Hunter’s Tale – going marketing

First thing to understand when promoting or trying to make a game visible is that even the smallest thing matters.

Also, you have to define your game in a way understandable not just for your head, so you have to put everything as much straightforward as possible. Few words: “superbrothers meet monster hunter and zelda”. Also, you need criteria to make the project interesting. I think hat our are the same that I will need to evaluate the project:

– strong art direction

– gameplay elements taken from consolidated genre of games

-strictly tries to stay inside a genre: the more it fits a genre (for us, action rpg), the more you will find a specific target audience and they will start interesting on the project

posting on twitter an image using the hashtag gamedev or indiedev helps it spreading around, and doing that on saturday using the hashtag screenshotsaturday can help even more, We got featured on this page!

http://indiegames.ch/screenshot-samstag-2-august-2014/

Also, you have to put your project into more websites possibles for indie. Right now I opened a steam greenlight draft page for the game

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=295749938

and I’m plannin, when the trailer and demo will be available, to go with more websites such as indiedb, epocu or indiecade. We’ll see later!

Meanwhile an italian website for videogames has written an article about the project!

http://www.games969.com/2014/08/04/hunter-s-tale-nuove-informazioni-sul-progetto/

Working on promoting the game is keeping me busy for entire days, got to get back to graphics now!

 

 

Hunter’s Tale – Level Design with construct2

After months of working with animations in Photoshop and Aseprite, I can say that the process of learning, testing and finalizing pixelart in motion is turning on quite nicely. So far I’m fitting my schedule plan but, even if every animation requires a specific and different research and making process, it feels kinda frustrating doing always the same thins. This is why I was so excited to do the level design for the game: not just the developing and drawing process (I already talked about that previously) but also taking all the sprites into the game engine (Construct2) and building the actual real level design of the game. It’s actually not that hard as it may sound, as it’s basically just like puzzling all the sprites where they fit, but it’s more like a work of patience, as there are a lot of things to insert and consider and, as it’s just like a puzzle, every piece must fit perfectly in the overall scheme.

The layering is the first thing: I already knew how many layers to insert, the hardest part was to insert the treees and the grass in the right position. It’s actually a developing process, and considering the paths of the character and the hidden ones, some trees needed to be moved and, fore example, some new items needed to be drawed, such as some small walls or stones to block the paths.

Above all you can see how all the layers fit. There are some effect missing in this image, but you can still see that it’s working nicely. It was nice to learn and do something different for once.

Hunter’s Tale – WIP screenshots from the bossfight and 5th test video

Poor Giuseppe, during these days, is coding the gian Toad bossfight. The hardest thing he’s been facing so far is the animation of jumping animals. Imagine with a giant one! No to spoil any new movements from the toad, You’ll see only the arrival and the walking parts:

The arrival is mainly when you get into the arena: from above, the toad falls down make a big impac on the ground and yells rageously: these are some screenshots about this part. After that, he/she (we didn’t decide the sex of the toad) start walking through you. The message is: you’re so SCREWED

I’ve started using freevideotogif editor. It’s much easier for me to use videos and turn them into gifs. They quite work very well!

 

Hunter’s Tale – character animation with wyvern suit

When you’ve already animated the same animations with 2 different suits, it may seem easy enough to do a third one.

The fact is that for the wyvern suit we wanted something different: it’s not just the more badass-look of the suit iself, we decided to change weapon too: instead of having sword+shield, we have a giant sword (it’s as tall as the character, poor videogame characters, carrying giant swords since the eighties). That measn that there is still a covering sistem even if there’s no shield, but some movements and especially the attacks needed to be reimagined: it would have been slower and look heavier.

Still, most of the animation looks the same:

Now, the different ones:

The Idle with weapon animation was the first one that required some studies behind it: what would have been the best position to rest while carrying such a great sword?

first version was the more logic one: he’s resting so he use the sword as a staff. It didn’t look very well though, so we changed our minds and decided to have it non-rational.

The final version definitely looks better and looks like this:

The attack animation, again, needed to look heavier and slower.

 

These are some WIP and studies for defense position

Hunter’s Tale – Forth Video test

4th video test for #hunterstale now with a first glimpse at @MauroKenjiSerra music!

I’m so excited to show for the first time the game with music, we worked together with Mauro to make the soundtrack as much perfect as possible and now that it’s finished we can really see how it fits the game!

Again, see how the music is fundamental to define the overall athmosphere

Hunter’s Tale – 3rd WIP video test

The most important thing about video tests is that are those parts that shows what the game is really about. The single animations work may be found (hopefully) interesting for the development process, but in the end it’s how the real game is that matters the most.

Even if these tests shows unfinished work and no sfx or music at all, they help evaluating the game:

-they shows the art direction for the game: it’s still not enought to get the entire athmosphere (you’ll need music and sfx too for that), you can still get to see the world the gme is settled in

-one by one, these videos defines the design of the game: not just the level design, but also the features and combat system: this helps to get future players to see that in terms of gameplay, the machanics are not new, but still consolidated ones, so that they knew what to expect.

– knowing what to expect is the most important thing for a project like Hunter’s Tale: it’s supposed to fit a specific genre, so videos must help this concept and help therefore to intrigue the future audience.

Hunter’s Tale – the GIANT bossfight, getting into the scale

This is another of those moments you realise you aimed for something too big…It could sound like a bad pun, but implementing the giant would literally take more time than we have. Not animating it, but he coding part would be harder because (as I will say in the giant animation posts) a monster this big requires to be animated in separate parts and put together inengine, so that you will only see the legs when the camera is down or only the torso when the camera is up.

Also, how could you defeat such a big boss (kojima joke)? the bossfight needed to be designed carefully, there is the risk to make it too “platformish” or to make it too “Bland”, like the other fights. This is not the case. This needed to be special, bigger.

This is why we decided to…SPOILER! Seriously, I’ve been telling almost everything about the game and the levels, I’m going to keep this for myself and let the players judge with the demo (or not). All I can say is that we fit our schedule, so there will be time for everything, hopefully.

Meanwhile, talking about scaling, I’d like to show you with this image how actually big is the giant.

Hunter’s Tale – again more UI

The idea is that you will need to accept quests in order to land for hunting/adventure/exploration in the wilderness. But how does the quest system works? There has to be a place inside the village which you accept them or you won’t be able to leave the village. I think I already told that we choose the pub to be this place. Also, as all the UI so far has been drawed to look like scrap pieces of paper, these needed the same treatment. Ideally the are separate, though, so you can keep the piece with your mission, like a bounty hunter of some sorts. Even if it’s with monsters, but still you get the point in that, do you?

Hunter’s Tale – icon

study for the game icon. It might sound a bit exhaggerated, but it’s actually the first thing you see from a page, so it needed to look right.

Meanwhile we decided to expand our social network range, please check out the polycount thread and facebook page!

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137364

https://www.facebook.com/hunterstale

 

 

The final one looks like this.

Hunter’s Tale – The ingame map

Designing the ingame map in something strange: it’s not supposed to look precisely like the ingame map and it need to have nice graphics and be understandable, otherwise orientation will result hard and therefore the game will look disorientating.

Taking the knowledge of all the maps I’ve seen in games, I decided I wanted to do something geometrical and straightforward: the map itself in our game is important in terms not just of locaing the character, but later on the escaping monster too (we’re not sure if this feature will be in the demo too)

As always, I made some sketches first and then drawed the pixelart.

This is the final aspect. Of course you will find connection and secret passages throughout the gameplay.