We’ve Been Greenlit!!

Thank you to everyone who supported us and voted for “Beneath Us” on Steam Greenlight! Because of you we have been greenlit and our game will be available to purchase on steam once it is completed.

Chase and I just participated in a week long gaming marathon with http://www.tsg.tv . We are now refreshed and will resume progress on the game. Our next goal is to start testing our game with some of our friends and family. We are working toward an alpha build that focuses on the first few hours of gameplay. We aim to have this done by the end of the summer.

Thank you!!

We are off to a great start!

We are less than 24 hours in and we’ve had a great start! We are able to see our trajectory compared to other top 100 greenlight games and we are doing very well comparatively. However, once our game submission comes off of the front page we are going to hit a wall and we will need all the promotion that we can get. If you all could help spread the word to get “Beneath Us” greenlit, we would very much appreciate it. We will be posting game up dates and progress throughout this process.

Thank you for all of your support!
-Britt

Greenlight here we come!

We have made our bid to be greenlit! Please check out our greenlight page to vote!!  http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=480485233

Upgrading to Unity to 5.1!

(Britt) Today we are upgrading to Unity 5.1. Chase has a lot of network code to transfer over and improve. He’s very excited about the new features that 5.1 has.  “uNet” is what Chase is looking forward to the most because of its network capabilities.  http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/12/announcing-unet-new-unity-multiplayer-technology/

Prior to the upgrade I’ve been working on the over-world and populating it. I’m tailoring it right now to fit our testing that we are soon to start. We want to polish the first couple of hours of gameplay and the titan combat before we begin testing. We are then going to ask some of our friends to test it out and get feedback from them. When we do this we will be sure to post video since I know we are yet to really show off what “Beneath Us” looks like.

I think its reasonable to expect that we will have begun our testing by the last week of July. We have a charity event in the middle of July and a lot to prepare for that will take up much of our free time in the coming weeks. In between getting ready for the event and our jobs we will be getting in as much work as possible on the game.

I look forward to showing you all “Beneath Us” soon 🙂

Upgrades Upgrades Upgrades!

We have finally upgraded to the unity 5 engine. It was a smooth transition (from unity 4) and we haven’t encountered too many bugs. We have also added some steam integration. We can now log into our game and it pulls our steam info so that your character is now unique to your steam account. We use this for account creation at the moment. Hopefully our game gets green lit and we can use this system for our release. However, if we are not greenlit, we have a plan B for our account creation system that we will only need to go into if the situation permits.

Chase has made many Gui updates and interaction additions involving drag and drop mechanics. I’ve been working hard changing over to our new look and I still have several menus and interfaces to update.

Chase also implemented a new movement system. With there being both melee and ranged items we need to make sure that either choice is fun and fair. Running in the same direction that you’re facing gives you increased movement speed. This means that backpedaling players that are shooting with ranged items can be caught easier and creates more strategy for players switching between melee and ranged. There’s also some more math behind this change and I’ll upload a video soon showing our player movement.

We’ve also added a lot of small things such player and mob animations, environment tiles, and story details.

In the next two weeks (we hope) we will start doing balance testing on our first “boss” of sorts. This is very exciting for us because we are going to be having some of our friends test the fight out. This will be the first time we’ve had people outside of ourselves play the game.

I hope the next update will be in video form to give you all a visual look of what we have been working on.

Until next time 🙂

Easter Update: Stash/Inventory system complete (well mostly)

Overdue update! Chase has been plugging away at our checklist of goals for alpha and he completed a big piece this week.  Our stash and inventory system was a big hurdle because of the online dynamic and it’s done (99.9234512%)!. A lot of other features in our game rely’s on that code so it is a huge step for us.

Graphically we’ve changed quiet a bit in the last month.  I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of looks and I’ve finally settled on a style. In our recent posts we’ve shown our main character and items and I’ve decided to have the rest of the world and environments match that pixel art look. Since making that decision I’ve been slowly changing over our gui and adding new content. I’m going to wait to show off what the game looks like currently in motion because of the lack of objects on our environments.

One last thing I wanted to show is a mockup of our menu screen/cover. I didn’t quiet finish it (notice the shadow less bear) but I covered the general idea. I’ve handed this over to our friend @tsgrust and he’s been working on his own take. I can’t wait to see what he creates, but until then, here’s my mockup.

The Road to Alpha

(Britt) A couple of weeks ago Chase and I compiled a checklist of features that we wanted in the game before we started testing “Beneath Us” with a group of people. We came up with 26 different things and Chase has made pretty good progress on about 5 of those since then.  Some of those features include our farming system, weather and day night cycle. If you watched our demo each of these were already in the game but not complete. Chase has added a little more depth to them this week. He’s also about 70- 80% done with our chat and tower systems.

Right now the list wouldn’t make too much sense to post because its written in an odd way. Things like, “fix stacky bug thingamajig”. I’ll see if we can clean it up this week and post it with the progress that has been made.

On the art side of things, I’ve been adding livestock to our game as well as touching up our main character. Like I mentioned in our previous post we changed the look of our main character to a different style of pixel art than the terrain. Here’s what he looks like now walking.

 

 

Some other animations are complete on him as well but I don’t have access to them on this computer. Ultimately we will make it to where you can customize your skin color, sex and hairstyle.Since this gif was made I have changed his legs a bit so that there is no gap between him and his body.

I’ve also finished the art for our farming system. We have 4 different stages of 4 different crops; corn, tomato, pumpkin and hemp.  With each of the crops and livestock we want them to fill a different need. A good example would be using your cow’s milk to give you a 2 hour health buff. The corn feeds your livestock while hemp is used for string/rope in different weapons and buildings. Crops can have multiple uses when crafting. You also have the option of breaking down the individual crop into even more seeds after its grown to its full potential.

These are just a few things that we’ve got going on right now and like everything, they’re subject to change.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Weapons

(Britt) I’ve been having a lot of fun designing weapons and learning more about pixel art. Our weapons and even our protagonist now are taking on a pixel art style. We were playing around with the visuals and we think it really makes our player and weapons/items pop with the back drop of our world. Our world and monsters/animals still retain the same look that we showed off in our fist demo though. Only the weapons and main character have changed. From a story/setting perspective, the changes work well with what we are trying to do.

Here are just a few items that I’ve done. Had to throw in a Majora’s Mask style sword 😉

We are going to have a huge collection of weapons, including bows, sword, hammers, axes and more. I don’t want to put a number or guesstimate on the amount of weapons we will have until we get into more balancing.

My brother and I really like exaggerated pixel weapons so you will see that reflected in our game. We grew up playing a lot of 2D mmo’s and 2D rpgs so farming for that sweet looking item is something we’ve done a lot over the years and enjoyed. We are still discussing how we are going to tier the weapons. Items will have different effects and attributes, including things like bleed, speed reduction etc. This will make the question “which item is better?” more ambiguous. Of course, something like a starting wooden sword vs a heavily farmed diamond/obsidian axe will be clear cut which is better, but we want play-style to also be a bit of a factor.

Thank you all for continuing to read our updates. I’ll try to continue to post on a weekly basis…TRY 😛

Networking and Towers

(Britt) Over the last couple of weeks Chase has turned his attention to cleaning up and adding code on the networking side of things. Since I only mainly do the art and design side of the game I can’t go into too much detail about what he’s done. But I know a good chunk of it has been smoothing out online player interaction. Our goal is for online play to be as seamless as possible and to look as clean as if you were playing offline. I think we are about at that point. Chase has also added a bit of PVP systems.  He has added global kill pvp streak announcements and global visuals/audio to make things more exciting. We feel like the global announcements gives the players a bit of an extra incentive to take on other players and become infamous. Be careful though, you might not want to become preoccupied too much with attacking other players as you will also need to focus your attention on the Titans. A player might not be too forgiving when he sees giant rock monsters destroying your belongings, if you were just seen killing innocents the night before.

I don’t have many visuals to update what we’ve been working on but I’ll leave you guys with screenshots of our current towers. Right now the plan is for the towers to be resource expensive because we feel like they give the players a big advantage. Each tower gives the players the ability to scout out other players, Titans, etc. Climbing the tower will zoom the map out to give you a better view of the area. You will want to build these strategically around the map. We are still brainstorming about the towers and its possible uses.

Tonight Chase and I will be hopping on the game together and testing out the new spawn point system he has created.  Hopefully I’ll have video soon of some of the progress that we made.

Until next time!

 

 

Elites

(Britt) I wrote a bit about Titans and the threat that they pose but there will also be danger that lives above ground. We want to prevent players from being too complacent so we’re testing out certain aggro ranges and how enemy wildlife should interact with players and what you’ve created. There will be certain things that you can build to help protect your belongings but there should always be a need to go out and explore. The increasing occurrence of the Titans will help drive most of that need. When a Titan spawns  the ground will shake to make the players aware of their arrival. You’ll then want to scout out the Titans using watch towers and other things so that you can defeat them to gain resources and also to scavenge their underground. You will also get resources off of regular spawns but also by scouting out “elites”.  Elites will have a different color palette then regular enemies, sometimes a different size, damage amounts and even attack animation. These harder enemies will give you better/rarer resources. Here’s a few examples of elites compared to their normal spawns.