Game News The Darkness Below generates a Demo

[Dorateen]

vlzvl you've been endorsed by Golden Era Games. You just won the internets.

 

[vlzvl]

I want this. And the editor. And an asset repository. And a flood of great user-created dungeons!

Hey thanx
Let's hope the editor reaches some new heights through continuous development and be ready for release with the game.
At the moment, its not the usual friendly type of an editor one might expects but I'm working to that.

Really good look for true 3D. Needs to break up the maps with some more variety but everything is really well done in this demo. Plays a lot like M&M which is welcome.

Hey thanx Cleveland Mark Blakemore, wow that was unexpected.
Yes, you're right. I'm working on adding more features & props, especially for indoor environments which look a bit flat at the moment.
Just happy at the moment to see the basic premise, playing like M&M with a bit of Eye of the Beholder, is getting met with every update and be welcomed.
Thanx for the feedback, man, greatly appreciated!

Powerful Lands of Lore 1 vibes.

I'm not a huge blobber fan, but this looks pretty good tbh.

Hey thanx I'm admiring the "Lands of Lore 1" interface, to the point that I somewhat stole some of its UI ideas.
Too intuitive, an artistic sign of the great company that made it. I wanted a glimpse of that intuitivity & accessibility.
I'm glad that you liked the demo, its only going to get better with a couple more updates.

vlzvl you've been endorsed by Golden Era Games. You just won the internets.

Yeah, wow... Have to think a minute or three or a month on that, those last days were really something.
I'm glad that current state of the game managed all that, considering that I'm still working a couple of improvements.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Hey thanx Cleveland Mark Blakemore, wow that was unexpected.
Yes, you're right. I'm working on adding more features & props, especially for indoor environments which look a bit flat at the moment.
Just happy at the moment to see the basic premise, playing like M&M with a bit of Eye of the Beholder, is getting met with every update and be welcomed.
Thanx for the feedback, man, greatly appreciated!

Purely in the interest of offering you some of my feedback from building demos in true 3D myself to capture the original charm, I want to tell you I have been down the exact same path you are on right now and kept running into the brick wall of budgetary limits when it comes to creating all the 2D resources for the frame animation, just as you are doing. Any way you slice it, it seems so expensive both time and money that you keep using your demo monsters and NPCs which is a limited subset of what you really need.

Each time I have come to the conclusion that the only way an indie author could possibly hope to surmount the demand for a dedicated artist to draw all the animation a frame at a time the way Monique did, is to use component 2D animation with Spriter or Spine and import to native. All you need is one set of 2D components from the artist and then you or he can generate amazing 2D animations from that original set at a fraction of the cost in effort and time. You can animate heads bobbing, eyes blinking, limbs attacking or defending with various weapons and appliances which can be attached at run time. You can make the dragons tail wave and his claws reach out without having to do all that frame by frame.

I have tried lots of experiments myself and have reached the same conclusions as you - you have struck on the best way to do the blobber engine in true 3D. If you use 2D animation tools for your monsters you can get away with one static sheet of components but end up with the most impressive animations for the creatures with a lot less work. This is what I have decided every time I have experimented with the front facing sprites like you have in the grid blobber. The thought of doing frame-by-frame again is so depressing I never get as far as you have ... but using modern 2D animation tools even an indie could end up with more impressive results than Lands of Lore or Might and Magic for creatures. Stonekeep used rotoscopy for its 2D creatures and they looked awful but a modern blobber using 2D anim utilities to generate the creatures could look incredible.

This may spook you or sound too ambitious but if you took the engine you have now and added these kinds of 2D monsters and NPCs you'd have something really awesome looking on a low budget.

I will probably end up using real 3D creatures in my next blobber but add a toon shader to make them look old skool. I still am not sure that it will look as good as what you have right now.

 

[vlzvl]

Hey thanx Cleveland Mark Blakemore, wow that was unexpected.
Yes, you're right. I'm working on adding more features & props, especially for indoor environments which look a bit flat at the moment.
Just happy at the moment to see the basic premise, playing like M&M with a bit of Eye of the Beholder, is getting met with every update and be welcomed.
Thanx for the feedback, man, greatly appreciated!

Purely in the interest of offering you some of my feedback from building demos in true 3D myself to capture the original charm, I want to tell you I have been down the exact same path you are on right now and kept running into the brick wall of budgetary limits when it comes to creating all the 2D resources for the frame animation, just as you are doing. Any way you slice it, it seems so expensive both time and money that you keep using your demo monsters and NPCs which is a limited subset of what you really need.

Each time I have come to the conclusion that the only way an indie author could possibly hope to surmount the demand for a dedicated artist to draw all the animation a frame at a time the way Monique did, is to use component 2D animation with Spriter or Spine and import to native. All you need is one set of 2D components from the artist and then you or he can generate amazing 2D animations from that original set at a fraction of the cost in effort and time. You can animate heads bobbing, eyes blinking, limbs attacking or defending with various weapons and appliances which can be attached at run time. You can make the dragons tail wave and his claws reach out without having to do all that frame by frame.

I have tried lots of experiments myself and have reached the same conclusions as you - you have struck on the best way to do the blobber engine in true 3D. If you use 2D animation tools for your monsters you can get away with one static sheet of components but end up with the most impressive animations for the creatures with a lot less work. This is what I have decided every time I have experimented with the front facing sprites like you have in the grid blobber. The thought of doing frame-by-frame again is so depressing I never get as far as you have ... but using modern 2D animation tools even an indie could end up with more impressive results than Lands of Lore or Might and Magic for creatures. Stonekeep used rotoscopy for its 2D creatures and they looked awful but a modern blobber using 2D anim utilities to generate the creatures could look incredible.

This may spook you or sound too ambitious but if you took the engine you have now and added these kinds of 2D monsters and NPCs you'd have something really awesome looking on a low budget.

I will probably end up using real 3D creatures in my next blobber but add a toon shader to make them look old skool. I still am not sure that it will look as good as what you have right now.

Thanx Cleve!
It's a great feeling knowing you walked down the same obstacles on this. Most of the times, its relieving and keeps you motivated. Budget limitation is definitely an issue, especially when dealing with large content. I'm using a mixed approach of paid and open-licensed resources to keep the budget in place and work them out a bit more (animation), as you did early on. Yes, it's quite painful and time-investing to deal with them all and been able to provide at least base-level quality, while dealing with content, rules, mechanics, technicals and stuff. Probably it won't be that rewarding in the end, counting all those man-hours but it's ok.

I chose an even harder way of doing animation on my limited-set resources, merely cropping animated parts myself and then building automated scrripts for producing & packing them into tight atlases. I'm starting to think this wont be sufficient for building all of my animated sprites this way, both time and quality wise, and some extra help would be needed in future, a lot skilled & faster than me, leave me be in my developing department. I didn't even knew about Spriter and Spine for that matter. I was inspired by M&M3-5 style of animation, moving limbs and stuff. I realized this would allow me some space, working mostly on technicals while providing good-enough sprites and for the most part this strategy seems great. I didn't even considered providing more than 2,3 monsters for the demo, since doing it faster & providing more usually leads reworking them all over again in future. I will look into Spine and Spriter, thanks.

Happy to know that you walked down the same experimentations and ended up with the same conclusions, this is quite nice to know, thanx for sharing. I also asked myself what's the best way to deliver stuff while trying to stay realistic, time and effort wise. Being solo requires quite the experimentation. I did experiemented a lot on sprite placement, movement and transition over time. My first versions of it were looking terrible and non-immersive at all. At the time I was quite happy to present them, but now I'm not. It's a good thing that you're growing as well with your game, asking and answering questions all the time. Yeah, Stonekeep & Lands of Lore sequels for that matter, sprites looked incredible back then but I now realize they mostly had a shock value; these FMV sprites didn't aged quite well like their pixel-art competition.

I also used 3D objects in my production chain and filtered them out with my limited pixel-art skills. Those ground items are all originating from 3D models. The availability of them all allowed me to realize that & trying another way. Something that would never happen for, saying, monsters and NPCs. And I'm talking for both paid / not solutions. Mixing strategies is required I guess. Unless you're working within a team, availability becomes an issue.

Thank you for all of your good words & insights, Cleve!