We're back! We've defeated the Summer Boss... one of our greatest foes. As we've talked about in previous Dev Updates, this is sort of a cyclical thing for our team: for eight months of the year we are on it with development, and then majorly slow down in the summer. Weird quirks like this are only natural with indie teams, especially those that are not able to do it full-time. Fortunately, this time we can say that our slowdown hasn't been solely due to summer. You see, we also had some major technical obstructions to overcome related to an engine upgrade that we've been working hard to overcome. And now we have!
This upgrade brought new features and increased performance, which is wonderful, but it also deprecated some of the main tools we use, and upgrading those tools to an up-to-date spec was not a simple process. It took a lot of time, a lot of trial and error, and eventually a Skype call with a rep from the engine developer—but we finally have those technical matters resolved!
So now, we've made it through the struggles of upgrade woes and entered into a clearing. We can see the short path ahead with more clarity, and we've been able to make a lot of forward progress in the last couple of weeks along that route. Here are some of the highlights:
First we fixed a problem with a text rendering tool that was crashing all our menus and interfaces. Which is just a little bit game-breaking.
We also fixed a camera control conflict and updated the opening cinematic (with an option to spacebar skip through it). While we were working on the camera system, we went ahead and added a camera animation for an encounter with a drone (which now has it's own "waking" animation as well), a bit of functionality that will have plenty of uses later on. You can see a clip of that opening animation from our Twitch stream here, and the drone animation here.
More recently, we've added new art in the game to represent the four tiers of repair kits. That means we're no longer using duplicates of the fuel cell art to represent these kits! Repair kits are working really well in our internal play testing and proving to be a valuable asset!
Finally, we have removed all the old camera render effects from the game, and updated to a newer system. The results are fantastic and the game looks more beautiful than ever before!
What's next? A new UI! We've started work on the UI update, which is the last major task we need to complete before launching Alpha 2! We'll be sharing updates on Twitch, Twitter and Discord, so please join us to provide your feedback and ideas. We really value your input and collaboration! Once the UI is complete, we'll be doing a lot of testing, bug squashing, and prepping for our Alpha 2 release! So, if you're interested in playing Alpha 2, please be sure to sign up!
That's going to do it for this update! We look forward to sharing more with you soon!
Dev Update #82: Designing User Experience
We're going to keep this week's Dev Update brief. The biggest items we've been focusing on this week have to do with design and user experience! This is a lot of concept over practice, but we want to keep you up to date on the discussions we're having internally. The first design update is about the repair kit we mentioned last week! This is a new part that is meant to enhance the user experience by allowing you to repair parts in addition to simply replacing them. We're early on in the art design of these kits, but the implementation from a code side is rather trivial since we already have similar functions with consumable fuel cells increasing battery power levels. While we aren't considering any of our art permanent during this prototype phase, we do want to make sure it looks good. Ekah, the artist working on this task, has shared the in-progress version (seen above) on our Discord last week, and is continuing to refine the design. Keep an eye out for updated art postings soon!
The other design work we've been doing is something we haven't talked too much about: tool tips. These are quite possibly the driest part of a game's design, but as mechanical complexity has risen, so has their importance. Tool tips and notifications help make sure that your gameplay experience comes with as little clutter as possible, and we're first implementing this system to help with part management.
In the current builds, as you play and carry out tasks in Gears of Eden, your parts will slowly degrade based on their usage. This makes sense, but unless you're super on top of watching those menus (to an extent that would simply become busy work, rather than actual fun), it's very likely that you'll find yourself caught off guard when your rover breaks down. "Oops, I was just playing and having fun and now I can't drive or drill or do anything." That's frustrating and a bad user experience, and though any good game has consequences, we want to use this system to warn you before such consequences arise. Eventually we'll expand these type of feedback systems to other aspects of the game's functionality.
So yeah! Mini Update done! Check back next week for more development news! Until then, if you want to keep up with all things GoE, check out our Twitter and Facebook pages! You can also give a listen to the most recent episode of our Reaching Eden podcast! Our creative director also streams some of his own development work, so be sure to follow us on Twitch! Thank you so much for your support and thank you for reading. We hope to see you again next Wednesday, but until then, have a great rest of your week.
Dev Update #81: Dominant Strategy
In game design, there is a term known as "dominant strategy," which describes a means of overcoming the game's challenges in the easiest and most efficient way possible. By the nature of interactive design, this is a pretty unavoidable situation. (Just checkout "glitchless speedruns" of just about any game and you'll no doubt find a lot of people playing in very similar ways.) By its own right, it's not a bad thing so long as you acknowledge it in your designs. This is why the best weapons in shooters tend to have the least ammo, why classes in RPGs tend to fair better or worse in given situations, and why certain tools have limited functionality. I've personally been playing the most recent Ratchet and Clankgame and I found the "Agents of Doom" to be vicious, efficient little killers that the enemy can rarely adapt to... unless the enemy can fly. Suddenly, my explosive little robo-dinosaurs, which once carved a hole through levels with ease, are made useless.
So much of game design is a balancing act, and the handling of dominant strategy is no exception. Recently while watching twitch streams of
Dev Update #80: You're In Control!
It's been a while since our last update, but we’re back! We know it's been a while, but we've been in the weeds fixing bugs, and there is only so much we can say about that before it starts to sound really repetitive. Apologies for the radio silence! Development is ongoing though, even if it slows down occasionally, and we’re really excited to talk to you this week!
The first bit we have to talk about was sort of a surprise! Our creative director had an evening to spare and wanted to play around with Gears of Eden’s backend and was able to get partial controller support working! He’s even tested it out on our Twitch channel! Obviously it’s very partial (at multiple points, he had to put down the controller and use his mouse and keyboard) and there’s a lot of fine tuning that needs to happen so that the control scheme is natural to use, but it’s in! As someone who likes to kick back and play on my TV from time to time, this was very exciting to see happen. You can expect at the very least to control the rover and it's functions with a controller in Alpha 2, but any UI or object interactions will likely come afterwards. Full controller support is definitely coming in the future though!
We also had planned developments this week as well, the biggest of them being changes to the way that Tier 1 parts functioned. Previously, as the player went through part upgrades, they’d go through a series of degradable parts, from Tier 2 to Tier 4. Once these parts fully degraded, they’d drop--without any accounting for tier level--to Tier 1, which we were treating as the “broken” state. This worked well for gamedev purposes by allowing us to test the basic idea of "part breaks, gets worse" but it's not very usable from a gameplay perspective. No amount of explanation can justify in lore why a) Tier 1, without any other indication, is the broken state or b) Tiers 2, 3, and 4 all function in the exact same way after they fall into disrepair.
Now each tier really does have its own broken state, including diminished stats. We plan to include a visual change to the model for this as well, but that’s naturally going to wait until we’ve created models for each tier. We hope that this change will end up in Alpha 2, but given recent delays, we might let those slip into Alpha 3 or the Demo release. We’ll see!
Next on our list are some minor bug fixes to various systems, and then the implementation of the new UI! We're really excited about the added functionality and user-friendliness of the new UI and can't wait to get it in game. Stay tuned for updates on our progress soon!
That'll be it for this week's Dev Update. We will be back next week with more! If you want to keep up with all things GoE, check out our Twitter and Facebook pages, or give a listen to the most recent episode of our Reaching Eden podcast! Thank you so much for your support and thank you for reading. We hope to see you again next Wednesday, but until then, have a great rest of your week.
Dev Update #79: Life As We Don't Know It
In our previous update, we talked about the process of re-concepting our starter asteroid. We've been working with artist Sasha Nodia to help update and improve the environment in our demo space game, and we're happy to share some more art with you this week! We also want your input on a question raised by this endeavor: should there be limited organic life on our asteroid?
At first glance, this seems a bit far-fetched. However, we have learned that certain lichens and bacteria can survive in space, and indeed this plays into a theory of transpermia (which suggests life spreads from one planet to another by hitching rides on asteroids and comets). Gears of Eden is also way more concerned with fun and gameplay than adhering to reality (we like to say, "More Star Wars than Star Trek"), but if we can use reality to make this game even more fun, we definitely want to!
It is, however, a balancing act. On the one hand, even if we like the idea of having stylized organic fungal life on asteroids in our game, do they need to be included on the starting world? Should that be saved for later? On the other hand... if we don't show enough off in our demo, which only has one location, we might not capture the interest and support we need to pursue the full game, which means that first location might also be the last.
Have some organic life, limited to a small area of the asteroid that sustains a micro-climate, would provide the opportunity to introduce new materials, crafting recipes, and varied gameplay and aesthetics (possibly even narrative or mission implications). Of course, this inclusion could also lead to some confusion in mechanics and at its worst, seem forced in.
So what do you think? Let us know your opinion in our Twitter poll!
That is going to wrap it up for this week's Dev Update! Please be sure to follow us over at Twitch for some live dev-streams, and keep up with all the latest and greatest Gears of Eden news on Twitter and Facebook! If you're interested in testing our upcoming Alpha 2, be sure to enroll on our website! Have a great week!
Dev Update #78: A Whole New World
We are in the thick of prepping Alpha 2 for it's upcoming release. If you've been following us, you know the biggest "new" addition coming to Alpha 2 is the lore item system. This game mechanic is fairly simple... we've hidden two series of short narrative character stories in a few data chips scattered around the asteroid and you get to go find them and see what they say. Good news! This system is already complete and released in a preview build for backers, Alpha 1.5.1 (featuring gibberish lore text until Alpha 2 is ready)! So, what else are we working on for Alpha 2?
I'm so glad you asked! Right now we are finishing up some changes that affect how Tier 1 parts work in the game. We originally ONLY had Tier 1 parts in the game, so we gave them infinite durability. And, since they never wore out, you didn't need to craft Tier 1 parts, and so that was never an option. Then we started building upgrade paths for each part in the game... so you progress from Tier 1 to Tier 2 all the way up to Tier 4. These upgraded Tier parts have durability, and when they durability wore out, we simply made them "break" and revert back to the default Tier 1 part.
That works for development – your part breaks and you experience a reduction in efficiency, but it doesn't really make sense from a gameplay perspective. Now each item will have it's own broken status. If you have a Tier 3 drill and it breaks, it won't revert back to a Tier 1 drill, it will just perform really badly as a broken Tier 3 drill. That means we don't need Tier 1 to act as a default part, so it can be a complete Tier that behaves as any other. That means Tier 1 parts now have durability, have their own broken status, and be crafted and replaced!
Another big Alpha 2 goal is completely replacing the user interface (UI) with something that is both functionally and aesthetically... well, better. The design for the new UI is complete, but we still need to implement this into the game. Our new UI has better organization and access to crafting menus, and will feature a lot of tooltips and alerts to help keep players aware of things like broken parts, inventory limits, or insufficient resources for crafting.
We also have a few stretch goals for Alpha 2. These are last on our list (because they may not make it into the Alpha 2 build), but they are really exciting (at least for us). These stretch goals include incorporating cinemachine into our project, which is an animation tool that will help us create some fun intro animations for the demo. We also would love to get a sample of visible part upgrades in the game. Right now, when you upgrade a part on your rover, you don't see any visual change. You get stat upgrades, sure, but your rover looks unchanged. Of course, in the long run, we want you to be able to swap parts on and off and have the experience of seeing your rover upgrade visually over time. We're hoping we can demonstrate this with one or two parts in Alpha 2. And, in the future, we hope to offer a lot more customization options for you.
Finally, and saving the best for last, we're currently working with 3D artist Sasha Nodia to reimagine the asteroid world our rover inhabits. We've gotten pretty far with our rocky little placeholder, but we really want to create a setting that captures your imagination and wonder. This means we want to create a "game" asteroid, that is more stylized and fun. Something that encourages you to drive around and explore. An asteroid that uses different textures, colors, and that has distinct visual areas you can visit and experience. The image at the beginning of this post is just an early sample as we work through the concept process for this new asteroid, but we're already really excited at where we are heading, and hope to include this new environment as part of our Alpha 2 release!
That's it for this update! Please be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more! As always, you can see Gears in action through our live development streams on Twitch. And be sure to catch the latest episode of our Podcast, Reaching Eden! Finally, if you're interested in testing Alpha 1.5.1 or Alpha 2, please be sure to enroll on our website.
Dev Update #77: Your Opinion (and UI)!
We've got two big things to talk about this week! One is something you may have heard about already if you've been following these Dev Updates: the User Interface! We're wrapping up a new layout design for Alpha 2 and so it makes sense that we talk about some of the decisions that went into making it. The other would be... well, you! Last week we asked for your input on mining systems! Now we get to review how our participants voted! But first, how about we talk about the user interface since that's something you'll see happen in-game a lot sooner.
If you played in Alpha 1.0 or 1.5 or have popped into some of our Twitch streams, you've seen our current UI. We started with a single pane of UI to house most of the menu functionality and that was able to work (to put it generously) because there wasn't much to do. As systems evolved, however, we quickly came upon the very limits of our UI functionality and it became obvious that we needed push things forward. We evolved toward a tabbed menu system that works much better from a functional perspective, but has been in serious need of some cosmetic updates.
Our upcoming, cleaner layout is a breath of fresh air and a huge step in the right direction. We have more visual indicators, better hierarchy, dividers, tooltips, and a lot more subtle design cues to not only aid in the design, but also increase the usability and feedback provided to the player. I know our UI will continue to evolve along with the game, but we're really excited to see this new design work its way into our internal builds in the weeks to come! Be sure to keep an eye on our Twitch channel to see the new UI in action when it is available!
Now! Onto your feedback! Last week, we asked for your thoughts on our internal discussion about an active mining mechanic versus a more passive one. We put up a poll for the question on Twitter and the results were very enlightening. None of us are surprised that you all prefer active game mechanics to passive ones, but I'm not sure if any of us were expecting such a distinct advantage in favor of active mining. There is exactly twice the number of people in favor of active mining as there are in favor of passive mining!
What's important to note though is that both of these options are blown out of the water by the number of people wanting a hybrid approach, in which you can swap from active to passive at will. This makes a lot of sense. Usually when I'm playing a game, I'm actively playing the game. But every so often, I'll be watching TV or get a text and it'll take my focus for a minute or two. In that time, if I've already proven that I know how to accomplish the standard gameplay loop of mining, it might be nice to have the game be a pal and get me some iron.
This is important for us to think about as we move forward, and you can bet we'll be delving further into this discussion after the launch of Alpha 2. Until then though, we've got a lot of work to do and we want to keep you informed with more Dev Updates like this one! So follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest and great Gears of Eden news! That's all for now, but I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you so much for reading!
Dev Update #76: Mining: Active, Passive or Both?
In a lot of games, the set of tools you have at your disposal shrinks and grows. You start an FPS with a baseball bat, and a few levels later you are mowing enemies down with a rocket launcher! This isn't because those first levels aren't cool enough to deserve a rocket launcher, but rather that as your understanding of the game expands, the variety of situations they can stick you into, and the variety of tools your capable of applying in those situations, is also expanding. It's a two-sided relationship, and one we want to make use of in Gears of Eden.
But how do we pull that off? This is a narrative-driven adventure game! It isn't designed with rocket launchers and laser cannons in mind! I know, it's a tragedy. Still, we want to reflect your growth (and therefore your character's growth) in the way you solve problems and accomplish goals. This means that is entirely possible that, while you're going to spend the early portion of the game drilling for resources, you very well might be doing a little less of it by the end! (No spoilers.) If a mechanic will be less used eventually, how much engagement should it require when it is used?
Right now, the drilling mechanic works for our level of development. It gets us through the cycle of gameplay and lets us test everything we need to. We're using a very passive system (seen above). You just drive up to a node, switch on the ole drill, watch the particle effects for a bit, and wait for the game to give your resources. We understand some players enjoy passive systems. This frees you up to do other things... craft an item, plan your next move, take a quick bio break... but, for other players, we can also understand how this might make them feel disengaged or... bored! Even if, after five hours of regular gameplay, those players never need to mine again and it turns into the most fun game of all time... they're still possibly left with five hours of a game that is defined in a major way by that mining experience. We don't want you to "trust" that Gears of Eden will be fun, we just want it to be fun.
We are currently having talks to see if we need to design a more active system of drilling and mining. We are just at the early stages of this, but we wanted to get your feedback and input on this internal discussion. We're going to share a very crude mock-up here that demonstrates in very broad brushstrokes what an active system could look like. If we implement an active system, it won't necessarily look like this, but it's a representation of a broader idea.
What do you think? In this scenario, a special camera view opens up featuring a top-down view of the ground at the located mining node. A laser system paints a grid on the ground, dividing it into sections. You actively mine these sections using your mouse cursor to collect resources and bust through to the layers below. And yes, we've used a well known mining/crafting game to cobble together a crude proof of concept animation. This system would act as a sort of mining mini-game, not unlike the fishing mechanic in Stardew Valley and might provide the opportunity to include hidden rewards and rare, undetected, items.
As we've considered active versus passive mining systems, a third options has come up in discussion on our Twitch streams: a hybrid system. In this approach, we'd also have the DrillCam view from the active system, but there would be an "auto" mode which would collect the resources for you. This would not be 100% accurate, so it would take longer to collect resources, use more energy, and add more wear and tear to your bit. But, it would provide convenience. Using the manual mode, you could dig yourself and save on energy and wear and tear. You could then level up the system you prefer with crafted upgrades that provide either a better functioning auto mode, or increase your proficiency with a manual/active approach!
So, what do you prefer? Active? Passive? Or a hybrid solution? Seriously, we want to know! You can vote in our Twitter Poll to let us know how you feel, and leave a comment to let us know why (or if you have ideas for other solutions).
Please keep in mind, especially those that do enjoy a more passive approach, whichever system we implement, there will be methods to reduce the amount of time you personally spend mining as you progress in a location!
And that is it for this week's Dev Update. It was a bit of a change of pace, switching from hard "this is what's happening" to "here's some game design philosophy to consider!" I hope you enjoyed it! We'll be back next week, but until then, check out our latest Reaching Eden Podcast! Or consider following us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest and greatest Gears of Eden news! Thank you so much for reading, thank you so much for supporting us, and I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Dev Update #75: Alpha Release… 1.5!
That's right, a new build of Gears of Eden is heading out the door soon! And backers, this one is for you! We've been talking a lot about the upcoming Alpha 2.0 release, but we don't want to forget all of you who have been actively supporting us throughout this development process. It means the world to us and to show our appreciation, we want to provide additional updates in-between those larger, public releases. Well right now, we're getting ready to release the very first of this group: Alpha 1.5!
You may be wondering what Alpha 1.5 even is. Well, at its most basic, it is everything we've accomplished towards the goal of reaching Alpha 2.0 to this stage. This means that there have been vast improvements to... basically every system in the game. The crafting is expanded far beyond Alpha 1.0, now including a "complete" upgrade system (meaning it's complete... for now), and a wider variety of power cells for the player to make use of. It also involves the SINTER Forge for larger items that it would be unlikely for a rover to craft itself! The inventory system, and in fact the entirety of the UI, has also been overhauled to allow for a greater level of control for the player, as well a greater ease of access to its functionality. Also, of course, we've upgraded the rover itself to a model that we believe to be more in-line with the visual aesthetic of the final game.
There are also a smattering of other improvements to the gameplay experience, such as an increased supply of resources and camera functionality. But, Alpha 1.5 is still really raw and still very much a dev-version of the game. Now, if you've been following our Dev Updates, you might be wondering... what exactly does this leaves to accomplish our goals for Alpha 2.0? Not a whole lot, actually! You can see the real breakdown in our recently updated changelog, but on a functional level, 1.5 is nearly everything we want 2.0 to be. The changes that we're going to be making are primarily aimed and making the public release a more pleasant and polished one. We have some small lore additions we want to add to the experience, a relatively small (but important) change to the way Tier 1 parts work, and some additional animations to make the release just that much more immersive for you. Alpha 2.0 will smooth out many of Alpha 1.5's rough edges. We're probably going to squeeze some other bits and pieces in, but as far as the necessities go? We're practically there!
Alpha 2 is going to be a big deal for us. We want to share Gears of Eden with you as development goes on, but we also want to draw eyes to our game and help build a community of people who can be a part of this development process. This is an integral part of indie development, and as you might imagine, it's important to show something off. This means that, between now and the Alpha 2.0 release, we're also going to be working on a substantial PR push, featuring a more developed trailer and eventually leading into a Kickstarter campaign! We'll have lots of fun events and some giveaways surrounding our 2.0 launch, so stayed tuned for more information soon!
That's it for this week's Dev Update, but you know that we're going to have a lot to talk about in the coming weeks and months, so follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up! And stop by our Discord to give us your feedback and ideas for the game! I know we'd love to answer any questions you might have. We'll be streaming more Alpha 1.5 and 2.0 on Twitch, which is also a great way to hang out with us and let us know what you think. Finally, if you're interested in accessing Alpha 1.5 and future "backer only" builds, you can support Gears of Eden through Twitch, our website, or Patreon! Until next time, thank you so much for sticking with us through this wild ride and we hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
Dev Update #74: Let’s Get Movin’
This week, we're going to keep things brief in our dev update, and do a little more show than tell! Currently, one of the primary goals in our current sprint is to set up the animations of the new rover model. While the new rover has been partially implemented in the game for a while now, importing the animations means importing an updated version of the 3D rover model into the game. Things are going well! But, as with anything else in game development, progress comes with some expected quirks! Now, we could delve into them here and just explain them to death... or we could show you them! They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right... but what about three clips??
This first clip is a video of the new solar panels in action. It looks great, smooth, technical, quick, and functions practically like something that might actually exist. It's exactly what we want... in terms of animation. Some other things, however, are a little bit off. Lets take a closer look.
Take a look at this second clip. Do you see it yet? Well the biggest thing here is that drill. This is one of those weird little bugs that comes up in implementation: that drill really wants to fold inward, almost as if it's scooping instead of drilling, which is actually not part of our planned animations. We'll need to cut that out. But I bet that doesn't distract you from those wheels, right? The wheels work a little different in-engine than the rest of the rover, and so we keep having issues where the textures are missing. Oops. We'll get them to stick though, don't you worry. Right now, the focus is on getting the animations in place. Not making it all look pretty.
Another issue, seen in clip 3, is all that clean white. It's not a subtle Tide ad. That's another result of a missing texture! Easy to fix! I really like this clip though because the antenna just looks nuts. Not only is it shrunken down, but it's spinning so fast you might not even be able to tell what's happening! Of all the animation glitches we're running into, this is my favorite. (Especially considering how easy a fix it'll be!) The good news here is the animation is working, and we now just need to refine the playback speed and the size.
You can also see some subtle head animations in the clip, which we're really excited about. For now, we're going to have a wide range of head animations that are played at random intervals. Later, we'll refine this system to have the rover react to certain events or spawn for things like idle animations.
We'll have these animations ironed out within a day, but we thought we'd share some of the ugly in-between steps in this dev update. It's very rare to implement something new into a game engine and have it work flawlessly and perfectly right away. Game development is a constant integration between implementation and testing, and choices constantly have to be made on how far refinement needs to go before moving on and tackling bigger features.
We're really excited to get these animations in place, because we are planning on a special "between alphas" build for our supporters that has been held up by this step. We'll have more information on that once we finish our next round of testing, which you'll be able to watch on our Twitch channel! In the meantime, if you're interested in supporting Gears of Eden, be sure to check our website or Patreon.
See? Pretty short! Thank you so much for reading! We'll be back next week with a more involved discussion, but this Dev Update is coming to a close. If you want to see the animations in a more completed state, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. We're putting out tons of behind-the-scenes content, and that is the best place to discover it the moment it's available. Until then, thank you again for sticking with us and have a great rest of your week.
