Open Development Week #27: Level Up, Environment Art, Ammo Drops
almost 8 years ago – Mon, May 21, 2018 at 10:31:48 AM

Hey Hunters,

Hope you've had an stellar weekend! I mean, not literally. Unless you're an astronaut or something. Maybe an astronomer? If an astronomer spends the weekend studying stars, is that a stellar weekend? Probably?

Sorry, got distracted. Let's talk about our week in Relic Hunters Legend development!

New Environment Art

Betu and Mari have been working on new assets for our Galyno Desert levels. The goal is to introduce a bit more visual storytelling and variety into our tile-created levels.

Galyno Desert is the first Region players will explore in Relic Hunters Legend. It sits right on the outside of Hilltown, and it is forbidden territory - Ducan troops patrol the Desert and control its borders. The Relic Hunters (those naughty rebels!) care not for the laws of the Ducans and will trespass on the territory and meddle into the Ducan excavation efforts. What are they digging for? You will find out soon!

 We are also experimenting with fences on the gameplay - they'd block movement but not gunfire, opening up new possibilities for our level design.

Ammo System / Ammo Drops

Your guns can also finally run out of ammo! Yay?

In all seriousness, we think this is an important addition to the game. We discussed this a little bit on Discord - the goal of the ammo system is to give players another factor to consider with their weapons and help us balance them between each other. Not only you'll have to consider Range, Burst DPS, Sustained DPS and Damage Type, but also Ammo Economy.

How would you balance a Sniper Rifle versus a Pistol with no ammo? To have the same "payoff", they would have to be balanced along the axis of Range vs. DPS (Sustained or Burst). So either the Sniper Rifle would have to be weak per shot or take a stupidly high amount of time to fire to be comparable with the pistol. But if we have a third axis to balance with (ammo economy) it becomes easier to make the sniper feel powerful but use more ammo (and rarer ammo).

The drops also require you to control territory You can't stay on top of a hill far away picking off enemies one by one - you will run out of ammo unless you go to the location where you KO'd the enemies.

The reason why infinite ammo works on games such as Paladins and Overwatch is that the characters have a closed "kit" combining weapon, health, mobility, skills, etc. In Legend, every character can use every weapon, so we have to have more variables to balance them and make sure there is no optimal choice.

So how does Ammo work?

Short answer: pretty much like in Relic Hunters Zero.

Long answer: we spent months of updates in Zero until we got to an ammo system that everybody was happy with. It all boils down to good balance, so that may take a while to get right in Legend as well, but the gist of it is:

• There are 3 Ammo Types: Light (green ammo), Medium (red ammo) and Heavy (blue ammo);
• Every weapon on the Primary and Secondary slots has its own ammo type;
• Light ammo is the most common and Heavy is the rarest, with Medium being on the middle;
• Each weapon has an Ammo Cost attribute which determines their efficiency. Higher Ammo Cost means that your gun will run out of ammo faster;
• In practice, it means that a Light Ammo weapon with low Ammo Cost will pretty much never run out of ammo, while a Heavy Ammo weapon with high Ammo Cost will only last for a few shots.
• You should also avoid carrying two guns of the same Ammo Type as they draw from the same pool.
• Ammo Drops are "smart", meaning that we avoid dropping useless ammo types. and we know when you are running low on ammo and up the drop rates a bit to help you out.

You will be able to increase your ammo efficiency with Gear, and some Hunters will have "Ammo Support" abilities that will help their parties with ammo management. Ultimately we want to give players a lot of interesting choice on how to tackle the ammo problem, and how it affects weapon selection.

We are working on Level Up/XP mechanics!

Hopefully for next week's build!

It will serve probably no purpose at all at the moment, but if you're anything like me you are already excited at the possibility of getting XP out of those Ducan KOs and getting a satisfying level up "ding" every once in a while :)

Tomorrow Celestino will be hosting our weekly livestream on Twitch, so be sure to tune in at Noon PDT!

See you next week!

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #26: New build, loot system, missions
almost 8 years ago – Mon, May 14, 2018 at 12:24:52 PM

Hey Hunters,

How have you been? We are starting to move faster and faster with game updates! We feel like we have finally settled on a good rhythm for the bi-weekly builds, and our strategy is to always balance out maintenance/tech/bug fixing stuff with actual new features and content that you get to play with every couple of weeks.

The new game build is now available for Alpha tier or higher backers/founders, and it includes, among other things, a loot drop system (which for now only drops Bounty), the Map Screen and a new mission (Galyno Canyons, Skirmish), as well as updated visuals and design on the old missions.

Sweet loot!

The majority of our time these last couple of weeks was spent on discussing, designing and implementing the Loot system in the game. We now have the tools to allow enemies to drop different loot, with drop tables, drop rates, and so forth and so on.

For now we are only dropping Bounty (which, if you haven't played Relic Hunters Zero, acts like gold in the game), and it serves absolutely no purpose. But I can't help myself and have to get them all :O

We now have the ability to create Loot Tables and specific drop rates for enemies, regions, or even global drop rates (for events and such). We can also drop weapons/gear but we still have to finish the item system to do that in a way that makes any sense.

We will focus on the Ammo system and ammo drops for the next build, so items will take a little while longer to make it into the game proper.

Map Screen / Missions

This may seem like a minor thing, but it's actually what excites us the most about this update.

The Map screen is closer to how we envision the final flow of the game, and is the result of our work in wrapping up our level creation pipeline, saving and loading levels with our internal editor, and overall having a more robust structure to work with and grow the game going forward.

In fact, we've been working quite a bit on our internal level editor to make sure that content will be easy and quick to create in the future. To test our new features, we have updated our 2 old levels and created a new one called Galyno Canyons.

The final Region will look something like this sketch we made in January.

That's it for this week! Looking forward to chatting with you live during our Twitch stream this Tuesday at Noon PDT. See you there!

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #25: Mobile? Crazy Camera? What's Going on?
almost 8 years ago – Mon, May 07, 2018 at 08:13:02 PM

Hey Hunters,

We have one week to go before our next Pre-Alpha update, and we've been trying some different things around here.

New HUD Layout

Starting out with something less radical, I (Mark) have been working on a final layout for the in-game HUD (or UI, or interface, or whatever you wanna call it).

There's nothing wrong with the current HUD per se, but it was developed for the Kickstarter demo and never considered future features that would be added to the game. Our final layout needs to take into consideration things such as enemy information, loot drops, XP, Ultimate skills, and more.

Here's how our layout is looking currently:

Bear in mind that this is just a mock-up, and Betu is still in Japan - that's why it looks ugly! Also, some founders such as Quartzel (Jade) and Astair have given us some pretty neat ideas which might be included in the final design. If you have feedback or ideas, please write them below or (better yet) at our Discord server.

Camera experiments

Earlier this week, Roni (one of the team's coders) tested a pretty neat little thing: this 3D camera perspective!

This looks way better than we anticipated. There are a lot of crazy tricks going on to combine 2D and 3D in Relic Hunters Legend in an interesting way, so we never got to experiment with other camera angles and projections. This little GIF proved that it was a mistake!

There's nothing officially planned for now, but we want to experiment more with the camera. Current ideas include zooming in for social spaces such as the Dropship or the Secret Market, and also when triggering your Ultimate Skills for extra coolness (everything could be turned off on the Settings menu, of course).

What do you think? Any ideas for how we could use different camera perspectives?

Mobile Cross-Play

This one is a doozy. We have been working on this on off-hours for the last couple of months, and even had a "secret" playable version at GDC and PAX - but now we are confident enough to officially announce it, and soon we'll be able to show it off.

You will be able to play Relic Hunters Legend on your phone (Android/iOS)! Not only that, it'll be the same game, and you will be able to play with people who are on PC. If that's not AWESOME, I don't know what it is!

It is still very early. Controls are clunky, interface is a mess and the performance is not there (it fluctuates between 13-30 fps on my mid-to-high tier phone). As soon as it is in a decent state, we will start sharing  Android APK files with our Alpha Founders to test it out.

A few things to get out of the way first, though:

- This will not affect PC/Console development resources. We plan to get funding on the side for this and get dedicated people to take care of mobile exclusively.

- This will not affect the design of the game. We will not "dumb down" or "streamline" the game in any way to make it a better fit for mobile. We believe in making real games for mobile, and we see this as an option. Legend is not being designed as a traditional "mobile game", but as a complete, fully-feature online game first and foremost.

- It will not run well on old/weaker phones. You will need a big screen and fairly modern hardware to play the game comfortably. There will be benefits to the PC/Consoles version in the sense that a LOT of optimization will have to be done for the mobile version and that will affect performance in a positive way on all platforms. But we will not compromise the visuals and presentation of the game to make it a better fit for older mobile devices.

- If you are primarily a mobile gamer and want to support the game on our Founders program, bear in mind that the mobile version is still not available even for Alpha backers and will be a secondary priority during the Alpha period. A mobile version might be available in a couple of months - we will let you know through all our channels when that happens.

That's it! See you next week ;)

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #24: New Build with Performance Improvements
almost 8 years ago – Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 07:23:44 AM

Hey Hunters,

Hope you've had a great week! We are wrapping up our 2-week-long maintenance period and celebrating it with a new update.

If you have Alpha access, you should have a new build with much improved performance and a few bug fixes here and there. Also new sound effects!

Level Editor Improvements

We have improved our Level Editor quite a bit. This has absolutely no impact on the build whatsoever, but it's one of those boring game development things that will make a world of difference in a few months.

It runs better, has better tools, it is "safer" (i.e. less chance for us to lose our work due to a silly mistake), and we're going to use it in the following weeks to improve our existing levels and make new ones - faster than ever!

Mari has also been working on some neat props such as this cute wooden bridge:

Betu in Japan!

Betu is taking a well-deserved vacation for the next couple of weeks, so we'll be with only Mari drawing pretty things for our next update.

Where in the world is Betu? Why, Japan, of course.

If you are in Japan, try to snatch a pic of Betu. He will probably be wherever they are serving onsen!

What Coming Up?

Now that we have cleaned the house a little bit, we're ready for new things! For the next bi-weekly build (May 12th), we will start putting some Progression in the game, as you, the community, asked us to.

We will probably start with Bounty and Ammo drops, as well as the actual Ammo system in the game and some HUD and menu improvements.

I will be able to confirm this and talk in-depth about it on our next Livestream, which is due next Tuesday May 1st at our usual time, Noon 1200 PST.

Talk soon! Have a great weekend ;)

Cheers,

~Mark

Open Development Week #23: Kami, Level Design, Performance
almost 8 years ago – Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 12:49:36 AM

Hey Hunters,

How's your week been? We've finally had a "normal" week of work and it feels super good to be back home working on Legend. Here's what's been going on:

The New Kami Is Alive

Look at how cutely deadly these guys are in motion!

They have a complex range of emotions, alternating between "grumpy" and "angry". Adorable!

Art Direction and Level Design improvements

While Betu has been bringing the Kamis to life, Mari has been working on one of the most important feedbacks we got from GDC and PAX: the levels are hard to read. It's currently hard to tell walls and cliffs apart, and where is and isn't safe to navigate.

Mari proposed a few solutions which we're going to test this week, including colored fog, new textures, a few props such as railings and rough terrain, and more. 

To complement this, Leite and I have been working on the Level Editor to make it more usable and less buggy. Hopefully next week's build will have a better and more readable environment.

Performance Improvements

Another overwhelming request we got from the previous build was to optimize the game a bit. Usually optimization is done at the end of the development process, but since this is an openly-developed game, we recognize the need to maintain a good framerate throughout development to allow all of you to play it confortably.

Roni and Leite helped Caio do some pretty neat optimizations on the CPU load of the game. The end result in our machines is a whopping 200-300% increase in framerate in situations where there are a lot of characters on the screen.

If you have access to the game - we are putting this performance patch live RIGHT NOW on the "Beta" branch of Steam for you to test. Please let us know if your performance has improved!

Coming up next: Progression

Last week we told you we wanted to figure out what to focus on next: more game modes and stages, or basic gear and character progression. We discussed this over Discord with our Founders and Backers, and also during Tuesday's stream. Finally, we held a Poll to vote on the winner.

Well, I have already spoiled it, uh? "Progression" won with a whopping 74% of votes!

So yeah, we are doing that next. We still have to sit down and decide on the details of the first implementation. It will include Exp and leveling, some Gear drops and Material progression. It will be fairly simple, but should give an idea of how progression would feel in the game - then we can work on your feedback and build from that.

Thanks and see you next week!

Cheers,

~Mark