Interior Designs & Graphics Galore
Recently the team finished up some map interior graphics & some of the few remaining animations for Arcadian Atlas’s 4 CORE job classes.
Becca has been working up some graphics for house interiors and our Recruitment Centers throughout Arcadia. You can see a few of these below.
And if we zoom in a bit you can see some light pouring through new windows, and bench for troops to sit and wait (because isn’t a Recruitment Center just a glorified waiting room) , and a fancy desk for processing new troops.
Of course, when you’re not waiting, you’re training with some quality practice dummies and an assortment of weaponry for our discerning warriors:
And when you’re ready to lay your sweet head to rest, we’ve got a deluxe bed you could probably cram a couple of people in (uncomfortably, but this isn’t a charity!) and some barrels full of wine to help the long hours seem short.
We’re also putting finishing touches on our primary attack animations, ensuring all eight frames front and back are as smooth as possible. From the heavy crossbow toting Ranger above, to the gargantuan hammer our Apothecary is dragging around below, we’re nearly done with all our CORE classes and their various fightin’ styles!
And of course a whole slew of new items for our re-vamped BITE enabled item editors!
Introducing: The BITE Engine
Way back when we jumped from RPG Maker to the more expansive world of Unity, we had a vision for not just our dream game, but for a creation tool so user-friendly it could be given to anyone who wanted to make a tactical RPG (one of the most notoriously difficult genres to create).
That dream is beginning to become a reality concurrently with the creation of Arcadian Atlas. Patrick has been hard-at-work on the foundation for what we are dubbing the BITE engine enhancement - an add-on that utilizes Odin Inspector’s tools to create easily-modifiable units, scenarios, skills, items, weapons, and scenes. The best part: this tool is being developed in conjunction with Atlas, meaning every benefit to the system is a benefit to the game, which includes the following:
More Power to the Game Designer - A large portion of a game designer’s life is turning knobs and whistles to balance values and to create the best possible experience for the player. You’ve all probably played RPGs with horrid difficulty spikes, or gotten bored going hours without a challenge. BITE allows us to easily and quickly implement your feedback when it comes beta time!
Smaller File and Patch Sizes - To get Arcadian Atlas’ prototype off the ground, we initially utilized Unity Prefabs. Moving to a new different segmented form of data means we can be much more efficient with the size of the game, as well as any patches we make on Steam (and elsewhere). We know some of you backers have internet data caps, so we want to keep file sizes as user-friendly as possible!
Advanced Cutscenes and Scenarios - We’ve forged a giant pyramid of stats, classes, status effects, and skills out of the prototype’s design work so far. Cutscenes and scenarios (missions) rely on pretty much everything, so being clean and organized with those building blocks allows us to quickly create, reorder, and modify events.
Plug & Play Capabilities - We’ve re-structured the logic and data to separate it from the graphics, which is a fancy way of saying Arcadian Atlas and future tactical RPGs using BITE will require far less digging into code-bases to create and play!
Effortless Changes - With BITE’s data-driven design, we can remove, add, and change everything from units, status effects, skills, missions, locations, cutscenes (or most anything else) effortlessly midway through development based on new needs and feedback!
Iconic
To celebrate BITE, we wanted to show off some of the graphics we’re paring with Patrick’s data-driven systems.
Iconography is an integral part of the user experience, and serves both as localization tool (because images require no translation) and ease of navigation. We love the design challenge of creating icons for our stats, items, text boxes, and menus that are at the same time simple, clean, and communicate efficiently. See below just a handful of those we’ve cooked up for our items:
Improvements Abound with Odin
As pretty as these lil’ dudes are walking, slapping, and smashing about - a video game has to be as efficient as possible. Our programmer Patrick recently upgraded our Unity build with Odin Inspector, a powerful tool that’s allowed him to streamline how maps, cutscenes, and menus save data and juggle database information.
We’ve gone from complicated and rather ugly excel files for items to completely in-engine databases with images and separate, easy-to-read and alter fields like this:
But it’s not just for databases! Odin has far-reaching implications for space saving, with the potential to reduce both disk and RAM space requirements by upwards of 90%! That’s huge for download size and run speed! In fact, we’re already applying it to how maps are constructed and saved:
So while we absolutely adore the animations and art side of Arcadian Atlas, this is easily what is making us most happy!
Oh, but we forgot that we’re even improving how animations are handled in the background ; ). Blend Trees will allow us to better organize all of our isometric animations within Unity so that we can finish hooking it up to our unique characters and classes faster! Possibly 75% faster! NUMBERS! BIG NUMBERS EVERYWHERE!
(Blend Trees to Reduce Animation Programming Lag)
Serving Fierce Face
Let’s face it (see what I did there?): little Apothecary and Warmancer sprites are super cute, but sometimes we need to look a person square in the high-detailed eye and give them a good talkin’ to.
So Becca and I have been hard at work on portraits to go with our sprites. Because there’s nothing sadder than walking into a tavern and the tavern-master won’t even look you in the face. That’s enough reason to brawl right then and there!
Dressed to the Nines
We want all our classes prepped and ready for battle, and it’s tough to go to battle naked. These are just facts. Not only do you look like a crazy person, but swords and arrows are going to go clean through that tender skin.
So one of the very practical things we’ve been working on? Animation, and that means putting clothes on these little freaks:
Insider View: For all those who ask, Becca and I (Taylor) primarily use Photoshop and Pyxel Edit for our graphics work. Pyxel Edit is especially useful for animations, as it has digital onion skin layovers and a continuous preview of the animation as you work!
Animating characters involves a meticulous knowledge of each piece of clothing the character wears. With the Ranger, the frills on his boots and loose sleeves move independently of closer-hugging clothing like his gloves. So in action animations, there’s a slight delay before those items move in relation to the rest of his clothing.
Likewise with the Cavalier, their capes are bulky and have a real weight to them, so during the jump animation you’ll notice it still pulls down and drags until late in the jump.
And this year in the Arcadian Atlas Olympics, who won the high jump event? Fem Cavalier, obviously.
Game Development: Back to Basics
Ah, the essentials of a fight. We’ve got our Idling, Walking, Injured, Charging, Jumping, Flying, Landing, Death animations, and the list goes on! And remember, that’s for front views, back views, male, and female troops. 48+ unique frames per class, 2 genders, 4 classes - that’s 384+ unique frames just for basic animations!
Over the last few months we’ve been steadily chipping away at them, and we’re happy to say we’ve not only finalized the designs for our male/female Apothecary and male/female Warmancer - but we’ve even knocked out all of their core animations! Yep, all 384+ of them!
And now we move on to the specialized attacks for each class, one of which Becca’s been hard at work on below:
Hammer SMASH’n
Anatomy of Animation
Artistically, animation is one of the most pain-staking processes of game development. It’s a multilayered art, both literally and figuratively, and we wanted to give you a peek behind that process in more depth as we finalize the animations for our core classes.
Each core class has a list of essential battle animations, arranged in a sheet, that are consistent across classes. What’s not consistent across classes? Attacks & Skills.
So when making new animations, we start with real-world examples and build keyframes from them. In the case of the above Apothecary Bottle Throw animation, I used myself as a base and built from it.
New animations typically work in stages:
- Raw Footage - a video or gif of real-world people performing the action to be animated.
- Skeleton - the basic shapes of an animation, typically very rough. This is used to ensure the flow of the animation looks correct before detail is added.
- Naked Base - the naked form all classes can use before hair, clothes, and other details are added.
- Clothed - usually the final stage where all class-specific content is added to the naked base and added to that core classes’ sprite sheet.
So in essence, any new animation we create is actually 3 animations, and from start to finish with the Apothecary Bottle Throw it looks like the example below:
And that’s just the specialized animations! We’ve got a whole slew of basic movements and actions to tackle.
- T