What would you like to see?
Nation Breakers: Steam Arena
Bot Customization coming soon! How would you like to kit-out your steam-bots?!
What would you like to see?
Steam-Bot Maintenance!
Thank you to all those who have jumped into NBSA over the last week, the feedback has been positive and useful. We just wanted to give you a rundown of our plans in Early Access moving forward. Aside from bug fixes and tweaks, these are the major updates coming your way.
January 2020 - Online Multiplayer, Character Customization.
- You can play online already with Steam's Remote play, but we will be switching on our own net-code in January that will connect you to your steam friends and prep us for new multiplayer modes down the track.
- Currently, we're tearing apart the animation pipeline to allow for character customization. In the January update you can expect to see a whole heap of options you can add to your bot and in-game experience. Just like our alternate projectile skins in the current build, new cosmetics will be free and unlock-able through game-play. (who has found and unlocked the 5th character?!)
February 2020 - Stats and Awards/Steam awards.
- This maybe a relatively small update while we work towards some bigger additions, but the player stats will be consolidated into a place for you access them at will as well as extending the our award system with some in-game feedback on your achievements.
March 2020 - New Mode!.
- We're working on a new and fun experience. No other details for now ;)
April 2020 - New Theme.
- A new arena theme will be added to the roster in April which will extend your verity in all the multiplayer and single-player modes. Included in new themes are a new special weapon, level mechanics, music and character.
Thanks for playing!
Zach and Damien
Official Release Trailer!
Destructathon101! - NB:SA Public Demo wrap-up.
Destructathon101! 2019.
If you missed it! We held the first public demo for Nation Breakers: Steam Arena on October 5th. Generously hosted by the amazing supportive lads and ladies at Escape Portal gaming center, Perth.
The purpose of the event was to show off the core game loop, have groups of random people playing unassisted and to gather feedback. We had two stations set up with large TV screens, hosting 4 players each. Running a build only a few days old that we knew was safe from any last minute changes. Thanks to the venue, above the stations we had two more large screens showing our teaser trailer on repeat and some recorded non-edited game-play on the other.
For the first few hours we allowed mixed groups to play a round or two of our "First to Five" mode, where players pick a character and each vote for one of the three current arena themes. The game then took the votes and with some mathematical magic, chose an arena theme before throwing them into a round. Each player aimed to be the first to gather 5 points in order to win the match trophy while avoiding the environmental hazards and their opponents. Needing three match trophy's to win a round, the rounds spanned anyway between 3-9 matches with 4 players.
Player Feedback.
Once players had finished their round we invited them to sign up for a tournament we were running later that day as well as filling out some feedback forms. The most positive takeaway was that everyone learned the game quickly and had a lot of high energy fun. Even players who couldn't match the skill of their friends still left us with the impression that they enjoyed their time despite losing. Everyone was asked to leave us with their best and worst experience in the game as well as any suggested changes. Thankfully the negative points were very sparse and were more suggestive of small design choices.
How did the game make you feel?
"Fast paced, lots of fun."
"Very epic, it made me feel awesome."
"Fun, Engaging, Entertaining."
"Very fun and fun for competitive players"
Tournament time!
Players who registered for the tournament where called up to compete for a chance to have their name in the games final credits and each round winner also walked away with a character art poster. It was great seeing people firing up into a competitive mode with no real push, each match ended with energetic displays of either loss or success, fueling the energy in the room up to the end of the round. Each round champion was pitted against each other until we had a team of 4 masters left, competing for the final prize. It was a long round with the players matched skills keeping them in check; the first four matches ended with four different trophy winners!
Wrap up!
This was overall positive and encouraging experience. We couldn't be more grateful to the team at Escape Portal for giving us the space. Thank you to all who attended! Although this was for testing purposes, we hope we can make Destructathon101! a returning event that brings our steam-bot community together in the future.
Zach & Damien
Coded Clay Interactive.
If you're in Western Australia, or just swinging through be sure to check out this great gaming venue - https://www.escapeportal.com.au/
Deconstruction! Dev Blog, Pt2 - Finding the Theme
Sorry for the late update!
We’ve been working hard on some new game features, fixes and iterations for the upcoming public demo we’re running next weekend. Thus, we’ve neglected the dev blog a little and we apologies! Here’s a sneak-peek at something to make up for it ;)
Snails with jetpacks or undead pets?
Damien and Zach met to discuss a potential partnership. It was still unclear what was going to come of the meeting as both of them had their own project in mind. After some discussion about the skills each could provide, it was decided that it was best to focus on a single project. Damien had come with a more fleshed out project, with already a couple of years of iteration on his platform brawler, so was the ideal launching point for the new partnership. While Damien had a mechanically sound prototype, it lacked any creative flair.
Zach requested that the magical ninja theme be scrapped. Like zombies and wizards, ninjas are a traditional video game theme and wouldn’t make their game stand out in an ever crowded gaming scene. This presented the challenge of picking a theme for the game to drive the visual narrative. It had to be something that would carry its own weight without the mechanics attached, just as the mechanics had its own strength despite a lacking theme.
The criteria for the theme for Zach was that the visual narrative would help translate mechanics into “in-world” elements, instead of being game mechanics just sitting atop of a stylistic background. It also had to be specific enough that it offered boundaries and was distinguishable as opposed to vague and open which ran the risk of becoming thin, Ie; A fantasy theme would of been to broad and allowed us to create anything with little narrative.
The first early theme idea had the characters as snails with jetpacks- a comical juxtaposition between the naturally slow animal with the intense movement granted by the jetpacks. This idea led to “what if the characters were not fighting for themselves, but controlled by someone else, like a more action focused Pokemon battle?”. The exact details are lost on scraps of paper and backs of napkins, but this somehow led to gothic children necromancing their long dead pets to fight each other. Damien enjoyed making bone’s jiggle but ultimately this theme was considered too morbid and the skeletal animals did allow for much room to move in character design.
The third iteration of world design proposed was for a steampunk like world - mechanical creations of some description blowing each other to bits. This theme had the flexibility to meet the mechanics already in place, and perhaps just as importantly, would allow for interesting variations in character design and weapon types. Zach and Damien researched different robot types and styles, leaning towards non-humanoid forms like tanks and creatures, partly Inspired by Robot Wars.
[previewyoutube="ISp8Q3ga0F0;full"]
Zach sketched up the first 4 character ideas (which haven't changed since!), and the vision for the game fell quickly into place. The restriction of a grid-based platform game, and the simplicity granted by non-humanoid robot design allowed for quirky characters to come to life quickly.
Read more about how the mechanics and world building come together in part 3 of this blog series.
Nation Breakers: Steam Arena - Public Demo, PERTH Western Australia
Listen up, Perth-Bots!
If you happen to be in our home town, you will be the first to play Nation Breakers: Steam Arena! October 5th 2019.
Deconstruction! Dev Blog, Pt1- The Beginning.
Hello Everyone!
Welcome to part 1 of the Nation Breakers: Steam Arena development blog. We will be releasing these every couple of weeks depending on our workload - as we don't want to detract from the development itself we may not always hit a weekly target.
The intention of the blog is to describe the evolution of different parts of the game as they evolved through the history of the game’s development. This lets us give you some dense and focused info without it being just a weekly log of iterations and tweaks. This first part will be about the origin of Coded Clay Interactive and the people behind the studio, essentially just getting to know us as well as getting into the early versions of the game. Okay! Enough of the intro fluff. Let the blog begin.
Team Clay - Who we are, where we’re from and what we do!
Damien Patterson - Programing, Co-founder.
“I was born and bred in Perth, Western Australia. From as young as 8 I can recall trying to program early versions of a graphic calculator and making ‘choose your own adventure’ style narratives by using programming to allow the player to put in their own friends and family members as characters. I made my first game with graphics around the age of 15, back in the early 2000s, using the same engine that now powers Nation Breakers: Steam Arena (well an iteration of it anyway).
I excelled at math and physics at school, and this became my focus in tertiary education, earning a degree in engineering. I didn’t like the ‘day job’ of engineering though, and quickly retrained to become a high school teacher. I’ve been teaching Physics for 9 years. I slowly got back into game development and improved my knowledge of the GameMaker language as a hobby. Learning everything myself, it was 5 years before I felt I was ready to make something for others and so I started work on early prototypes of Nation Breakers: Steam Arena.”
Zachary Andrews - Artist, Co-founder.
“My story begins in Esperance, Western Australia. A small town in the south west, it has incredibly white beaches and a 1:1 scale, undamaged replica of the Stone Henge of England (because.. reasons). My exposure to art comes from my parents, they ran an art gallery for roughly 10 years which was essentially our house and home. There we hosted countless exhibitions, weddings and live music. Out of school I went into graphic design studies and picked up my first lot of skills which I've used as a backbone for my work ever since. I put those skills into my love for music, joining several bands as a vocalist and doing the CD art, music video production and freelancing that work out to the music community.
Through one of these bands, an international project, I worked with a writer from the Polish game studio Techland. He landed me some voice over work for Dying Light, making zombie noises (perks of being a metal singer) and some temp character assets. As a massive fan of gaming, being able to have this taste of the industry was super cool and seeded a strong desire to work in it. Several years went on and I had developed writing fiction as strong hobby, something I took up to give my game design ideas extra depth beyond concept art. This work was really my private collection of moonlight thinking while I mainly made a living with art design, video production, tattooing and day jobs. Now to be actualizing those secret ideas and being deep in game development, it’s as if a decade long burn of skill accumulation has merged into a single expression. Happy to finally be here!“
How the Clay was eventually Coded.
Community forums focused on game engines, like GameMaker, often have collaboration threads with people looking to find a great dev relationship that produces a great game and a great studio. Reaching out and hoping someone will just latch onto your post and say “yes, I'll help, lets go!” usually goes unanswered, or cops some cynical feedback about skills, ideas or the industry. But not always, and that's exactly how Coded Clay Interactive was born!
Mid 2018, Zach had just left university as raising a child, studying full time and maintaining enough income became too stressful. Feeling defeated and dwelling on his stock of game design and fiction material, he reached back out to his friend in the industry who in return delivered a little pep talk, telling him to learn the skills to do it himself. Zach took it upon himself to delve hard into coding tutorials, using the GameMaker Studio 2 engine and producing his own prototypes. Eventually, reaching a roadblock as programming was not his strength. Zach reached out on the GameMaker forums, asking for anyone in Perth, Australia to help.
To his surprise, someone actually replied! Damien was in the forums and by sheer luck happened to be looking through the collaboration section within a day of Zach posting. Perth is a pretty small place for a capital city and one of the most isolated cities in the world, seeing a developer in his home town piqued his interest! Luckily, it turned out Damien and Zach only lived 20 minutes from each other and could quickly meet up and discuss ideas and ambitions. Damien came prepared with an early version of a game that would soon become Nation Breakers: Steam Arena, using a lot of placeholder art. What originally started as a “I'll draw yours if you code mine” kind of deal soon developed into a single project focus when they realized the scope of what they wanted to do and the work involved (An obvious thing really!).
Over the last year of sharing ideas, developing the team dynamic, exploring limits and ambitions they concrete a work ethic and unified drive. As a team of busy working parents, Coded Clay Interactive hopes to deliver rich and engaging gaming experiences to all those who spend their valuable and limited time on them.
The Prototype!
Damien, as a hobby, had started work on a dozen games before settling on Nation Breakers: Steam Arena. This included a game where players designed their own fleet of spaceships (from fighters up to goliath motherships) for RTS battles, a game where the player manipulated hordes of zombies to take over towns and a rogue-like 2D platformer whose levels were inside of mechwarrior-like machines that the player was also in charge of in a larger overarching battle. Each game died from a lack of interest to get beyond the basic prototype. The next game was another rogue-like 2D platformer (with an additional multiplayer component boot, because larger than life scope was his thing).
Half way through the prototype Damien finally decided to limit the scope to something that he would complete. Cutting all but the original platforming and player attacks - the focus was now going to be a 4 player competitive brawler, fast paced with single hit kills, in single screen arenas.
Taking inspiration from ninja themed anime like Naruto, the game focused on 4 mechanics - parkour like platforming, melee attacks, range attacks and a dodge - each mechanic interacting with the others. Shuriken would collide, sword swings would deflect shuriken and dodge moves would avoid damage and place the player behind opponents.
He had done it. It was a complete game - so much so that Damien took to playing it with his students at the end of the year during the last week before summer break - they had a blast. To his surprise, his students asked “are you going to sell it on Steam?”
Damien had never considered it. Seeing how much the students whooped and cheered when they played this early version sparked a desire in him to get the game to more people. So the first task was to improve the art. Everything in the game was free assets or crudely drawn by Damien. Without much of a budget he was left using community marketplaces. It was hard to find a ninja themed set of characters that had the right sort of attacks and movement. Too hard. In the end Damien chose to change the theme of the game to a world of warriors and magic based on a fairly complete set of assets from the GameMaker marketplace.
After a year of further refinement and redoing all the art, it was clear that marketplace assets just wasn’t going to cut it. The game was fun, but lacked a consistency in its presentation. Damien had just commissioned an artist to produce a few character sprites to test the waters of how much it would cost to bring an artist on board when he found Zach’s post on the forum looking for assistance in Perth. That was the start of the partnership that led to Nation Breakers: Steam Arena.
That's it for today!
Apologies for the long blog. We wanted to get the studio background out of the way yet still give you some game info. Thanks for reading!
Next Episode - Finding Planet Piston, Re-themeing the game!
Zach and Damien
And we're LIVE. So, what's next?
Welcome to all!
First off, massive thank you to the early adopters who've Wishlisted Nation Breakers: Steam Arena. It's only 48 hours since we revealed the game and It's exciting for us to see you excited!
This post is just an introduction to let you know who we are and what you can expect to hear from us moving forward - I'm Zachary Andrews, artist at Coded Clay Interactive. I take care of all the games art, animations, sound FX and the front end of the studio (website design, marketing assets).
Damien Patterson is the other half of studio and co-founder, Damien takes care of programming, game design, visual FX and studio back end. Although we're primarily a two-man show, we do have additional help on the soundtrack thanks to, George Lever.
Development Blog.
We want to keep you updated on our progress but equally, we want to share with you how the game evolved to its current state.
Starting next week we will release a development blog backdating the progress of the game. The blog will focus on a certain aspect with each episode and highlight the evolution of that element in the game. Here is a basic breakdown of the first blog chapters, these are subject to change.
Deconstruction! Nation Breakers Development Blog.
- Pt1 - Studio Origins, Team backgrounds, Early Prototypes.
- Pt2 - Developing the theme, art style.
- Pt3 - Rebuilding from scratch, The first Characters, The Art Rules
- Pt4 - World Building, Asset Creation, Translating Mechanics.
- Pt5 - Developing VFX, Steam and Particles.
The blog will quickly catch up to now and we will be reporting on new developments we're currently working on leading up to the Early Access release. We look forward to sharing some new concepts going in that we didn't get to show off in the reveal trailer! Here is a clue for one thing - the Voice you heard in the trailer is from an in-game character, Commentator Cog Bufferson!
Have a great weekend!
Zach and Damien.