of the way: Dave isn't your typical hero. When sending someone underwater in a diving armor to get something done, maybe you should call some expert marine, right? Someone who is really confident and ready for action, correct? Well, that is not Dave.

Dave will do what he has to do, and will fight for his life, sure... But Dave kinda finds himself in that situation, and while he knows how to move around and all the basic diving procedures, he's not super confident. He's more Peter Parker than Spiderman. Although he can clearly find his way around, he's not really used to the stuff that professional rescue divers might have to deal with on a daily basis...





When we created Dave's sprite, we decided to give him a big diving helmet. Given the extreme size limitations, we thought it made him more charismatic. However, how do you create animations that convey a character's personality when you can't see his face? How can you tell what he's feeling or what are his emotions? Our solution was to rely on his body, specially his arms, to do most of the storytelling. His exaggerated, Shakespearean moves also convey something about his personality.

Throughout this journey, Dave will encounter many perils that he isn't quite ready to deal with. When facing simple problems, he will sometimes handle it in a childish, stubborn way. When facing true danger, however, his reactions sometimes are really unpredictable... If he's in such a dangerous situation, shouldn't he be more startled?
His nods and nays while speaking in the radio are also a way of showing an incompatible behaviour. He's not very confident in his equipment, and his general good mood makes it seem like he doesn't fully understand how dire his situation is. It's also a great way to keep the player entertained with small details while going through long text boxes


Signature animations

The two animations below, despite being simple, are in fact really important to convey Dave's personality and the situation he's in. We will be covering signature animations in depth in a future update. For now, just try looking at these two gifs, and compare to how other characters would be moving if they were in Dave's situation. If the character was Link, he would be in a much more 'readying for battle' pose. If he was Duke Nukem, he would go "I'm here to kick ass and use my lamp, and I'm all out of lamps!"

Seriously, though. Compare that to how Dave reacts (or doesn't). We don't like to over-spoil story or lore related stuff in these updates, so for now, just know that this demeanor in Dave is not by chance, but rather the result of a very deliberate storytelling choice!







That's it for today guys! Hope you liked this update! We've been working carefully in building Dave's animations. Despite being a small pixel guy, it's important for us to work on making him relatable and empathetic.

Do you have any suggestions on how we can improve his animations? We'd love to hear! We are always hanging out on Twitterand Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 49 - Darkness Revealed!


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

We're super excited with today's update! As you all know by now, our current project is strongly inspired on our past jam game "Last Dive" - to the point where we've been calling it "project Last Dive" since we began development one year ago. We have even called it a "remake", but in all honesty, that's one hell of an understatement!

Our new game was made from scratch. It surely rests on the shoulders of the original's best insights and concepts, but we are rethinking and improving every bit and pixel along the way. Over the past 12 months, just about everything - from graphics to gameplay, to the whole game story - was so dramatically overhauled that our current game barely resembles the original Last Dive!

In that spirit, today we are proud to announce our game's definitive name: Darkness Revealed!

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"How to Pick a Name for Your Game"

It's baffling how much time and work are required to properly answer such an apparently simple question! To give some perspective, consider the thousands of hours that go into making a game like Darkness Revealed. Try and take a grasp of the actual meaning of "thousands of hours". Next, try recalling the last time you browsed Steam's new releases session. Think about how much time you dedicate to understand what each single game is about, how it feels to play it, and so on. You'll surely take a closer look at the games that appeal to you the most, but... What about all the others that didn't immediately appeal to you?

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Question: What did you really know about those games when you unconsciously decided not to learn more about them?

Answer: The game's name. And a thumbnail containing its logo. Maybe a screenshot if the game is featured. And that's it. With that minimum amount of information, on the blink of an eye, thousands of people will quickly decide if they wanna learn more about this thing you've invested your heart, mind and sweat over thousands of hours or not. Hell, we usually make that kind of decision in less than one second!

Does that help giving some perspective on why choosing the right name is extremely important?

Just for clarity's sake, we are not showing Steam's front page to incite anyone to go super commercial or anything. God knows we are not in this for the money, or we would have launched a bunch of smaller, commercial products by now, instead of spending years perfecting our craft and technologies while making dozens of games and releasing them for free!

Investing the right amount of time in figuring a proper name - and a proper image + logo that represents the core aspects of the game - is essential even for the design process itself. You need to understand your game really well to pick a proper name - and you also need to understand your game really damn well to make it good. So, despite what we, developers, usually think about when making our games, at some point we need to look at them from the outside.

What is the core appeal of your game? What is the game mostly about? What are the core concepts and feelings that you want to evoke when people read your game's name without knowing anything else about it?

Point in case, our game, Darkness Revealed is about many things. It has a deep, emotional, mind bending story. It has cool "moving underwater in a heavy diving suit" jump mechanics. It has giant bosses, failing radios and grappling hooks. However, if we have to translate the game's core sensation in a simple (animated) image, it is probably something like this:

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The same goes for the name. Out of everything that we could be saying about our game, after much consideration, we understood that "Darkness Revealed" was the combination of words that better evoked the concepts and feelings that our game is all about.

To be honest, after calling our project "Last Dive's remake" for several months, it did take us a couple days to get accustomed with calling it Darkness Revealed. That's normal, and honestly unimportant. Most people will not be used to what you used to call your game before. In fact, most people never heard about your game before!

That's it for today guys! We're very happy to finally share this announcement with all of you. And that's only the beginning of some cool updates coming soon! Next week we will show a bit of the process that got us to this logo and poster. Some pretty good insights, don't miss out!

And as always, if you want to stop by and talk or share your opinion with us, we will be hanging out on Twitter and Facebook! Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email every 15 days! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

UPDATE 50 - Creating Darkness Revealed's Logo


Hello everyone! How's it going?

After months of expectation and preparations for the announcement, last week we finally revealed our game's definitive name! "Project Last Dive" is now officially called Darkness Revealed! We also shared with you guys the game's logo as well as it's final poster. In case you missed any of this, you can read all about it here!

So today, we will be talking a bit more about the game's name and logo. But this time, focused on the logo's development process and how it's final version came to be. Let's get going!


Revealing the Darkness

With the game's name finally set, it was time to create a logo and a visual identity to go along with it. This process was fairly complicated. It took us a couple months and some major twists till we finally got to a version everyone was happy with. These were some of the first "the game translated into an image" tests we made.

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For a long time in development we were using this placeholder logo. We weren't fully aware of what message we were trying to send with all of this. What stories were these images supposed to tell? We didn't know it back then, but the image that goes with the logo would become almost as important as the logo itself.

After a few months, we started working on the logo for real. We had long brainstorm sessions to generate ideas of what would make a good logo. Should it be underwater? Should Dave be in it? Should it have monsters crawling out of it? Once we had settled for some cool concepts, we made a first wave of quick and dirty drafts. The purpose of this was trying a big number of ideas with little time investment. It doesn't take much work to see if an idea works or not, if you can abstract from the rendering quality and focus on the design concepts themselves.

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This step was huge in helping us identify elements and layouts we believed could work. And you can notice some of these elements are still present in the final logo. After this first batch of tests we tried out a new concept: underwater communication over radio. Dave's radio is his only link to the "outside" world, so we thought this could be a cool theme for the logo.

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These were the two variants we liked the most out of more than 40 tests that were created. From these logos somethings was starting to become clear:

- Darkness Revealed is a big name, and it's hard to make cool details or smart plays look great. The simpler approaches were always beating altered versions. We tried several types of glitches, cracks and word slides. But everything was affecting readability, and was still unable to really capture the real feeling of the game.

- For the reason above, we wouldn't be able to stray too much from a simple logo. Therefore, the image in the back (or the poster as we've been calling it) would play a HUGE part in setting the mood and expectations straight. It would guide the production of logo thumbnails and overall logo usage in context.

- The radio theme was cool, but it was difficult to make the logo convey "radio" while not feeling futuristic, military or other notions that are not really representative of the game. Toning down the radio effects, however, made the radio theme unrecognizable. This led to whole batches of logos with image effects that felt arbitrary and unconnected to the game.

With that in mind, we went for a drastic change. We had plenty of internal discussions to help us figure out more clearly what story this image had to tell - logo included. So a new testing phase started. Realizing it was mostly a change related to the background image, we came to a new variant.

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You may laugh at us, but we called this the "Spielberg logo"! We thought it had a 90's mystery adventure movie vibe, that was much closer to what Darkness Revealed is all about. Encouraged by this new approach, we completely dropped the radio theme and instead focused on fonts and layouts that contributed to a feeling of mystery, adventure and revelation. We took inspiration from sources such as Lost, Aliens, and Prometheus and, before we noticed, Darkness Revealed's true face came to be!

We've shown it on the top of this update, but here is the image again, just for the sake of completing the story:

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Holiday's Coming!

We're very happy to finally share this announcement with you guys. And that's only the beginning of some cool updates coming soon! But the holidays are almost upon us, so go make a snowman (or a beach sand castle, if you're on the south hemisphere like us), and make sure to rest well, be with your loved ones and prepare for the awesome year that 2017 is bound to be! We will be pausing our updates for now, and we'll be back in January with cool new stuff, like Darkness Revealed's first trailer! =O

We will still be on Twitter and Facebook, so make sure to stop by and say hello! Or if you want to receive these updates complete and before everyone else, sign up for our Golden Chest.

Thanks a lot! Cya next year!

 

On behalf of everyone at Pixel Cows, we wish you a
Merry Christmas and an awesome 2017!​

​

We're immensely thankful for the great year that 2016 was for us. And 2017 is bound to be even better!

Challenges will surely come, and we’ll be here waiting for them! We'll be fighting, inventing solutions, and working our asses off to make some sweet lemonade out of whatever lemons life throws at us! Oh yeah, and we’ll be making games and having fun all the while, no doubt about that!

We will be immensely proud and thankful if you are there by our side for another year. You, dear fans old and new, are the reason for everything. You, the person reading this right now, is who makes it all worth it.

All that said, we do wish you some great holidays! This is the time of the year to chill out, hang with loved ones and gain some weight, so just go do that already! Thank you for being awesome, and see you in 2017!


With love,
The Pixel Cows team

 

Back to Work!

Hey guys, been a while since we last talked!

Much like Dave, our caribbean vacations are long gone...

We've been hard at work for the past couple weeks,
and appreciate your patience as we get ready to dive back into Darkness Revealed!

Lots of updates and cool stuff coming very soon!

 

UPDATE 45 - What Darkness Revealed Should Look Like!


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

It's been a while since we last talked!

First of all, sorry for the long silence... Our whole team has been heads down working on our game's super-juicy first 15 minutes of gameplay, with all that it entangles, which is no excuse, but... Hell, yeah, it's actually a pretty good excuse! Anyway, thank you all for sticking with us through this update hiatus. You guys are the best! Anyway, take a deep breath, as we're about to catch you up on all that happened on these past couple months with a full serving of sweet, sweet gifs

Last time we talked, we announced our game's name: Darkness Revealed! Old time fans: don't worry, it still has everything that made "project Last Dive" special, and much, much more!





Where the hell have you guys been?!

After a short, well-deserved holiday break, we started the year by planning our activities for 2017 - namely, looking at where we were in development and detailing what was left to do. We are not keen on cutting scope, and we would never cut on quality, so we decided to expand our team instead!

Please welcome Carlos Cadori and Cleiton Oliveira, the two newest cows in the farm!





Cadori will be lending a hand in system / infra development and performance optimization, while Cleiton is tackling a lot of gameplay related stuff. We've been sharing the noisy trenches of game development with these two talented guys for over a month now, and all we can say is that we are very happy!

With our new team formed, we went on to tackle something that was really bothering us: performance. It's pretty standard that, at the beginning of a project, no one cares about optimizing assets, code and whatnot. Speed is the word of order when you are iterating, removing and rebuilding stuff as you determine what the game is about. At some point, though, you'll start stumbling on fps drops and even the eventual out-of-memory crash. So once we got to a point where we had the game pretty much figured out, it was time for a good old cleanup! We recently had an entire sprint focused on compressing assets and improving the game's performance. The gains from this taskforce ended up being huge! We're talking 400% improvements, and the game now runs smooth as butter under the sun! Furthermore, now it's much easier to build new content, which is always great and will revert back into more sweet stuff for you to find and play with.


The Vertical Slice (not a sword fight term, I'm afraid)

Throughout 2016 we worked and experimented on several different parts of Darkness Revealed. At the end of the year, the core of the game was fun and solid, so we decided it was time for building a vertical slice of our game. That is, a small part of the game that would feature everything in final quality, as a sample of what the final game will look and feel like. This was an important decision, as it would show us, for the first time, what our game really felt like. For that, we decided to overhaul the tutorial level of the game, which was really broken up to this point.

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The main goal with this level, other than teaching the game's controls, is to set the mood and expectations for the rest of the game. The tutorial acts as a general sample, showing the player a bit of everything he will get to experience, such as characters, mechanics, enemies, cutscenes, environments, and much more. This area also serves as an introduction to Dave's personality. You get to know a bit of how he feels, thinks, acts and most importantly: what he's doing in this place.

The tutorial was also a first real test of our main story conduct: the dialogue box. You might remember when we focused an entire update on the dialogue box. Players will be seeing it a lot, so it was crucial for us to get it just right. For the tutorial's overhaul we once again worked on the box. Besides improving its design, we also worked on the colors for each character and created a custom font for the game!

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That's all for today guys! Once again, sorry for the long silence... From now till launch you can expect a lot of content and cool gifs! In the next update, for example, we will show a more from the tutorial. Including our new jump mechanics and some dark and gloomy mood transitions!

Other than that, what did you think of our tutorial's final looks? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email per month! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

Wow! Nice pixelated surface water. I've not seen that quality before. Well done.

 

Looks awesome! I 'suffer' from mild thalassophobia so I think if done right this game can really make me feel uncomfortable haha!

 

Thanks! We worked hard on it

Hahaha that's what we're aiming for! We really want people to feel a bit tense and overwhelmed by the situation. Hopefully we'll hit that sweet spot without making anyone too uncomfortable

 

UPDATE 46 - Creating a Working Tutorial


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In our last post, we updated you guys on what we did during our long silence since our last post back in December. We introduced our two new programmers, Cleiton and Cadori, and told you how they helped us improve the game's fps and performance. To wrap up, we explained how we've been working on giving our tutorial level a final quality look. Today we'll show you a bit more of how the tutorial level is shaping up. Including new jump mechanics and the level's mood changes. Let's get going!


Creating a working tutorial

Let's be honest, bad tutorials are the kind of pain that can make you give up a game before ever getting to know it! We believe the best way to teach players is to make as few interferences as possible, while giving context to those interferences so that they feel like integral parts of the core experience. In Darkness Revealed, controls are only taught when the story and the level design demands those actions. Some handy visual instructions also allow us to keep tutorial texts shorter or skipping them altogether, avoiding unnecessary gameplay interruptions.

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Darkness Revealed is a game that has an uncommon set of controls. There are three different types of jumps, and all three are accessed by the space bar. At first sight, the decision of using only one key for all of them could look like an unnecessary source of confusion, but in fact it's one of the central aspects of our gameplay design - and it gets pretty darn fun after the 15 seconds you take to figure out the different jumps! As designers, it's our job to make this learning curve as pleasant as possible, so we thought the best way to teach our different set of jumps was with the help of visual cues.

So now, when Dave starts charging his jumps, two thresholds are indicated. The first, seen on the left, is triggered first, and allows Dave to perform the Distance Leap if the player releases the button at that moment. The second one, seen on the right, is used to trigger the Height Jump. But how do players know how much they have to charge for each jump? That's where visual cues come in.

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Notice how we added small wind gusts coming from the character's feet? Those are in place to help us explain how the jump is achieved and also, so players can quickly tell which jump they are about to perform. Animation also plays a huge part in helping with player's understanding of what is about to happen. Notice how on both types of jumps, Dave's pose clearly indicates in which direction he is about to propel himself. These changes helped drastically with the understanding of our somewhat unusual movement system.


Setting the mood

As mentioned earlier, the main goal with this tutorial level was to set the correct mood for the game. We don't want to spoil it too much, but we'd like to show you a couple ways on how we have been handling mood changes and expectations.

From the get go, the corals are a great place to be - so full of colors and beautiful sea life! But that changes quickly as you progress through the area. The background and the water surface play a big part in setting the correct mood. As seen in the gif to the left, the surface becomes darker as Dave moves through the level. This is one the ways we have of subtly telling a story and foreshadowing upcoming events. Another example of these changes is the gif to the right. When Dave encounters old ruins, the sea starts getting agitated and lightnings take over the water surface... Uh oh, I feel some trouble ahead!

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Light changes are all around Darkness Revealed. When it comes to setting the correct feel to a scene, lighting effects are one of our main ways of doing it. Other than the subtle changes to background and surface lighting shown above, we also like tempering with it in more obvious ways. It won't be rare for Dave to find himself in really dark places. In these scenarios, his lantern is most likely his best friend. Throughout the game, you can expect to frequently see scenes like the ones shown below. As it helps us create tension and makes certain story situations more believable.

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That's all for today guys! Hope you have enjoyed our update and the tutorial's final look. Did you like how we taught our jump mechanics in game? Think it's still hard to understand? We'd love to hear you opinion! We are always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook!

Or, if you want to be among the first to receive these updates complete and with exclusive content, sign up for our Golden Chest Newsletter. Just one email per month! Good content, interesting articles about gamedev and no spamming. And if you don't like it, feel free to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

For the flashlight, currently it's a sphere which is pretty realistic of course for a lantern. Does the light cast shadows if there are for example rocks or obstacles on the path?

 

Not currently! Most props in Dave's game layer have their own normal maps and get affected by his light, but they don't really block his way. They are sort of in a backwards part of the game layer and Dave can just walk past them. So it wouldn't make much sense for them to block his light or cast shadows at this moment. But improving his lantern's light interactions is definitely on our backlog!

 

Alright, that's what I thought Thanks for the reply!

 

UPDATE 47 - The Only 5 Enemies You Need to Make Your Game Fun (Part 1)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

We've been at full speed here at Pixel Cows developing Darkness Revealed, so I'll talk a little about that before jumping into the topic of enemies!

We've been diligently working on a build that is story complete - that is, a version of the game that has all the dialogues, characters, cutscenes and locations that are essential to make our plot work. It is different from content complete, because we will still add more levels, enemies and all sorts of fun stuff afterwards. In other words: our late development will focus on exploring all the possibilities that are allowed by our game mechanics and systems, theme and locations. Our current development focuses on establishing a solid base for all the rest - and that's where enemies come in!

Today's update is a little different from what we usually do. Our goal is to shed some light on what has worked for us, throughout the years, regarding enemy creation and their impact in the game's design. We think you'll enjoy the thought process behind picking the enemies for Darkness Revealed! And hopefully, this article will end up being useful for fellow game dev's in the same journey as our's

So many ideas, so little time! How to choose which ones will make the cut?​

So, what are the 5 enemies that MY game needs?

To answer that, we must quickly take a step back and answer two other questions:

- What is my game about?
- What is the purpose that enemies have in my design?

Your whole game works like a machine, and enemies are only a cog meant to complement the other cogs (story, setting, movement mechanics, etc), so that the whole machinery works. In the end, all that matters is that the broader experience makes sense.

Once you understand what your game is about and how enemies contribute to its design, prioritize potential enemy ideas by developing first the ones that enable the largest amount of cool, engrossing, varied gameplay.

To help illustrate this point, let's think of a scenario where you are only allowed to develop one single enemy for the game. If you can only have one, which one would be it?


What is the one single enemy that will contribute the most to my design?

Some examples:

- Resident Evil: the basic, walking zombie. If follows you slowly, withstands a lot of bullets and try to eat your brain, like a good zombie should. Resident Evil is all about mood and the fear of being cornered by slow moving corpses and / or running out of bullets. If Capcom needed to develop just one enemy to make Resident Evil work, the basic zombie would still allow the game's core objective to work.

- The original Super Mario: Goomba. In a game that is basically about jumping, you need to jump over it to avoid being killed, and jump on it to kill it. The existence of Goomba gives purpose to that game's main mechanic, and most other enemies are variations.

- Darkness Revealed: the Electric Eel. It's a timing-based platformer about exploring the levels and mastering the pace of Dave's movements. The Electric Eel shows clear menace to those who don't learn the timing, they allow for many different challenges regarding timing and jumping, and they are stuck to specific parts of the level, so that the player feels safe when they're not crossing those parts.

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Think of the first enemy not as an entity in itself, but as a complementary part of your game's core idea and mechanics.

Maybe you need more than one enemy to make your basic gameplay work - specially if your gameplay is about more than one thing. If your game is about mastering a bow, a sword and a shield, maybe you'll need one enemy that emphasizes and rewards the use of each.

The main point is: Prioritize. Focus your early efforts on the enemies that will make the bread and butter of your gameplay.

Now, that's not to say that your game should have few enemies. You can make a thousand different enemies if you want! So, how would you choose what your second enemy should be? I think you will find me repetitive here: Considering that your first enemy is in place, what is the next enemy that, if added, would allow for an experience that is the closest to what you envision for the complete game?

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For Darkness Revealed, it's the seahorse. What does it do? Absolutely nothing! It literally just stands still! But why?

Besides learning the timing to move in your diving suit, you must also learn the jumps' trajectories. The Seahorse is not about running for your life. It's not about timing. It's just about figuring out where you must be so that you don't touch it as you try to jump past it.

The Seahorse also looks at you. This is purely an aesthetic choice, with no bearings on mechanic. Still, notice how you can use details to affect player's perception. Thinking about hitboxes, this seahorse is exactly equivalent to a "dead" thing like a floating ball of coral covered in spikes. In terms of mechanic and difficulty, it would be the exact same thing. However, it wouldn't feel the same, would it? More on that in a sec!


Enemies as a way to make you feel tense

Remember when I said that enemies are just another cog in your game's broader design? Oftentimes, that will have nothing at all to do with mechanics (even if it does have a mechanic tied to it). An enemy can be designed just to make the player feel a certain way, either through mechanic, graphics, audio, level placement or all of them. Take a look at the ugly moray, for exemple:

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We usually hide it at some points through the levels, partially hidden by some algae or rocks. Once you spot it, it's not particularly difficult to avoid, but you take one hell of a scare if you don't see it before! Its purpose is twofold: it makes you pay attention to the level (finding hidden stuff / "revealing the darkness" is a common theme in our game), and despite not being a difficult enemy, it's looks and moves are somewhat oppressive, making you 'respect' the levels instead of just carelessly hopping your way through the game. Without words, it tells you: you're a deep diver stranded on an utterly alien environment. Pay attention or get punished!


That's all for now guys! In "Part 2" of this update, we'll talk about enemy tiers and thematic variances and how they fit into the game's core design. And if you haven't figured out yet, we'll dig deeper into understanding the only 5 enemies you need to make your game fun

Did you like this update? Want to read Part 2 right away? Just sign up to our special Golden Chest fan club and be among the first to receive our updates complete and with exclusive content! We are also always hanging out on Twitter and Facebook, so feel free to say hello, and we'll make sure to let you know when the next update is out!


Thanks for stopping by!

 

Very interesting to read! Wonderful update post

 

Glad you liked it! We'll be posting Part 2 next week

 

UPDATE 48 - The Only 5 Enemies You Need to Make Your Game Fun (Part 2)


Hello, everyone! How's it going?

In the last update we started talking about enemies, and their major roles in games. As we discussed before, enemies are often there to exalt a very specific design goal. But what are those goals? Well, that changes from game to game! It's important for a game designer to observe his game's core mechanics and try to understand what enemy can extract the most from them.

Today, we're gonna delve a bit further into this subject and explore how thematic variations help with keeping enemies and mechanics looking fresh. If you haven't read our last update yet, we highly recommend you read it before this one.

Let's get going!


Enemy Tiers and Thematic Variations

Because it's so important, later on I'll return to the topic of considering your mechanics to prioritize which enemies to develop. For now, though, let's just say this out loud: there are plenty other arguments to create more varied enemies.

- Maybe a seahorse is not menacing enough for the apocalyptic ending of the game
- Players won't stand a game where, after 2 hours, they are still jumping seahorses
- Genre expectations: if it's a game about the ocean, there better be a damn shark somewhere!

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These are all examples of enemy designs that have a strong impact on mood, aesthetics and storytelling - most of these won't make the cut, but are rather studies on how to use enemies to affect these areas of design. Sharks invoke an urgent sense of danger (specially if their behaviour is less passive than other enemies'); the glowing sea worm is there for it's cool looks, and the two weird things on the right tell a lot about the nature of the place you are exploring, contributing to the game's story and setting without requiring a single line of dialogue.


Matching Mechanics with Looks

There are at least two ways to start thinking enemies:

1. You can start thinking about the desired mechanics and then find a "skin" that will fit that mechanic
2. You can start thinking about the desired looks, and then find mechanic that fits it

There's no universally better way. Returning to an example from the last update: Resident Evil's case is the latter. It's a game about zombies, so I bet they started up with a very clear notion that zombies would be their main creep. Therefore, it was up to the gameplay designers to find a matching set of player movements versus basic zombie mechanics.

Darkness Revealed is the former, since the game is mostly about exploring very deliberate level design and mastering Dave's heavy movements. In 90% of the time, enemies are carefully positioned in very specific ways to create different flavours of interesting level design. We have a very clear notion of how each creep must behave, so for all enemies that fit this category, it's our job to find an appropriate skin.




The shellfish is pretty standard. You only take damage if you don't get out of its way or if you jump on it (notice the sharp shell)! It doesn't really care about Dave, so it makes sense for it to look like a peaceful animal.




The crab is pretty much the same - except that it follows Dave to the best of his abilities! Since this is a more aggressive behaviour, it makes sense that he is themed accordingly - ergo, a menacing looking spider like crab.


A Thing About Variety

On to my last set of examples. Please meet the blowfish. All it does is swim back and forth through a predefined trajectory. Originally, we had blowfishes doing all sorts of trajectories besides this one. We called the different varieties "Linear Blowfish", "Circular Blowfish", "Angry Blowfish", etc. Even the seahorse that you already met used to be called a "Static Blowfish"!



However, looking from the player's perspective, the movement above is very different from this one. Yes, this used to be the Circular Blowfish! It's still a collision box flying over a predefined trajectory, but it's different enough to justify completely different aesthetics, don't you think? Not only does this contribute to clarity (which is often an advantage), but it also increases the player's perception of variety. If they were all blowfishes, players would be tired very quickly.



Time to exercise your mind: can you think of games that use up to dozens of different visual representations to what is technically the same enemy (exactly the same mechanic)? Does it necessarily feel cheap, or they have some good reasons to do that?


Ok, so... What are the 5 damn enemies I need to make my game fun?

All right, all right, we'll spell it out! I hope it's pretty obvious by now that no list will work for every game, but there's a way to think about this question that will allow you to come up with a list that makes sense for your game. And that is:

Develop first the enemy that will fix the aspect of your game that is more broken.
When you have zero enemies and your game requires some, you probably want to start out with the bread and butter enemy (or enemies). The one that will allow the player to exercise the game's main mechanics.

Once you feel that your mechanic is already viable (if it's a game about swordfighting, there's already one or two enemies for you to bash and slice to death), then you can start prioritizing. Always start with the ideas that will make the largest contribution to pushing your making game towards your grand vision for it.

Is your game purely about stat progression? Then maybe you can clone the same exact enemy and just increase its stats! If it's about dodging and hammering creeps and you already made heavy enemies that charge onto you and force you to dodge, maybe the next in line is a lightweight enemy that flies meters away when you hit it, just so that it's pleasant to fight with a hammer! Is it a Resident Evilesque zombie game and you already got the basic zombie? Maybe it's the fat zombie that just appears every once in a while to make players think: oh no, I'm screwed! Think about what your game is about and develop the next enemy that will contribute the most to the experience. Play the game and see how it changed with the new enemy. With this new knowledge in mind, rinse and repeat.

Don't feel overwhelmed. Work one at a time. You will get there. Just be smart about prioritizing work. Ultimately, your game will never be about the one billion ideas that you never developed, but about the ones that did make the cut. Prioritization is everything.

To wrap things up, here's a shark. I told you there needed to be one.

Time to help Pixel Cows!​

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