Over the next few Devlogs we're going to showcase a few of the weapons that you will be able to utilize in Forge and Fight!
The first one we are showing off today is the Soul Eater!
The Soul Eater is legendary. It was only wielded by the Billabonk Fight Boys, but since looting got banned by the boring humanitarians, the tribes needed an alternative source of income. They launched the Soul Eater Leasing Initiative, which allows all gladiators access to this powerful weapon.
Forging with this weapon has an immediate drawback as it reduces your health, but if you stay on the aggressive and score enough eliminations, you can become what the Billabonkers call a “Chonky Boi”.
*Please note that all values are subject to change before Early Access as balancing is happening continuously.
Forge and Fight is coming to Early Access in Summer 2020!
Follow us on our social channels to get more sneak peeks! Twitter: https://twitter.com/forgeandfight Facebook: https://facebook.com/forgeandfight Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/flamebaitgames
Devlog - Thank You For Playing The Open Beta!
Hey Everyone, John here!
Firstly i just want to say thank you to everyone who checked out Forge and Fight! during the Open Beta during the Steam Game Festival and for all the feedback you guys sent us on our Discord and on our feedback form!
We also want to be transparent about how we are going to take your feedback about a few of the major points that came up, and improve the game with it!
New Player Onboarding.
We heard from many of you that the initial first few games felt awkward, especially when being thrown into an active match, and the lack of a Tutorial didn't help with this. We are working on a tutorial and we will try to continue to make things clearer.
Game Balance, namely Snipers, Defender Set, the Whirlwind and the rotator.
As we playtest internally, we will have another look at the balance of the above, and the rest of the sets and items, and keep on tweaking it if needed. For Early Access, we are adding additional weapon parts which will impact the game balance in different ways as well.
Certain sets were harder to achieve then others due to lack of parts.
The weapon part list is still being worked on, and we have parts already in mind to improve this balance, as our goal is to try and make each set bonus achievable, and fun to play with.
Difficult to understand what is going on due to too many effects
We hear you! Especially in the later parts of a match when everyone has fully built weapons, it can be certainly hard to understand what is going on. We’re constantly striving towards finding the perfect place between chaos and clarity, which often is quite challenging.
Sandbox mode!
Many of you mentioned wanting a sandbox mode which allows you to create your weapons and test them at will. We can say that we are planning on having some form of Sandbox Mode in Early Access.
Optimization, bugs and general issues
For some, the game struggled to run smoothly, and we've made a list of bugs and issues that you all have made us aware of, we will go through this list to improve both the optimization and try and get rid of those pesky bugs and issues before early access!
We have much more to come in Early Access, coming Summer 2020.
Follow us on our social channels to get more sneak peeks! Twitter: https://twitter.com/forgeandfight Facebook: https://facebook.com/forgeandfight Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/flamebaitgames
Devlog - Character Customization Setup and Pipeline
Forge and Fight is a multiplayer title and this brings a new set of expectations compared to the games we’ve worked on before. Solid backend systems that allow scaling the game, fair balancing with multiple players in mind, and a wide variety of viable strategies, are some of the things people tend to expect.
Among these features, we have character customization which happens to be one of my personal favourites when playing with other people. Being able to create a cool, slick rogue with a complete, unified set or creating a dumb space clown with flip flops lends a sense of freedom and provides people with the opportunity to express themselves and shape the community as a whole. Lots of fun! While these end-user tools haven’t been implemented into the game as of yet they’re planned for the release and most of the backend work has been completed at this point.
Modifier Attributes and Cosmetics
To make communication around character creation easier we’ve split aspects of customization into two parts: modifier attributes and cosmetics. The cosmetics are the actual base models or assets which the character consists of such as their head, torso, shoes, or voice line pack. The modifier attributes are the characteristics that modify attributes of cosmetics. This would include colour tints of the characters’ skin and clothing or the pitch of the character's voice for instance.
The five categories of cosmetics are feet, hands, torso, head, and hair. These need to fit together both proportionally and aesthetically to feel cohesive and satisfying to use. To aid in maintaining proportional consistency we’ve established some prerequisites and workflows to ensure things are easy to produce without a lot of trial and error.
Prerequisites
To make it easier on ourselves characters are all the same proportions and extremities of the character are separated from the torso. These decisions were primarily the result of wanting to keep the characters the same size for fair gameplay and providing an interesting look to the overall character design. The decision also brings the added benefit of letting me use a reference character to build things off of with clear examples of how other clothing looks for easy comparison without having to keep different character proportions in mind. The separated extremities mean there are no seams between cosmetics which leads to less worry about how articles of clothing clip through each other which brings down some of the skinning work as well.
The reference poses not the same as bind pose.
Workflow
As for workflow, every article of clothing is created as part of a set. So, in essence, every pair of gloves have a matching hat, shirt, and pair of shoes associated with them as well. This line of thinking encourages the production of more assets and also speeds the production process up with multiple things being created with each production cycle. This reduces the number of working files during the production and thus minimizes workload and general confusion.
When a set of clothing has been sculpted, low poly versions are created in Maya and given their respective material names, their own UV layouts, and mesh names with a ‘_low’ suffix for baking. Since the clothing will be mixed and matched later on it makes more sense to treat them as their own assets in this regard.
There hasn’t been a need to implement it yet but there is an opportunity to optimize with this setup by creating texture atlases of character clothing during runtime to reduce the number of textures being called. A working version with all associated meshes is exported for texturing. This is again a step to reduce the number of working files and keeping things neat.
The working version has its textures baked from the high poly version and is then textured in Substance Painter (huge timesaver, well worth learning and reduces the need for lots of software). Not gonna go into specific methods of texturing here but there are lots of great learning videos made by allegorithmic walking through concepts and techniques.
One feature that is worth mentioning in this context, however, is the naming convention when exporting textures. By giving the working file an appropriate name after the set you’re working on and the materials after the article of clothing you get a very neat naming convention that is easy to search for in the engine later on. This becomes more important as the project scales up. Again, all measures to keep the workload down and reduce confusion in the long run.
To allow for the colouring of cosmetics in-engine a mask map is produced in Substance Painter during the texturing process as well. This is done by creating a user-defined channel and making a black and white mask from it. When creating the mask texture colour is applied in the colour channel with a multiply blend mode to give an idea of how the colours will behave in the shader. This is also included with a good naming convention by creating a custom export preset in substance based on the Unity 5 preset.
The working file is handed to Niklas (our animator) to be skinned for use in the game. Since all characters are the same proportion, the same skeleton is used. Each article of clothing is then exported as a separate skinned mesh to unity and applied to the character animations, and materials are swapped during runtime to assemble the final character. Depending on the game mode the assigned clothing colours will be the team colour or user-defined colours. Very cool!
After all this, we have a completed character that consists of multiple parts. While the feature is not strictly necessary for gameplay it provides a lot of flavours that are well worth it in order to build up the community.
Connect with us: Twitter: https://twitter.com/forgeandfight Facebook: https://facebook.com/forgeandfight Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/flamebaitgames
Devlog - 1 Year of Unity Game Development
With the Open Beta just around the corner, we wanted to look back the past year of our development into show how things have progressed and give you a little insight to game development.
[previewyoutube="GN3OcUFLlYw;full"]
Game Director Mattias also had a little message to share with you all:
Thank you for all the loving support so far! <3
The Open Beta is happening super soon on June 16th, but before that I want to share this video with you. It’s me going through 1 year of development of Forge and Fight, and wow it’s wild to see how much it’s changed! I really hope you’ll love the game and I’m so looking forward to hearing your feedback from the Beta.
Join us on Wednesday 17th 18:00 - 20:00 CEST as our Community Manager: Seraxia, dives into the game with you, the community and answers your questions.
Forge and Fight was originally developed as a prototype and is now realized into a fully functioning wacky and fun weapon crafting multiplayer action game. Each round you are given random parts to work with, and you utilize them to build as an effective ( or silly) weapon as possible, to help you get through each round against other players or bots.
The result? Crazy weapon builds, laughs with friends and many memorable moments.
Meet the developers of Forge and Fight! AMA June 18th
Join Community Manager: Seraxia, and Mattias, Game Director for Forge and FIght, who together, will be running an AMA over on the official discord channel, on Thursday 18th June between 16:00 - 17:00 CEST.
So whether you have a question about the running of a games company, a community, how to get into the games industry, or just general questions about Forge and Fight!, then join us and ask away!
[previewyoutube="RyYx-QQVLAI;full"] See you there!
Open Beta Coming to the Steam Game Festival - 9th June! [Rescheduled to 16th]
Hey Everyone!
We're super excited to announce that our game is going into Open Beta during the Steam Festival starting on the 16th June! So break out your smithing tools and create some of the most wonderfully badass and bizarre weapons you can, to show your friends or foes, who is the best blacksmith gladiator!
Fancy chatting with us? Reach out to us in any of the following social channels where you will see regular clips from our game and support, should you need it!
This time around we have a Dev Blog written by Miya, our wonderful marketing Manager here at Flamebait Games! So without further ado, here you are:
"I’m Miya, Marketing Manager at Flamebait Games. I’m based in Sweden, but I’m originally from Japan. One of my responsibilities early on was community management for our games. This post is about my experiments with community management mostly focussing on Discord.
The Games Market, Discord Servers and Languages
As you know Flamebait Games is a Swedish game studio, but all our community information, Social Media posts, Discord announcements, Newsletters, are in English. This is not highly unusual in the games industry, especially not in Sweden where most people speak English very well. However, I always wondered if games communities tend to focus on English a bit too much? If we look at sales, Asia contributes a huge chunk these days.
It is no secret that in the last several years, the Asian games market has been growing rapidly.
Passpartout
I can share a little example here. This is sales rankings of Flamebait Games’ previous title “Passpartout” on each platform during its lifetime.
We can clearly see from the table above that the Asian countries do make their presence felt. To elaborate further about iOS, we added Simplified Chinese language in November 2019 that is after 3 years since we launched in the US and Europe, within 6 months the Chinese sales have caught up with Germany. Additionally, on the Nintendo Switch, we released a Japanese version 6 months after the EU/US version release, but Japanese sales are only a few hundred copies behind the US sales numbers.
It was very clear that much like the global market trends, Asia was a big part of our sales numbers. This is why I started to think it is very important that we don’t ignore our Asian community of gamers. This was reinforced by what was happening with Forge and Fight!
Forge and Fight!
In the case of Forge and Fight!, looking at the traffic data from our Steam page. We were getting 28% of traffic from Korea and 24% from the US. Half of our traffic was coming from these two countries.
This surge of traffic from South Korea influenced our Discord member demographics as well. We have around 2600 members on Discord, and around 20% of the members have Korean language usernames (some may well be using English usernames as well).
Multi-Language Discord Server
Many Asian gamers understand English well, but some are not comfortable to chat in a fast-paced environment like Discord, with other English speakers. My assumption was that if we have Korean, Japanese and Chinese language channels on our Discord server, it would drive up the activity! We decided to try it out.
We got a few conversations going on our Korean and Japanese channels. However, it was not a roaring success. I tried to understand why this was the case, maybe they are not talking because there are no topics to talk about or events to attend which they could chat about. One day, I asked “why are people so silent in the channel” in Japanese channel and people replied, “I came here to get information updates and new giveaway events, not really to communicate with other people”. I realized I didn’t need to feel bad if people are silent in our Discord and that Discord is a good place to post news and announcements as well. There are three types of people on our channels: Observers, whose purpose is getting some information from the server; Communicators, who love to talk with people and developers and share feedback; Inactive, people who just joined the server somewhere and never really log in.
The most important thing then is how to give some benefit to people joining our server and keep giving useful information there and, of course, maintaining a comfortable atmosphere so everyone can be there.
Closed Alpha Test
At some point during the Forge and Fight! Development, we decided to do a closed Alpha test. I thought this would be a good time to involve our Discord community and try to further understand the demographics of our server.
Our target was to have 100 testers (Test duration was only 24 hours). The game was supported on Windows OS only. Players needed to sign-up to be eligible. We announced the Alpha test information on Discord, Twitter, Facebook and our Devlog, and we got 400+ signups. We tried to get testers from all over the world because Forge and Fight! is an Online multiplayer game and we wanted to check if people could play together from any location. Sadly though, we couldn’t get enough Asian testers from our own Discord server. I asked Game Cast, one of the more successful Japanese Game Community Discord server, for help and they were happy to make a temporary Forge and Fight! Channel there. (Thank you @Gamecast)
In the end, we got testers from all over the world and got a bunch of great feedback. I learned that if we couldn’t gather enough members for the event ourselves, it’s ok to ask other servers, if there is synergy, for help and that can totally work!
Location % of Alpha testers
Next Steps!
We’ll soon-ish announce the Forge and Fight! Beta test details on our server. We are currently making great plans of how much “Hype” we can create and carry forward from the Beta test to early access and how frequently we’ll have updates/events after early access. We'd also like to have a more participatory Discord server in the future. Lessons Learnt
・Language support is important, but continuous updates, events and information are much more important. ・To an extent, Observers can also be a healthy part of a server. ・Asian language support is not always necessary, but if we put some effort, it is usually appreciated.
This was my experience of our Discord community :-) If you have any questions or good tips for a multi-language community, please ping me (@EmberCat), I’ll answer as much as I can! I also would like to add that we have a new community manager now! (@Seraxia) who will further take care of all our lovely community members."
Connect with us: Twitter: https://twitter.com/forgeandfight Facebook: https://facebook.com/forgeandfight Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/flamebaitgames
Devlog - Our Weapon Philosophy
Heya, here we are with a devlog!
This time we’re going to be talking about the weapons in Forge and Fight.
In the game, you forge weapons and fight with them which means that the weapon parts need all the love that we can give them, but before we could dive in to actually designing and creating each part, there was a key design challenge we had to overcome.
Why does it matter which weapon parts I choose to put on my weapon?
The answer to this question will help us understand how to approach creating interesting weapon parts for the game. In the prototype of Forge and Fight each weapon part mainly had three variables that would answer that question.
1). How much damage the part does. 2). How large (and easy to hit with) it is. 3). How cool it looks.
This was incredibly problematic as there is only so much variance you can make with that range of variables. That meant that it didn’t really matter what you put on your weapon which, in the long run, yields shallow gameplay.
Screenshot of the Forge and Fight prototype. The damage numbers aren’t even displayed, making the choice even less interesting for the players.
So how do we go about creating the required depth to make the choice of weapon parts matter?
We can not just look at the weapon parts in isolation but must also consider the goals of the combat itself. As to not make this blog post too long I’ll just touch on the main goal that relates to the weapon designs: The combat needs to afford multiple playstyles that can be counterplayed.
The playstyles in Forge and Fight are most easily described through their archetypes, the Tank, Sniper, Brute or Scout. There is also a possibility to mix the archetypes as well as new ones to emerge once the players get their hands on the game but this is our baseline for which we’ll design our parts.
We take inspiration from RPGs and increase the number of variables and mechanics that fit the archetypes. For instance, a part can give bonuses to sustainability making you tankier, or bonuses to manoeuvrability ranged or melee damage.
A few of the parts in the game, each with their own unique modifiers or mechanics. Very much WIP, card graphics and effects can change dramatically before launch.
With the increased variance, we were able to produce a good amount of parts with their own purpose and feel. However, it didn’t quite provide enough depth just by itself. What we were lacking at this stage, was the ability to create stronger synergies with your weapon builds. To improve upon this, we created the Class System.
Each part belongs to one or more classes and by placing several parts of the same class the player unlocks strong set bonuses with great synergizing potential.
A simple example is a part that belongs to the Sharp class, which has a set bonus that says “If you place 2 or more sharp parts, all sharp parts gain +5 damage”. The more Sharp parts you add, the stronger the effect is. This also had the added benefit of being able to categorize the parts for the players so they could more easily understand what the role of each part is.
The Damascus set bonuses are honed towards speed.
Looping back to our original question of “Why does it matter which weapon parts I choose to put on my weapon?” the answer is now clear. Each choice of parts can help you build towards your desired playstyle and unlock powerful synergies.
Perhaps in the future, I’ll have an opportunity to go into more detail how the process looks when actually creating a part, but for now, we’ll have to leave it at the high-level stuff.
If you got any questions or wanna discuss anything games related you can head over to our discord! And stay safe everyone!
Hello everyone!
