Interesting few days!

New Members join our team

I'd like to welcome David and Linus to our team! Yes we have a second David haha. Linus is a programmer/scripter and David is a music composer!

Dev VLOG 3

Linus and Severi have been working hard on getting the code done for the game and it's starting to come together as you seen in the recent vlog.

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Shutout to my friend Ryan for giving me advice on Vlogging. I tried to keep it a bit more scripted, although I was getting frustrated due to the amount of times I had to record it and just went with the flow, good thing about it is that it kept the VLOG shorter and more compressed to the point. Damn you XSplit Gamecaster for screwing me over so many times!

In game changes include:

- Health regen added to Player character and AI (0.9 and 0.1)

- Changed the Base mesh to a Huge Tree (Tree of Life/Gahya)

- Construction system added

- Spike floor mesh and animations added

Phase music

Me and David have been discussing music regarding the Battle phase and Downtime phase. Each character will have his/her own theme based for these situations! David has been working hard on a first sketch for the Battle phase. He will be working on one for the Dwarf soon as it's going to be our first character. This sketch is most likely going to be used for a human based character in the future! Check out the song below and give David a follow because his music is awesome.

Character art

Our character artist David Alexandru has been working hard this week on getting the dwarf ready. He's made some great progress on it so far!

New textures, models and animations!

I've been a bit all over the place this week, been organizing some new tasks, creating models, textures and animations! 

Honestly the ingame content has been limited due to this. You may have seen this tree that I made but I'll show you some other content that I've been working on this week.

A WIP but here's the Wooden wall I've been working on recently. It's been taking some time because I decided I want to make a lot of variation in the wood and make each plank have a different texture. 

Here's the UV map. This will show you why it's taking so long. I'm hoping to finish this tonight or by tomorrow at some point!

Some new wood textures. One on the right is tillable. 

What I was most excited about this week though was learning how to use 2d sprites to create a 3D/material FX in UE4. It's only a test but I'm pretty happy with it for now. You might have also seen my awesome spikes animation ;)

That concludes this weeks blog, stay tuned we should have more to show next week!

Texturing, level design and characters!

Texturing 

 Over the last two/three days I've been working these seamless textures for our game. I used many different processes/techniques to make these textures. 

Level Design

I've also been working on the level design. Mostly on shaping the landscapes, applying the textures and creating new areas to explore. 

Some more ambients/fx have been added along with new base models!

Here's a video showing the recent updates along with some new implemented codes/blueprints.

Characters

I'd like to introduce a character that will be a playable guardian in the game. His name is Astrad and he's a drunken dwarf. 

'Astrad lived a peaceful life with his parents at the Royal Fort of Kazudum. That changed once the Goblins and Mountain Trolls started invading their towns and cities. One day a high ranked commander from the Goblin army led a siege upon Kazudum and they were forced to flee into the river. His father the King of Kazudum refused to leave the Fort to the armies of their enemies and stayed behind to defend with his soldiers. In the river they were ambushed by Goblin Scouts and everyone including his mother was killed. The Queen shielded her son from the attackers and although she died, Astrad did not. The young dwarf was King of his lands but after the Goblins crusade the Dwarven territory belong to the Goblins. Astrad was King of nothing and was one of the only Dwarves left alive. He worked whenever and wherever he could find it, this would mostly involve bounty work. He worked and drank. This is was what became of the Kings son. Until one day a mission required him to help defend The Grand Tree (tree of life) against his most hateful foe. He could not back down from avenging his people and took the mission without hesitation.'

 Our character artist has been working hard on a design for our first playable character Astrad. 

Vacancies 

 As an independent developer I can't offer you payment but I can guarantee if the game sells you would receive a percentage of profits. Although we are not currently searching for any more developers we do need the help. Send your portfolio/CV and a cover letter to danielpaine@hotmail.co.uk if you are interested! 

Team, Prototyping and Plans for the future!

 Game Overview

I started about 5 days ago with an idea for a game that could be unique compared to other tower defence games. Being inspired by Moba games and old RTS games mostly the idea sprung to mind. A top down fantasy four player defence game. You have to defend against the hordes and masses of enemies that spawn behind gates. Inside the game you have different timers. One is Downtime which in this period you can Build/Construct structures or Explore the map to capture objectives/kill neutral camps while you wait for the next wave to spawn. The other timer that persists is objective timers. Objective timers are capturing monumental areas to receive extra bonuses/privileges for your team and you can only capture these when they are available. Monumental areas are very important for your team. The types of bonuses they can grant are Resource bonuses, Defence bonuses and Military bonuses. 

Building/Constructing comes from gathering resources which will be available across the map. There will be random spawns for these similar to Age of Empires. The gathering process is done by Builders. On the start of the game you are granted your hero of choice and one builder. Builders are very important they gather resources for you to Build your defences. You should try to keep your builder alive at the start because if you don't have the builder you can't get the resource to get more of them. The resources available are Wood, Stone, Gems and Gold. All of these except gold can be gathered. Gold can only be collected upon killing enemies. That brings me toward another important feature called Favour. When you kill enemies you are granted favour, you will usually need favour to upgrade buildings such as Towers and Catapults. Upgrading these types of buildings can grant them special powers like Poison arrows or Icy projectiles. With this said to keep the game balanced each player will be allocated equal territory to Build/Construct upon.

For the moment the story is a bit vague. In the past I've spent a bit too long on the Game design document/concept pages and it pushed me away from doing what I love more which is Game development. 

The base story is that you are The Guardians of Gahya a Tree of Life which if destroyed darkness will over shadow the light in the world. Evil foes want to kill Gahya to rule the world and you have to stop them. You play the 'Hero' all with their own reasons to protect the Tree of Life.

Current Team

Daniel Paine - Project Lead/Game Designer

Severi Kasurinen - Programmer/Blueprint Scripter

David Alexandru - Character Artist

Prototyping Begins!

I decided first to make this game in Unreal 4 because I have had much more success with it. I've made two successful game jams with it and am pleased with the engine as a whole. After deciding on the engine I needed to learn a few things, these were importing animations/skeletons into UE4 as I was never tasked with this before. The process was really simple and using animations/autorig skeleton from mixamo was a huge help. My hope is to make our own characters and use mixamo for prototyping and look for less generic animations later on with a help of a talented animator. 

With some blueprinting experience in the past I was able to make the tower shoot a projectile at my character and got the enemies to follow me around the map. Even know I was having fun with blueprinting I was very limited to what I could do with my experience. I was fortunate to have a great programmer contact which kindly decided to help with my project even know he had no experience with UE4 he quickly grasped the Blueprinting system I was working with and made some awesome functions. Some of which we have done so far are:

- Fleshed out the base level/boundaries

- Created 3 out of 4 of the monumental areas on the map
- Added Player and AI animations/controls
- Added Player and AI health/damage

- Added AI objective and player aggro radius

- Added AI spread when attacking
- Tower shoots projectiles at the player with aggro radius

Here's a video of what we have right now.

Screenshot of the Overview of the game. 

Farewell, for now.

I hope you guys liked the first post, I'm hoping to make much more when we have more to show. In the next post there should be some information/media of the character development and more game development in general. Thanks for reading!