Open Development Week #33: Getting Ready for the Future!
almost 8 years ago – Wed, Jul 04, 2018 at 11:15:58 AM

Hey Hunters,

It's been 2 weeks since my last written update here, but it feels like a lifetime to me! So much has happened! Sorry for the absence.

Team meet-up!

After we deployed our last Update to the Pre-Alpha version, we flew to São Paulo for BiG (Brazilian Independent Games Festival), and also for the F.R.O.N.G. (First Roguesnail Official National Gathering). Which is totally what it's called since I made the name up 30 seconds ago.

In all seriousness, for those who don't know, Rogue Snail is a fully remote company. This means that we are spread out all around Brazil (and Germany!) and some of us had never met in person. The BiG Festival was an excellent opportunity to get everybody together, so we did!

 After eating (a lot) and cheering for Brazil at the World Cup, we took our first ever team picture! From left to right we have Gabriel Leite (Code), Pedro Falcão (Story), Raph Müller (Audio), Mark Venturelli (Design), Betu Souza (Art), Roni Silva (Code), Caio Lima (Code), Gabriel Celestino (Community) and Mari Souto (Art).

We are having a lot of fun working on Relic Hunters Legend together - and if it all goes well, this family is going to grow quite considerably until the end of the year! Fingers crossed ;)

What's New In The Game?

Glad you asked! We spent a considerable amount of time before our trip to São Paulo to get the new Mission structure done. It was a lot of work (like, a LOT) but we now have a very robust and scaleable codebase that will allow us to create and modify Missions very easily in the future.

This took most of our waking hours last month, but we still have some other, tangible new things to show off.

First off, we have a new HUD and scaling options!

The new HUD not only looks better, it's also implemented in a smarter way. First of all, it detects if you are playing with mouse and keyboard or a gamepad, and scales automatically (it looks bigger on Gamepad mode since you will usually be sitting further away from the screen).

You can also freely scale the HUD on the Options menu, with separate settings for both Keyboard+Mouse and Gamepad modes! I might be tooting our own horn at this point, but I honestly wish that more games would include this feature.

If you think it's important, we might include the ability to scale individual elements of the HUD (including text) separbly in the future, but we think this is enough for now.

Randomized Enemy Positions

Staying true to the Relic Hunters Zero heritage, our new Mission code allows us to easily generate enemy squads and positions to be different every time you play. This drastically increases replayability and is now live on the latest update.

It is not 100% done though. There is a major issue with how Skirmish game mode is spawning enemies, and they are often spawned on top of each other in huge clusters. It is very imbalanced and broken and it will be fixed on the next build - but for now, it is quite a funny challenge to undertake for the most experienced Hunters out there!

What Are We Up To Now?

This week we decided to keep our mindset of focusing on the future rather than pushing out features as fast as we can. We saw huge benefits from taking the time to do Missions right, so before we implement the Elite Enemies we are tackling another challenge: AI code.

Our AI has been a hastily-put-together piece of code that Caio whipped up for last year's Kickstarter demo - and that's what we have been using since then!

We have now designed a bigger, scalable system that will give us:

* Better performance;

* Smarter enemies;

* Less time to implement new enemies in the future;

We hope to conclude this in time for the next build, so fingers crossed! ;)

See You Next Week!

We are back to our regular schedule, so Celestino will be with you again on the Livestream next Tuesday (July 10th), and I will captain the stream on the following week to show off the new update!

Check our stream every Tuesday at Noon PT exclusively on http://twitch.tv/playrelichunters

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #31: Polishing and another Ducan Elite
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 09:03:09 PM

Hey Hunters,

How did the weekend treat you? We spent ours watching Brazil's disappointing tie with Switzerland. At least it wasn't 7x1!

Well, World Cup or not, we are still very much focused on Relic Hunters Legend. The last few weeks have been challenging, with tough technical problems to overcome. We are retooling our entire system to create and load Missions and stages, and have finally (hopefully) resolved the Shield Regen issue described on the previous update, once and for all.

We still found time for some new stuff, though! Lately we have a new internal rule: every 2 weeks, one of our coders (a third of our programming team!) will dedicate himself to polish and bug fixing. This ensures we are always moving forward without leaving a lot of unfinished things behind us!

Ducan Hivemaster

Betu just finished re-doing the animation rig for our Ducans, and now it's much easier for him to create new Ducan styles and visuals without having to re-animate a lot of parts.

Enter the new Elite to join the Ducan faction: the Ducan Hivemaster!

Being the Elite version of the Ducan Mortar crew, the Hivemaster will be showering you with bombardment-style attacks. Its default attack is a bee-hive mortar that leaves an area of constant Nature damage - a powerful area denial tool that will make the Hivemaster the priority target during Scavenge missions.

To defend itself, the Hivemaster has a personal honey-gun that will shoot sticky goo at assaulters and make them slow down, so be careful when rushing for the Hivemaster in the enemy backline!

The Hivemaster joins the Commando in our Elite hoster, but we still have one to go: the Turlek Tank! Coming up soon, fresh from Betu's oven!

Gravity-related stuff

Falling is fun, right? At least in videogames! We always crack up when accidentally falling down pits in the game, as well as when we manage to push the Ducans off of cliffs!

This has been a rough experience so far, though, and we know it. This week we addressed the two main issues with falling down on pits.

Instead of returning all the way back to the start of the map when you fall down (yuck!) you will now be teleported to your last valid position on the ground. Convenient, isn't it? However, there is a price to pay for this convenience: you will take 100 points of damage, paid upfront. We accept no returns!

Also (and perhaps more importantly, for the greedy kinds out there), enemies that fall down pits to their ultimate demise will now drop their loot on the ground next to it! No more missing out on those rewards just because you pulled off a stylish move.

Effects & Polish

We have also gotten a friend of ours from Aquiris Game Studio to teach a few VFX tricks to Betu and Roni. As soon as we get back from our trip to São Paulo next week, they will be having some private lessons and learning all kinds of neat visual effects to enhance the way that our game looks!

In the meantime Betu is sketching new effects and feedback that are sorely needed, such as damage indicators on the borders of your screen, and effects for everyone's Shields and Armor.

That's all for this week! As always, we invite you to come and check out our weekly Livestream - every Tuesday at Noon PT @ http://www.twitch.tv/playrelichunters !

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development #30: A Brief Story About How Game Development Actually Plays Out
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 03:35:21 PM

Hey Hunters,

So today you were supposed to be playing the new bi-weekly update! Instead, you are reading this post. We are going to be a bit late (hopefully tomorrow, on time for the livestream)!

However, I want to take the opportunity that we have, being a game in open development for 30 weeks now, to re-tell the events of the last couple of weeks in detail, and maybe shine a bit of light on why game development is so difficult to predict, and promises so hard to keep.

Basically, this is the story of how two things that have zero impact in your actual game experience took us two weeks of work.

Doing Things Fast vs. Doing Things Right

Programming sometimes feels like building a house of cards. Imagine two programmers, "A" and "B". A's goal is to lay out 10 cards: she can be sloppy and fast, making sure that the 9th card is just stable enough to put the final card on top of it. B's goal is to lay out 50 cards, so she has to stop and think things through, laying out a good foundation. 

A lays out cards a lot faster than B. But if you suddenly tell A that she has to put in 5 extra cards now.... whoops. She will maybe have to remove 4 cards and arrange them a little bit differently, or risk the whole house of cards crumbling down. When she finally gets 15 cards arranged, B is already at 20!

With a project like Legend, we are not laying out 10 cards. We are not laying 50 cards. We are trying to build this:

Sorry for the long-winded metaphor. I just mean that going fast with game development is a sure way of getting illusion of progress - but as you go further, you realize you will have to backtrack and re-do what you thought was done. Game code can be very fragile and an unexpected gust of wind can bring whole sections down.

Missions

We did Missions very fast for the Kickstarter - we needed to save the campaign, after all! But it was made in a very rigid way: we could only have either a "King of The Hill" mode or a "Skirmish" mode, and they were all separate and had a lot of duplicate functionality between them.

For the June Update, we had to free Missions to be whatever they wanted to be. We have multiple game modes planned (Payload, Defense, Sabotage, Distraction, and more), so we had to make things in a way that allowed our small team to create varied content very fast in the future.

We planned the whole thing out before announcing the June update, but as soon as we started working on it, a new and exciting idea came up: what if we allowed Missions to not only easily slot in different game modes, but also allow multiple game modes at the same time? We could have a Mission that starts out with Skirmish, then you reach a gate and have to capture a point, and then you had to push a Payload?

We could have Overwatch-style Missions that were very dynamic and complex, using extremely simple tools that could get the job done in no time! We were (and are!) super excited about it, so we threw away all of our careful planning and dove right into this new idea.

Very exciting (if you are a nerdy game programmer), but threw the first wrench at our carefully-laid-out plans. A last-minute bug meant that we had our entire team get together to figure it out, turning what was supposed to be 2 or 3 extra days in about a week of extra work.

And yes, I meant "first" wrench, because here comes the second one.

How Extremely Complicated Multiplayer Games Can Be

Have you been following me up until this point? Strap yourself up for this next one, it's a doozy.

Online real-time multiplayer doesn't actually exist.

Unless you are playing locally on the same machine, it's all smoke and mirrors to create an illusion of simultaneous gameplay. Different computers compute things differently - there is not a single "real game" going on, as doing it like this would be too slow, unresponsive and expensive. Even with the best possible connections, everyone is still limited by the speed of light, so cross-country or international play would always be laggy.

What happens instead is that every single computer has its own version of what is happening, and they exchange messages between each other, telling each other what is going on and trying to keep things from getting too different. This process is usually called "synchronization", and is anything but straightforward. Bigger online games can have a dedicated server that is responsible for most gameplay stuff, with each player's computer handling things such as graphics and input. For an indie game like Legend, we want to keep it to a minimum to avoid server costs, and compute a lot of things locally to give the game a good responsive feel without going bankrupt with server costs.

Still with me? So now that you understand a bit about the challenges of multiplayer game development, here's how regenerating Shields took us a week of development.

How Regenerating Shields Took A Week of Development

During the Kickstarter demo we also did something very quickly: enemies and players had Shields that, just like in Relic Hunters Zero, would regenerate after a few seconds without taking damage. No big deal, right?

A few months later, for the PAX demo, we implemented the Ducan Demolisher mini-boss and tried to give him some Shields. In single-player it worked perfectly, but online it was a mess - it would be dead on one machine, but had half its health remaining on another one! What was going on? We had no idea, and no time to figure it out either - we just removed the Shields from it and went on with our lives.

For the June update, however, we had to have the Elite enemies, and the Ducan Commandos had to have Shields. It was a core design thing about them, so it was time to face the issues.

The problem was how you stopped regeneration in Multiplayer. Each player is responsible for calculating damage and telling other players about it - that way we can have a fun and responsive feel, as you don't have to wait to see your damage affect the enemies. 

It works fine if the enemy never heals itself, but when you have a timed regeneration effect going on, what happens is that each player has a version of the enemy with slightly different Life every time (because the damage interrupts the regeneration at a different point in each machine). And the difference gets worse and worse each time the enemy regenerates!

How could we fix this in a 100% reliable way while at the same time ensuring that everything felt smooth and responsible? Making sure that the enemy health bar would not jump up and down when other players were lagging? Dealing with players leaving the match or connecting to the match just as the enemy starts regenerating shields?

The answer is: by spending an entire week working on it, testing different solutions, and bug-fixing with 4 people at the same time.

Now we have regenerating shields working! Something that everyone thought was already done, and no player will ever know how hard it was and how valuable it is to have it feel responsive as it does now.

Well, no player except you. Congratulations on making it this far! You are now more aware of the work that goes on behind the scenes of game development, and also understand why it is so hard for us to promise dates and keep promises when seemingly small and inconsequential things can take 1 or 2 weeks of work.

Well, that was boring!

Uh, sorry about that. Here's a pic of the new HUD! Yay! It's coming on the next update (hopefully this week):

TL:DR Game development is hard, we just lost 2 weeks in two things that should be simple and have no visible progress whatsoever. Does it affect the June Update release date and scope? We still have no idea! Will let you know as soon as we do!

As per tradition, I'll be playing the game and talking about game dev on our stream tomorrow (Tuesday 12th) at Noon PT on http://www.twitch.tv/playrelichunters ! Come join us!

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #29: Tools and tech for the June update
almost 8 years ago – Sat, Jun 02, 2018 at 03:00:03 PM

Hey Hunters,

Hope you're having an excellent weekend! I have just learned to bake bread and just had some at breakfast - if that's not the best way to start a weekend, I don't know what is!

We have also been baking other things here at Rogue Snail - namely the June update! If you missed its announcement, you can check last week's update. Spoilers: it'll be awesome!

There are a lot of boring technical things we have to do before the June update (and the rest of the game) can be done properly. We have created tools to build Missions in a super cool way which allows us to put different game modes at the same time on a Mission, as well as re-use environments and randomize them at our will. It'll have zero impact on your experience playing the game right now, but it will allow us to make a lot more stuff a lot faster and with less bugs.

It makes for a pretty boring post, though. I planned to talk about bread for the rest of the Update, but alas the art team came to the rescue and I can show you some new assets!

Fences!

They are made of metal! You can shoot through them! We can hang "Wanted" posters and nasty oppressive Ducan propaganda on them! Gaze at the unremarkableness of it! Is "unremarkableness" even a word?

Day, Night and Sunset Missions

We are also working on adding more visual variety through a Weather System. We'll be able to set missions at day, night and sunset, add things like rain, snow and storms, all at the click of a button!

Ducan Commando visual design

The Elite enemies are the feature that I'm personally most excited for on the June update, and this week Betu finished the visuals of the first one: the Ducan Commando! Here it is, alongside some sketches of more Ducans

The Ducan Commando is an Elite version of our regular cannon-fodder, the Ducan Trooper. Commandos will be much more dangerous for three reasons:

• They will have regenerating Shields, and will be smart enough to hide behind cover when their Shields are down!
• They have a special skill called "Aimed Shot" where they stand still for about 2 seconds charging an attack. During that time, a laser sight will tell you who their target is - get behind cover or out of range, because the shot is hit-scan and cannot be dodged!
• On multiplayer matches only (2+ players), the Aimed Shot skill will also have a dangerous Stun effect for a couple of seconds. This is the start of our design goal of making enemy CC (crowd control) effects on multiplayer matches to encourage teamwork and taking care of each other.

Elite enemies will only show up on Hard difficulty and upwards (with Epic difficulty completely replacing cannon-fodder like Ducan Troopers with their Elite counterparts!). So start tweaking your guns for that 2% DPS increase, Hunters - you're gonna need it!

---

That's it for this week! We cannot wait until the June update and so far things are looking good for our June 22nd target date! Fingers crossed!

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #28: New Build, announcing the June Update
almost 8 years ago – Tue, May 29, 2018 at 05:51:00 AM

Hey Hunters,

Sorry about the delay on this week's update! We've been busy with something pretty exciting! But first things first: there is a new update build available on Steam for our Alpha founders!

New Build: Level Up!

Our bi-weekly update brings some pretty sweet new features. Chief among them is the Experience (XP) and Level Up system. We have introduced enemies of random levels from 1 to 6 - defeating them yields XP based on the difference between your Hunter's level and theirs.

In Relic Hunters Legend, enemies and activities will yield a fixed amount of XP that will not scale. As you level up past the activity/enemy level, the XP amount will diminish. On the other hand, higher level enemies and activities will earn you more XP.

There is a upper and lower cap for those effects at about 4-5 levels of difference. This means that we don't incentivize players to go for content 5+ levels above their own, and also we don't punish you for playing with low-level friends - you will still get some XP out of it, as long as you are scaled down with Normalized Power. If you are NOT scaled down, however, you will be getting zero XP.

The goal of this system is to allow you to play what you want and still progress, while rewarding you for going to harder activities. We are also removing low-level farming as a valid option for leveling up - unless you are helping other people out, in which case it's totally fine!

Keep in mind that levels do absolutely nothing in the current build and the progress will be reset very soon, so as tempting as it may be to level up, keep that in mind.

(Level Cap is 20, though. I double-dare you!)

New Build: Ammo System!

We finally included the Ammo System and ammo drops in the game, and are pretty happy with the results so far. You can read more about ammo on last week's update.

New Build: Brand New Missions!

We now have a total of 6 unique Missions to play in the Pre-Alpha, and we feel like we are finally at a good place to start adding the progression systems (as you voted for us to do).

The new Galyno Canyons Skirmish mission will introduce new players to the Region, and will soon sport new environment features such as metal fences and crates.

The Broken Lake is our second Scavenge map, this time using the snow tileset. It is a tight map that rewards mobility, and it's a blast to play!

Finally, the Red Mouth Hill will be the entrance to the Kami part of the region. Sadly the Kami are not yet implemented, so you will have to keep shooting Ducans for the time being. It is a Skirmish map with a neat second part that folds onto itself (my favorite Skirmish map that Gabriel built for the game so far)!

Announcing the "June Update"

Last but not least, we wanted to announce something super cool! We are going to fly to São Paulo and have the entire team meet in-person for the first time during Brazil's BIG Festival. This will happen by the end of June, and we will take about a week off for the occasion.

Before we did that, we wanted to leave you busy with something cool.

Enter the June Update:

• Hunter Screen fully functional;
• Change Weapons freely on all characters;
• New Elite enemies: Ducan Commando, Turlek Tank and Ducan Hivemaster;
• Stats and Stat Growth on Level Up;
• Enemy scaling for Enemy Level and Difficulty;
• Full level progression from 1-20 on the Missions;
• Combat Rating system;
• Timelines and Map Progression (Present, Past and Future);

You will be able to play the game in longer sessions for the first time. We expect it to take about 2 hours to take a Hunter from level 1 to 20, going through all 6 Missions on all 3 Timelines (for a total of 18 Missions).

The best part? It's coming in June! And very soon! Our estimated release date for this update is June 22nd. Save the date!

See You On the Livestream Today!

As is tradition on every second Tuesday, today I'll be piloting our Twitch channel as we play the new build, talk about the new things in it, and I answer your questions about the June update and life in general ;)

Join us today at Noon PDT on http://twitch.tv/playrelichunters/

Cheers,

~Mark