Tag Archives: game dev

Summer Game Dev Update

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Julian with hat

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since we updated y’all on Crimson Spires and other Woodsy Studio goings-on, so we thought we’d put out a post on how summer has been going for us. First off, it has been very hot and very humid. There’s a lot of great things about living and working in St. Louis, but the summer is definitely not one of them. Not for us, and not for our studio’s dog, a husky who dramatically changes her opinion on walks for three+ months out of the year.

Mira in the summer sun

Other than that, summer has marked a slow down for us, which brings me to leading with our biggest piece of bad news. Crimson Spires has been delayed until 2020, likely closer to the middle of the year than the beginning of the year.

This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone following the project, as this is very clearly our most ambitious game. When we set out with this project, we thought that we would end up expanding the gameplay scope (to include 3D exploration) but have a similar-sized script to our Echoes of the Fey titles. We were incredibly wrong. Currently, the Crimson Spires script is approximately as long as Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament and we haven’t even written 2/4 paths. The paths in this game are considerably more unique than anything we’ve done before, so we’re probably looking at a script close to twice the size of Last Sacrament.

We’ve also hit other difficulties. In the past, we released an average of a game a year and now we’re at slightly over the one year mark for Crimson Spires. Our quick turnaround wasn’t just about getting money from releases (although that was a necessary factor), but also our own fickleness with projects. We work hard and then we burn out–typically after about a year. That happened, and it sucks.

Finally, we both found that we needed to find other financial support for our studio beyond game sales. A few things happened. First, we didn’t release a game this year (duh, that’s a problem). Second, changes were made late last year to the Steam algorithm for recommending games to users. This has caused a rather dramatic reduction in views and wishlists for indie developers across the board. Naturally, it hit us hard as a studio that really relied on Steam sales of back catalog titles.

The growing 3D landscape of Crimson Spires in UE4

Here’s the good news: we’re not done. You’ll notice we’re not cancelling anything, just pushing it back. And we hope that it will be even better for the delay. To help support us, Malcolm has been teaching game design at a local university and Jenny has begun a full-time job in web development. This is going to slow us down, but it’s also going to give us the resources to make Crimson Spires even better. We’ll be able to ship with more voice acting, for one thing. And we’re not too proud to admit that we’ll use some of the extra money on assets that can improve the world of Bataille, Missouri. We always tweak any assets we buy to fit our game, but it’s especially easy with a game set in (relatively) modern day in a (relatively) realistic style to find useful ways to speed up environmental development.

So, what have we done recently? The 3D world of Bataille is considerably more built-out and explorable. Julian’s path has been almost entirely added into the game project. Maddy’s path is halfway written. New art for new characters has been deployed on the project, some of which we’ve scattered throughout this post.

And we’ve also made sure to start taking better care of ourselves. Jenny’s new job allows her to treat working on Crimson Spires as more of a passion project and less of a piece of work she has to finish to keep the lights on. Malcolm took a quick breather this week to participate in the UE4jam, a four-day long game jam put on by Epic Games. You can see his game here. Both of us know that if we stay burnt out, we won’t be able to provide the story and experiences we want to.

We pride ourselves at Woodsy Studio on finishing games. We don’t start something and just let it wither and die. Crimson Spires is coming, we just ask for a little patience while we make it the best vampire/serial killer romance about late capitalism in the Midwest that it can be.

March Game Dev Log

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We’re excited to say that we finished our big update for Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation in March, and it’s now available on Steam and itch! The game should now perform better on lower-end computers, and everyone can enjoy remastered artwork and new special effects. Meanwhile, our work on Crimson Spires continues!

WINDOWS OF ILLUSION

A few months ago, we considered trying to make false interior windows in the style of (among other games) the PS4 Spider-Man game. It was a half-realized thought that we didn’t follow through on because we weren’t sure it was worth the effort considering the lofi visual style of the environments.

Well, it turns out there was a good reason to start looking at fake windows, but instead of false interiors we were motivated by creating false *exteriors.* There aren’t too many times you’ll be wandering around  inside a house or other area in Crimson Spires, but in the few instances we had, we found that the black reflective material didn’t quite create the effect we wanted. It was just too reflective and looked like everyone was blacking out their windows with paint. That might work for our conspiracy-theorist Thomas Wagner, but characters like Erika and Maddy wouldn’t be doing that sort of thing.

With this in mind, Malcolm decided to re-explore the idea of using bump offset to fake depth and create some background images for windows that look outside. To do this, we created some textures based on screenshots of the open world and built a shader to adjust their depth based upon the  angle of viewing. Bump offset isn’t quite as good at this as it is at  fake interiors, but given how rarely players will actually walk around the windows to see the seams, we think its an effective way to portray exteriors without having to build out some small version of the 3d world outside every interior level.

This  is completely placeholder, because we haven’t taken the final  screenshots for the material yet. When we do, we’ll actually take three–one for day, another for dusk, and finally one for night. Using a  vector material parameter, we’ll fade between them to correctly show time of day.

Once this was done, we had to give the fake interiors another shot just  in case we wanted to use those as well. They look better in motion than  the fake exteriors, so we may end up using those as well.

BLOCKING OUT THE SCENES THAT BLOCKED US

In March, we passed an important personal milestone: blocking out the sequence of the story that gave Jenny writer’s block for so long. This was a segment of the script that she rewrote at least 5 times. She started to fear she would never find an iteration of the script that was solid enough to keep building upon.

At long last, adding one of these scenes to the game felt like confirmation that she was on the right track again and ready to keep going.

Here’s later in that scene, blocked out in UE4:

This whole scene didn’t even exist until Jenny’s final rewrite of that story sequence, but now it’s a pivotal moment that ultimately brings Erika and Julian closer together.

REDO ONE CG, REDO ‘EM ALL!

Similar to how Jenny ended up redoing every sprite in the Immolation after fixing up a few animations, most of the CGs also got a makeover. Jenny knew she could improve upon her old digital paintings. At first she was just going to touch up a few details, but then it was hard to stop.

In this case, it’s easier to show you the changes than try to describe them, so here are some examples.

There are plenty more CGs we remastered, but we’ll let you discover those for yourself when you play the update!

ADDING LIFE WITH MOVEMENT

While working on Crimson Spires, Malcolm started to worry that the world felt a little too  static. While we’re still going for a look that evokes older 3D games on simpler systems, we thought some movement in the world might make it more interesting. To accomplish that, we modeled and added a handful of new props.

While no one drives in Bataille, we thought it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to think that no one ever bothered to take down the streetlight. Is this just sleight of  hand to let us make a small Twin Peaks reference at some point? Maybe.

It  wouldn’t be small-town America without a lot of American flags flying  across the town. Since we have incorporated weather effects, we thought  the flags should be affected and created this prop with that in mind.

We’ll continue to add other less-than-static tweaks to the environment as we  build it out, hoping to make it a more interesting place to explore.