Tyler here from the Deckpoint Studio team! I’m writing this week to give a nod to what’s ahead for Mark and the rest of the Luckless Seven. As the writer, I’m usually focused on the next narrative frontier for our band of misfits, but this time I’m looking forward to what’s next physically: the levels players will traverse in the next segment of the game!
As a teaser, here’s what to expect for the next tournament venue:
Design document for the next casino along the way in Arithia's Ekosi tournament.
When I came aboard the project during our Summer ‘15 Kickstarter, a few, important spaces were already designed: Mark’s apartment, Krista’s house, the hospital and library. Jesse invited me to partake in the level design process, and I eagerly did so with the least impressive Photoshop work in history.
An early design document for the first casino in Mark's hometown of Patrida. Note my uncertainty regarding the
Look familiar?
Obviously, a lot of work takes place between my brainstorming and your playing. When reviewing my plans for the story, Jesse and I discuss the levels required to accommodate every event. I prepare a list of desired areas & design documents. Jesse makes suggestions from his perspective as developer before undergoing the Herculean work of bringing our ideas to fruition. In anywhere between a few days and two weeks, Jesse has a functional model for us to improve as we go.
Our design priorities are efficiency, story fit, and style fit.
Efficiency: There are no superfluous levels.
Story fit: All levels are made to fit their definitions and roles in the story. Our spaces are built with realism and important thematic/story information in mind.
Style fit: All levels should complement the isometric art style. We avoid placing surfaces perpendicular with the camera, and we always avoid obstructing the camera’s view of traversable terrain.
Take Day 4 for example. We’ve long known we needed just two levels: one large, mostly-open trail level between the cities, and one level dedicated to the reflective campfire dialogue. I knew I wanted Mark and Krista to encounter diverse personalities along a sprawling route that really made Mark feel his size. Here’s the first design document I presented and the finished level below:
Big, just like I’d hoped. We eagerly wanted to communicate that Mark and company were traveling a huge distance across Arithia, and I think were successful in delivering that message.
For Mark’s next steps, we have functionally similar spaces in mind: a casino interior and exterior, a living area, card shops, etc. However, they’ll all come with Neropolis’s new visual theme. Neropolis, host to the next stage in the Ekosi tournament, is a quaint coastal city set upon by new development. To build it, we’re drawing inspiration from the Mediterranean peninsulas and islands. Here’s a peek at what’s to come:
We’re working to bring you a fully-realized coastal paradise that will meet all of your Ekosi and vacation needs. In our next update, we also look forward to bringing you the long-awaited and much-requested save/load system.
We couldn’t have gotten this far without your support. Thank you as always, and we look forward to your thoughts!
Tyler here from the Luckless Seven crew. I’m writing today to announce another playable release: a campfire conversation on the trail between Mark’s hometown of Patrida and his tournament destination of Neropolis.
Not every day in Luckless Seven has a night, but Day 4 long has; since outlining the game’s narrative, we have planned to include this reflective conversation between Mark and his companions. Our team has internally referred to it as Day 4.5, and it’s the first of two campfire conversations that the Luckless Seven cast will partake in on their competitive journey across Arithia.
A lot has happened at this point in the game. Mark has been surprised with the opportunity to forego his obligations at home and reclaim his repressed passion for Ekosi. He’s connected with friends old and new. Importantly, he’s already made a number of choices along the way. For our team, the campfire dialogues present an important opportunity to reap what the player has sown. Dialogue with the cast of Luckless Seven will provide alternate perspectives on Mark’s choices both within and outside the group.
After Day 4, a relatively grand and Ekosi-filled segment of the game, we think the campfire dialogue will present players with an opportunity to pause and reflect. Although we’re emphasizing reflection and calm, don’t think that this dialogue will be without new choices or variety. Having written it, I can assure you: it’s a complex beast.
As always, the new gameplay experience is not alone. Jesse has reliably improved and updated many of the technical aspects of the game since the initial release of Day 4. Here are some of the changes:
Improved animations for most characters.
Improved pathfinding and increased Krista run speed along Day 4’s trail.
Removed a game fail state that could occur if the player exited the game mid-dialogue after an Ekosi battle.
Major fixes to the mini-map. Removed false quest arrows that wouldn’t disappear.
Made loading screens smoother and added a fade-in effect to Day 4.
Added environmental, ambient sound effects to Day 4.
This update provides our most ambitious dialogue scene to date, so we’re excited to hear your thoughts. Day 4.5 marks the end of the open/public alpha. We’ll still update the public demo, but Day 5 and future gameplay segments will be released via Steam only to our Kickstarter backers. Thanks for reading, and let us know your thoughts!
Tyler here from the Luckless Seven crew. I’m writing today to announce that today is the day we’ve been awaiting for a long time. It’s Day 4.
We’ve had our eyes set on Day 4 of the Luckless Seven journey since finishing Day 3 last year. We took some detours to improve various other areas of the game, including an overhaul of the game’s opening and significant enhancements to the Ekosi experience. Finally, in the last few months, we’ve returned our attention to creating the next little step of the way on Mark and the gang’s journey for competitive glory. And it’s anything but little.
Day 4 is, without doubt, big. The trail that takes the Luckless Seven crew from their hometown of Patrida to the next tournament city, Neropolis, is by far the largest level that we’ve designed for the game to date. Our first foray into the great outdoors offers a whole new environment: tall grasses and taller trees, man-made bridges over beautiful waterways, and sandy shores that give way to ocean vistas. On a narrative level, Day 4 will offer players a chance to declare their goals for the tournament, spend a lot of one-on-one time with Krista, and meet the diverse passersby on the trail. Not all, but many of the characters on the trail have a background with Ekosi, and there’s no shortage of matches to be played.
In addition to the all-new environment, story, and gameplay offerings, this update includes several enhancements to existing game systems. Here are some of the changes:
Fixed problems with the Journal (quest log), adjusted the Inventory to no longer punish card reselling, and improved pathfinding to help Krista and other characters along their way.
Tweaked Ekosi interface colors, added “Tiebreaker” icon, and made visual enhancements to the start menu.
Added trophy and question mark icons above character heads to more clearly identify interesting opportunities and added a system for altering lighting over time to create gradual time shifts in levels.
We could say plenty more about all the new experiences packed into Day 4, but we’d rather let you find out for yourself. After all, we’ve had it for long enough; it’s yours now!
We wouldn’t have gotten this far without your help, so please feel encouraged to give the new demo a spin and give us your thoughts! Have really bad luck in Ekosi? Fall in the river? Collapse from a heap of driftwood on your back? We want to know! The new demo is available live on Steam or IndieDB, and you can give us your feedback on the Steam forums, the comments here, or via email at deckpointstudio (at) gmail.com.
Thanks for reading, and have fun!
Composer Profile: Brandon Ledbetter
Hello everyone!
Tyler here from the Luckless Seven crew. We’ve been working through the holidays on the newest gameplay release, and it’s coming soon. We couldn’t wait to touch base with our backers, however, so we’re christening the new year with a bit of a different post.
Instead of an update on tweaks to the game and new content, we wanted to take you into the studio to learn about the music of Luckless Seven. To do so, I sat down with composer Brandon Ledbetter to discuss his background as an artist, the game at large, and his process in creating its music.
Our composer, Brandon, speaks with players at GDEX 2016.
The process doesn’t start with Brandon. It starts with Jesse and I reviewing our plans for new environments in the game or new moments in the story and contemplating the rough ideas or moods that we’d like to communicate to the player. We’ll then take those ideas and share them with Brandon. For example, when we changed Day 1 to open with an Ekosi battle taking place within a nightmare, we simply told Brandon that we were looking for a “spooky battle theme.” He did the rest.
A visitor plays through the Ekosi nightmare sequence at GDEX 2016.
“For me, it’s always really important to start with the sound of the track,” Brandon says. He’s been producing music of all kinds for six years, and his roots in music production are appropriately enmeshed in his history with games: “Back in high school, I got really into the chiptune music scene. I really liked the whole DIY thing of taking your old toys and breaking them to make stuff. I started with music [from] the Gameboy, the original Gameboy.” The discombobulated Gameboy that gave Brandon his start in music production still rests in pieces on his shelf at home.
With the “spooky battle theme” and other requests, Brandon will identify existing songs that have some attractive attributes. “Really, when you’re doing horror, you just want dark. You want low, sub-heavy kind of stuff.” Recognizing that key feature, Brandon set to work building instruments to use on the track.
“For what became ‘In The Dark’ … I actually built every single instrument in there from scratch. … I started with the bass line. I brought in my Monark synth, the minimoog [emulator], because that thing does really smooth baselines. And I just lowered everything down, got a really heavy sub, and put an LFO [low-frequency oscillation] tool on it to give it that wobble.”
For me, the final product perfectly captures both a wistfulness that defines Mark’s attitude at the story’s outset and the psychological terror of a wolfman taunting him with all of his innermost worries.
Of course, “In The Dark” isn’t the first nor the last piece that Brandon has composed or will compose for the Luckless Seven soundtrack. He’s been involved in the project for about three years now, and there are several more environments, dialogue scenes, and battles to score before his work is done. When I asked him what he was looking forward to for the project, he mentioned two things.
First, work. “I know we’re going to be working on the [unreleased] third zone, which is going to mean another shift in the music,” Brandon says, looking ahead to Mark and the Luckless Seven cast advancing from Patrida to Neropolis to Antipolis. (His songs for the second city, “What Kind Of Beach Resort Doesn't Have A Palm Tree” and “Beachfront” show off a tropical flare, a departure from the sounds that define life in Mark’s hometown.)
The second thing? Conclusion. “I’m looking forward to finishing [Luckless Seven] and then it being released to the public. … I’m really ready to see what everyone else thinks of it.”
I and the rest of the team agree, and we know you do too. With that in mind, stay tuned to the Kickstarter, website, or Steam community hub for updates on development. I highly encourage you listen to Brandon’s music on his SoundCloud. There you’ll find his music for the Luckless Seven soundtrack as well as his other projects and the appropriately-labeled Beat of the Week.
Last year around this time, my colleague Jonathan delivered an update titled “Thank you for a great OGDE!” OGDE, the Ohio Game Developer Expo, was reloaded and rebranded this year as GDEX. The event brings together regional game developers, players, and the general public to show off works-in-progress, discuss game design, and celebrate the medium we love.
As developers, this event is particularly good for a couple of reasons. First, the event’s popularity means that we have the rare pleasure of watching hundreds of players experience Luckless Seven right in front of us. The second, connected virtue is that these players offer awesome feedback: both generous compliments and insightful recommendations. As I often say in these posts, that feedback is invaluable.
At last year’s event, we demonstrated a very different-looking version of the game. The start menu looked different. The opening to the game distinctly lacked any supernatural beasts. The Ekosi tutorial was only recently designed, and it was a wordy beast that ultimately missed a few spots. Players recognized this, and they gave us diverse recommendations: some requested clarification on the card game’s finer details, and others rightly pointed out that our explanatory wall of text was overwhelming.
If you’ve been following development in the last year, you’ll know we’ve put a lot of attention into that opening segment of gameplay. It’s important to teach players how to play the card game clearly and concisely, and we’ve taken as much time as needed in pursuit of that goal. Exhibiting the game at GDEX 2016 was an exciting opportunity to measure our success in making the game both accessible and fun.
The results were encouraging. Like last year, we got to watch hundreds of people partake in the game we’ve invested so much care into. This time, however, we got to see these curious new players learning Ekosi much more quickly and easily than ever before. But it wasn’t just the anecdotal experience of watching players thriving: our player surveys were also overwhelmingly more positive than those from last year.
We collected roughly fifty survey responses this year. All of the questions were optional, but a strong majority of respondents answered all questions. On average, players this year played for longer before hanging up their headphones, and more players elected to fill out the survey. Here are some of our favorite results:
Survey respondents ranked the game’s easiness to learn much more highly than last year.
Players indicated that there were far fewer points of confusion throughout the game’s tutorial.
The majority of respondents indicated that the game was visually impressive, fun to play, and original.
It’s important in any feedback context to be aware of potential biases, and that’s especially true at a big, public exhibition like GDEX. While the general public is invited to enter, a large portion of players are video game enthusiasts or developers themselves. In short, they’re people that support games. Not just that, but people can be overly polite when offering feedback about a project with the creators present. (People are nice like that.) All of this amounts to a potential positivity bias in survey results.
Even with that positivity bias in mind, we were very happy about the results of our survey. In comparing this year’s results to last’s, we see that attendees played longer, learned more easily, and enjoyed the game more overall. These results offer our team positive reinforcement for our time and energy spent to revamp the game’s opening. We feel that we’re on the right track to making Luckless Seven the game we want it to be.
That confidence doesn’t mean that we’re content, though. If anything, just the opposite. The positive reception we received at GDEX 2016 is a direct result of player criticism and feedback, and we intend to continue implementing changes. Survey results, observations, and conversations with the players have indicated a few more areas for improvement. Some points of confusion included how replenishment cards work and how to navigate the opening areas. In the coming months, we’ll look to follow through on your constructive feedback!
That’s all from us for now! As always, you can find our public demos on Steam and IndieDB. We have some exciting news ahead as we continue production on Day 4 of gameplay. Thanks again for your support and your feedback.
Until next time,
Tyler
It's Happening!
Hello everyone!
It’s been awhile since our last update, but I think we have something worth the wait.
Caption: A long time coming
If the picture doesn’t say it all, I will. Today, we launched the Luckless Seven Steam store page. Most PC gamers will be familiar with Steam, the largest digital game distributor there is. If you aren’t, well, that’s what it is! For many players, myself included, it is the place to buy and download games. I hope it goes without saying that our launch on Steam is a day that everyone on the team has looked forward to for a long time.
Steam Store Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/433370
Launching on Steam means reaching a much larger audience than we’ve met before, and we wanted to make a good impression on the community of players that will join us for the next stages of development. So, for the past couple of months, we’ve been devoted to creating and improving promotional materials: the trailer, captioned screenshots, game descriptions, and more. Of utmost importance was refining our existing demo.
Caption: Screenshot featured prominently on our Steam store page
When working on the demo, we continued to emphasize teaching Ekosi. It’s at the core of Luckless Seven’s gameplay, and a proper education in it is essential to us. To that end, we’ve created a branching path in the AI Ekosi Tutorial. For players that elect it, the tutorial now provides more information than ever. For experienced players and those who prefer to learn by doing, we’ve added an option to disable the tutorial entirely.
Caption: Our handsome Ekosi instructor will now hold your hand through the basics of Ekosi--if you choose, of course.
Of course, there are other changes. Taking screenshots and re-recording gameplay for the trailer inspired us to revisit our graphics and make improvements to Luckless Seven’s visual world by recoloring objects, creating new ones, adjusting saturation, contrast, lighting, etc. Additionally, we’ve made changes to correct a few problems with pathfinding. Finally, a few permanent changes to the Ekosi interface have made it more intuitive than ever before.
Caption: The Casino interior looks better now! But it's not the only location to receive some extra attention.
Caption: Ekosi battle board featuring Status text, new Replenishment Card icons, and Stacked Field coloring.
You’ll be able to find all of these changes and more by downloading the current version of the game (0.664) directly from Steam. We’ll be hosting stable versions of the game on Steam, but newer versions will be downloadable at IndieDB as always.
If you have any thoughts to share about the current and new versions of the Luckless Seven demo, we encourage you to share them at our new Steam Forum. The Forum will provide a fantastic space to discuss your experiences with the game, any bugs you encounter, and your suggestions for the team.
We’re super excited about the launch on Steam, and we couldn’t have gotten this far without the generous support of our Kickstarter backers. Thank you! We look forward to continuing work on the game, and we’ll see you on Steam!
Until next time!
Tyler
Website Blog Post: http://www.deckpointstudio.com/2016/09/its-happening.html
