Son of Nor - Action RPG

We unbox our Tobii Eye-Tracking Dev Kit!

• This week: Tobii eye-tracking dev kit, we're at EXPO GAMES in Bozen (South Tyrol) with a huge Son of Nor banner, in-game tutorial system is taking shape, new animation for grabbed Sarahul and new for running Sarahul, entrance to the Wind Temple, new sounds in the Wind Temple.
• We're especially interested in what you think of the improved animations, if they're going in the right direction, and the Wind Temple sounds.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

The eye tracking device I have to say is pretty cool. Currently, it's a Windows and Linux only device so I cannot use it directly on my Mac but it works beautifully in a VM in Parallels. I calibrated it and played with some tech demos Tobii packages with their drivers and one can clearly see the potential of that thing.

What excites me most about it is that it's very natural to use. It's not like a brain device that you have to train and learn how to use. Just use your eyes like you'd normally do. The accuracy is astounding for a device that was only used in usability testing and marketing labs (how long do people look on advertising) not long ago. These things come to consumer price level now. And a device like that opens a lot of possibilities. Not only in gaming, also for apps. So I'm positively surprised, hadn't thought it works with a relative low level of setup required (basically stick the bar below the screen, calibrate, done). I hope we're allowed to show more in the near future.

PS: The dev kit comes with a Unity plugin so it's fairly easy to integrate!

 

eye tracking sounds great! I'm keen to see its implementation when you are allowed to show it off more

 

How many people are working on this project?And how long have you been coding for?

 

We're about 10 people who either work very regularly or even fulltime on the project. We started late 2011 which means it's about 2.5 years now. To be honest, the first year we spent more time with building a working team and laying some ground work. We became really productive about 1.5 years ago.

 

We give you a sneak peek at our own cutscene editor. And its bugs.

• This week: We were at Subotron in Vienna, Austria, talking about our Kickstarter campaign. Then: dialogs, cutscenes, funny bugs in our NPCs and cutscene editor, many new sounds in the Wind Temple, crosshair adjustment and doing a fire burst with a wind push (both based on forum and tester feedback).
• We're especially interested in what you think of the crosshair and the fire burst idea.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

this is really impressive work !

 

Hey guys, I've been following this since almost as soon as you posted the thread. I can't believe how good it looks now to then, it looks amazing. I seriously can't wait to get my hands on this! Finish it and get it on Steam! I'll settle for an early access beta.

 

FIRST REAL video of our eye-tracking implementation. And the play-feeling is really cool. And as the eye-tracking device is non-intrusive (no glasses you wear, no helmet, nothing, it's under your screen...) it really feels like magic!

• This week: Valve's Steam integration into Son of Nor, more work on the menu with multiplayer waiting rooms, more work on the triplanar shader, eye-tracking demonstration.
• We're going to be at GDC! You will be able to test out Son of Nor with eye-tracking there! Contact us if you'll be around.
• We're especially interested in what you think of the eye-tracking.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

You guys are going to revolutionize UV mapping

 

Wow, I'm really impressed by the eye tracking and the dynamic texturing!
And the game looks fantastic, I'm going to tell my brother about this game for sure. (He loves magic and telekinetic stuff)

 

Thanks We're working very very hard on this project.

 

It appears you guys have been working on this project for over 3 years. Once you release, do you think you will be able to receive 3 years worth of paycheck for everyone on your main team?

 

Asks the guy with 3 unfinished projects in his signature.

 

Assumes that everyone was there working full time since day one. Not like Chris had a successful kickstarter 9 months ago.

 

I actually really love the idea of this game and I think it will be a pretty great game

 

Hey guys

Phew, OK this is going to be a longer post. I think this discussion is important and maybe it also helps future devs to get a grasp on finances. Are you playing with the thought of one day opening your own game studio? Read this high level overview

@roger0: It's not 3 years. You know how it is with game startups that grow from very simple roots. We were a bunch of colleagues at first. Then we looked for friends online and found some. Our team was growing. People came, people left. We have about 16 team members. Of those, 10 are really active, meaning 50% to 100% (full work week). Julian once counted that we had over 50 different people in our team, what then crystallized into the team we have today.

@roger0, Ocid: This team grew and we got more professional. We were working without pay until the Kickstarter. Our team was stable (meaning practically no new members, and no one left) since early 2013. So let's ignore the time before 2013 as we all worked for free. Then we had a successful Kickstarter where we raised something around $151,000, which looks like an INCREDIBLE amount. For us it was! We're not US-based, we don't have a track record of awesome games, we don't make a "spiritual successor" of a greatly beloved game. We roll our own franchise, story, gameplay mechanic. This amount of money was a big achievement.

What's left of this? After Kickstarter and Amazon payment fees, after physical rewards, shipping and all other costs we had we're maybe left with ~60% of that amount. Not 100% of what you get one can invest in the game. People like physical rewards, one has to calculate for the costs. So 60% of $150k are $90,000. We're 10 people. Many of us now work full time. Currently, we're only covering costs of our people. Living, food, rent. Really minimum. Game will probably be released lat mid 2014. From beginning 2013 that is about 20 months. Let's say 6 full-time people (we still have unpaid members who work a lot, I'm one of them, and we have members who only spend a few hours per month as a hobby). This would result in a monthly wage of $750 per person per month. We're paying our full-timers more at the moment.

This means: The money we got from Kickstarter doesn't even cover the development time for the game today. This answers @roger0's question It doesn't finance the development of our next game as it doesn't even finance this game!

That's why we're looking for additional money elsewhere. Governmental boosts, funds, competitions and so on. Of course the game will be sold at some point. But all data I saw from other indie teams doesn't point to huge successes. If you're nor Angry Birds or so, successful indie games sell maybe 10,000 copies if they're lucky. Even with lots of press coverage. Solid games sell 2500 to 5000 copies. Let's assume after selling 2500 copies in our Kickstarter, that we make 10,000 more. All payment systems and portals, after all the fees, leave you with about 50% of your selling price. Given our indie status but taking into account the bigger scope of the game, let's think of $25 selling price. 10,000 copies * $25 * 50% = additional $125,000.

For fun, let's just have a look at what the development of this game WOULD cost if we would pay low wages. Now we need to go back to the starting point. December 2012. Let's say we were always about 10 full-time people in total that worked on this game. Let's say we'd pay each a very low wage that is still somehow acceptable for a very small startup with a big dream. Let's say $3000 per month (significantly lower than the average US income, which would be about $5300 from what I'm looking at in Wikipedia). Times 32 projected months and 10 people equals $960,000. Add to that office space, computers, software licenses, social costs, sick days, vacation, travel, game fair tickets, not to mention marketing costs, maybe buy some advertising here and there and so on. We'd quickly be at $1.5 million.

As you see, Kickstarter AND selling 10,000 copies of our game would still not be enough financing a studio of our size. It's a little depressing once you think of it. So we're running on a veeeery low temperature finance wise, still with a lot of goodwill from all our people (including me . We WANT to continue making games and we're already in talks with companies to do contract work, which is one form of keeping yourself financed. Working on games for other companies, getting money, and on the side plan and work on your next project. That's how a lot of startups do it.

Always keep in mind: The number you see on Kickstarter projects is not the money the team gets. Only 60% can be used for actual game development. The rest goes to fees and physical rewards and shipping. Still, the sum for an individual looks huge! $90,000 sounds like a lot! Until you divide it by a team of 10 and the project duration of 2,5 years.

We're happy with our team and the way we work and we found a very good pace and huge satisfaction in our project. We'd all like to live from making games one day. But this project will prooooobably not boost us over this threshold yet. Except if it turns out to be a hit Let's all hope and cross fingers!

 

Hello Chris, thanks for the reply. Whenever I see a game project being worked on for a long time, I wonder how much they respect to get in return. Including myself with some projects I've been working on for awhile.

Well, I think having multiple projects going on is a good thing. It gives me breaks from hammering on only one. Also, one or the other is going to get finished .

 

I work on multiple projects too. Not all game related. For example I'm working on sound for a short film. Great way to get some other input and do other work than just one game

I hope my post helped. It was meant to be open about the whole thing. We're all devs. Maybe it shed some more light on things but I guess everything I said is pretty much known anyway. We (me included) just sometimes don't want to see those big numbers as they seem so incredibly far away. We'll see how this develops. I'm sure once we're on the market we'll do some post mortems and revisit this topic again

 

Something is wrong with this week's dev diary. The original content is gone, but I guess we can use the diary anyway...

• Hear new sounds! Tearing out crystals from their pedestals and tearing out rocks from their original shape. It comes with a really cool camera shake!
• Alex, our producer and level designer interrupts our original broadcast to show a time-lapse video of him building one of the levels you'll play through almost at the end of the game. Check how the first block-out is done and how testing as you build is really important! Don't forget you can ask Alex any game-related question at his ask.fm account.
• Argh, so who was that woman?
• We're going to be at GDC! You'll be able to test Son of Nor WITH eye-tracking there! Contact us if you'll be around. We'll be at the Tobii eye-tracking booth!
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

We have destroyable barrels in the game. And they're not empty!

• This week: More work on Yant'shaza, our fire effect, fire burst effect, fire tornado effect, a lot of cluttering in level 00 tutorial, destroyable barrels with contents, Sarahul dancing bug.
• We're going to be at GDC! You'll be able to test Son of Nor WITH eye-tracking there! Look for the Tobii eye-tracking booth!
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

This week we have a LIMITED TIME offer you just can't refuse!

• This week: We put a lot of vegetation and cluttering into The Edge level, lighting and cluttering in the cave circuit that takes you to one of the temples, improved gameplay going around and new game objectives in Yant'shaza, new destroyable stuff, commercial break advertising wind surfers, a lot of info about the Lur god.
• We're especially interested in what you think would be cool as statue of Lur in Yant'shaza (see video).
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss YOUR opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Lots of testing this week and guess what: Son of Nor is surprisingly fun to play!

• This week: We added more atmo (haze, steam) to the Fire Temple, new enemy in the fire temple, sounds for this new enemy (no spoilers but you can hear the sound), I discovered a very old piece of coder art while testing, some pillars of a temple try to escape when destroyed, playtesting Yant'shaza a lot, sounds for the scorpion enemy and behind the scenes of making these sounds.
• We're especially interested in what you think of the different ways you can take in a level. Do you prefer options or super linear gameplay?
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss YOUR opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

This has been a long time in the making. We've completely overhauled basic game mechanics in Son of Nor. Today, we're introducing a new praying system and in-app purchases.

We've prepared a blog post that explains the new mechanics. READ HERE.

 

We polished important gameplay elements that increase immersion, or at least don't take you out of it

• This week: Polished AI group formations after battle, enemy spawn points and the iterations necessary to make them work, progress on Lur's statue.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss YOUR opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Do you guys plan on improving your particle effects, to me the particles look well unimpressive or to use your term, it feels like "Coder art." I feel that particle effects add a lot to a game and are even more vital for your game.

Have a look at this:

 

True true. And in fact particles are something we still need to work on. Which ones especially did you mean?

In general unity has sadly a really really poor performance when it comes to particles. So this makes things a lot harder as well. Do you guys have any suggestion or idea on how to tackle that issue?

 

Ricardo recaps our April Fools' joke and shows progress on beautifying and cluttering levels he works on.

• Welcome Natascha (human concepts) and Drew (animator) to the team.
• Our April Fools' joke was quite successful this year
• Cluttering and sounds in Yant'shaza: tearable obelisks, market places and more. We're really happy how the atmosphere comes along. Here, too, there are different styles for traversing a level.
• Something big is coming. But it's quite ugly still.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Look for the egg, we've hidden one in this week's dev diary beside loudness metering and grotesque sand statues.

• Us devs have Son of Nor now in our Steam library for testing. It's a cool feeling seeing one's game there.
• Yant'shaza cluttering progress.
• Grotesque sand statues when getting rid of Sarahul. Statue pose competition as soon as our alpha starts
• Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill.
• Diving into tech land: Loudness metering for games is important as with any audio product in the digital audio world. Chris shows how he does it.
• There are so many strange websites on the internet, some of which are just not necessary. But to whom is this any news...
• We're slowly climbing the ranks in the cracker universe even though our game isn't released yet (we're getting to alpha state now). Starting from bedrock, a cracker has taken up the task to distribute Son of Nor WITH CRACK even though everything we've released so far wasn't protected AT ALL Funny if you think about it...
• HAPPY EASTER. Did you find the Easter Egg hidden in this dev diary? Happy searching!
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

We're working on the game's intro. The story of Son of Nor has never been told in this way before.

• We've overhauled the havoc spell. The spell that happens when all 3 elements (wind, fire, essence) are combined.
• Julian himself narrates the intro to Son of Nor. For this, he even wrote additional text to extend it. Just for this dev diary.
• Music by our composer Mike Skalandunas. Go check him out when you're interested to hire him for your project.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

This week there's progress on a level we showed some time back as well as the last temple, the essence temple.

• Our last story time dev diary was well received and we reached rank 7 on IndieDB, which is always a nice feeling.
• We showed you a timelapse video of a dripstone cave blockout a while back. It didn't look much like a cave then but we made progress in this area we'd like to show. Take a look and listen.
• In this level, too, players can choose among several paths, depending on their playing style.
• Don't break the eggs. Other than that there is fun to be had with them.
• The essence temple with dragonlings that are immune to damage (at first), some puzzles, Indiana Jones style abysses and leaps of faith and more.
• Some infos about the Essence spell.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Another look at strange places Son of Nor popped up on the internet. And a lot of MUSIC!

• I got some more Google Alerts this week about places on the internet where Son of Nor suddenly appeared. I like to investigate these as they sometimes are quite funny. Cracker sites advertising to have a crack / serial / activator for Son of Nor (a game that isn't even released yet and only has demo versions that don't need any crack) are a source of humor. Places claiming to have lifetime licenses (what a funny choice of words) or instructions that say you have to make sure to install all the software components for the game to work (which tells me that maybe more pieces of software get installed than you actually want).
• We showed music of Son of Nor a few times but always rather quick. I like to dedicate this episode to music and to our composer Mike, who does a great job. I picked scenes for which we have the soundtrack more or less ready and cut it together, resulting in a Son of Nor medley. Enjoy.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Every day we are closer to final release so we concentrate more on polishing everything, this goes from effects to even voices!

• Dev Diary #80! A new anniversary! Will we reach #100 before final release?
• This week has been all about improving stuff. Daniel has improved the light set up of various levels, Ricardo has been improving the cutscenes, and Chris made some voice tests for one of the characters! Listen to him trying to be a bird with different accents to find the right personality for him!
• Son of Nor Alpha has been released and soon enough we'll go beta. Ruben, our talented high res render guy, has been working on a new high definition render for promotion purposes.
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

What did you guys do to get the lighting to improve so well? Looks really good!

To give more detail I refer to the latest diary where he shows a 'before' and 'after' scene within the cave.

 

We use a skylight that casts shoadows as well as 2-6 additional light sources from different directions (no shoadows) to improve lighting and simulate bouncing of light. This makes sure we don't have any really black areas. Those additional lights have a veeeery low intensity, they're just to simulate bouncing and are probably colored towards yellow / redish.

We also use pro features of Unity. Bloom and glow. Then we put the whole screen through a tone mapper to compress colors further and in the end we use a commercial plugin called Amplify Color, which is great because we can make a screenshot, export it to Photoshop, use Photoshops tools to modify colors, send it back to Unity and it maps all the colors to what we did in Photoshop.

Did that help?

 

Yes that answers my question thanks. Boy that took quite a bit of work but the results are well worth it!

 

More polishing and Son of Nor now starts to feel like a "game" even for us! Some NPCs talk about bananas.

• It's hard for us to think of Son of Nor as a playable game as we're working on so many ends, we're constantly seeing behind the scenes, we're testing little pieces all the time so that we literally don't see the big picture. There's a nice saying in German: Wir sehen den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht mehr (not to see the wood for the trees). But now that we play through the game in bigger chunks, everything comes together, also for us. Which is really cool to see. Son of Nor is fun
• You can now interact with NPCs and they have a separat little icon that indicates you can talk to them or interact with them (quest givers).
• All dialogs are localised. Text is pulled from external files we can edit and translate outside the game. Have a peek inside.
• More color and lighting improvements.
• Rocks you can pull out of canyon walls now have a great representation in-game.
• To prevent players from being without ammo, we introduced re-growing crystals and things that can be picked up again and again.
• We updated the tree shader to take lighting better into account and also bend in the wind. Settings need to be tweaked though, currently trees wobble funnily
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Great stuff Chris, been following your dev diary's each week. Like always looking forward to the next update

 

Thanks It's quite exciting currently to see all the pieces of the puzzle come together.

 

wow , looks awesome

 

Follow Chris as he creates monster sounds. And behold the "Child of Nor" super suit™ for kids!

• We tweaked the plant shader. Trees now gently wave in the wind. No more spastic dancing. There were some funny side effects along the way.
• Chris completely reworked creature sounds for the Sarahul. They now sound more aggressive. We show the sound design process in this diary with lions, horses and our own voices.
• Take a peek behind the scenes: stillalive studios threw a BBQ party in Innsbruck, Austria, a week ago. See Julian being the grill master and us having fun.
• While Chris was there, he got a super hero super suit for his soon to be super kid, hand made by the team.
• We love our fans. Chris got a 3D printed belt buckle as a present!
• We declare this day to be the show-your-favorite-game-developer-some-love-day. Pick your favorite dev and write them a nice mail that you appreciate what they're doing!
• Get into the discussion and leave your comments here, on YouTube, or join our forum at http://forum.sonofnor.com so we can discuss your opinion in our daily team meetings!

 

Cool stuff again, Only thing I can suggest is I think Sarahul talking with each other is a bit to loud or aggressive and a bit repetitive just a thought.

great video once again, Congrats on being a Dad!

 

Thanks gwubgwub. I anyway need to adjust volumes of all sounds for all levels, this is on my todo list! Thanks!

 

Son of Nor BETA is out! We announced a great distribution deal this week and new spells have landed!

• Our closed beta has arrived! Beta backers: download and test the game!
• We announced a great partnership this week with Viva Media and bitComposer. They'll help us with the distribution of Son of Nor. Read more here: http://stillalive-studios.com/2014/partnership-with-viva-media-bitcomposer/
• New spell: Fire Nova. Powerful but use it with caution.
• New spell: Wind Field. A shield and crowd control in one.
• New spell: Summoning. Summons a ghost that helps in fights.
• To keep our sanity, dev diaries from now on will be released MONDAYS so that we can take the weekend off, too. It all got a little intense. Besides, everybody likes to watch videos on Monday instead of working. So this is good timing.
• We also renamed the generic "Dev Diary" to "SASDiary" and specify the game "Son of Nor". You never know when we might start developing a new game for which we then need another name!
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Love the new Spells looks like a lot of fun can be had with them

 

Play some game jam games for free this week

• Son of Nor Closed Beta is out! People downloaded their beta on Steam and are playing the game.
• Look at how the menu currently looks like, some work was done there.
• One backer who's in the closed beta group did a pretty cool Let's Play as he's a YouTuber. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9WYuOrIRuKc2t_-Df1P-p8RAyes955mp
• This weekend the whole team was busy with our own internal stillalive studios game jam. 3 teams, 3 games. You can look at them in the video and download and play them here: http://stillalive-studios.com/games/
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Great new sounds and lots of awesome polishing was done this week thanks to let's players!

• New player models are being implemented. Textures are still missing, though.
• New animations are being tried, some are not set up correctly
• There's now an audbible indicator when your life is low.
• Some more quirky settings with the player character, you turn into the female model when you die. 2 steps forward, 1 step back.
• We were watching a lot of let's play footage and a guy streaming Son of Nor beta and started improving many things they complained about: puzzles, information, player guidance, bugs.
• We have to break levels up because they just crash Unity 3D because of their size. We have to make them smaller. There were levels nobody could even start anymore in the editor.
• Intermezzo.
• Visual tweaks were applied to Yant'shaza to make it look hotter and more jungly.
• There's an easy way to kill scarabs nobody has found yet. We're going to keep it secret, too. It's fun discovering it.
• Sarahul Mages now have their proper sounds when they cast spells like Ray of Light and Solar Flare!
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

We've got an explosive package this week: The Fire Pillar spell variation.

• All kinds of weird animation strangeness. We keep laughing at them because we get so bizarre results sometimes. It's mostly configuration work, but see for yourself.
• After the essence ghost, the fire nova and the wind field we have new spell variations to show.
• Jason made an incredibly cool effect for the fire pillar spell variation. You've got to plan casting it though, it takes some time.
• Julian also shows a new wind and essence magic spell variation. The "wind self tornado" (internal name) and an essence spell that doesn't even have an internal name yet.
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

That first guy was coincidentally in earth bender clothes Game looks great. I like your post on finances and it is disheartening to think about the money sometimes, but don't let it get you down. When a game is a work of passion then the quality will show through in the end product. Don't let your graphics slack but we all know from lots of new games and movies like Avatar that graphics are not everything. Gamers, especially rpg gamers, are people of passion and will look past unimportant things to get the story and the experience rather than just be subjected to a series of flashy images haha

 

Haha, thanks lazdude17! We're all very excited how the game will be received once it gets close to the finishing line.