It's been 1.5 years since I posted the last dev update here. And only a couple of dev updates since I pledged to try and post one update every couple of months ːarchduckː I guess we now know that might have been a bit overambitious commitment to make on my part.

Let me bring you up to speed with what happened during that time. And boy, did stuff happen!

We have been tackling the project from three angles: art, tech, and design. What makes this especially tricky is that these three are interlocked, so there are plenty of unknowns with each decision. This leads to uncertainty and this took a toll on the team. After the exceptionally tough years during the pandemic lockdown, we had more than one team member burnout.

And by burnout, I meant not the "I can't connect to my muse" state but rather the "dark bottomless pit with no escape" kind of affair. It's much better now, thank you. We have found the mindset that allows us to move forward. Remember everyone: self-care is important and should come first.

This is one of the reasons for the radio silence - even though work was progressing everyone felt like we were not moving ahead despite the great deal of work we put in. The expectation to deliver news was crushing at times.

This is also why we have decided to be much more open about the development (as you can see from this rather personal post) and plan around the unknowns. We believe that most of that expectation was ultimately in our heads since the community was nothing if not understanding all this time. You are awesome, by the way.

So, after that heavy and long intro, let's get to the stuff we worked on during the project so far!

As I mentioned all three aspects are interconnected. Art is directly linked to the engine. Our engine, CUG, is primarily 2D. As we worked on Book of Aliens prototypes and Hellcard we came to a decision that our games could benefit from a switch to 3D. Our current art asset production pipelines already included 3D models that were rendered onto 2D sprites and manually imported to the engine. And they put into pseudo 3D hierarchies that imitated 3D. Not the most efficient way to do it, but it did have some benefits. If you are interested in how it worked I did an Imgur post on it here[imgur.com].

The initial artstyle you all know was designed for a 2D rendering with no dynamic lights, free 3D camera, or effects like fog.

Models from the above picture have many jagged edges and, in some cases, are flat since they were designed for a fixed camera.

We had to reinvent the textures, how the paper meshes are built, and everything else for it to work in 3D.

This process is still ongoing, but I would like to show you one of our mockup maps in 3D:
As you can see the scale is smaller, and the map is being unfolded as it is being explored. That's one visual effect area we are planning to explore and a topic for a whole other post.

Please don't be reading too much into how dark/lighthearted it looks. This can be easily modified with shaders and texture design. Since then we have been preparing assets to be used in the prototypes and the final game.

And a short peek of an in-engine tile visual exploration state representation (which I like a lot):
As you can see above this test was done in-engine but with the older design of a tile. A much larger one.

We have decided that ditching our old, trusty engine is the best way forward. This would allow us to free manpower for doing actual games not taking care of what's underhood. Also shifting to 3D would be an insane amount of work, unfeasible for our team.

It took the team almost a year of careful consideration and research. Such decisions are not taken lightly since we had to adapt our whole tech stack to the new tech. The wrong choice here would cost us dearly in the future.

Eventually, we decided to move to Unity. Yeah. This was around 2021. It seemed a better choice being indie-friendly with a huge community. Not without issues, of course. But the good stuff outweighed the bad. We worked out pipelines and started churning out assets even as the mechanical design was still undergoing. The team was learning the intricacies of the engine, new prototypes were made in the new engine as well.

And then the whole Unity meltdown happened. For those of you who don't know Unity suddenly decided to change monetization models from a subscription to per-install pay. This in itself wasn't a huge problem, we were pretty confident they would have to backtrack and rework this into something feasible. However, this meant Unity just can't be trusted with long-term development and support. Not to mention Unity kept sacking engineers and hiring marketing people instead. Which didn't bode well for the future of the engine.

I won't go into the details but we have decided to switch to Unreal Engine as a result. We didn't post a piece of dramatic news at the time, since the decision wasn't emotional. It's a cold calculation. We can't be left with a dead or unusable engine in 3 or 7 years. Or worse yet, one that forces a monetization model on us and our community. We intend to make a series of games here - and at the end of this journey we want all of them to keep working and be available to the players ːarchduckː

This shift to yet another engine comes with a steep price tag - we have to redo much of what we have already created. The team has to learn the new engine all over again (not that we are complaining here, learning new stuff is exciting but it does slow you down). This will take time as we will be creating smaller test projects for GFX (like the one with the rotating tile above). We are also considering making a smaller and easier project on the new engine before moving full throttle ahead with writing the code for Book of Aliens. The more dry runs we make first the better and less buggy game will come out of it.

It has an upside though - we got an opportunity to revisit the assets and designs and improve on them. With Unreal we are also confident that we can make the game perform better and make it look better. And, who knows, maybe one of these smaller games will turn out to be fun enough to share with the world ːarchduckː

Here is where it gets really interesting. We have come up with several completely different designs for the core mechanic. Including a sudoku-based one. Yes, you read that right! That one didn't make it into the final selection though.

Some prototypes were very basic in the visual layer, focusing only on the raw mechanics, like this one:
As you can see both soldiers and actions are cards in this one and there are no tiles (blasphemy!).

Others utilized actual art and were playable from start to end with a whole campaign implemented (we often overdo stuff, I know).

Over time we concluded that we expect two things from tactical shooters and UFO games that are difficult to mix: opportunity to plan our game and a bit of chaos to spice things up.

That's why our designs explored mechanics that mixed these two ingredients in various proportions. As a result, we ended up with not one but two games. We want to finish prototyping the second one and then we will decide which one is going into preproduction. And the other one may also get made at a later date. That's a huge benefit of all that time we have spent on art style. We can adapt it to new ideas quickly and without changes to base assets.

This also is a topic for a whole other post though.

This is where we are right now. A better place, and excited about the stuff we are working on. The team is small, and the task is huge but I hope the glimpses I have shown you here give you an idea of how much work went into the project already. And what it can become.

I will be posting new stuff as it comes. For the foreseeable future, though, we will be learning Unreal and adapting our workflows. This isn't a particularly interesting topic to write about, certainly doesn't come with a lot of cool screenshots. So maybe the next post will be more about art and challenges we faced when adapting our 2D style to a 3rd dimension? Let me know in the comments if that sounds like something you would like to read about.

Stay safe on paper tiles,
Konstanty

In the last few updates, we have been talking about influences and, most recently, logos. Today let’s get back to the meat of it, namely the guns.

Weapons have always been an important aspect of UFO games. On the surface it’s pretty obvious - it’s the guns that kill the invading aliens, of course they are important!

But they did more than that. Weapons progression was an important narrative device. We started the game with the best humanity could throw at the alien threat. Best rifles, over-the-top portable canons. All high caliber. All futuristic, bulky, and looking ridiculously powerful. Who didn’t think “this will blow these aliens out of the water” when looking at his arsenal for the first time?

And it all was not enough! This highlighted how hopelessly outmatched we were in that war. The juxtaposition between our agent futile firing his bulky rifle at a diminutive grey alien hiding in wheat only to be critically wounded by a blast from said alien’s tiny plasma pistol contributed to the overall feeling of dread and despair. Which we all loved.

We aim at recapturing all these experiences in some ways. Getting guns right is important. When designing their cardboard counterpart we tried to preserve the bulkiness. Which isn’t as simple as it sounds when the guns are made of cardboard and paper! As you can see in the progression animation below, we focused on two aspects when designing kinetic starting weapons.

• Bulkiness to convey the power of the guns. This is especially visible on the pistol. Pistols are not very imposing or impressive by themselves, so we struggled here a bit. Eventually, someone came up with a brilliant idea to add a sound suppressor to it. This made the pistol look much more deadly, and impressive, and made it easier to recognize by the outline on the battlefield.
  
• Making the guns themselves more interesting visually than simple flat cutouts. This resulted in more parts being tilted with respect to the core bulk of the gun, like the beforementioned suppressor or magazines.

Book of Aliens team is also part-time helping the Hellcard team this and the next few months. Hellcard is gearing up toward a closed beta and since we are a rather small company they do need a hand as the work gets more intense. This impacts the pace at which we work on the game, but in a few months, the situation should reverse with the Hellcard team giving us a hand.

Meanwhile, you can pass time helping us and considering participating in Hellcard Demo Closed Beta! You can sign up for keys and get more info on the game itself in this news:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1201540/announcements/detail/3262315803613786362

As always, take care and never hunt aliens in wheat by night!
Konstanty