Development Blog

Character Redesign

03/19/2019

After much musing and experimentation, we’ve decided to double down on making our character designs abstract.

The original character art was designed to give the illusion of looking at the top of a vaguely human head, with floating hands and feet.

As we’ve play tested the game and continued progressing with development, we found that these character designs had many flaws. They were limited, difficult to read, and overall just looked awkward.

Our new design is much simpler and leaves more to the imagination, which is perfect for this perspective.

Most importantly, this new design is one crucial piece of allowing us to remove the HUD and display important information directly on the character.

We think this new art style will be a lot more appealing and allow us to make far more interesting characters.


Posted by: Eluem on 03/19/2019

Life Finds a Way (To Get in the Way)

03/03/2019

But… we’re back and we’ve got some updates coming along.

2017 & 2018

Life happened. Some great things, and some not so great. However, now that my life is starting to normalize a bit, I’m able to focus on my projects more.

Updated Art

The next major update I’d like to share about Helheim is that we’ve overhauled our character and weapon art designs quite significantly.
This also relates to our plans to massively overhaul the UI…. or lack there of, but we’ll get into that in another post.

Regarding the art, we’ve made a major design shift away from the current pseudo top down view towards some more abstract characters.
Also, our weapon designs have been streamlined and stylized.

I can’t wait to show you what we have, and why we decided to change these designs.

PAX 2019

Oh and one more thing! We’re going to be at PAX East 2019 (since we ALWAYS go!).
We won’t have a booth, but we’re super excited to meet other gamers and game developers as we do every year.

If you bump into us somehow, we’d love to discuss Helheim, or development process, or anything else regarding games!

Hope to see you there!


Posted by: Eluem on 03/03/2019

Progress Update #6 – Map Progress

06/07/2016

We’ve been working on adding a layer of polish to all of our in game assets. The first thing we wanted to go over was our balcony map.

We’re constantly developing our art style and trying to figure out exactly how we want Helheim to look. Below are some screenshots of the map as it has progressed over the last few months.

Garden Balcony Version 1

This is one of the first playable versions of this map. We were trying to test some different water colors and in this particular screenshot. The original plan for this map was to make it a ruins of the plateau jutting out of the side of a massive mountain. We had a difficult time getting the mountain to look nice in this perspective with our fairly limited resources.

Garden Balcony Version 2

Eventually, we decided to replace the concept of setting the map on the side of a mountain with making it a garden balcony on a massive skyscraper. This suited our lore quite well and made for a much easier time getting the backdrop to look right. We also tuned and increased the overall level of detail with this revision.

Garden Balcony Version 3

In our current version, we decided to increase the overall level of detail again. We’re still trying to find the balance between how much detail we want in the game compared to how clear we want the gamestate to be. We also went over the level design in this version, adding new obstacles and removing others in an attempt to adjust how players naturally use the different parts of the map. As you can see, this version of the map also contains a flags for our CTF game mode.


Posted by: Eluem on 06/07/2016

Interview With OPNoobs

05/26/2016

When we went to IndieCade East, we had the pleasure of meeting two fellows from the PC Gaming  site, OPNoobs.

After playing Helheim, they asked us if we’d be interested in discussing our game. Of course, we were delighted! I personally love talking, and ranting, about video games… so it was quite fun!

Watch the interview below or on OpNoobs website.

Hope you enjoy seeing us discuss the origin of Helheim!


Posted by: Eluem on 05/26/2016

PAX East & IndieCade East 2016

05/09/2016

Now that things have finally started winding down from PAX East and IndieCade (also Overwatch and Dark Souls 3….), we wanted to make a post about how those events went.

20160424_143029

PAX East

As usual, PAX East was an amazing experience. It’s our favorite event to attend every year, there’s always so many new awesome promising games and so many great indie developers. We would love to have a booth there someday.

 

IndieCade East

The following week we attended IndieCade East, which was a new experience for us. There were so many interesting, clever, and just plain well built games there that I haven’t heard of. There were also a bunch of really strange experimental games that were really awesome. One of the coolest things about IndieCade East is the Shown & Tell Cafe that they run. Developers are given a small table and a monitor for a 2 hour time slot to show off anything they’re working on. It’s a great experience for new developers to get feedback on their work, you simply need to register with your purchased IndieCade ticket.

While this may sound a little self serving, my absolute favorite experience during IndieCade East was having our very own table in the Show & Tell Cafe and seeing everyone’s reactions to Helheim! It was such an exciting experience, seeing how everyone played the game and hearing their reactions. Most people that played seem to have a lot of fun, and at times we had a full set of 4 players enjoying our new prototype CTF mode. I just watched with this big stupid grin. It was easily one of the most satisfying experiences in my entire life.

20160430_114612
20160430_105628

 

085

Some Promising Games We Discovered

Here is a short list of games we thought looked awesome and either never heard of or knew very little about prior to these events:

Also, not that it needs any help, we thought Law Breakers looked pretty promising as a modern FPS that didn’t look like a typical Mil-Sim.


Posted by: Eluem on 05/09/2016

Helheim at PAX East 2016!!

04/19/2016

pax We’re heading to Boston in a few day for PAX East and we’re super excited! We will be enjoying all that is PAX including playing old and new games, panels, dance parties ect. We’re also going to be bring Helheim with us.

We are really excited to show off the progress we’ve made so far. It’s been a lot of fun developing it and we’re ready to get some feedback.


Posted by: Eluem on 04/19/2016

Progress Update #5 – Water Mechanics

03/28/2016

We’ve finally fully implemented the first iteration of the set of mechanics for how the player will interact with the water on the new cliff map we’re working on. Surprisingly, creating some of the interactions required a lot of rengineering of core systems that were already implemented. So, it also required a TON of refactoring. The main reason for this is the fact that we wanted to create a concept of being “under” the bridge when you fell into the water. At first, this sounds like it’d be some fairly trivial physics or mechanics. However, when you take into account the fact that this game runs with a 2d physics engine, it becomes a lot more complex.

You need to set up tons of layers and complex systems to determine when the player (and other objects) will be interacting with the water or the bridge. After iterating through 2 entirely different systems for implementing this, I found one that I felt would serve us well enough for the types of interactions we would like to support. It’s still an art to actually implement the system into different maps… but I’m pretty happy with what we have now.

Balcony Map


Posted by: Eluem on 03/28/2016

Progress Update #4 – Floating Status Bars and Dash Differentiation

02/29/2016

Status Bars

We’ve been working very hard to design and implement some nice status bars for a while now. We decided to scrap the HUD style status bars that were shown in the original alpha video. For Helheim, we think floating status bars that follow your player make more sense. You don’t want to glance to the edge of your screen somewhere to find out how much health or mana you currently have. It’s far easier to glance within a couple inches of your character.

So lets breakdown what you’re seeing here. The red and green are pretty straight forward health and stamina. You’ll also notice small and large notches in the healthbar. The small notches represent 10 health each and the large notches represent a health threshold. If you take no damage for a small amount of time, your health will regenerate up to the next threshold. The blue on the left is your mana. You generate mana by landing different attacks (the amount that they generate can vary). The mana is split into 4 “chunks”. All abilities that spend mana cost 1-4 “chunks” of your mana pool. This makes mana management a more straight forward choice and it makes it easier to recognize how many uses of what abilities you can use.

The last thing in this gif is a specialized bar for any ammo based ability. Here, the player with the dual daggers has the Shuriken equipped. They have 3 ammo before needing to reload, so you can see that under their health bar. This space will be used differently depending on how the ability functions. It can be used to represent cooldowns via a bar or abilities that charge up via a bar that fills up over time, for example. If you equip two abilities with such specialized bars, you’ll see a second bar show up under your health.

There’s still a decent bit to flesh out with them. For example, we’d like to prevent them from overlapping by having them push each other out of the way. We also implemented a feature so that when they overlap a player, they fade out a bit.. however we think that this feature needs some tuning as well. Lastly, it we’re considering coloring the borders or health values differently for each local player…

We think that, in the end, this interface will serve players nicely in allowing them to focus on the moment to moment tactical decisions.

Dash Differentiation

In Helheim, your equipped weapon is the core defining factor of your character’s play style. As such, different weapons can have entirely different dashes. Not just in terms of animation, but in terms of functionality as well. They can vary in how long they are, how many i-frames they have, and possibly work completely differently than most like our planned Sword and Shield (having a shield charge instead of a dodge).

On the left, the two dashes are equal in every way except their look. In the build on the right, we’ve significantly altered the physics of the Ultra Greatsword such that it will come to a stop much earlier.

 

(Side Note: I personally believe that the dashes in both of these gifs have too much distance, but we’re still playing around with this to get an idea of what feels good)

I believe that having the power to control how each weapon’s dash works individually is a great way to balance and further differentiate each weapon. However, in general, they should most likely fit within certain standards unless it really suits the weapon. Like for the Sword and Shield, for example.


Posted by: Eluem on 02/29/2016

Progress Update #3 – Dual Daggers and Concept Art

02/23/2016

Dual Dagger Combo 1Dual Daggers

This past week we got some more mechanics implemented for the Dual Daggers. There’s still more to do as far as polishing, and I’d like to add a few more attacks to finish the weapon up, but this is good for getting an idea of balancing large vs small weapons for now.

In the gif you can see three distinct actions from the Dual Dagger’s move set. First you see a left diagonal slash. The Dual Daggers can do left and right diagonal dashing slashes with the R2 and L2 triggers. This can be used to close in on enemies and reposition yourself while simultaneously attacking. Then you see a simple R1->R1 combo. This combo chain has a few more moves in it, but you only see the first two slashes here.

The last move you see is an evasive cross slash which can be used to deal significant damage in a large area and simultaneously create distance from your opponent. It’s a good move to throw in when you’re running low on stamina after rushing in and dealing a bunch of damage to your opponent.

I think that with these moves implemented, the Dual Daggers are shaping up quite nicely to achieve their goal of being an agile weapon with quick and ferocious engagements with swift disengagements.


Concept Art

So far we haven’t shown any concept art or even really given too much of an idea about the world that the game will take place in. So in this update, I’d like to take some time to address that a little bit.

Death:

Death Concept Art

When a person’s life comes to an end, they were once greeted by a Valkyrie which would usually either bring you to Asgard or Helheim. However, as the population of humanity grew, and since most humans aren’t worthy of being brought to Asgard, the Valkyries were beginning to become fatigued bringing the many average souls to Helheim.

In response to this Hephestus, hoping to impress Frejya, created a sentient servant to collect the souls of those would would be brought to Helheim so that the Valkyries could focus only on those deemed worthy of being brought to Asgard. This servant would become known to mortals as Death.

Hel:

Hel Concept Art

Helheim, named after it’s overseer, is inhabited mostly by the souls of those mortals whose passions were not strong enough to burn brightly through their transition into the eternity of afterlife.

Entirely complacent with wherever they find themselves, these souls barely bother to drag themselves about unless they are disturbed. The dreary sense of decay and loneliness that fills Hel’s domain has become engraved in her very being.


Posted by: Eluem on 02/23/2016