Time for another DevBlog! It feels amazing that we have been actually doing these over a year now. I hope you have enjoyed reading these as much as we have enjoyed sharing our development process with you! Let's get to it then.
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Let's see how the team's been doing!
NOORA
I have spent most of my time with a customer project but outside of that I’ve had the chance to model some cute characters for our own game. The creatures are based on Joonas’ awesome concepts and I can’t wait to see them coming alive through animations by Heini! I’m also slowly working on some design plans for how our UI setups and scenes will play out but more on that at a later time (when there’s actually something pretty to show). Here’s a little sneak peek on a transforming ability that one of the little creatures has:
TIPI
Game Design. Narrative Design. Level Design. And all the other types of design there is.
I think I have been purely puking out SO MUCH TEXT lately that I feel like a river gone dry now that I am facing this devblog.
xD Apologies in advance for my rather brief story here.
To be honest, I am so excited to see the game progress and move forward! There will be so many cool and fun things in this game and I cannot wait to show it to the world!
There will be creatures and there will be critters and there will monsters.
Also I had to make a request for Mikko to implement a dev-mode to the game because it is so hard that it is nearly impossible to test stuff when I just keep dying alllll the bloody time! xD
Outside projects hustling and organizing stuff mostly on the business dev side of things. We visited at GDC with Mikko and I have to say that ooommmg it was so cool to meet some devs that have created some of my all time favorites! <3 Also felt really hyped by how cool of an industry game industry is because of all the amazing people working with games.
MIKKO
Work on character movement and inputs is pretty much done. Our genre-fan tester told us it felt a lot like the controls in Hollow Knight which made us all super proud as that was exactly what we were going for. We also made a system for dark areas and illuminating them in collaboration with the artists which felt really great when we got to bang our heads together and solve a problem as a team. The solution works well now but still needs some love from the art department. I also had a bit of a challenge with Unreal’s Niagara system as I tried to detect the particle collisions on other objects. I managed to get it working though but it could still prove to be too heavy a solution. Lots of progress in a short time period and even more to come now that GDC is behind us.
So GDC happened and we got to experience it with Tipi. Our accommodation was a lovely AirBnB apartment and the hosts were very friendly. San Francisco itself was huge with beautiful sights to see but also some very dangerous areas where we also accidentally wandered for a brief moment. Nothing bad happened though but it was very clear to us then that we should get away from there.
The event itself was great and we got to meet a lot of friends, old and new. One particular highlight was the awards ceremony where to my surprise I found my inner fanboy. I don’t usually get too excited about meeting celebrities and such but this time it was different. I was able to keep my cool and just watch as Tipi was super excited about the devs who made some of her and her kids favorite games. But. Then. GDC Lifetime Award. Warren Spector walks up to the stage, gives a speech and welcomes John Romero to the stage. My heart starts racing as I realize that I have played almost every game those two have published and they were my childhood heroes. I can now claim to have seen the creators of System Shock and Doom live in the same room with me and I can die as a happy fanboy.
JOONAS
I have done so much environment art: assets, shaders, etc. and implemented those to the level. Most of the time I have spend making different kind of materials, and with trial and error tried to find good. We make most of the decorative assets in 2D, and finding good material for that have been surprisingly hard in Unreal Engine.
HEINI
I have done animations for the main character and implemented some of them in UE. Afterwards I’ve also fixed some of said animations since I saw they didn’t really work exactly how I wanted them to, and had to try something else. I learned to create blendspaces in UE and I’m awed, the animation transition is so SMOOTH! Mikko also showed me how to create and use animation montages, since it’s oftentimes easier to use those than create a monster of a chart into the Animation Blueprint with different animations connecting to each other this way and that, so that was very interesting and neat.
In addition to creating animations for the main character I’ve done animations for another creature who’s a little scared of the main character and skitters away if they come too close! Once the main character has passed, they might peek out of their hiding spot to see if the danger has passed.
That's it for this time! We are really hoping to see you here next month as we continue our development and adventure!
With best regards,
Punnu Games Team
