DEVLOG #45 – Preparing For The Proofreading

Hi, Ascenderians!

Garnet’s here and now I’m preparing to send the draft of Ascender dialogues and quests for proofreading. Basically, all I have done for the narrative assets need to be checked and corrected. Grammatical, terms and phrases in English are the main issues identified from our feedbacks. I’m planning to give one of Ruby’s friend lived in Australia for some years that can speak, listen, write and read like a native English. But, there’s a job to do for me since all the narrative assets is written in excel format and without premises text, she won’t know what I mean and how the game flow with that narratives. It seems that she isn’t really a player, but I need her English skill to do the proofreading. Here is the Excel structure of my assets and converted to Words with added premises.

The Excel File

The Word File with Premises

See the differences? Yeah, I tidy it up  a little bit as well, it supposed to help the proofreader I hope. I also add some table of contents, character descriptions, prologue and ending scenes as well. Right now, I have to finish up premises that define the correlation between quests. Hopefully, with Ruby’s friend checking Ascender’s narrative drafts, our lovely game can have a better quality before it launched (I’m looking for publisher input also later on before it become the very best appropriate draft). You guys also can give suggestion with the formatting or input in the comments below.

Oh yeah, right now I’m working on new game that relate something about graves as a producer! Let’see where it goes!

Garnet is signing out from GameChanger Headquarter! Ciao!

 

 

DEVLOG #43 – Credit Title

Hi Ascenderian, Fire here..

Ascender began entering the finishing stage. In this stage, there are polishing process and put some additional object to the game. Amber, the art director told me to make the credits title by using the concept of Ascender. So, the concept of this credit title is illustrated by showing the camera moving from bottom to top, showing the background that is used as an in game stages.

The name of the stage are Rajumla, Helion, Mustang, Dolopo and Everest. There are a lot of NPC representing every stage and had a simple animation. The NPCs have many spreadsheet that wasting a lot of time to make and i must put it in after effects composition.In addition, Sky must be animated to jumping from text credit to the background platform.

Sky character animation process is a little bit tricky because it must adjust spreadsheet from different layer and animations. Sometimes, I have to double checking the timing of each spreadsheet layer for smoothing the transitions.Stage also had changing several times. It caused by strange looking parts from the stage and it must be repaired.

Unfortunately, the file does not have a Photoshop format so that the repair process is a bit time consuming. The credit title making process  is entering the finalization process, but I must wait for more people that will contribute in making this Ascender game. After that, I can finish it.

That’s all from me, continue to support Ascender.

Cheers 🙂

DEVLOG #42 – Irritating Implementation of Platforming Predicament, Part V: The End, or Not

My goodness, there you are! You see, I’ve been buried in this pile of codes ever since the last devlog post, and I just barely have the chance to write this one!

Umm, where do I start? Oh well, I’m Chalcedony, and here is the 42nd entry for this devlog series. It might as well be my last chance to write, and hence the title. This will be the story of preparations towards the ending of this project.

Let’s start… Or not. Heheheh.

There is an interesting trivia about the number 42 to be the answer of life, universe, and everything. Others view it as death – the end. It’s up to you to interpret it your own way, but hopefully this entry, the 42nd, will provide you with some answers… Or not. Oh right, back to topic! Ending, from a coder’s perspective.

It is the time where every other members from the team flood you with their not-so-final creation. Yeah, nothing can ever be treated as final, as revisions pop out every day, hour, second, even millisecond.

Picted below is one in-game footage, after and before some lovely revisions… Or not.

The right one transforms into the left. Some rooms and corridors are generally widened for easier navigation.

Little changes are more often than not, jeopardize your code structure, if they are numerous and are done near the end of the development process. The addition of many if-elses is killing you. We have a couple of instances where some objects only appear at a specific time and place (and aren’t used in any other occasions). We have a dedicated folder containing local script object for those things, just to avoid massive lines of ifs.

This cutesy folder of LocalObjects is home to nearly 100 scripts

Events that are tightly tied to time also serve as a genuine hassle when changes occurred. Mistimed jumps, stuck in closing door, you name it.

Ending sequence is constantly changing and therefore is a total time waster :(. The team made me swear not to post any spoilers here, so sorry, no more asking, and no, no screenshot nor gifs for you… Or not.

Watch it on your own risk.

Now you would think that, after applying all changes, we would just hit the build button, and everything should be okay… or not? Well, we still have to do the testing, assuring this game can run on most computers, et cetera. We have seen cases where people complained about this game crashing after the first screen. Weird, as it runs perfectly on our machines. This is one of the harder case of bugs, and sometimes we decide that sometimes, you just have to use a better computer for games.

A typical testing scene.

Done checking (internally)! The next step is to distribute the executable to some secretly picked testers, for the final input for the game. We just need upload the game, and… Hey, look at the size! At the moment, our build is 2.56 GB, waaay above our expectations of how big this game should be. Zipping could reduce it to 357 MB though.

It is possible to check on what is bloating the size of your project in Unity. The editor log gives you a pointer in it. And in our case, guess what, the textures are totally dominating the build, by a whopping 97.0%!

Not all hope is lost, though. Unity also has the option to compress texture size – crunched texture the name. The upside is, crunching effectively drop the texture size to about 25% of its original size, with almost no noticeable loss of quality! The downside is, crunching takes a huuuge amount of time, and only textures with specific size could be crunched (must be 2^n or 100 * n, to be exact). And the worst part is, it is not even documented! It is recommended to write a script that selectively crunch your assets (you can do it manually, in exchange for your sanity), and let unity do its work while you party on… Or not.

Hold on, crunching may take up to a day or so.

Great! It’s finished and ready to be served! Or not. In reality, we are still struggling with constant changes, and haven’t reached this state yet. Hopefully this madness will soon reach its end! Yeah, that’s it, that’s all, guys! Tune in this channel weekly for more updates! See you around!

 

 

 

 
Still here? Okay… here’s some statistics as of 18th June.
– Build size: 2.56 GB.
– Project size: 13.8 GB
– script files in project: 400 items
– texture files in project: 5804 items
– audio files in project: 134 items
– script size in build : 1.0 MB (0.0%)
– texture size in build : 2521.6 MB (97.0%)
– audio size in build : 55.1 MB (2.1%)
Note that this will definitely change in the released version… Or not. Heheheh.

The size of the project.

I’m outta here – Chalcedony

DEVLOG #41 – Trailer Designer!

Long time no see… Hi Ascenderians, Citrine here.­­­­_­

As a Sound Designer, I’ll tell you that the sound designing progress on Ascender is almost done. I just have to make some sound effect for ending scene & retouch background music for ending to the credit title. But, over the development process, sometimes the programmer still give me some input related the audio. Because he is the one who plays Ascender every day on his Unity project, so I think he would understand if there something are less cool both in terms of art or audio.

Here some of my todo list :

• Ending scene
• Camera moving up
• Glow SFX
• Ocean walking, jump & land
• Ocean transform
• Charging SFX
• Audio ending transition

So,  while completing some audio work, Rubi The Producer told me to make a trailer for Ascender. From sound designer to be trailer maker, hmm, Trailer Designer! lol. Well, to be honest, I was not too great in terms of making a trailer but I’ll try my best. 😀

This time, I’ll make a different trailer from the previous one that I made for Steam Greenlight trailer. The previous trailer is telling more about the arrival of Ocean to the GOA civilization. While the new trailer, I would emphasize to the friendship between Ocean and Sky,  so we can understand the motivation of why Sky want to fight for Ocean. Here is my draft for ‘brand new’ trailer.

Less obvious? lol, it’s just little sneak peak for Ascender’s Trailer. I’m still working on it probably until next week or the end of June. Asap.

Sorry gtg I have to finish this ‘hopefully awesome’ trailer.

Citrine out. 😀

 

nb: Thanks to Moldovite has given me the idea for this trailer & help me make a draft.

DEVLOG #40 – Everest: The Root

Hi Ascenderians, this time, moldovite is back!! In this blog, I will tell you about Everest.

Everest is one of many districts in GOA’s civilization, it is not a mountain nor a city. Everest is a massive sacred root and becomes the center of religious activities.

So why it so special?

Citizen of GOA thinks that the root is the path to the heaven. It is a sacred bridge that connects the world below to above. Because of that, many people in goa begun to come to Everest to pray for health and success to the almighty.

Just like many focus grounds before, we start it with a sketch before we went digital. For Everest, Amber (the art director) make a sketch like this

And because Everest is the root that connects the two world, it surely has something magical and mystic that make Everest different from other roots. After a lot of discussions, we choose purple and violet for the color of the tree and the surrounding. The color is chosen because they represent the color of magic. mystic and fantasy.

Here is the digitalization of the sketch earlier

Ta daaa…… The Everest! The root of God!! 🙂

If you look in detail, you will notice that there is a minor change with stair in the upper left, this case happen sometimes, for the sake of game design sometimes we must chop off the art, and adjust it. I think it’s not bad. And like civil war quote “sometimes we need to lose the small battles in order to win the war” so it doesn’t mind me at all.

And that will be our end of this session, let me say my goodbye to you…

Moldovite sign out.

DEVLOG #39 – GameDevs Story Literally

Hi, Ascenderians! Garnet’s here!

Well, right now Ascender almost reach the finish line, but we are still in the pit stop of a few laps to go. Polishing time before the checkered flag waved! So, I have to make my mouth shut to prevent anything spoiled. I want to share my checklist to you at this moment, the big parts before wrapping up:

• Simplifying some dialogues
• Grammar checks and corrections
• Make ups some generic NPC’s Dialogues
• Detailing the ending with artists and programmers

There’s more things has been done in past weeks. I feel so lucky that I can attend the Casual Connect event in Singapore from 17 – 19 May 2016. I have a chit chat with some story writers and learn some lessons from the story gurus. I’ve met this guy, Scott Chen, the story writer of OPUS : The Day We Found Earth, story driven telescope simulator-like game. He’s fantastic! He shared that the power of his game is the story and the gameplay authenticity. So, I asked him if he had the same struggle that I had as writer, and he’s not denying it neither agree with it, he is quite confident with his English and story concept. Lesson learned : Proof reading and dialogue fixing is one thing but having a confident in your writing is more important. His work is picked by Google Play Store as Editor’s Choice under the name of Team Signal, studio game based in Taiwan.

Scott Chen, OPUS story writer

OPUS game scene

OPUS : The Day We Found Earth

In addition, I saw another amazing story-based game called Désiré, black and white point and click adventure from France developed by Sylvain Seccia. Best Game Narrative in Indie Prize Showcase! I heard his accent and his speech when receiving the award, his not so fluent in English, I think, but still, he won! So, lesson learned : even English isn’t your first language, but go for it! You still can make the best story! No need to worry so much about it!

Best Game Narrative in Indie Prize Asia 2016

It’s been a quite remarkable story writer experience for me attending the Casual Connect Asia 2016. Last week, I also met one guy, Cipto Adiguno, the brain behind story in Celestian Tales: Old North, a classic JRPG from Indonesia who awarded as Best Game Narrative and Game of The Year in Game Developer Gathering Indonesia 2015. He’s so humble and we have quite long chit chat about being story writer and struggle delivering a lot of quests and dialogues. Lesson learned : If you find a publisher from US or UK, surely they will help you with narrative issues, but mostly you can make it in low priority because it takes a lot of effort if the number of narrative texts reach thousands. He said that player will understand what you want to deliver if you have a good basic in English.

Celestian Tales: Old North Awards

Cipto Adiguno, The Man In The Middle

No need to be so worry about that, visualization and gameplay  is the most important part, you just have to make sure the story is firmed. I’m quite agree with this as in this article said “Realizing that 95% of people won’t remember a thing you’ve written a week after playing……………. They won’t do any of the sidequests, they won’t read any of the lore, they won’t care about any of the time you spent trying to make sure.  And that’s okay.” With all these things connected, my confident is boosting up, as a newbie in game writing world, I feel proud that I can give my idea and writings in Ascender and become part of GameChanger as story writer. When I received the news about we won Best Game Narrative 2016 in Indie Game Festival Indonesia, I feel like “Really? How’s that possible? With all those grammatical errors?”, now I’m assured that I just need to continue polishing Ascender’s narrative parts and never stop learning to write an amazing game story from experienced one. Side Project: Read all those Warcraft’s tales (my book still being captive by Ruby anyway) and start to write Ascender’s  book.

Best Game Narrative in Indie Game Festival Indonesia 2016

Garnet is signing out from GameChanger Team Headquarter!

 

DEVLOG #36 – Making The NPCs

Hello everybody! My codename is Varis­­­­­­­­cite, the new intern at the GameChanger Team. I’m here to help make the NPCs and animate the characters. To be honest I don’t actually know what to write here since this is my first blog post. But I’m going to try and hope that I don’t mess things up. Enough of the introduction, let’s go!

The other artists made such a beautiful environments that it would be a waste that there’s no people living there, right? Don’t you worry! Here comes my role. The NPCs can make the environment more lively. They can serve a variety of functions and reinforce a sense of immersion in the environment.

For example, the market. Market is an environment that allows buyers and sellers to trade or exchange goods, services, and information, a place where people go to buy or sell things and any type of trade takes place. So there will be lots of interaction and activity there. So, in this case I made some NPCs that will fit to the situation. Like a women with a shopping basket and there’s also a kid carrying a paper bag full of things.

And there you have it! Villagers that lives in the city. But wait it’s not moving? Is that supposed to be a human or is that a cardboard cutout? That’s where the animation takes place. Let’s start breathing some life into the Characters. After making the NPCs, I break down the body parts (body, head, eyes, and etc.), combine it again in a program that I use to animate, add the bone, and I’m all ready to animate. Most of the characters have 3 animation, which is Idle, Walk, and Talk.

I guess it’s enough for me today, there’s more but that would spoil all the fun! But anyway thanks for reading. Be sure to stay tuned for more interesting stories!

~ Veriscite

DEVLOG#32 – Designing the Puzzles

Hello Ascenderians,

Can’t believe that it is my turn to write, it has been a challenging weeks toward the next version of our game.

During testing, some players said that the “Boss” Puzzle in Ascender is quite intense. Well, as a designer I never really think that the puzzle that they describe is actually a Boss puzzle. I like to all it Intense Puzzle where player is given a task to complete a puzzle with a pressure (it can be time or annoyance).

I use Intense Puzzle is used for two purpose,  first to validate that user know how to use certain skill and the second is truly a challenge for the player to face in order to progress the game.

The first example of Intense Puzzle is B.RO Puzzle in the beginning of the game. I use the puzzle to validate the skill that is newly acquired skill (Double Jump and Hook) and let B.RO chase them down in order to heighten the intensity of play. We even test the player to use the skill accordingly in order to get away from B.RO

Run !!! Sky… Sun !!!

After this player are tasked to finish not so obvious puzzle, and I call it hidden puzzle. This type of puzzle is where player probably saw an item but can not get into it. Some puzzle can not be directly solved since some of them uses skill that player may not have yet. In the public preview, there are a lot of these type of puzzle that you can found.

Well, I need the box to jump higher.

Player will not also find many type of puzzle, there are also quest that is affected by circumstances of the world. This quest includes a race with nippytron, capturing pet called gnallo and many more. Try out the public preview in order to find more type of this gameplay.

Let the race begin!!!

There are more type of puzzle in Ascender but mainly it is the variation or combination of puzzle that I just mentioned above. I guess that is all from me right now, see you in another discussion.

 

Best Regards,

Amethyst

DEVLOG#30 – Irritating Implementation of Platforming Predicament, Part IV: Shader

Oh hello there, guys! Here already? Come on in! There are pictures to feast on and stories to savor, so pick a comfortable place to sit and eat well.

Haven’t I introduced myself yet? Well, if you follow this blog from the beginning, you surely must know that I am Chalcedony, one of the programmers of Ascender. Well you know what – now I’m not an intern anymore in devlogging – I am a full-fledged one!

Here we go, the appetizer: sneak peeks! The never-ever-seen-before scenes are ready for your eyes only! [*Plays awesome sound effect*]

Firstly, we have the tendrils. Sky can jump on and off it. Note how they react accordingly to sky’s movement.

Do the villagers climb on them too?

This kind of trampoline is also fun for some boing-boing. Hold the jump button for more air time.

Trampoline image just for placeholder.

How defying gravity sounds? You can climb wall and even fall into the horizon.

The house is still in repair, no worries.

For today’s special, we serve shaders. What is a shader, you ask? Wikipedia says “a program that tells a computer how to draw something in a specific and unique way”. Shader is used for special (and not-so-special) effects, like these.

Remember this big robot? His laser effect was my first shader creation (not counting failures, of course)!

The rune stays intact, so why sky does not?

The layer where sky is standing is affected by the light from the lamp, whereas the background and the foreground are not. Just shader.

Villagers have nothing to do, so they spend the whole day standing there.

Even simple menus need shader to clip the items so they are not rendered off-window.

Why so many tasks for so little robot?

Look closely, the water distorts the scenery behind it. How to do it? Shader.

It distorts my sanity too.

Contrast to C# in terms of language, one should use Cg/HLSL language when creating shader in Unity. The scripts below both are for B.RO, the left one is written in C# for controlling the movement, and the right one is in Cg for you know, shading.

These are among the first scripts for this game! Bad, bad scripts.

 Those two look alike, but in truth are quite huge in difference! Debugging is especially a hell in shading. You will often end up with this kind of result…

Error in shader equals magenta for you. My favorite color!

Of course without you knowing what’s wrong. For some cases, Unity will be a good guy and tell you (approximately) which line caused the shader into haywire. Granted, I am by no means a master in shading, but still, when you went to fix the line, then it goes boom…

Very menacing water.

Gah! Dealing with these stuffs always drives me to my boiling point!

Anyway, that’s all for today’s meal! Did you enjoyed it? What now, you need dessert too? If you are still craving for more, be sure to play our public preview now, and let us know what’s on your mind!

Wow, it’s been ages since my last post, but now we must apart once more. Fret not, we will prepare more special dishes for you to relish, so stay tuned, and eat well. Bye!

 

DEVLOG#24 – Quick tour of Dolopo from within

Hi!! I am Moldivite from GameChanger Team, I am a junior 2d artist. Today, it will be my task to deliver you some of insight regarding our game development. I will give you a quick tour of inside Dolopo.

Our art director, Amber, given the task to develop the Interior of Dolopo to Fire (the intern) and me.It will be the last task for Fire and we will be missing him for sure. Now lets start talking about Interior!!!

In the process of making it unique we have to know what is the purpose or intent of the buildings. It does not need to be complicated, the building purpose can be simple. Such as, hotel is the place to stay, hospital is where citizen have rest and treatment, and post office is where people send letters. Knowing how the building works also help us creating more details in the interior. We can design items that is present within the building. I will give some interior breakdown in Dolopo, for now which interior get my breakdown list is, post office, medical center and research center.

 

POST OFFICE

Post office dolopo city

The first to breakdown is post office.

First thing to do is draw a sketch of the post office, this is done by Fire, with direction from our art director, Amber. Following picture is an early sketch of the post office, early sketch by Fire is only the focus ground.

Sketch of post office

Can be seen on sketch, there are registration desk, a delivery room and  letters and meowl placefor takes rest, meowl itself is the sender of the letter in Goa.

after receiving the focus ground, it is my turn to digitalize the post office, following picture is the results of digital.

Digitalize post office

After converted to digital, post office look more attractive isn’t it?

You can see the top right spot for meowl, I added some hay there. Because that is a place for meowl to rest and gather (after a long journey full of peril to deliver mail), so I though that place should look comfortable enough for meowl. And don’t forget about background in the interior.

Here’s backround that has been applied to the focusground.

Post office with background

At the center of the background right behind the registration desk, there is a map on the wall and a closet containing a stack of books and letters, the map on the wall is to facilitate the mailer in showing their destination.

Now let’s look at the space coordinate the delivery at the bottom left. On the walls there are little notes which contain details of shipments. This is done in order to not misdirected the sending all packages or letters in sent order, because if something goes wrong the blame is on poor meowl (lol, jk)

Overall background made darker because of the geographical location of the post office itself is located at the bottom of town Dolopo.

 

MEDICAL CENTER

Medical center dolopo city

Just like post office area, we get started with a sketch first.

Medical centre sketch

In the sketch, there are two mattresses rest and space registration or space for registration. There is also an upstairs room, but the upstairs room is not accessible. The upstairs room was made to show that at the medical center is not a small building which have some medical tools that can not be seen on the 1st floor, such as wheelchairs and oxygen tanks on top.

Digitalize medical center

After I finish with the digitalization, I made the top room that can not be accessed darker. So players can focus on the bottom ground. The interior is quite small this time, because the concept of this medical center is not a hospital but just a health center.

RESEARCH CENTRE

Exterior of research center 

If we look at the research centre exterior, we can imagine that this building will have a large interior with a more advanced technology than the other buildings in Dolopo.

Therefore, Fire make escalator in the interior, because the research center itself has two floors. Let we see the research center sketch by Fire.

Sketch of research center 1st floor 

Sketch of research center 2nd floor

This time we get a two sketch from Fire, on the first floor focus ground sketch directly exposed to the escalator. Fire itself received a referral from Amber that sky is not too explore part of the 1st floor and was immediately directed to the second floor.

On the second floor, the escalator was immediately arrived at scientist’s room, there is a research table with reaction tube, bookcase and a computer along with the server. At the top there is a box containing the material, tools and equipment for research.

The following image is the digitalization of the research center

Digitalize interior research center

After digitalizing and combining 2 floors you’ll see a different, yap right, there is an additional 1 room below focus ground 2nd floor, and a tube in it side. The addition of the interior is done because if  directly added and incorporated into Unity program there will be gaps at the bottom 2nd floor and under the gate on the 2nd floor, and make the focus ground drift.

Even after, digitilization is done the room still looks a little less so visible as a research center of the building. That is why we are now strengthten the background so that it looks more to be as research center.

Interior research center with background

Well, after I give a background to that picture, is that starting to look like a research center isn’t? The emphasis of the research center looks at some of the tubes in the first floor which coated glass. Glass coatings emphasize that there’s research on the unknown danger that awaits and not known by the scientist by doing that research,

With background tubes and glass,we can show that this is indeed a big research center just as seen on the exterior. Background wall that seemed neat and simple make an hygienic impression on the interior. Hygienic itself is one trait that is guarded by the scientist.

So….

Differences in the making exteriror environement and interior environment are in the manufacturing background. Interior does not as complicated as GOA exterior creation that uses parallax, it only uses one background image file.

So this is all from me about  interior in Cental Capital Dolopo,

Stay tune in ascender devblog for another interior breakdown from me moldovite

Moldovite over and out.. 🙂