Hey everyone, Igor here.

We’ve been pushing this update back for a bit to make sure we have everything we need to show it off, and it’s finally here. This post showcases once of our larger production maps that will be in Forged of Blood. With all the work that has gone into it, we thought it’d be nice to do a tag-team post again to show how the map goes from one end of the studio to the other.

When we started churning out maps for tactical combat in Forged of Blood, the vast majority of them were designed with tactical play in mind. Creating multiple avenues of approach, engagement points, and allowing for creative solutions in approaching the combat has always been at the forefront of our design philosophy, and once the maps are blocked out, they were passed on to the art side for production (see our post by the art team). For the most part, these maps reused assets according to their environment and were designed with multiple uses in mind – these maps would make the large pool of maps we’ve slotted for the many encounters players would have in-game.

We did however, reserve a handful of maps for one-off uses that would be lore-specific and today we’ll cover the “Mirlitas Ruins.” Without giving too much away, this tactical map is housed in a section of a vast ancient city where the player will encounter a powerful new enemy – or potentially gain a new ally.

With so many little projects going on concurrently, I teamed up with Joe to get the map designed. Going into the design, I had a few story specific objectives that Joe needed to translate into a blocked out map in-engine. First, I wanted the opening engagement to take place in the center of a map where the player’s party will be surrounded by NPCs at an elevated position – an ambush. The story I had in mind gives players the option to engage in a bit of diplomacy instead of outright combat, the map had to be designed to put players in a tactically inferior starting position, but have multiple egress routes to disengage and regroup. Part of the lore I had written also pointed to an inherent weakness in the enemy forces that could help the player end the battle quickly – if they could see the right avenues of approach and had the character builds required. All this plus the need to build a assets and architecture that are unlike the rest of the maps we’ve created so far make this one of the more time intensive maps to produce.

With that I’ll pass this on to Joe for a look at how he interpreted the tactical needs of the story into the map.

Joe:
Hi, Joe here. When I chatted with Igor regarding the map, I started to think what sort of maps would be suitable. Given the pivotal moment where the protagonist will either face a powerful enemy or gain new allies, I thought of the idea that the protagonist will have to make a pilgrimage to seek help. I immediately thought of The Seven Thousands steps on the Throat of the World in Skyrim and like the idea of pilgrimage steps.

For the ambush Igor mentioned, I was thinking that the area where the protagonist spawns will be pretty open with very few cover objects to hide behind. The area should also be enclosed with enough “spawn” points for the ambushers to spawn. Finally, since the protagonist will also meet and have a chance to engage in some key dialogue, I wanted a memorable place for the entire conversation to be set in. With that in mind, this is what I came up after several iterations:

The idea is for the protagonist to walk up the steps and finally meet and talk to a faction leader on top of the stairs. Notice the area has relatively less cover and surrounded by “buildings.” Perfect for ambusher spawn points.

Originally, I planned for the faction leader to stand at this platform. 

I envisioned the platform to be a toppled, half destroyed statue like the image below (keeping in mind the ancient grandeur Igor wanted for the ruins).

Given the background of the factions and faction leader, I thought it would be a powerful image for the player if negotiation for the faction’s help is held while the faction leader stands on the ruins of the previous civilization. Ultimately, we decided to change the platform into another building as this map exceeds the time budget if we were to implement half destroyed statue as platform.

As usual, I tried to make multiple solution approaches for the map so that the player does not have to complete the scenario exactly the way that we designed it to be.

One example in this map is how the player’s respond to the ambush (if ambush happens). If the player decides to retreat, then one way is to run down the stairs, drawing and taking multiple attacks by the ambushers. Or the player can try to make use of this “collapsed” section of the wall as a shortcut and jumped down instead of going through the stairs. However, the player has to charge through multiple ambusher should they chose this route. A fast but fragile party might prefer to sprint through the enemies while the slower but defensive party might prefer wider route. That’s all from my end, once Igor and I liked where the map was, we could hand then pass it on to the art side.

Igor:
Once the map was blocked out by Joe, the next phase was to sit down with Ken and set the environmental theme for the map. In the Forged of Blood lore, this was an ancient city and the architectural style is one that would permeate throughout the world, and what the current world’s  architectural stylings are derivative of. I knew that I wanted it to be grand and ornate. Something appropriate to the architectural tendencies of powerful beings, and the style had to reflect a race that was based on a matriarchal society. Anyway, the heavy lifting then went to Ken really bring the map to life.

Ken:
With this map, my goal was to design a part of the city for the tactical gameplay area. The map was designed with a huge staircase leading up to the big open area, I imagined that this could be the entrance to the city. Visitors coming from the mountain go up through the staircase where the area opens up to a big square. Of course, it’s hard to depict scale with limited resource and pre-determined greybox blocked by the game designers, so there were some liberties taken with the layout of the main square. It’s definitely going to feel more condensed than what an actual city square will look like.

During my first dip into the map, I had to find reasons why the map (or this part of the city) is blocked off. There needs to be a sensible reason why the playable area is restricted. I thought maybe it could be cool visually to show that the mountain where the city is located, was starting to split and slide off, thus causing the destruction of the bridge that leads to the inner city area and also the divide between the main square area. As the mountain split and the city destroyed, the place has now become desolate and deserted. We went off with that idea.

For the design of the architectural style itself, I took a lot of inspirations from gothic architectural styles with the arches and flying buttresses. Gothic architectures were supposed to reach the heavens so they are typically very tall and I think it’s very fitting because the Volgisi was the ancient civilization that was formed from all the different Volgisi clans. My goal was to make their architectural style more elegant, thus the arches and the lighter colored materials used for the buildings. Once the art was done, we passed it on to Lienny.

Lienny:
After getting the concept art for the map, the map was divided into 3 categories, full custom assets, semi custom assets and modular pieces that will be used in different parts.

The map itself has a number of specific structure designs that only appear in this particular map, so choosing the right pieces to custom make is the first thing I did to measure the total time allocation for this map.

After the process is done, I began to block out the structures that are supposed to be fully custom, and then I moved on to the modular pieces first, as some of the modular pieces will still be implemented to create a semi custom piece like the walls or stairwell. Full custom pieces are reserved for the buildings structures like houses and towers, etc.

In total there are 6 fully custom assets, 4 semi custom, and 40 pieces of custom modular assets.

For fully customized pieces, there were some issues implementing the concept art into the map. Some of the blocked space for the structure is too small for the design, and the structure itself ended up looking like a miniature piece in the map. We discussed this with the level designer and ended up with increasing  the blocked out space to fit the concept design.

Aside issues of the game play area itself, I also need to make the “feel” of the surrounding environment, and ended up with making the whole map twice the gameplay area to reflect the surroundings, and while this is ongoing, there were also changes of covers and walls specification by the game design team – so we had to go back and redesign some of the custom cover objects.

In the end, it took approximately 5 weeks to fully block out and make the asset pieces, plus additional 2-3 weeks to add further details to the map itself and getting the right ambiance.

Igor:
This map is one of larger scale maps that really put a dent in our production schedule, and while getting one down means we will be able to reuse some of the assets in maps with the similar look, we do try to keep these maps tied to specific engagements. This post – much like the map – took a little work from a large part of the team but the final product is pretty sweet to look at. In terms of production, we are still on track with our 2018 release, and a few of these special maps aside, our tactical map production is really picking up pace.

Foreword:

Hey guys, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming (blog schedule) as we formally close our crowdfunding round. While the outcome was unfortunate (see our closing remarks here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalforge/forged-of-blood/posts/1877218 ) we are excited to go back to our (more or less) regular production schedule as the team is no longer stretched out in trying to chase down PR leads and maintaining the campaign. To everyone who keeps up with us here and on the communities we are always open to your comments and suggestions  so please do continue to engage us. To start us off with a bang, Ken’s here to talk about our most recent overhauls to Forged of Blood:

The UI Overhaul

Hello readers, this is Ken writing, and I am back with a post covering our UI (User Interface) and more specifically UX (or User Experience), and their evolution. For this blog, I will focus on the Tactical Layer specifically.

Rethinking Our Tactical Layer

While our first run at the UI design worked well from the art standpoint (Igor and I are very happy with the minimalist fantasy thing we have going on), our trips to Gameprime Asia 2016 and PAX East 2017 gave us a lot of to reflect on. During the events, we had players play our Tactical Layer gameplay. Although there were a lot of gameplay improvements from Gameprime to PAX, the UI and UX remained consistent throughout, so feedback and criticism about the UI were taken very seriously by us. One of the most jarring UI issues we saw was that players kept trying to hit enemies behind cover using low-level Maul attacks – with a 0% Hit Chance. This concerned us as this meant that the displayed tactical information was not conveyed well to the players.
In the old Tactical UI, when a player had to make a decision to attack an enemy, their eyes needed to shift to the bottom left area to check their attack’s Hit Chance. While if you need to check the status of the enemy you had selected, you had to look towards the bottom right area. This huge space gap of space between the displayed information was very unintuitive as players will tend to be oblivious about the information presented.

1a. First UI Pass, Concept

1b. First UI Pass, In-game

As we were examining the previous Tactical UI, we also felt that some elements were not doing much and only added to the screen clutter. If you look at the above screenshots, what we called the Action Center (the panel at the bottom center), contained icons that were not used often by the players and were there mostly for redundancy – we had buttons to Attack, Move, Shift, Use Item, Interact. Fathur (our programmer) brought a great point that the center area of the screen should be used for very important actions and information, and with the previous implementation, the most important aspects, such as Abilities and attack Hit Chance, were located to the side.

Although we liked how the Action Points were conveyed (the bar and node designs above the icons), it was not easily expandable and that’s became a problem. Due to iterations in the game design, units are now able to have up to two digits of Action Points, and with the old UI, it’s almost impossible to expand the number of points displayed.

What’s interesting to see in our iterative design process is how our design philosophies shift with feedback and experience. Going into our first UI pass, the philosophy was to present the player as much information as possible to allow for a deliberate action. This led to the cluttered mass of information that our players experienced, and through feedback, we quickly shifted our design direction to one that tiers the information presented. Before we tackle the UI changes, we first had to revisit all the relevant tactical information and properly categorize them in order of importance. Which naturally led us to revisit the user experience as a whole.

Rethinking Our UX

Our conversation started by discussing the feedback we have gotten from our players. Coming into the  UX challenge, we first had to redefine the goals for the Tactical Combat. We listed the information and actions that the players needed to be take to achieve those goals. After establishing an order of importance for each action and presented information with the game designers, we also had to look at the primary, secondary, and tertiary placement of information and how it is all ultimately accessed by the player. Several of the team members, namely Pandu, Fathur, and myself went on to do some research about how tactical information was laid out in other games.

2. UI Research

The decision was made to streamline player interaction and information overlay to the mouse cursor. Information that we had relegated to the lower tiers of importance will now be accessible through additional steps, while all actions and top-tier information are available immediately in the primary Tactical Layer.

3a. New UI Concept, unexpanded

3b. New UI Concept, Expanded

So in the new UI flow, we changed how the Left and Right Clicks work. Left Clicks are now actions, and Right Click is used to access more detailed information and actions. Streamlining the new tactical UX as such:

• Top Tier Information (Image 3a):
  • Turn order (top center)
  • Player Character information (bottom left)
  • Accessible Player Actions (bottom center)
    • Base Tactical Actions, Player Character Abilities
  • Gameplay information (top left and bottom right)
    • Quest information, Actions taken
  • Action Information (on mouse cursor)
    • Ability Descriptions, Hit Chance on Target, Action Tooltips
• Secondary Tier Information (Image 3b):
  • NPC Information & Available Actions (on mouse cursor, on right-click on target)
  • Expanded Character Information Sheet (windowed overlay, on left-click Character button)
  • Expanded Lore Information Sheet (windowed overlay, on left-click Codex button & demarcated hyperlink)
  • Game Menu (windowed overlay, on left-click Game Menu button)

As you can see, the Action Center is now merged with the Ability Bar in the center, with the current character’s abilities as the focus. We feel that this is more important than showing just the actions and relegating the abilities to the side. The move actions are also streamlined: all move actions are now just called Move in the Action Center (located at the bottom right). The previous actions are now located to the sides while the End Turn button is unchanged. Action Points Panel has also replaced the old design, it now clearly displays (in numbers) how many points the unit has. We have also made Objectives and Combat Log to be more easily accessible to the player by moving them to the top left and bottom corners of the screen respectively.

You will also notice that the Turn Order is now bigger and more prominent on the screen – clearly showing what armor the units are wearing and whose turn it is and where the unit’s next turn will be. The frames of the units also reflect the allegiance of each unit in the tactical layer: red being enemies, green being controllable units, and blue NPC allies. The color information is also reflected in the floating health bar above the units.
Here’s a WIP of how it looks in-game. Note that not all of the changes have been implemented yet.

4. New Tactical UI Work-in-Progress

Additional UX Quality of Life Changes

There are a few other additional features/changes we have decided upon that affects players’ User Experience. One such issue that we addressed is helping players distinguish what’s a cover object and what’s not, we had to identify the problems and define some guidelines for the artists to follow. Before PAX, there were no rules about covers, so any object of any size could either be a Partial Cover, a Full Cover, or a Complete Cover, as long as they feel like it’s suitable. It’s very arbitrary and subjective, and ultimately, confusing to the player. This was especially apparent in more natural maps. Distinguishing between traversable path and covers was like a guessing game.

So to solve this issue, we now have defined rules for each type of cover. Partial Covers can now not go over 1 block high is one of such rules. There are definitely more to the cover changes, but basically the rules are now helping the players identify the visual information better.

That is all for this week’s blog post about our tactical UI and UX updates. Thank you for reading, I hope it was an enjoyable read from start to finish. See you again next time.

– Ken

Hello, this week, we’ve got a triple tag team blog post from our artists: Lienny, Jennifer, and Ken. Ken, you’ve already met. Lienny is our lead modeller in charge of doing a lot of stuff, from character and environment modeling to any art-related technical or engine difficulties. Last but not least is Jennifer; she is our modeler in charge of handling most of the environment art.

For this blog post, Lienny and Jennifer have picked some of the maps that they have worked on. Then we will go through and explain some of our process of making those maps pretty, including the quirks, workarounds, and solutions used and/or encountered.

Initial Environment Creation

Environment creation was initially a confusing process, since we only have a limited talent to work with: one multi-function Art Director and two 3D Artists in the studio. Thus creating a scarcity in environment concepts. A bunch of references given by Ken were very broad overviews of what the final environment ought to “feel” like instead of what they should look like.

The Game Designers would pass us a grey box of the map layout and stage. As the blocked out maps make their down the pipeline to Lienny and Jennifer, the onus fall on us to interpret the gray and colored blocks. With little to go on, this process actually gives the environment team a lot of freedom in approaching the map design.

As with any experiment, it does go through a lot of iterations, screenshot paintovers, and additional custom assets as requested by the level designers, concept artist, and environment artists.

 

Making the first map

As we experiment with the visual overview of the environment and how much we can push the quality, the level designers were also working in parallel to design maps according to the play style (or in some cases visual style) they were trying to achieve. Which brings this to the first issue: visual limitation. The maps are designed based on a grid system, which means that the set dressing will also need to follow the grid. Unique stage designs and placements do not translate well to the set dressing stage. Here is where a lot of creative solutions need to be discussed and brainstormed so we, the artists, are able to give the best visual according to the stage design.

This is a sample of one of the very first maps after a few iterations. Since this map is designed as a generic map with a smaller playable area, and there was not much requirement for looks or guideline asked by the Game Designers for us to follow. They only asked: desert/arid type map and “the grid position SHALL NOT be changed”.

With more experience, comes a great responsibility

After a few maps under our belt, maps with much larger playable areas with more custom and specific themes were created – which also means new problems and a different approach for each.

Theme 1: The Three Statues

 

The Three Statues map (or The 2 Statues map as we initially called it) was quite a challenge. Joe wanted this map to have two giant statues that the player could stand on. With this, two problems have arose: one, we need large scale custom assets for the statues, and two, the statues need to also be platforms. We discussed how to tackle the problems and Ken made several design solutions approach issues at hand.

Once the final design has been picked, the concept is then passed on to Lienny to model.

 

There are a lot of specific design and tweaks for this map, and the concept artist, level designer and environment artist worked really closely on this particular one.

Theme 2: Dresthon

 

Dresthon is designed as a medium-large town built on cliffs. Unlike the Three Statues map, even though this map was specifically designed to be a cliff city, there wasn’t as much visual requirement aside from this being a town.

Jennifer, who worked on this particular map started off as a 3D artist who was more accustomed with working on detailed concept references, and being given the freedom to explore the visual style of the map with almost no specific references threw her a bit out of her comfort zone. The curse and blessing of this map is probably the freedom that is given by the design team.

Issue1: Transitioning from props

Other than being more accustomed to detailed concept references, another issue Jennifer faced was creating any custom assets, material management, deciding on what props will fit in which type of scene/style.

Issue 2: Seemingly empty spaces.

The first major mapmaking challenge would mostly revolve around the aesthetic point of view of the map, which can affect a lot of factors in map making. Since people have different views on what looks good and what does not, changes has to be made on the map. Moreover, there are times the layouts can be such a restraint on how the artist visualize it to be.

There were times when Jennifer had to sit back and stare at the map because it looked unsatisfactory somehow, despite seemingly having done everything she could think of. Sometimes, the lighting needed to be tweaked over and over because it looked too dark, or too bright, or the shadows being too strong. Other times, there were new things implemented, and there would be changes made to the maps. All in all, making a map is a continuously evolving process.

 

Another challenge came from the technical side. In more than one occasion, there were changes from the programming side and the blueprints had to be re-done in order to get the game running well. Then there could be updates on assets and blueprints that had to be implemented urgently as map making progressed. These could be time consuming, and they ultimately pushed back our deadline for other priorities.

Perhaps the more jarring solution for these issues is more communication between each the teams. Since people have different inputs, more ideas are presented, which means it is so much easier to come up with new ideas on layouts and the overall look of the map. The second solution would be working efficiently and spare some buffer time, in case sudden changes must be made. By working faster and setting a personal deadline a day or two before the actual deadline, there is still a margin of time to spot errors and making changes on the map itself.

Hope you enjoy this week’s meaty blog post. ‘Til next time. So long. Lienny, Jennifer, and Ken signing out.

Hello and happy 2017 everyone!

It’s been a long while since our last post – my bad – so I’ll try to make this update a little more packed with information that usual.

The studio has been back from break for a month now and we’ve been gearing up for both PAX East and Kickstarter in March – let’s just say it’s been a hectic month to say the least. The build we are looking to showcase for both milestones will feature an expanded game loop to what we’ve shown so far that will showcase the strategic map and quest system for the main game.

On the narrative front, we now have a full summary for the main plotlines and have begun expanding and writing out specific quests. For our RPG elements, the way we’re structuring the narrative section of the game will vary a little from the usual Choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) format to take into account player agency on the Strategic Layer with the format evolving between Acts I and II.

We will start the game off with a more structured CYOA path in the introductory act as it is designed to direct the players towards the starting location of Act II and to give them a more controlled path that will serve as an expanded tutorial for the game. The plan is to layer the different mechanics and gradually increase the complexity of the core game loop to allow players to acclimate themselves to the mechanics at play.

Once we get to Act II the story becomes a wholly different beast and we start layering a few more mechanics to the game loop. After a quick introductory series of quests that follows a more rigid CYOA structure (pictured above), we open up the whole world map to the player, along with the Party Management and Castle layers that will help them progress through the game.

The rest of Act II no longer takes the direct CYOA form, but instead works with a series of checks that will happen at regular intervals. These checks take into account the player’s actions and trigger certain story quests if a particular value like the Personality Plots, Region Counts, or other factors have been met. This method of storytelling can be classified as event-based storytelling and is a method that we think is perfect to drive our story forward while still allowing for player agency as part of the story. Given that events only trigger as a consequence of player action, an event-based storytelling system puts the flow of the game firmly in their control. Naturally, this means that we have to take into account their potential choices and craft the stories around those very possibilities. The biggest challenge to this method – especially for a studio and writing team of our size – is scope creep. While the ideal situation accounts for every possibility, the reality of our budget and ability dictates we approach the story within the confines of the mechanics, with the next challenge being the creation of unique and meaningful choices without an explosion of possibilities that will bog down the writing process.

To be perfectly honest, this is probably going to be an ongoing challenge for me personally: having to balance my goals as the writer, the goals of the story itself, and the finite resources at hand. Still, this is the challenge at hand and one we are more than happy to face to create the narrative experience we want out of the game.

Anyway, as we expand on the story, we’ve also started to explore the implementation of the Personality Plot system we had in mind for the characters. In the UI mock up of the system below, you can see the circle that denotes the PDT or Personality Distance Threshold around the white Personality Plot Point of the player character. Other characters’ Personality Plot Points are shown as different colors, with unique symbols reserved for important characters like Leivan.

The Personality system we have for the game works to achieve a number of functions. In the context of the world and lore, it serves to punctuate the point that this is indeed a “morally grey” world. This is probably the biggest sticking point for me as a writer as I want to create a game world where actions are not judged as “good” or “evil” and “light” or “dark.” To me, there is no right or wrong, just people and the actions that define them. In terms of the narrative, the Personality system allows us to explore the interpersonal relationships between the characters as part of the story – in particular that of the main character and his brother, who assumed the throne. To that end, we went with three personality traits that we feel don’t necessarily point one way or another in terms of morality, and allow the actions to be judged on a combination of those three factors: Empathy, Hedonism, and Wisdom.

I think, I’ll dedicate a more detailed breakdown of the system for another day but in terms of the game mechanics and the narrative, the PDT will determine the characters that will align with the player. This means characters can leave or take action when they are no longer within the threshold and will have dramatic impact on the player’s choices in managing the makeup of their parties in Act II.

I’ll wrap it up here for now and we’ll have a few more updates as we near the Kickstarter and PAX dates over the next few weeks. For now, we’re excited to anounce that we have officially partnered with the awesome folks over at Gamepedia for our public wiki, which you can find our wiki page here: http://forgedofblood.gamepedia.com/Forged_of_Blood_Wiki

Stay tuned for updates!
– Igor