KOTCL Developer Diaries: Creativity is Our Everything
Knock-knock, seekers!
The developer diaries are back and we’re going to tell you what we've been up to this week.
Long live cosplay!
Before we were just guessing, but now we're 100% sure that KOTCL gets our players’ creative juices flowing.
Just take a look at this fantastic Millenis cosplay by SCHLAFLỢS | cosplay & etc. Definitely beautiful, and dangerous-looking too – and that means something coming from us!
KOTCL trade guild
The ranks of the venders continue to grow as members of various races are joining in. For example, very soon, representatives of the KOTCL trade guild like those below will open their stalls. Look for them on your biome routes!
And, of course, we haven’t forgotten to animate our traders too!
The animation hullabaloo continues
Which means that along with transitioning animations to Spine, we are also continuing to animate well-known and unknown events. The results don’t take long to arrive!
Mushrooms live in the swamps...
Gnomeo and Elfiet
That’s some real trouble, isn’t it!
Card tricks
After putting on bandit armor, the heroes will undoubtedly see new unique cards appear in their decks, there’s simply no way around that. We're going to slightly lift the veil... but only slightly.
As you must have understood by now, we love animals, so we continue adding them to Vanadis’ deck. As the meme goes, ‘if not friend, why friend-shaped’?
You can never have too much good UI, but there is a catch...
We’ve not forgotten about Mortis' notes. This wonderful auxiliary feature hasn't taken its full-fledged form yet, but we're working on it – honest to goodness! That's why we’re turning to you for help once again. Which of these three options for Mortis' note icons do you like the most? We're looking forward to your comments!
What about some chit-chat?
In line with past tradition, I, Andrew, aka Innrey, founder of RedBoon Studio, am here again. And today, I'd like to touch on an interesting topic.
It's no secret to anyone that there are a lot of difficulties that arise when creating a game. Sometimes, the variety of challenges can be truly dumbfounding.
For example, even in the final stages of development, there's often a desire to refine something, revamp a game mechanic, or simply work on the final visual a bit more. There's no limit to perfection, and so on and so forth. All of this leads to an increase in the time spent, but we all know that time is one of the most valuable and expensive resources in game development. Thus, the conversation comes back to our beloved balance.
Here, I'm not referring to game balance but rather the balance between the result and the effort required to achieve that result. As sometimes happens, the value of creating and implementing a small feature is not all that great, while the amount of time spent on it is regrettably large. For example, an event system in a game.
Initially, the events were not interconnected; they were standalone events with immediate outcomes and they didn't influence anything beyond the current run and its result. However, we really liked the idea that events could evolve, change, and impact other events by altering their outcomes, and some of them could even influence the game's ending.
In the end, we took the risk and, through lots of hard work, after many hours of completely reworking the technical foundation from scratch, events saw the light of day. Well what was the result? The result was that our players loved this feature so much that we decided to further develop the events and create entire event chains. Now it's one of the most memorable features of our game.
Or take for example, class-specific cards and clothing. We spent a long time contemplating how much we needed them, if needed at all. But in the end, we decided to go for it because we really wanted to diversify gameplay for different classes. It turned out great and dynamic; for instance, playing any of Bjorn's classes is so different from playing the others that you definitely won't be bored. Generally, you have to make sacrifices in such situations, after carefully weighing and analyzing everything. It will always seem that you can add or improve something, somewhere. But, again, done is better than perfect, as they say.
Game developers can be divided into two hypothetical camps: "We are developers, our word is law, and we make the game for ourselves" and "We are developers, and we make the game for players." Both principles can work and bear fruit; they are both partly right. But it's so important to find that golden mean and not slide into development radicalism. Can you feel how it all comes back to balance? Without it, we can't get anywhere, neither in games, nor in work, nor in life.
I think we can wrap it up on this philosophical note. Many challenges and tasks await us, but we'll definitely overcome them.
See you next week!
We wish everyone a great weekend, but make sure that you don’t get as carried away on your time off as this guy :)
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HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Happy Halloween! Hope everyone has a frightfully good time, filled with spooky games, delicious treats, and plenty of tricks and treats! 🎃
RedBoon team
To center, or not to center, that is the question...
Greetings, Travellers!
The thought of how to make a clear and nice interface has been on our mind for quite a long time. And today it dawned on us: what if we move the buffs/debuffs icons closer to the center? Which variant seems more convenient and logical to you? We are waiting for your opinion in the comments!
1. Classic UI: 2. New suggestion:
KOTCL Developer Diaries: map, cards and cards again
Knock knock, travelers!
Once again, we’ll share with you in our diaries what we’ve worked hard on this week.
A clearer future for our players
When you see the biome map as a player, you don’t know where to look first because of the huge number of unexplored places. And even after you’ve studied these places the map is still covered with question marks, literally. “That’s cruel,” we thought and so we decided to correct the situation. Our solution was simple: after unlocking events, icons corresponding to each event will appear on the map. Things in the future will be much clearer because of this, we think.
Total Demonization
Do you remember when we showed you some sketches of the demonic set? Well, to make life less of a breeze for enemies, and perhaps even for our players, unique cards will be added to the set. The result looks truly epic (and quite demonic). Do you already feel the presence of supernatural forces?
And we can’t forget Vanadis’ pet cards. Fresh out of the oven! Well, aren’t they beautiful?
"Steam Scream: The Revenge" Festival. Let's bring the chills!
We're excited to announce that Knock On The Coffin Lid is participating in Steam Scream: The Revenge fest! This festival is all about spooky, Halloween stuff. It will run from October 26th to November 2nd. If you love spine-chilling horror and want to test your nerves – Steam Scream: The Revenge festival is waiting for you!
What about some chit-chat?
Hey, Andrew aka Innrey, the founder of RedBoon, is live in the studio. As I wrote earlier, Groundhog Day has become our reality. Balancing sets, cards, and enemies is mostly complete; now all that remains to fine-tune the technical side of everything. I consider this a significant victory. However, sometimes interesting and occasionally challenging tasks break through the monotonous flow of workdays. For example, we are still working on reducing the time for finishing each run; right now our task is to optimize the map, and to optimize it in a way that minimizes the content losses. Spoiler: losses are unavoidable. We’ve got a lot to work on here, but we’re not afraid of challenges. When revising the map, it's important to initially determine what needs to be kept and what has to be sacrificed. There are many events in the world of KOTCL, all of them are exciting, engrossing, and colorful. Sometimes they form quest chains, for example in the Frontier and Rotten Bog this is not uncommon. If you remove even one element from this chain, everything will go awry and break, which is not good at all. You can't simply reduce 13 points on the map to 7. So we need to find workarounds – both literally and figuratively. Namely, we will create more routes and add more forks. We'll have to brainstorm about all of this and then implement it effectively.
On a positive note: our programmers are doing a great job! Of course, this has always been true, but recently they proved it once again. One of their tasks is to create tools for development and testing. Considering that testing is a significant part of game development, solid, convenient tools not only save the team time but also enhance the game's quality. Our team recently completed a "sandbox" for testing event development, significantly reducing testing time. What have we done to deserve such great programmers? :)
I think that's probably enough for now. This has been Andrew, aka Innrey. See you in the next diary!
Don't forget to check out our social media; we're always happy to chat with you and answer your questions.
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KOTCL Developer Diaries: Balance and Moving Pictures
Knock, knock, travelers!
Right now, we're busy re-balancing and refining the final battle (did we mention it's going to be awesome?),We are also polishing the game, all the while not forgetting about making things look beautiful. But let's go through it step by step, shall we.
Road of sorrows balance
Our veteran players remember how challenging KOTCL was at the beginning - tough and merciless. It took enormous luck to complete even a few events on the map and gather at least part of a set. Of course, some players like games to be hardcore, but we wanted to create a game that doesn't constantly push you to your limits. So, we decided to introduce some balance changes. That's why we're creating new sets and cards, some of which we've shown you before.
But what exactly are we changing the game for? To ensure that players can comfortably complete a few runs in one session without spending all their free time and last nerve cells. Also so that they can enjoy the plot twists, beautiful visuals, and pleasant music. In other words, so that they can appreciate the game and have fun.
Achieving this goal wasn't easy; it required a deep rework of the game, from biomes to the rebalancing of the equipment, enemies, and cards. Basically, we had to change almost everything. As they say, heroes always take the long way. For example, biomes underwent a significant overhaul: events are now distributed more evenly along the routes, and the time it takes to traverse different routes is similar. Enemies have gotten their share of changes too.
We’ve also had an idea to add biome cards to the deck that will work in parallel with sets.
By the way, speaking of sets and other attire, one of the key elements of KOTCL's rebalance was reevaluating sets, non-set clothing, and trophies. Previously, it was chaotic - for example, orcish boots, despite being classless, outperformed some legendary items in terms of properties and strength. It was not ok and provided yet another opportunity to break the game. To minimize such occurrences, every item is being carefully reviewed and adjusted based on power criteria, then reworked. It's all about sleight of hand, no trickery here.
That's how we create new sets that maintain our precious balance. Behind all that we do is logic and a clear adherence to the lore.
Oh, and there's so much more behind the scenes, but it will definitely make an appearance some day! We're even a little envious of the players...
Biome cards? We've got them!
In order to not make unsubstantiated statements, we'll share the results of our meticulous work on the future biome card art. As for the effects the cards provide, trust your imagination and experience in KOTCL give you a hint.
During the card creation process a meme was born :D
Animation of the brain
Animation transitioning from Unity to Spine continues, and it's great to hear that players have noticed a significant improvement in the quality of game animations. Today, we have such new items on our menu as: "The Birth and Death of the Lycan," "Vanadis' Left Hook," and "He’s made it!"
Choosing the Bandit Set
The voting for the best Bandit Set has concluded. We received a large number of comments and even more opinions and wishes. We want to thank everyone who participated in the poll. We'll never stop emphasizing that you help us make KOTCL better. All feedback is carefully collected and passed on to our artists, and you'll see the results in future episodes. Stay tuned!
Self-irony is beautiful
Work aside, we also aren’t forgetting to analyze past mistakes and draw lessons from them. We noticed that our UI isn't consistent everywhere (that sort of thing can happen). We promise to fix it all, but for now, let's take a look together at this fun collection of our diverse UI.
What about some chit-chat?
Once again, Andrew, aka Innrey, founder of RedBoon, is here to wrap up another week. You could say that every day of working on KOTCL is somewhat like the previous one: bugs, final battles, balancing, art, animations. It's a bit like Groundhog Day. Sometimes patches sneak into this list. But I can say that progress is being made, and that's very encouraging.
The team continues to evolve. This week, game designer Ksay shared his thoughts and impressions with me. He finds it amusing that working on balancing made him realize that sometimes, you have to tame your hardcore tendencies. He recalled a moment from development where, to satisfy our players' needs, difficulty levels were introduced. Initially, there were three, but we received a lot of feedback that the hardest level was too easy. In response, we firmly slammed the table with our coffee mugs and made the level even more challenging, introducing a fourth difficulty level to KOTCL.
One interesting and creative aspect of the game designer's work is creating the concept of new characters. On the one hand, it's an entirely creative process, giving free rein to your imagination and coming up with intricate details. On the other hand, it's analytical work based on gaming experience and hundreds of hours of play.
We've learned and are actively learning how to create UI. It needs to be clear. The big challenge is that many things essentially do the same—a player has a bunch of buffs and debuffs, and they have to spend time and attention on understanding them. What's more important is not what effect is on the hero but how much damage these effects will inflict. Recently, we found out that our UI is cited as a good example of game UI in narrow and wide circles of UI designers. We were surprised but proud!
Ksay also noted that planning sprints for developers has become more mentally satisfying. By looking at the whole scope of work, it's clear that the workload is not as extensive as it used to be. It's almost like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And in this light, bugs keep swirling endlessly... swirling, and swirling, and swirling…’round.
And, on that poetic note, we bid you farewell! :D
Don't forget to visit us on social media and send your greetings to the team - we're always happy to see your comments and suggestions.
Developer diaries will be back next week with more new interesting facts!
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KOTCL Developer Diaries: a little bit of everything
Knock, knock, seekers!
Friday has arrived swiftly, and the developer diaries are here again to share with you what we worked on this week.
CBT Patch
The closed beta test is well on its way, with bug-fixing in progress, and feedback actively being collected. However, we collected most of the issues and put out a major patch. We hope we’ll finish working on the CBT and update the live version of the game next month.
Do you love animals as much as Vanadis does?
It's best not to argue with our archer too much, otherwise you might experience the full force of her pets. To make it clear that you shouldn't mess with Vanadis, we're sharing some visual examples. Plus, they’re simply beautiful, aren’t they.
Bandit set: we need your opinion
There's no limit to perfection, so we're continuing to improve game balance with new outfits. This week, we asked which version of the new set you prefer. The voting is still open, and your comments are highly welcome!
Perfectionist’s burden
We're constantly improving visual effects to create a pretty picture and a more immersive atmosphere. Yes, being a demon's minion is a heavy burden in every sense.
Some characters not only look audacious but make audacious movements too. You have to admit that this is an extremely high concentration of audacity in just a few pixels. And it looks quite unnatural, too. To tame their behavior, we took some disciplinary actions.
Emergency resuscitation
Once again, Bjorn has found his way to our operating table. The thing is he’s developed a habit of losing his things during adventures. We had almost given up on finding the reasons for his remarkable absentmindedness, but our animators came to the rescue. What would we do without them? Diagnosis: the patient was suffering from internal code conflicts, and the animation was causing complications. We prescribed crutches and sent him home for further outpatient observation.
What about some chit-chat?
Let's get acquainted!
My name is Andrew, aka Innrey, and I'm the founder of RedBoon Studio. I’d like to tell you about some interesting moments that took place and the experience we gained over these long four years of development.
The second week of CBT is underway, with many bugs identified, but we're fixing them quickly and successfully. At the same time, we're continuing to develop new content, which we hope to show you soon. I'd like to thank all the participants of the closed beta for their reports and suggestions, especially Altair, CallMeShadow, Dark Knight, GribanovIV.
Many players have emphasized the unique and recognizable imagery of KOTCL in their feedback, and I'm damn proud of it! Of course, there have been and there still are shortcomings, which we continue to work on. In the near future, I'll try to announce the release date and share more about our future plans.
One thing I can already say – my team and I, and the players who help us – we learn something new every day. What can you learn in 4 years of game development? It may seem surprising, but we've learned how to make... games. We’ve learned how to make cool 2D animations. We switched from Unity animations to Spine, which immediately revamped the behavior of characters in the game. We've learned how to work with sounds – there are more of them now, so the scenes have become more immersive, and I hope events will become even more enjoyable. We've learned how to code – it's challenging to make it in a way so that you don't have to rewrite everything when a new programmer comes along. Mind you, we had to change programmers three times -_-
However, now because of everything we’ve learned, we need to polish the entire project, as the difference between before and after is quite noticeable. Personally, I've learned not to lose heart and not to abandon the project in seemingly hopeless situations but to keep on improving our game.
One thing that I’d like to mention specifically is the importance of proper task setting and communication with the team (especially if your team is small and proud!). Through my own (sometimes painful) experience, I've seen that the level of detail of a task and of its discussion determine the speed, the quality of realization, and the task’s impact on the entire development pipeline. From the outside, you could say that 4 years is a lot for the development of a game. I agree, but it's also an invaluable experience that will help me to make the next game faster and even better.
Sincerely yours – Andrew aka Innrey
See you next Friday! Don't forget to check if you follow us.
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Poll: choose new set
Greetings, Seekers!
You know that we pay great attention to the balance and struggle with existing meta (too powerful Persival, for example). We unite items to create complete sets, so they can be effective as well as meta and give more abilities for experiments.
What do you think about our set options? Please, rate them from 1 to 3 Ezio Auditore :D You’ll see the best option in the game.
KOTCL developer diaries: cards, sets and CBT.
Knock-knock, seekers!
Friday is here so the week is over! That means that KOTCL developer diaries are back on the air! So, what's on the agenda today?
Is there life after CBT?
Our answer: sure thing and it’s better than you can imagine! After the start of CBT, we received tonns of messages, reports, and all sorts of reactions from our amazing seekers. We welcome every feedback and every report and then start to work on it – feedback for the feedback god!
Democracy won!
At least when it is about our UI design. Recently we’ve asked for your advice on a convenient glossary marker. Today we’re glad to announce the winner: with the large majority option 1 got 1st place. Please, welcome!
Down with trade monopolies!
Have you noticed the suspicious similarities among all merchants you meet? You know, it feels like they're either spying on you or they have a really huge retail network (and lots of twin brothers!). We’ve been discussing this for quite a long time and we finally decided that it's time to broaden the range of merchants just because we can. The RedBoon Antimonopoly Service is always here for you!
They say don't judge a book by its cover... but then they knock on the coffin lid.
Balance, oh balance... You can’t even imagine how many sleepless nights we've spent thinking about balance. We thought and thought and thought and we've come up with a solution. But it requires some re-work. We decided to add a couple of new ones and make changes to a few existing ones. While we’re scratching our heads over how to make the already demonic set look even more demonic, we invite you to take a look at the first prototypes from our fashion designers. We'll tell you about its impact on balance in the upcoming episodes. Stay tuned. The first Persival wasn’t too lucky and caught a headcrab.
Time for some cards
The balancing and arming our brave Vanadis continues. After all, the more cards, the better, right? ...Right?
That's all for today! Hope you enjoy our news. Don't forget to check if you follow our media, we usually post some updates, don't miss out. A small reminder that we have awesome Discord where you can find lots of handy information, memes and chat with developers.
See you next Friday!
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KOTCL Developer Diaries: the final CBT before the release
Knock-knock, travelers! In today’s diary, we continue sharing the development results for this week. We hope you love numbers. Enjoy your reading!
So, this week we have:
- Created 36 icons for events on the map. - Created 10 images for new battle cards. - Improved 6 hero portraits. - Added 24 new character animations.
And all in one month we have:
- Fixed more than 120 bugs. - Addressed game freezes. - Fixed issues with card descriptions and their operation. - Corrected translation errors. - Started closed beta test,
and much more. Details below!
Launch of CBT
If you've been following our news, you probably know that we've started closed beta testing. The update will bring a vast amount of new content, which we hope CBT participants will enjoy. Through this testing, we aim to gather feedback from our most dedicated players about the modifications we've added to the game in the last 6 months. We carefully examine your feedback and suggestions to make KOTCL the highest quality and most enjoyable game possible. Beta testing will help us gather even more feedback before releasing the final version.
We have extended the acceptance of applications for participation in the CBT until Sunday, 10/01/2023. We remind you that if you have played more than 20 hours and want to participate in the CBT, leave a request with your Steam ID in our Discord (test thread).
Visual effect improvement for buffs and debuffs
One of the innovations we'd like to share with you is the adjustment of the battle UI/UX. This task turned out to be more challenging than we expected because sometimes the list of all buffs and debuffs above the heroes was so long that the descriptions could take 20-30 seconds to appear; if overlapping was turned on, the text became entirely unreadable. As a result, to ensure you don't miss out on what happens to your character during battle, we filtered out and removed some buffs and kept the most important and non-obvious ones. Besides, we’ve re- introduced a universal animation that appeared in the earliest builds! (Do you remember how long ago that was?) That is, displaying buffs and debuffs as arrows of different colors: golden-white for buffs and blood-red for debuffs. We look forward to hearing feedback on this feature from CBT participants and are ready to make adjustments.
Event journal
Another important innovation is the event journal, which we added to make the gameplay easier and clearer.
As the name suggests, the event journal is a record of your actions, but not only that. It provides a brief description of the events you’ve visited and tells you what has happened. The journal is your assistant in tracking the progression of events, which can now change if you revisit the events. The journal helps players keep track of key moments and storyline developments. Do you like this idea? Feel free to write your thoughts in the comments.
Continuing animation work
As usual, let's talk a bit about animations. Sergey a.k.a. Animatoid shared his vision of the animation for Vanadis’ second class – the Raven's Sister. Unlike other characters, this animation “has a beginning" rather than being just a looping motion. This new approach sparked a lot of debate: will it cause discomfort when switching between classes? Will such a difference be too noticeable? What are your thoughts here?
Comedy moments
The process of creating animations can be very interesting and fun, not only for animators but for the entire development team. Sergey shared some animations with us as they appeared during his work, and we decided to show them to you. In the first picture, Vanadis got a bit "stuck" in the textures. It looks like she really doesn't want to let go of the raven and is holding onto his tail, much to the bird's displeasure.
Later, while trying to fix this animation, we encountered some slight issues with Vanadis's facial expression, and now she looks slightly arrogant :) During work, we always try various options in order to eventually choose the best one of them.
And of course, we ended up with a few funny moments. Here's a dynamic video we came up with while creating the animation for the "Turmoil" event. It won't be in the game, but we decided to share this creation with you. We hope you enjoy your weekend as much as the folks in the video!
Sum-up
Those are all the highlights for this week! To stay updated on the latest news, don't forget to subscribe to our social media channels, where you can also interact with the developers and ask any questions you have.
See you in the next diary!
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Invitation to our closed beta test
Closed Beta Test is Coming!
Dear players,
We would like to invite dedicated KOTCL players to our Closed Beta Test (CBT) of the updated version to gather initial feedback and reviews. Only after the successful completion of the CBT will we release the patch to the main Steam branch.
🌟 What awaits you in the CBT? 🌟
- Numerous bugs have been fixed (although we can't guarantee that new ones haven't appeared). - Buff appearance animations have been added at the beginning of battles. - Many events have been fixed and updated. - New Spine 2D animations have been added for various units. - An event log has been added during runs.
🔑 Participation requirements: To join the CBT, you should have played Knock on the coffin lid for more than 20 hours.
🎮 How to join the CBT? Join our Discord and write a comment with your Steam ID in the #test-branch. We will contact you next week to provide access to the CBT.
To reiterate, we currently don’t plan to release this update to the public branch now, but your feedback and participation are highly valuable to us.
Don't miss the opportunity to play the updated version of Knock on the coffin lid and contribute to the game's development!
