QuestFlow git repo has been updated

QuestFlow with new XML support has been pushed to the repo

https://bitbucket.org/erebusman/questflow-1/overview

Enjoy!

Holy Slog Batman, The Rise of Dagon now at 59.66666667 progress!

47 Days ago I started on writing my own quest system for The Rise of Dagon.. I had hoped it would take only 4 weeks, but instead it took almost 7!

As with any endeavor when things start going long you start questioning if the ROI (return on investment) is going to be worth it?

The truth is it might take several years before I know if writing my new quest system (QuestFlow)  was worth it or not, but the good news is that having finished I can now estimate The Rise of Dagon's project progress at 59.66666667!  Or heck, let's just round that off to 60% shall we?

The further good news is I have written it as such that it is a reusable package in Unity 3D that I can import into any game I write in the future that has quests.

If you were following some previous posts you know that I have made QuestFlow in to free software. The original QuestFlow implementation centered entirely around Scriptable Object's and Unity Editor Windows for its implementation however as it turned out you can't actually save data to a scriptable object at run time so it was necessary to pull that piece out and change to .XML serialization instead.

I'll need to update the QuestFlow repo with this new implementation; I branched this to a new codeline as I did not want to break the existing functionality before providing the new functionality - so I will provide an update in the next few days once I merge the changes over.

So now I have to create an in-game implementation of the QuestFlow system in the Rise of Dagon, I hope to also make this part of the QuestFlow package - but only if the implementation is not overly specific.


The in-game implementation of QuestFlow aside there are a few features I still need to code left before I consider Dagon to be "baseline implemented" (yes I made that phrase up as far as I know).  What "baseline implementation" means to me is that every feature I plan to have in the game will exist in some fashion - but not all of them are fully implemented.

So for instance I have implemented about 1/3 of the Spells in the game - this is enough for me to know that the Spell system works and its just a matter of adding more spells over time, polishing the particle effects and getting good quality sounds behind them.

Similarly the Character Creation system works but lacks more refined elements like being able to choose a custom portrait or perhaps being able to assign your attributes out by hand.

Aside from those pure feature rounding areas there are in fact just a very few things that don't have baseline implementations (throwing objects in to the scene for example) and I hope to get those done before the end of the year so that as I round in to the new year it becomes polishing, iterating, and tightening things up to get the game in to beta state!

QuestFlow 1 now available, free, open source

As discussed last week on my blog here and reddit  I have written QuestFlow 1 is a Quest and Dialogue system for Unity 3D 5.x line written in C#.

QuestFlow 1 is Apache 2.0 licensed

If licenses are TLDR for you: yes you can make a game with this and sell the game if you wish!

QuestFlow 1 includes

• scriptable object's for Campaign, Quests, NPC's, Conversations, Locations, and Achievements
• Unity Editor Scripts for creating the scriptable objects
• Unity Editor Windows for editing the scriptable objects
• an Observer pattern based Quest Event Manager script to use in your implementation of the system in game.
• some generic NPC icons to get you started prototyping
• a sample scene demoing the QuestEventManager

Quest Flow 1 does not include:

• A gameplay implementation.

----------------------

The bitbucket git repo:
https://erebusman@bitbucket.org/erebusman/questflow-1.git

----------------------
If you just want a Unity package to import grab this package:

https://bitbucket.org/erebusman/questflow-1/raw/ad44510d6b39326047bc543034ed424f59e11ee2/QuestFlow1.unitypackage

----------------------

The git overview page contains a readme that has a little bit of usage instructions to get you started.

There is still lots of room for this to improve including external file serialization and loading but right now this is a "handle everything inside the unity editor" type of solution.


There could be a game play implementation that went along with this however I just see that as something so personal to the game your writing I'm not sure if that's is really the target audience for this or not?


I expect a total of 3 people will download it and I'll be the only person to ever use it ; but hey its free so surprise me?!


Comments/discussion welcome.

QuestFlow : A Unity 3D Quest & Dialogue Editor, free?

If you've been following me at all you know I'm working on a classic dungeon crawl RPG called The Rise of Dagon and as such I have need of a quest and dialogue system in my game.

Today I would like to not bore you with the details of how I typed so diligently on my game, but rather offer up a discussion about the QuestFlow system I'm writing and that I am looking to at releasing it for free.

As such I wanted to discuss what my needs were that bring me to this decision and then discuss with you (if you are interested) in having / using this system? And if you are interested what I might need to do to make it better for you in the short, mid and long term?

If you ever get a chance to work in professional software development that uses the Agile methodologies you'll come across this thing called a "user story".  A  user story describes what the end user  expectations are about the software you are about to deliver.

When I sat down to write (or purchase) a quest system for The Rise of Dagon I realized I needed to create a user story of what my expectations were going to be otherwise I might spend some time doing the wrong things and my time is limited and valuable so .. yeah lets not waste it!

The user story I came up with was:

"I need to be able to implement a quest system that allows both myself and my game playing customer the ability to create a full quest campaign with NPCs, Quests, Dialogue's, Locations, and Rewards. 

Ideally this system needs to be able to be integrated to the actual game.

Bonus points for the ability to re-use it in my next game!"

And so I went looking for a system that I could purchase that would do this for me on the Unity Asset store, and I also went Googling for solutions as well.

What I came up with was a lot of systems that almost worked; but ultimately one big clinchers came up again and again:  my game playing customers would not be allowed to use it without them also paying!

And this is critical for me because end user modification is huge ; if your game takes off and your gamers are able to create their own content ; they will create far more content themselves than you will ever humanly be able to do!

No system that required my gamers to go buy a hundred dollar software like Articy Draft for example was going to "add value" to my game.

Rather requiring a 3rd party purchase would just put the first 3 nails in the coffin  of modding for my game as far as I'm concerned!

While I did find some assets on the Unity asset store that could have let me make my game - I could not have freely distributed them to my customers; or I would have had to do extensive work to integrate the 3rd party utility to interface through my games UI.

I came to a point where I was considering the approach of using a 3rd party dialogue system called Dialogue System by Pixel Crushers but after prototyping a quest with it and then spending 2-3 days reading documentation I came away with a feeling that they were trying too hard to please too many people with endless 3rd party support options. Ultimately the system feels bloated and integrating it in to my game would probably require creating some sort of bridge between Unity and the LUA back end scripting that they use.

If I was willing to do all that (and I was) I should also be willing to spend a few days considering a homebrew system that was written purely in Unity and C# and that wouldn't require any dancing around with endless 3rd party systems.

So this week I wrote the initial implementation of Quest Flow and realized it was going so well that this really does seem like the way to go after all.

Additionally because I have the requirement that my gamers be able to use it freely; I may need to post it on the Unity Asset store as a package (or a git repo, or an importable package included with the game etc).

Given that .. we come to my post today .. if I'm going to be posting it for free then I should probably consider opening it up even further - to you!

So if I were to do such a thing, I realize that I myself would have questions like : what license, what features, does it do this thing I want it to do?

And given that I'm trying to develop games to SELL to MAKE MONEY .. it has to be a license that won't get in my way of doing that, nor should it do so if you want to use my quest system or distribute it to your customers!

So I wanted to open a discussion about the following topics:

• What license would be most attractive for this? Currently I'm leaning towards Apache 2.0
• What features would you like to see in such software - considering at least initially it is intended to be a complete solution within Unity in C#.
• Should I in fact make this a fully open source project and post up a git repo for it and invite people to collaborate?

Obviously I'm okay with any other discussion as well but these are the ones top of my mind at the moment.

Where it is at right now:

• I have written base classes for NPCs, Locations, Quests, and Conversations
• I have written Unity Editor windows for all of the above

What do I plan on doing next?

After writing the Unity Editor windows I realize that this system really needs to work together better and I'm tempted either take a more detailed combined editor window approach that integrates all of the items together OR alternatively utilize the new Unity GUI to create a full featured Quest editor.

The advantage of using the Unity GUI to doing it is that anyone adopting the system could simply use this for themselves and their gamers by implementing it in a scene.

This second approach feels most right to me because of the end goal of user modification; but maybe I'm not thinking everything through here?

Thoughts?

How I used the Observer pattern to implement doors, pressure Plates, pit traps, and levers

If you are like me at all when it comes to "design patterns" you might sort of shake your head and get a little lost in the architecture jargon that most of the texts, books, and websites often take when they are talking about them. As such the first two years of my programming experience I really didn't "get" patterns!

Well not too long ago I stumbled across the excellent book Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom (which is available in all sorts of formats including on the web for free so check it out!) and finally someone was writing things in a way which made sense to me!

What I think really made the difference was that Robert was speaking about the patterns as they relate to game design - which is something I think about constantly - so I could totally relate to the concepts.

What struck me as interesting upon finishing the book is  that I had been creating/using recognized patterns on my own and I didn't even know it!   For instance I had implemented both a Singleton and Observer-like pattern for my Enemy Manager.

In the middle of a long slump Indie Insights reinvigorated me with a simple lets play session for my game..

I've been working on the Rise of Dagon since April of 2014 and to be honest with you I had hit that really long deep trench  in the middle of a long project where daylight disappears and you completely lose sight  a project and have no hope of seeing the end either.

I still believed in my project - this is still the kind of game I've always wanted to make - but lately it literally felt like every step forward was becoming exponentially more difficult.

Then something totally unexpected happened to me:  a gentleman by the handle of Highsight who runs a Lets Play channel on Twitch for Indie Games in progress called Indie Insights reached out to me to offer to play my game, The Rise of Dagon, live on his channel.

To be totally fair Indie Insights has a fairly small audience (which he was upfront about) so realistically this was not 'my big chance' to show my game to the world or anything .

Rather it was just what it sounded like ; a chance for a tiny bit of exposure and maybe some helpful feedback.

Much to my surprise though the mere fact that anyone had reached out and showed interest in my game reignited my creative drive and spark! All of a sudden instead of feeling like I was carrying a ten ton heavy-thing with me; I was able to crank out what would easily have looked like a month's worth of work in the next two weeks getting my game polished up and presentable with several new features!

I had of course planned to do these things anyways - but all of a sudden I had really strong short term goals and a very demanding reason to make them happen!

I've linked the youtube video for his playthrough here in the post - and let me tell you I was actually really impressed with Highsight's feedback during the play through.   Particularly helpful was his style of 'stream of consciousness' feedback of just saying out loud exactly what he was thinking as he played through.

Sure : many things he talked about I either planned to do or had thought about doing but all of a sudden many things became painfully obvious I needed to do right away.

One great example is his feedback about right-click equipping items .. I had this on a list of  things to do "one day" but I realized that both because I had not implemented a 'paper doll' system yet and the confusion about inventory management in general that really I simply had to make my inventory much easier to use.

And that's a funny thing for me to admit because one of my goals had always been to make my user interface better than the old classic games like Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master - yet here I was neglecting it to the point that it really distracted/detracted from a lot of the game play how inventory management was difficult for him to figure out.

Otherwise though something that really inspired me was his ability to pick up on my core design for the look and feel of the dungeon.  It's super easy to get so locked into tunnel vision when you are making a game that you completely lose sight if your game looks and feels like you want it to - or you are just telling yourself that it does ..

Highsight's feedback about my dungeon's look and feel and the movement controls really inspired confidence that I was doing it right and that confirmation is HUUUGE for me! If the dungeon and movement don't feel right - this game is not going to be worth playing!

Another cool thing came out of him playing my game - and that is I've attended the live cast of the show a few times now and participated in giving feedback to the other developers whose games are being played.

Even when it's not your personal game being played - you learn things from watching Highsight play and comment on what' hes experiencing; and then comparing your observations and feelings about the game being played vs his.  Then at the end of a game play through he takes feedback from the audience  - which further helps spur discussion that may differ or match your perceptions about the game.

It actually reminds me of when I took art classes in college; and we would go around at the end of class and provide critical feedback to each other in a really constructive and thoughtful way.  This is something that's really intensely difficult to get as an indie and I enjoy it immensely when I can!

In summary I have to send out a heart-felt thank-you to Highsight for taking the time to show interest and play through my game - he made a big difference in my motivation that I'm still seeing the benefits of  - and that I'm very grateful for!

Teleporters and Treasure!

This was a really nice week for productivity for me : I was able to get in teleporters and lootable treasure containers in to the Rise of Dagon.

While the lootable treasure containers did take a bit of code work because of the slightly complex nature of handling 4 different characters inventory including being able to drag & drop on portraits, in to hands, into the inventory, and into the equipment area where your traditional 'paper doll' for all your armor and such that has very specific slot requirements - yes despite that mouthful - it was only about 3-4 hours of work to get it in as I was able to copy patterns I had in for the rest of the inventory.

Also I was able to optimize/refactor a little bit of inventory code to be better while I was in there so it was a double win!

The teleporter was  pretty easy --  it literally took more time to make the particle effects than the code!  Its really nice when features that you worry about ahead of time end up being much less painful to implement than you had feared!  (either that or I'm slowly getting better at this but I don't realize it?)

I still need to integrate teleporters in to the level editor but I should be able to get that done by the end of the weekend!

That's it for this update - see you next time!

Cemetery Gates Spell named

Special thanks to everyone who submitted names, there were actually quite a few really good ones ; Undertaker came up several times and was a very close call but in the end I went with Cemetery Gates for this Dark Affinity spell pictured in today's animated GIF

Special thanks to +Pedro Rocha for the spell name!

Also of note over the past two weeks I've been taking  the second past of UI polish and making the UI look less like Unity's default GUI and more like a fantasy RPG UI!

You can see it in the GIF above and also pictured here on the character creation screen:

New UI sprites/textures as shown on the character creation screen

I think it will definitely need more polish but it definitely comes off as more suitable to the game now that I've moved it away from unity's default!

Otherwise I've been working on polishing the core game in to a demo-able state. I have received two requests to demo the game one live, and one via twitch.  Once I have an idea what night the twitch broadcast is going to take place I will do an update via twitter  (follow me for notification: @CarlKidwell1 on Twitter ).

For the live demo it will be on August 18th at the Sacramento IGDA Meetup you'd have to sign up for the meetup to come but if your in the area and would like a preview your welcome to come!

Otherwise I've been doing some really focused refactoring/cleanup of my code as well. There are quite a few areas where things got really muddy during the design phase for player movement, and combat for the player and monsters -- also a bit in the inventory area.

I had tons of boiler plate code in some of those areas to handle if(player1), else if(player2) , else if (player3), else if (playe4) and then each brace would have 20+ lines of code for some complex inventory action.

I was able to take quite a few of those and parametize them so that only one statement is needed and it operates on a reference to the player that was passed .. greatly simplifying the code and making it easier to read and maintain - which I think was a really critical thing to do now. The project is getting pretty big and the more out of hand I let things get the more effort its going to be to maintain and make further changes to!

What should I name this spell?

What should I name this spell?

I thought I would reach out and ask for some audience participation / help on naming this spell I'm working on today!

Spell Effect Description:

This spell is an "in progress" work from the Dark Affinity school of spells (black/dark/evil style magic).

The spell idea is to have a group of skeletal hands rise from under the target and attack it.

The red cloud is just for atmosphere and ambience .. the Skeletal Warrior pictured standing in the cloud in this case just happens to be the monster I caught in it for this screenshot - he is not actually part of the spell effect!

My initial name idea was "Army of Darkness" as a tribute/easter egg to the film of the same name but I'm worried that I might run in to trademark or copyright issues if I do that?

So .. now taking ideas for a cool spell name!

Terms & Conditions:

By submitting a spell name you hereby grant me rights to use it royalty free in my game.

Bonus

No promises.. but I hope to take your name/handle down (if you want) and include it in a portions of the credits, I'm already planning on doing a kickstarter and having some of the stretch goals include user design contributions so this is something I want to do anyways!

Good luck and thanks for the ideas!

edit: Updated image -- particles are more 'bloody' red less 'pink' lol.

Animated GIF's and Substance Painter Tutorial, and more!

Hello,

I'm doing kind of a media dump today - - I've done several really good updates over the past few days including a video tutorial Substance Painter using the shield from my main menu, some animated GIF's showing off the new spells I worked on this week and a quick video showing off some of the spells from last week!

Substance Painter Video Tutorial:

Animated GIF's

Earth Crush ; one of my Earth Affinity Spells:

Earth Spike is another Earth Affinity Spell shown here:

Finally a quick look at the Ice Affinity spell IceBolt

And this video I show off the Firebolt and Icebolt spell a little more and discuss the spell system but I created the video last week so if you follow my G+ feed you may have already seen it:

The Rise of Dagon main menu now in Unity 5 PBR!

So I've been wanting for a long time (yeah about 1 year) to create a compelling main menu screen for The Rise of Dagon RPG that I've been working on.

It's something that I knew would take a lot of energy and talent .. perhaps more talent than I actually have.

Fortunately things came together the past two weeks between Unity 5, Mudbox, Substance Painter and Silo 2 3D tools that I have.

Oh yes and a crap ton of very time consuming and difficult art production!

While it does look good I actually had a few problems with it. The main problem near the end was the PBR textures metallic values are not coming across in Unity 5 as I expect.

Check out the main menu as seen above - then check out this screenshot of the shield as being textured in Substance Painter the metallic rim around the shield - and the pounded bronze metallic sun in the middle are dramatically different!

After some Googling I found suggestions that perhaps I had not placed reflection probes or light probes in my scene (I hadn't) and that those might fix it (they didn't!).

In the end I was not able to figure out how to get the metal's to look even remotely accurate but I hope over time with future experimentation that I will figure that out. (but hey if you have some ideas leave me a comment I'd love some tips!)

I will say Substance Painter was a real pleasure to work with once I figured out how to do the layer masking (seen in upper right hand corner) it was really slick and easy to work with!  As long as you have 'substances' (similar to a material) to paint with you are ready to do some truly impressive texturing with some of the most powerful and awesome tools I've ever laid my hands on.


Also I had hoped to cause the text of "The Rise of Dagon" to glow or have some other interesting particle effects as I purchased Particle Playground 2 -- but I ended up having significant problems there too -- apparently to do the particle effect with a sprite you have to mark it as read/write enabled and turn it in to an 'advanced' import type in the Unity import settings for the sprite and then set all the settings yourself manually.

I was able to do all that - but somehow only the bottom half of the text showed up and I was running out of time to post my shot today for #screenshotsaturday so I went with what I have for the moment!

So despite the fact that it looks quite spiffy -I do sincerely hope to make it even better and leverage the learning experiences in making it towards making The Rise of Dagon look even better!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

How I implemented my first spell in to my Unity based RPG

Today I'm going to do something I haven't done before: attempt to share my complete implementation of a feature (my Spell system) in my Rise of Dagon RPG (made in Unity 3D) including some source code!

I know of course I'm no bloody genius and my code hasn't any unique ideas in it - in fact if your a particularly great coder you can probably spot some things I've done poorly.  (hey if so drop me a note - I'd love to make improvements!)

But also I hope that a few people might find it interesting - maybe you haven't gotten in to the new Unity UI, maybe you are just starting out on an RPG and seeing how someone else went about it will help you think your way through yours?

Maybe my game's code is a train wreck - and this will be a great laugh for you?  Perhaps a great example of what not to do?

As I'm attempting to share the complete implementation - this is going to be long! So hey if your the TLDR type; pan through the screenshots and bail now!

Otherwise .. here we go!

Deeper dungeons! Oh my!

This shot points out the three levels, the wall texture makes them blend together a bit.

I've been working on the dungeon editor this past week for Rise of Dagon  ,and while the level format has always supported dungeons of multiple level depth its only been recently that I've added that support properly in to the editor as well as the player movement behaviors so you could actually go from one level to the other.

That's quite a nasty drop off to the left, don't look down!

At this time all you can do is fall down to a lower level, I have not yet implemented stairs or ladders (not sure I will actually do ladders..) but I have a prototype stair in progress and hope to have that in fairly soon.

Next up I have been continuously working on my character portraits in Mudbox and Photoshop. I've found that creating a bust sculpt of a character in Mudbox, then using the Mudbox painting tools to give the character some skin tones and color the hair in works very nicely.  Then I take a screenshot and do some post effects, add in a backdrop, and a little retouching in Photoshop.  This has been working out for me pretty well and I've put a lot of practice in to that process; and it looks like it starting to pay off to me!

Here is the 3 main steps that produce a portrait.

I'm certainly not going to win any fantasy artist awards but I am getting to the point where I'm starting to actually like the way the output looks!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Notch invests in The Rise of Dagon development...

So before we get any further, the topic here is a spoof.  Notch has not invested in The Rise of Dagon and I have no expectation that he is even aware I exist.

But I saw a tweet from Notch here and it really stirred up a huge amount of unexpected thoughts in me that I wanted to share today.

Notch (in real life known as Markus Persson) is one of the founders of Minecraft , and sold his share in the company recently to Microsoft for a hefty $2.5 billion dollars.

After recovering from shock at both the raw number and the fact that he sold and exited the company he helped create - naturally many hopeful indie developers probably have  had a fleeting thought that Notch could be a really powerful Angel Investor / Philanthropist in the indie community and seed some incredible indie projects around the world with much needed funding - potentially causing a game production revolution single handedly.

There are all sorts of projects on Kickstarter that want small amounts like $20,000, $50,000 and so on. Notch could pick one project a month under $100,000 and be funding projects for the next 10,000+ months if he reserved 1 Billion for his philanthropist efforts right?

Sounds great, lets get to work!

But then I stopped and really thought about it.  I mean really think about it.

What if he did invest in my project .. does he get a say in my development now?

Maybe I would be willing to to have him as an executive producer for the cash influx? But what would you have to trade for an investor?

Are you really just expecting an investor to throw you a bucket of cash and say "I truly don't care what you do with my money, buy a truck of bacon for all I care?".

But I thought I was an indie? All of a sudden I'm really willing to surrender some portion of my vision - this thing I've been telling everyone else (never mind myself) that I believe in so much!! SO freaking much!

But no apparently all it takes is Markus Persson walking up with $55,000.00 and all of a sudden I'm throwing shit out the window like I don't give a damn about my game just to make him happy?

I thought this is the entire reason I'm an indie so I can do it my way?

I'm not going AAA for a reason.

I'm not looking for a publisher for a reason!

I'm not looking to sell out to make a quick buck for a reason!

Because if I was I wouldn't be slaving over this blog for a year to build a community, and grinding architecture out late at night after I get off work from my day job and after I put my kid to bed would I?

I mean its  hard, its damn hard. But am I being honest with myself if I take this kind of money??

If your going to sell out - then don't ask Notch to be your enabler. Just sell out. Go get some AAA or hell .. these days in the mobile market I'd call most of these mobile studios single A studios - go get paid. Stop bellyaching.

And then there's this other thing that hit me - that made me write this.

Get this .. if Notch did invest in my project (or yours) then all of a sudden everyone would know (because of course you would proudly tell everyone someone so awesome as Notch invested in you right??)

So now .. everyone is looking at your project all of a sudden.  Everyone is wondering to themselves "What is so cool about this project that I missed - it's got to be there, Notch saw it!"

And everything will change; just because he invested.  Even if it was some small amount like $5000.00 dollars.

$5000.00 won't make a dent in my project; but the press attention, the community exposure, the freaking twitter storm?  You can't buy that kind of exposure!

So now - the world has changed ; you are on the map now man! All because Markus threw you a 5k drop in the bucket.

But every time someone sees your tweet - its in the back of their head and they are going to pay you one more notch of attention (no pun intended :-).

And when your game finally ships - you know all the news sites are going to mention that this is the game that Notch invested in right?

And lets say (for fantasy or arguments sake - take your pic) that your game ships and is a financial success.

When you sit back afterwards and the a euphoria has worn off  are you going to pat yourself on the back and tell yourself how right you were all along?  How your game's vision was just so awesome that it was destined to succeed no matter what? How great of a designer you are?

Or maybe, just maybe might you start to wonder - what would have happened if Notch never did invest?

Would anyone have ever noticed you?

This is your chance of getting noticed in the mobile market place today

Would anyone care about your project?

And to me that's heavy shit. I've dreamed of making this RPG for a long time.  But if I had to attribute all of its success to someone else's fame and investment rather than my effort, my design, my dream - to me that would be a bitter pill to swallow and I sure as hell wouldn't be patting myself on the back.

So in the end that little dream many of us have of someone swooping in and solving all of our financial woes when it comes to production doesn't feel as sweet to me as it sounds.

Finally  I admit even with doubts I am expressing here;  I can not dismiss the possibility of investors or crowd funding or other sources of income to supplement my development are interesting and would need to be carefully considered for their reward vs their impact on the project.

I (like many of you) wish I could have a self sustaining business and do this for the rest of my life - as I've been doing on the side for 20 full years.

But Notch buying my success with his personal gravitas is no recipe for sustainability. It doesn't make my studio in to a gold minting machine.

What happens when he doesn't invest in my next game?  Then, all of a sudden, I'm getting 1/4 of the sales and attention? Does my studio go out of business?

As indie's we have to find our way to sustainability, usually on our own.

And so I close with some thoughts and advice:

Do not dwell in despair over another person's success, even if it seems outrageous.

Do not overwhelm your daily sense of wonder and joy in creating games in jealousy over Markus's billions.

Do live in the moment, find joy in creativity, hope for wonderful things, and put a little bit of your heart in your game every day.

When you finally finish I hope you find a sense of satisfaction and a job well done, perhaps a few moments of truly uplifting euphoria - the kind that money can't buy.

Walk the path you've chosen without hope or despair, just simply enjoy the journey, sometimes that's all you get.

One Year Into My First RPG - The Rise of Dagon

If you follow any of the Indie Game development communities in various of places like Reddit, TigSource, or even the forums on game engines a piece of advice you'll see fairly often is "don't make an RPG/MMO for your first project".

Doing so is widely considered a recipe for failure ; there are just too many things you need to learn that adding the complexity of an RPG or an MMO to the mix pretty much guarantees that you will fail, and fail super hard.

I was lucky enough that I didn't fall in to the trap of picking something too big to start with; instead I made a match 3 game, then another, and another. And then I made a few other types of small games. Eventually I made somewhere between 7-11 smallish games in the past 3 years (depending on do game jams count?)!

At the tail end of all those games I created a game that I spent a lot of time and money on ; but the publisher whom I thought was going to take the game - didn't take it.  And then I struggled to find anywhere to put it at all.

In the end that game was a gigantic flop - I think it sold a total of 4 copies.
 
After much introspection I finally decided that it was time to go ahead and do what I had wanted to do from the beginning - which is make an RPG.

I resolved that going forward I need to spend my time on a game that I can say I'm glad that I spent my time creating it - even if not a single person ever buys it.  Because in the end I might indeed just be making this game for myself.
 
So this is the story of what's happened in the year since I started that journey.  What I've learned, how far I've come and where I think I have yet to go.

Mudbox Painting Tutorial on Servant of Dagon model

Hello,

To follow up on the set of tutorials I've been doing the past week I am doing a diffuse painting tutorial using Mudbox 3D today using my Servant of Dagon model.

I go over some basic painting tools, how to approach using reference, and paint a new texture from start to finish in an exploratory fashion

Modelling process tutorial - Servant of Dagon

Hello!

I had a special update today, a fellow indie developer messaged me with questions about my creative process on the Servant of Dagon model I shared this past weekend.

So in interest of sharing with the community I took the time to document the process and I did some screen grabs and annotated them with comments to create a sort of "process tutorial" on the model.

A process tutorial is basically means it shows how I went about creating the model as logical steps; rather than being a "how do I operate the mechanics of modelling program X" approach.

I know that when I was learning a lot of this I had to do it by myself and its really hard to find a tutor or mentor on these topics so I hope these grabs shed some light on the creative process.

Please feel free to ask questions I'll try to follow up with comments, additional grabs or write ups as needed.

I've put a few pro-tips on a lot of these shots, if you have some insights or pro tips of your own you'd like to share please leave a comment below!

Step 1: Create a low poly base model, typically using box modelling techniques. If available recycle old models you have as a starting point!

Step 2: In my example I have recycled a chest from a human model that I created in the past, here I am stitching that chest together with the newly modeled tail and head piece I created for the Servant of Dagon.

Step 3:  Use the mirroring technique so that you only have to create 'half' of a model.  This saves immense amount of time. If you need non-symmetrical parts add those after you have mirrored your model over.

Step 4: Here I show the marking of UV seams as a step towards doing the UV mapping.  Try to make the seams in places that will be out of the players line of sight, or in areas they are less likely to view often.

Step 5 :  Create the actual UV maps.  UV map creation can be very time consuming and complex (especially as a beginner) make sure to watch SEVERAL application specific tutorials until you are reasonably sure you have found what appears to be the easiest method applicable to your application.  In my case LSCM unwrapping automatically unwraps the model in a very satisfactory way at the press of a single menu option.

Step 6: Further adjust UV maps as needed.  Even if your application does a brilliant job you may want to either adjust the map for maximum coverage on the canvas (blank space is a waste of canvas that could be adding detail to your model!) or arrange as I did in this example so that I have room for some accessories I plan to add to the model in the near future.

Step 7: Import in to a sculpting app (Zbrush, Mudbox, Blender etc) and sculpt large details first at low subdivision levels

Step 8: Sculpt the more fine details at higher subdivision levels. Focus your time in high visibility areas like the face or areas the player will see most often.

Step 9: Paint the model.  Ideally these days you would be painting in an advanced 3D painter program like Mudbox, Substance Painter or others ; but if needed export the UV map and paint in Photoshop or GIMP.

Step 10: Get him in game!  Obviously the end goal is to get our new model in game!

Let me know how you liked this tutorial and if the process approach was good/bad for you!

Servant of Dagon - looking better in game (SOLVED)

Yesterday I mentioned that the Servant of Dagon was not looking up to the quality level I had expected in the Unity 5 Game engine.

This morning (fresh after some rest!) I took another look and found that by default texture compression had been selected for this model's texture.  After removing the texture compression he looks much closer to the intended quality levels as seen in this shot:

I moved him a little closer to the camera here to get a bit more detail in this shot showing through, he looks quite nice now (sharper and more details)  ... nasty compression, we hates it my precious!

Rise of Dagon : Servant of Dagon

This week I wanted to work on getting a new monster model in to the game, but it takes a gigantic tonne of work to do all the 3d modelling, uv mapping, texture painting, sculpting, rigging, and animation as you can imagine!

However I decided that I had to try and do this  - so far if you've been following I've only been showing one enemy in screenshots, the skeletal footman.  While I hope everyone loves a good skeleton it was simply not nearly enough visual variety for people to remain excited about over the long term!

So I began a mad scramble to put this guy together - giving myself a goal of doing it in one week. Thankfully he's been on my design list for a while and I knew much of what I wanted out of the model.  Dagon is the evil god of the universe in this game and he has both dragon / serpent as well as darker cthulu like qualities.  So these Servant's of Dagon are a reptilian race who worship him and act as his agents in the game.

Back view of model

Realize of course I'm a guy with a full time job, a wife and kid and I do all my dev on the time  I can squeeze in between all of life's other commitments so were talking about 1.5 hours a day MAX and maybe 4 hours per day on the weekend.

I did not get him fully animated so you could say I failed my goal - however I did get him in game with the beginning of an idle animation.  Having set such an aggressive goal I was able to stay very focused and having got a nice looking model in game in such a short time I am really pleased!

What's a bit odd (to me) is he looks much better in Mudbox than he does in Unity 5. I'm not sure why as I brought over high res materials and normal maps etc. He doesn't look bad either - just not as spectacular and I can't be sure if I'm doing something wrong or if its just how it goes?  After seeing the Blacksmith demo video from Unity 5 I can't help but feel I am doing something wrong and losing out on visual fidelity if I knew the right buttons to press!

If you have any hints or tips on how to improve my characters look in game drop me a line I'd love to hear about them!

Rise of Dagon adding in logic for doors

This week I focused on tying in the logic of doors and gates like the porticullis I implemented last week in to the logic for the game.

So this required some code changes in several areas:

- player movement
- monster movement
- level logic code
- additional scripts on game objects in the scene

While this isn't a lot to show off visually in a screenshot I did try to record a video but my software kept crashing when I tried to record audio!  Unfortunately that took too long and I'm just going with a screenshot today.

Hopefully I'll figure out what's going on with the video cap software soon and I'll try to get a video update soon as I haven't done one in a while and many things have changed.

The other thing I took on this week is a second iteration of the inventory and character inspection sheets.

This screenshot shows off the new inventory - which if you compare to older screenshots this now hugs the left and right rather than obscuring the whole screen.

This looks nicer - as obviously you can still see what is going on in the game as you tinker with your inventory - and avoid getting clobbered if a monster is coming!

There is further work to do in the inventory iteration, I would like to polish the graphics up a bit and I have a mouse-over inspector but for some reason its really  jittery so I need to solve that problem so the UI feels smooth rather than touchy.

That's it for this week, thanks for reading!

The Rise of Dagon : Pits, Brazier's, Unity 5.0 released, and more oh my!

Last week I shared the new Portcullis that I was able to get in to the level format and editor for the Rise of Dagon.

As anticipated I went ahead and implemented more items in to the level format.

So this week I have added the following:

• uncovered pits
• covered pits (traps essentially)
• pressure plates
• floor braziers

An important note to make though ; I did not put in the logic to control the pressure plates and the covered pit doors.. that will have to be in a future update as it took a fair bit of work to get this content in this week.

I had one problem when doing it and that was the default Unity UI doesn't have a 'drop down' list so I did a really quick toggle for the implementation of the covered pit vs the uncovered pit but I could see this was going to get really laborious and inefficient eventually.

Some googling turned up a thread on the Unity forums talking about this implementation of a drop down list someone shared that looks promising (but I have not tried out yet).  Have you heard of any other good tutorials or drop down lists people have shared as of the 4.6 GUI rollout? I know a lot of people probably have needs in this area?

I also added some additional code to the logic of the player and monster movement that makes it so you can't step in to the same square as a component such as a brazier (there will eventually be other ones)

Above I show a shot from within the Unity editor that shows the light probes in the scene and an early version of the uncovered pit.

And then finally below I have the uncovered pit in an actual in-game screenshot that was placed with the level editor:

Right now you can walk right over them, I look forward to making the code that has you 'drop down' the pit and fall to the next level or potentially die - that should be a fun bit of code!

It was on Wednesday that I did some of these shots and Unity 5.0 was released .. so these shots are the first one's that are using a production build of Unity 5.  It was interesting because as with several of the beta builds when I loaded the project up some of the default shader properties must have changed once again and I was forced to make changes to my materials mainly in the area of the metallic and smoothness properties.

Overall though I ended up feeling like this final tweak to the shader seemed to improve the visual quality of the level just a little bit.

Another thing I've done this week is add just a little touch of ambient light to the levels.  It makes everything more 'visible' on darker screens ; but it then makes it so the level isn't quite as dark and scary so I'm not sure if I like it or not yet? It is nice to be able to see things for sure but I do want to build an atmosphere that the dungeon is a scary place so I think I will end up tweaking it down - or potentially pushing it up and down depending on if you have a light source on with your party perhaps?

The Brazier I added seems to have some problems in that it exposes the general weakness of the fire sprite I'm using at the moment (looks way too saturated and thick to me?) as seen in the shot below:

I've put that down on my list to make improvements on but for now it's a nice additional to the lighting possibilities in the level!

Finally here's a nice shot showing a pit and a brazier around a corner:

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Rise of Dagon: What's a dungeon without a portcullis?

This week I have approximately two weeks of work to share for you.  All of that work went in to diving back in to the level editor for The Rise of Dagon and adding portcullis doors to the editor and getting them in the game.

I also added those big clunky dungeon 'wall switches' so you could open and close them.

portcullis door with switch

The material on the switch looks too simple right now but it was more important to get it in the game and working than it was to polish the texture on it.

The really cool thing about adding in the portcullis door this stretch was that it added about 25% more visual variety to the current level layouts and it really just made things a lot more visually inspiring for me - such that I've decided I'll be focusing on adding more features to the level format for the next couple of weeks as my primary focus.

In closing I quickly wanted to mention if you enjoyed reading my 3 Year Indie Retrospective you might also enjoy year 2, and year 1 respectively. I had meant to link them in-line in the 3 Year retro but forgot to  do so as it took me a week to write all that up and by the time I was done that thought was gone from my head!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

3 Year Indie Retrospective

A swipe side-by-side comparison between a year 1 game and a year 3 of mine.

Roughly four years ago in mid 2011 ago I was working in a call center working as a tech support agent and due to some office politics (a manager got mad at one of my co-workers) and a bit of bad judgement on my part (we were both using foul language in a private chat to each other ) I was called in to an office and given my “final written notice” that if I did even one more thing wrong I would be fired immediately.  This happened in the great Wall Street induced depression of 2008 and jobs were scarce to come by (still are)!

I was terrified.

Rise of Dagon : Rings, Necklaces, Earrings, Arms, and combat log added this week

This week was pretty crazy when it came to productivity - for some reason I was just hitting goals one after another and was able to get a lot done!

I would like to think it was just from pure awesomeness, but I suspect that I have reached a certain velocity in my inventory system and therefor was able to make a lot of changes in a short time due to having set up much of my system already.

So I was able to create icons (using in part some 3D assets I purchased, and also some items I modeled myself) and then add earrings, rings, necklaces, and arm armor to the game.

Each of these items of course is part of the procedural loot system so there is a very wide variety of items that can be generated out of the combinations of prefixes, suffixes and magical attributes that can be on a weapon.

I was also able to program in the ability to restrict the type of item you can equip according to the slot it goes in. So previously you could drag an gauntlet in to a helmet slot, this is no longer the case.

Further more I was able to get my message system up to speed and create your basic RPG combat log window.  Right now I post some messages to the combat log are for debug purposes, like when a monster sees you -- this will eventually become apparent through either sound design or animations or a combination of those, but for now its a nice way to make sure that the monsters have spotted me and should be behaving as such.




Finally Unity delivered the first RC candidate of Unity 5... RC means "release candidate" meaning apparently they feel it has enough features that they are done adding new features and now they just need to make sure everything is as bug free as they can make it before it ships.

So I took another pass at tuning the graphics as every beta it seems to have gotten out of sync a little bit with my settings or the tone mapping script changes and becomes invalid etc.

Thanks for reading see you next week!

Rise of Dagon: Procedural Loot System coming together

A couple of days after last week's update where I mentioned I have been working on my inventory system for 6 weeks it struck me that was a little disingenuous because I have in fact been working on the inventory for that time but I've also been working on my procedural loot system at the same time!

So I have not tracked the specific time I spent on either one; they integrate to tightly its often been at the same time but effectively you could say I've been working on each of them for about 3 weeks.

This week I was able to really take the procedural loot to the next level by adding in the loot Prefix and Suffix type to weapons and armor!

So I have a cool screenshot of some randomly generated items  to share to show off how that is coming along

So what's not immediately apparent in these weapons is all the components that go in to making the items..

Each item has a "MagicProperty" component which can provide a "prefix" power, and a "suffix" power.

So depending on what Prefix or Suffix your item has it has a name that goes along with it. 

So a "Leeching" prefixed item is actually a vampiric property that helps heal you when you damage an enemy with it.

A Suffix of "Darkness" would give extra bonus to your Darkness Affinity - and as discussed previously any bonus to your Affinity Powers will have multiple ramifications. Stacking desired affinity powers for character builds will be a major source of building a powerful character.

Some properties provide stat bonuses, others will provide a spell like effect on attack and so forth.

The properties can also be blank of course meaning they convey no bonus in that case but that's not as quite fun to show off!

So the title of the weapon or equipment item reflects the Prefix/Suffix of the MagicProperty and this is the only way the player currently knows that the item contains some additional powers to those that are listed on the inspector itself.

So below that of course is the normalized Attribute (stats) that an item might have bonuses to your Strength, Dexterity or other attributes.

I created a system where the item can have from 1-5 of these bonuses but currently since I'm designing for the low level end of the game only 1-3 can actually show up.

Furthermore I hope to fine tune it so that if you kill an elite or boss monster you will be much more likely to get an item with better range and value of Attribute bonuses on it as a reward.

So that's it for this week - the procedural loot system is in very solid shape right now it just needs polish and some iterations to make more variety and interesting combinations come out so that the loot will seem interesting and varied.

Thanks for reading,see you next week!