The Year of Iron is here, with release of the Iron Danger sneaking just behind the nearby corner. And the Year of Iron is really kicked into start during this weekend at San Antonio, where you can try out our exhibition demo of Iron Danger at Pax South.
You can find us from booth 20025.
As you can see, the booth is already waiting for you to give it a go. So come to try out the game and say hi to some of us devs if you are around!
Closed beta testing
Exciting news!
We have decided to run a closed beta testing still during this year.
We will take in limited amount of interested people to test the game and to give their feedback.
Few summarized facts about testing:
The game is close to be finished (all features and content are in, even though some polishing and bug fixing is still going on)
We are looking mostly feedback of how the game feels and your opinions and thoughts about the game
We are only looking for applicants who are prepared to spend at least 5+ hours with the game and to fill-in survey in end of testing. As seats are limited, we wish you only apply if you can promise this.
You are not allowed to share videos, screenshots or similar of the game.
The testing will be done with Windows version of the game
Testing will be done through Steam. Those who test suitable amount of time and fill in feedback form in the end will keep their Steam key for the game release as well (means that you'll have the full game for free)
We are taking in applications only during this weekend 13. - 15.12.2019. The testing period starts next week and you are allowed to test the game until 31.12.2019.
You can find more testing related instructions and information how to apply on our Discord server: https://discord.gg/IronDanger
Excited? We surely are!
Devblog: What's going on?
Woah, it has been some time since last post!
After miserably failing our once per week – cycle, let’s try to get back to track. It is nice to see you reminding us of that and asking for more. :)
This time it’s more progress report kind of thing.
The main reason why we haven’t been posting anything is that our hands have been even more full with work than usual. One of the main goals has been to hit internal beta, which means to us that the game is both feature and content complete. That in practice means that there are no missing levels, visual assets, gameplay mechanics and so on. It does not mean that there would not be tons to bug fix and some levels and assets that we want to still polish a bit.
And what makes us really happy is that we got our beta build ready during on the end of October!
In addition of having Windows beta build ready at that time, we also had our first (pretty) stable Linux and MacOS builds and now we can in practice play the game through with those platforms as well. There is still some amount of visual differences between the platforms that we need to iron out, but the main steps have now been taken.
At the moment we are working on that bug fixing and polishing part, but also one of the main focus areas is localization. Our in-game texts are currently being translated and we are working on technical implementation of localization with Google translated test set.
It’s actually pretty exciting to see the characters talking in different languages as well!
This week we should receive the real translations, so that we can get rid of our clumsy test translations and then it is time to start localization QA.
Meanwhile we keep on hunting down and fixing bugs and optimizing performance.
We tease you with new trailer!
Exciting news for all.
First of all, earlier this week we announced that we have made publishing deal with Daedalic Entertainment. We are really excited of this deal, which provides us an opportunity to focus on the most important aspects of the development.
In a way, this might be old news for those who have seen us work together on exhibitions, but now it is really official.
In addition our Steam store page got updated, and there you might have also noticed our fresh new teaser trailer.
If you haven't yet seen the new trailer, here you go!
[previewyoutube="q46XJqnXjQ4;leftthumb"]
Devblog: Time to Freeze
Time to look something more specific about the gameplay this week. During the journey, characters may learn variety of new skills. One of those things is ice magic.
Even though ice magic is not as powerful for direct damage as for example fire magic, it is very versatile and deadly as tactical element.
Icy ground is slippery, improving knockback and increasing chance of knockdown for people standing on it. In addition you can even cast giant blocks of ice to shield you from incoming projectiles or push enemies back. Handy, eh?
And that is not all. If some of the enemy hotheads need calming down, you can use ice magic to lower their temperature and eventually freeze them. And why not turn your companion to frost beast itself by enchanting their blade. That allows them to spread the frost around the battlefield and freeze the enemies with their swings.
So, if you are looking for versatile control over battlefield, the ice is your friend!
Devblog: Skills and more skills
One of the major things we’ve been working lately is to polish character skills, add some new skills and rework on our skill upgrade mechanics. Let’s take a look at main things on that work.
GAINING NEW SKILLS
When adventuring in the world of Iron Danger, our playable characters will be gaining new skills on constant pace. As part of minimizing grinding, we have removed experience points and character levels and instead will be giving skills as part of story progress.
Originally we fleshed out a system in which each level will have special focus goal, which was sort of competition between your two characters. On most simple form it could’ve been number of enemies killed by Kipuna versus number of enemies killed by Lemichen. Based on this condition, one of the characters would then receive skill upgrade.
However, more we played with those conditions the more we got into impression that it is not as much fun as we expected and could easily lead into non-balanced character development. Therefore we started to rework on it. Now the system is actually more straight-forward. After each of so called adventure-level, some of the characters will gain new skill upgrade. The skill upgrade can be selected from the pool of available upgrades for that specific character and picking a skill, might add new upgrades to the pool for future. This actually feels really good, because we can have steady supply of upgrades going on and constantly giving something fresh to try out.
There was initial downside with this as well. Now that we get skills more often, we were running out of the skills, so we needed to start working on adding some new skills. This was some unplanned extra work for us, but just plain happy bonus for the players.
REWORKING SKILLS AND ADDING NEW ONES
Big part of working on skill progress upgrades was to go through all the existing skills and see that their possible upgrades are rewarding enough to receive. As they’ve been added during long time, there actually were also many skills of which upgrade felt worse than original skill. We had 49 character skills for our main characters (this excludes skills like throwing grenades etc and some special characters without skill progression of their own). Tons of modifications were made for those skills, smallest one being some description or skill name changes and with the biggest ones being changing nearly all the functionality of the skill. We also added 12 new skills, so the total number of combined skills of all main characters is now 61, which should be plenty enough. About half of the skills are on the pool of our main protagonist Kipuna, and the rest is split quite evenly between two other main characters.
Initial feeling of the progress and skill changes is very positive. We are currently doing some heavy in-house play testing and will be wiser after that to see if things turned up as good as we wanted or if some work on skills is still required.
Gamescom conquered, now it's time for Pax West!
Gamescom conquered
Gamescom, the biggest consumer event in gaming industry, and we survived through it!
As mentioned earlier, we had own booth at Gamescom as well as had pile of press meetings booked. During the three days of press meetings, we showed the game to over 200 journalists. In addition, our booth (4 computers) were continuously populated by gamers. So, evaluating by sheer volume, the things seemed to be success.
The reception of the game was extremely excited. We were for example happy to witness some people to play the game for over 2 hours in row, only to come back tomorrow and bring their friends with them. Also, we managed to capture magical triple-double moment when we had seven players occupying our four seats.
Press opinions have been very positive as well. Some of the highlights are the selection of 10 of the coolest things seen in Gamescom by Jeff Cork of Game Informer, as well as being selected as one of top 10 best games of Gamescom by Play Experience. We are really proud to be on those lists together with titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 3.
You can find the articles at:
https://play-experience.com/best-experience-awards-and-the-winner-is/
https://www.gameinformer.com/gamescom-2019/2019/08/22/10-of-the-coolest-things-i-saw-at-gamescom-2019
Beware Pax West, Action Squad is coming to house!
After the highly successful Gamescom, it is time to take Iron Danger over the sea to Pax West. In Pax West we will have game playable on our booth as well as possibility to meet two members of our development team. This is a chance not to miss.
You can find us from booth 6508!
Play Iron Danger at Gamescom 2019!
Exciting news for those who will be participating Gamescom 2019 this week.
You can get to play Iron Danger demo in our booth!
So, don't miss the big and shiny main attraction of the whole show, and head to our booth in Indie Village (Hall 10.2) E-038a.
.. oh and most brave and daring ones might even get a chance to have a chat with some of our devs there!
Devblog: Water water, let it flow
This time we have more development techniques oriented post. Written by our lead designer Jussi. But it still includes some nice result screenshots for others as well!
Gushing water. that is where it’s been at this week!
We are redoing some of the levels from the game that we feel have not been up to par with our current understanding of fun game-play. And this week it was the turn for our dreaded underwater temple to go! We saved some of the super complicated trigger work, but about 150% of the level content was scrapped and redone from scratch. This sort of total overhaul has been done to a bunch of our level content in the last month or so.
But back to the topic. As we were redoing the water temple. I got super exited to add a bunch of gushing pipes and whatnot to the level. And they need gushing water, so this is how we went about creating that effect!
ELEMENT 1: THE SHAPE OF THE WATER
In this example I’ll be showcasing a simple water faucet type of effect, so the water shape is simply a cylinder. It is actually 2 cylinders inside each other.
The inner cylinder is an animated material with gradual alpha cutoff value going to the bottom. When we are animating the diffuse channel UV the image never clips at the bottom as it is faded out. This is representing the foams and air gushing within the water.
The outer cylinder is the water surface. This is rendered transparent in play mode (when the game is running) with animated normals and distortions. This represent the surface of the water and will be hidden once it intersects with other waters, creating an unified water surface.
ELEMENT 2: THE SURFACE COLLISION
The surface impact is split into 2 parts: particles that spawn on collision (I will explain that bit in the next chapter) and a mesh and some particles that are placed on the surface by hand.
The manually placed assets are a particle emitter just spewing out water splashes and a similarly animated alpha-cutoff shader as with the inner cylinder. but instead of being a cylinder, it is an outwards expanding disk. Allowing us to animate the foam spreading out from the impact point.
ELEMENT 3: THE PARTICLES
One master particle system is in charge of creating the base for all of the particles. Once this system collides with a water surface (or floor) we spawn slow dispersing steam particles and distortion rings that add life to the surface that is being impacted on.
THE RESULT
When combined, these elements create a nice gushing water effect that can be used with pretty much any shape we wish.
I am also a fan of the internal cylinder with the foam texture being visible under other water surfaces all alone, as it gives an impression of violent current churning in the deep.
Devblog: Back from vacation!
The whole team has now returned from well earned summer vacation and all ready to rumble again!
The focus has been quite a lot in some play-through testing, to ensure that all the things are working together as we want to. So, in practice it means playing the game by ourselves (lucky us!).
However, here are some of the things that are in-progress and has happened during the vacation.
COMMUNITY REWARDS
Our opinion has always been that the road to success is built together with our community, and therefore we had special reward program running at our Discord server. Some of the main rewards that we had were to get your own look-a-like NPC to the game. Even though it is very early WIP, we can now proudly show you that we have really started the work with one of our lucky community member’s reward. In future he will be able to dive into game and slay bandit boss that looks very much like him!
Here you can see sneak peek on early phase of workflow. Just looking the shapes from photo and starting to carve in the real facial features to suit the overall game visuals.
https://youtu.be/lhM0gtfrJfQ
You are most than welcome to join us at Discord. Even though we currently have no open community rewards program going on, we are really interested to have chat of all of you! And you never know if something still comes up when we get closer to release!
PRESENTATIONS
We are such a strange creatures that we rarely stay out of our work, even during the vacation. There were some nice events this summer, where we were invited to talk about Iron Danger and of course we went.
First event was Illusion 2019 at Joensuu, where Sami and HP went to discuss about development experiences and learnings of developing something such unique as Iron Danger is. It was really nice event with good atmosphere!
In the beginning of August, HP had interview type Q&A session at Assembly 2019 ArtTech seminar. That session is also available in depths of interwebs, so if you are eager to learn something more about Iron Danger and us, jump in to take a look!
