We’re pushing our Steam updates and blog updates together now, so without further ado: This is it! We’re finally pulling back the curtains on Forged of Blood with our official feature overview trailer and our beta going live to our testers.

2018 came and went so quickly, and before we knew it, it’s 2019! I know that we’ve been so very quiet this year, and the fact is we just had to dig down and power through everything that we needed to do to get Forged of Blood where we’d like to be. We just had to take it one bug, one feature, one quest, one day at a time.

A lot of the work we’ve been doing over the last year has been on the back end of the production – hooking up features, testing, refactoring, optimizing, writing and rewriting – and for the most part there just isn’t a lot to share as part of these blog posts. With so many things to do, it was admittedly easier to just get into the rhythm and keep going.

Our biggest focus at the moment is in getting all the disparate features on the strategic layer working cohesively into the game we wanted to craft. In the first few days of the new year, we sat down and took inventory of everything we had finished, everything we have yet to do, and how all of it came together into the game that is Forged of Blood. We decided to make changes to the strategic layer that created a more seamless and intuitive gameplay experience, that we really liked. With the path ahead planned, we immediately set into motion a very rigid schedule of implementation, testing, and iteration to get all the features across that finish line, and so far we are progressing rather nicely.

Among the many critical tasks that still lay before us, is the question of optimization. As we continue to refine our tactical maps we’re always looking to squeeze out an extra FPS or two wherever we can, even if it means shaving off 0.01 by cleaning up a decal or reducing the number of polys on pot.

 

The above side-by-side picture shows a simple fort map in the editor view and how the same map looks in the shader complexity view – it’s a bit of a mess. So, we’re going map by map, item by item, and optimizing assets wherever we can while maintaining the visual fidelity we had set. Fortunately, much of the work involves cleaning up the interactable objects that are reused multiple times, creating a depreciating timetable as more objects are optimized and each map has fewer and fewer issues.

On the narrative front, we’ve implemented two of the three main story arcs and have begun the process of refining the over 70 additional side quests that will make up the rest of the game. The biggest obstacles on this end has been the number of realignments and fixes we had to apply to the dialogue as certain features and data sets are changed. With a number of complex dialogue trees tied to our main story experiences, the cascading effects of a “small” shift in the structural format of the dialogue is pretty damaging.

You can see a sample dialogue tree (pictured left) here to get a rough idea of the choices we’re going for on the narrative front, and we’re really excited to test out the full length of the arcs in tandem with all the strategic gameplay features we’ve implemented.

All in all, I believe that we have things well in hand with our new schedule. 2018 saw us through some extremely long days, and I have no doubt that we have many more ahead of us this year – but the light the end of the tunnel gets brighter every day. In the recent weeks we’re able to see many of the untested features being connected into the game as a whole and we’re quickly working up to being able to properly test the full game loop.

I’ll end this update with a few screenshots from our latest build showing the updated (but unrefined) UI. This fully revamped tactical interface is one that we’re pretty happy with so far, as it addresses many of the specific issues we’ve found over the last couple years of play tests. We’re still refining the on-tile overlays, markers, and positioning at the moment, but the functionality is working as intended and we have clear objectives to target as we approach the final polishing phase.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Interestingly enough, this year’s date nicely aligns with the studio’s two year anniversary. Two years ago to the day, six of us started this journey in a dusty office space with hand-me-down furniture and a few dozen boxes of electronics. In those first few days we didn’t have a studio name, a game title, or even an internet connection. All we had was a common dream to make something cool, something tactical, and something we can call our own. Yeah, that was cheesy, but honestly it’s hard not to get a little cheesy over something we’ve put our savings and a couple years (so far) of our lives into.

Now, we’re just months away from launching Forged of Blood and the last couple years has been an absolute blur. In that time we’ve built out the team to a studio peak of eleven and have said goodbye to some incredibly talented people as they moved on to other projects. At the end of the day, the game we will launch is a testament to their talent and I could not have been any more grateful to have had the chance to work with them so far.

So while the studio is closed for the Lunar New Year celebrations, I thought it would be nice to see just how far we’ve come. Thing is, while I’ve had this post planned for about a month now… the toughest thing about all this, is the sad fact that we don’t have a lot of “good” photos to look back through – a side effect, no doubt; of crappy office lighting, an old camera phone, and being a bunch of camera shy nerds, but I digress.

As we close on the second year of production, we’re starting to see the intended vision of Forged of Blood take shape. The programmers are busy chasing down our feature list and making sure our layers of mechanical systems are working, while the art side is getting ready to wrap up their side of production and have been looking to potential future content. Our quest lines are being written and rewritten as fast as humanly possible, and little by little we’re seeing the layers upon layers of mechanics come together into something that we’re actually enjoying.

Where once there was chicken scratchings on a whiteboard, we know have realized mechanics tied into multiple layers of gameplay.

That hastily drawn table on a whiteboard, pictured above, is where we started with character stats, just a few figures listed out for a few Lego miniatures duking it out on the table. Pen, paper, die, and legos gave way to rough character stats and programmable mechanics. Fast forward a couple years and we have the tactical gameplay layer (see below) that we’ve proudly showcased at PAX East, Tokyo Game Show, Gameprime, and Popcon Jakarta.

Our strategic layer was subject to many heated discussions and iterations on the board as well. How much of the game would we house on this layer? What functions do we want served? And how well would it pair with a tactically focused game? These were recurring points as we went back and forth for months until we scratched out what we felt would be the perfect medium to allow for player agency in the planned narrative.

In just the last couple weeks, we’ve managed to fine tune the visual elements on the Strategic Layer and begun implementing a small sampling of quests into the build. These quests take us from the dialogue to strategic command to tactical combat in a manner that drove the narrative forward and allowed for the integration of our other non-tactical mechanics. Chief among which is the Tri-Axis Philosophical Index, which as you might have guessed: started with yet another set of hieroglyphs on the now dusted and ancient surface of the whiteboard.

Two years ago:

Igor: “Here’s the thing though… I don’t want the same old thing. Light/dark… good/evil is boring. I want something with multiple traits we can track on something…”

Milo: “Oh, how about something like this?”

*Milo draws a circle on the board and three axes*

Igor: “Huh, that works.”

Milo: “Really?”

Igor: “Yeah.”

Milo: “Cool. Hey Joe, check this out…”

And so the TPI was born.

Granted, it still took another year or so of philosophical and mechanical debates, but the beginnings of what would be the driving narrative force in our game really did have such an anticlimactic beginning (you can read more about the system here).

The last two years came and went so quickly I still can’t quite believe that we’re in the home stretch. We’ve made a ton of mistakes in the process and we’ve had our share of disappointments (failed Kickstarter campaigns, missed opportunities, and seeing dear friends leave), but through it all we kept going and I knew that everything we did, we did for the betterment of the game. With scant resources and an ambitious timeline, this was (is) one hell of a project for a virgin studio and I am so proud to say that each member of our team has thus far exceeded every expectation.

So where are we now?

Well, the programming side is in implementation and clean up mode. It’s tedious, time consuming and often frustrating, but we’re inching our way through. On the art side of things, all of our 3D assets and special visual effects are done – and I’m very happy to say that we’ve exceeded our intended map-count by a comfortable margin. Our solo animator is busy putting together the final few cinematics with 2D assets coming in from the awesome folks over at Caravan Studios. Our music tracks are being finalized, and our custom creature sound effects are in production – leaving only the generic sound effects for us to deal with in the pipeline (one thing at a time…). On the narrative front, we are admittedly lagging – mostly due to the breadth of things pulling me away from it at any given point of the day. However we are making a ton of progress and I’m very relieved to have some solid friends helping me smooth things along there.

Forged of Blood, has been and continues to be one of the greatest challenges in my creative career. I’d like to think that I’ve grown over the last two years of mistakes and daily challenges,  and I truly believe that the studio will have something we can be very proud to call our own when it is all said and done. Nevertheless, the coming months will be hard and they will be stressful, I have no doubt of that; but I really hope that collectively we take a moment and look back on where we were just two short years ago. The progress we’ve made is tremendous, and the work we are putting out has been worthy of the very high bar we’ve set for ourselves.

With that, I’d like to close with my sincerest gratitude for every member of our studio – past, present, and future. We’ve done amazing things together and we’ve forged one hell of a game so far. We’re almost there, and I cannot wait to show the world what we’ve done.

To our fans, friends, and families who have cheered us on from the very beginning, seen us through our Kickstarter campaign and the aftermath, and helped us deal with the very real and very challenging stresses of game development – “thank you” is just not enough. We wouldn’t be here without you and we hope to make you all proud with the game we will launch this year, and seriously: thank you.

Finally, to those of you who are just joining us on this journey. Take a moment, have a look, and we hope you like what you see.

Here’s wishing everyone a happy and prosperous new year, and here’s to another year of adventures at Critical Forge.

– Igor

Hey guys,

The studio will be going on break for the winter holidays but with the updates we just rolled out on the front page I thought we’d take some time to talk a little bit more about the Tri-Axis Philosophical Index we have for Forged of Blood.

The last time we talked about the personality system we touched more on the inspiration of the system. To recap: we really wanted to create a system that reflects the “grey” nature of our world and goes the beyond the usual binaries of good vs. evil, light vs. dark, etc. With our focus on choice and consequence, we also felt that it was important that the system have some very real consequences for the player beyond simply being a narrative tool for my whims. So we’d like to take this time to show a bit more of what the system actually entails.

In its current iteration the personality system is divided by three “philosophies” as opposed to “personalities” as to give the fairest interpretation between the three axes that the player will be measured against – and to try our best in removing overtly positive or negative connotations. Lorewise, the three philosophies represent three schools of thought that have shaped the world and upon which the denizens of Attiras are judged.

Altruism, Hedonism, and Rationalism make up the three axes of the circular index in which players will be plotted. The player, every playable character, Leivan (the brother King) and every conquerable region will have their own Philosophical Plot Point (PPP) that may shift throughout the duration of the game through direct and indirect player actions. With player’s parties and decisions acting as the unequivocal representative of the crown, Tavias’ plot point will act as the central point against which all decisions and consequences will be measured. Around this plot point is drawn what we call the: Philosophical Distance Threshold (PDT), which is a radius drawn around Tavias’ PPP that will denote the moral latitude that the different characters will accept. This plotted point will shift according to the player’s actions as they complete quests and advance the storyline.

This is where the mechanics of the system gets a bit more interesting to us. Playable characters within the radius will remain loyal to the player and be available for use in their parties, while captured regions within this radius will be loyal to your faction and slowly move their PPP towards the player’s over time. Conversely, characters that go beyond the player PDT will leave the player’s faction permanently and regions will have a percentage chance to rebel against the player’s control as time passes. Throughout the duration of the game, the player’s primary goal (aside from the chasing down quests) will be to retake territories throughout the world. As mentioned before, conquered regions will slowly shift their PPP towards Tavias’ PPP as time passes in the game. This leads up to the end-game in which the regional PPPs relative to the player’s will determine the player’s fate in the world.

So how does this all translate into the game loop? While the tactical combat and character progression systems remain core to our game, the added layer of the Tri-Axis Philosophical Index bring in some political choices and management to the non-combat related sections of the game. Your characters and soldiers are key to winning in battle – but if your choices pushes them beyond your PDT then you will quickly lose your effective fighting force. On top of that is the emphasis of the Philosophies’ impact on the world at large. Regions – controlled by a regional lord will have their own PPP like we mentioned, but doing a quest that gets the lord killed or replaced will give an entirely new PPP for that region, and this may or may not work in the player’s favor.

The endgame comes down to how many regions are in “favor” with the player’s PPP – calculated simply by distance between the three Faction PPPs. So while conquering regions is important, managing your PPP – and thereby the consequences of your actions –  is key to effectively win the final end-game conditions. I won’t give away anymore than that as we do have a few things planned for the storylines that work in tandem with this mechanic, but I hope that does help paint a better picture as to the system we’re building out.

(If you’re not interested in the philosophical definitions and the reasons why we chose the three “philosophies”, stop here – continued wall of text below.)

I’ll now touch on the three philosophies that we chose to form the three axes of the index. This was a subject that we discussed at length, starting with our first iteration of the three as: Empathy, Hedonism, and Wisdom. Empathy meaning the ability to understand the feelings of others, Hedonism being the pursuit of self-indulgence, and Wisdom being the exemplar of good judgement, knowledge, and experience. While those worked well in the beginning, I began running into problems in writing them into the world, especially when we are writing for a singular character whose actions reflect how an entire faction will be viewed.

That line of questioning eventually led to the shift from Personality to Philosophy. It’s a schematic difference, but one that allowed me to write in a plausible reason as to how the player’s actions will impact his faction as a whole. Tavias – the player character – is in essence the face of the crown to the world while his brother Leivan secrets himself away to find other solutions to the conflict at hand and any hidden knowledge that might save his family line. Therefore, the PPP of player/Tavias that we plot on the Tri-Axis Philosophical Index is a reflection of the world’s view on his actions in accordance to the three philosophies.

Using the three Personalities as a base, we finally went with Altruism, Hedonism, and Rationalism. As a whole, the three words actually fit better. As we see it: Rationalism is a more neutral version of Wisdom, and Altruism is a more detached form of Empathy. Hedonism had always been the challenge as it has some inherent connotations to it, but in principle is still all about finding the option that benefits the self the most. When put into the three axes, each philosophy works out to be the direct opposite of a combination of the other two.

For example: Altruism – selflessness, concern for others – is both characteristically the opposite of hedonism and not very rational. Hedonism – pursuit of self-indulgence – is both the opposite of altruism and is actually rather rational if you think about it. While Rationalism, is a direct counter to both Altruism and Hedonism as it is all about reason over emotion,

At the risk the drawing you into a full blown debate, I will give a cursory explanation of the definitions we set for these and the reasoning behind them. So let’s start by defining Rationalism and certain priorities that we might agree can be defined as the practice of Rationalism. Self-preservation is a biologically rational line of thought, as is the sacrifice of something small for a larger purpose, that’s just math and basic sense of self. Now, when we add in the complexities of human emotion and societal morals, we can see some shortcomings in pure and cold rationalism. So in that regard we can also measure the other two philosophies. Altruism is the practice of selflessness, and in the contemporary moral compass, is perhaps the highest ideal in which we can aspire to. However, if we were to measure it against Rationalism, it is inherently counter to the idea of self-preservation and we start to have some moral grey areas when it comes to sacrifice for the greater good. Hedonism on the other hand is the pursuit of self-indulgence, while this goes well with self-preservation, hedonism will inherently clash with the idea of the greater good and working for the benefit of others.

This gives us a stage in which we can set in motion the various faction ideals and motivations in the game. If we were to look at the direct opposites of each axes we can come to a few short generalizations. Rationalism is the direct opposite of the pure emotion that comes with Altruism and Hedonism, while Altruism is the direct opposite of cold self-serving efficiency. On the other end of the spectrum is what we define as the traditional hero complex: that almost fantastical notion of the perfect balance between selflessness and reason. In the most pedestrian narrative trope, the hero’s journey is one that follows a righteous path that is often difficult and downright foolhardy. Therein lies the commentary I’d like to make with this game. The edges of the index represent the extremes – and in each extreme we see the obvious negative connotations.

The edges of the index represent the extremes – and in each extreme we see the obvious negative connotations while still having their own merits. War, politics, and society as a whole are awash in grey areas, and Forged of Blood is no exception. We are trying to design an experience that will put players into situations where certain decisions might clash against their own moral code but are necessary to retain their followers. We want players to decide between mechanical efficiency and their own views, while also thinking about the objectives put forth in game’s storyline.

Personally speaking, I think our morality system works well, with the PPP and PDT mechanics interlaced nicely within the core game loop. However, the onus now falls on the narrative content to bear the weight of the mechanics, and I hope that my team and I can live up to the lofty goals we’ve set. So I’ll leave it here for now – thank you for reading and indulging my wall of text.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been super lax with these updates – the schedule is getting tighter and the pressure is definitely on to get Forged of Blood over the last few months here. However, we do have a cool new update to share so here we go:

Over the last couple years, we’ve had some hazy discussions internally over the implementation of a Fog of War system in Forged of Blood. Should we? Would we? Could we? It was one of those things that we unanimously agreed that we “would” with the “should” and “could” of all up in the air until we’ve developed the rest of our mechanics.

Early on in the development process, we had designed the basic tactical mechanics around the idea of being able to survey the battlefield and the enemies in it right away (this goes back to the “meaningful choice” design pillar we chose). Over innumerable playtests in the last couple years, the tactical game loop had largely revolved around two steps:

1. Scrolling around the map to find the enemy spawn.
2. Reacting and moving units accordingly.

Internally, and in the builds we’ve showcased at past public events, the tactical order of operations had been very predictable with players positioning their units like pieces on a chess board leading to the eventual engagement flashpoint. Positioning and turn efficiency carried the day and giving the player a full overview of the map and tactical situation made the battles feel more like a tactical puzzle. In that iteration, Forged of Blood was already a challenging game for most (less than a third of our public playtesters win, and a flawless victories were counted on one hand per event) and we realized just what a curve ball a fog of war system would do to the tactical layer. That said, we also still had a few mechanics (spells and the like) that were contingent on the nailing down whether or not we would be implementing a fog of war system, so we finally took the time to test it out.

After some tinkering, Pandu flipped off the lights and we had fog of war to mess with. Our fog of war system is pretty basic (as described by Pandu) and works by overlaying a textured grid over our base game grid to obscure the map with a fog of war. He then applied shaders to the character sight range that effectively cuts a swathe in the overlaid grid to remove the fog of war as characters move through the map. In the image above (time of day color lighting differences aside) you can see just how different the game feels visually, and once in-game we’ve noticed that our play also evolved to match the new aesthetic.

Long-ranged builds that once dominated the battlefield (and were ruthlessly nerfed by Milo) immediately felt their limitations without the benefit of map-wide visibility, and we naturally approached the engagements a lot more cautiously. Mobile-striker builds became more effective as scouts and tankier builds started to shine a bit more in the dark. Obscuring enemy starting positions and actions at the start of the battle added a layer of discovery into the tactical layer that we just didn’t have before.

With the current iteration of our fog of war system, the tactical loop goes:

1. Scroll to survey observable terrain for cover and environment line-of-sight utility.
2. Defensive posturing and scouting around the map to find enemy position.
3. Reacting and moving units accordingly.

There’s still a few more things to work out internally that may change that loop depending on the rulesets that we implement, but in its basic form the fog of war system already adds a lot to Forged of Blood. The overall weapon balancing needs to be reconsidered slightly as the different builds find their inherent advantages and disadvantages in the context of an obscured battle map. We’d also have to update the AI to behave within the parameters of any new rulesets we decide for the new fog of war system. Finally, we also have some pretty drastic ripple effects going on to the art side of the studio.

Obscuring the map in darkness and finally being able to implement the edge of map systems we’ve been waiting on means that we can finally review the maps as they will finally look like in-game. One of the biggest issues that was immediately solved was the question of our skybox – or to put it simply: what skybox? The screenshots below show how one of our maps look in-engine in contrast to how it looks in-game with the fog of war on.

The visual blend between the black areas outside of the play area and the fog of war meant that we can close the edges of our maps a lot tighter in – saving on map size and overall resource consumption in the build. Our varying times of day also got a big visual boost, with our night maps feeling much darker  without needing to actually reduce the visibility, while the day maps ended up feeling much more vibrant in the contrast to the undiscovered areas.

Implementing the fog of war system is a huge milestone for the production, allowing us to progress the evolution of our gameplay mechanics and solving many of our visual hurdles at the same time. We’re really glad we took the time to explore it and in the end: Fog of war, what is it good for?

Absolutely everything.

– Igor

Hey everyone,

We wanted to do a quick check in this week to update everyone on the events we’ve been going to and are planning to go in Asia. While our event and marketing budgets have be severely depleted, we have been very honored to have been invited by a couple game events here in Jakarta. (Huge thank you go out the people at BEKRAF (the Indonesian Agency  for Creative Economy), AGI (Indonesian Game Association), and Duniaku.net for graciously hosting us.) We did an update for the Kickstarter backers a couple weeks ago that does go into a little bit more detail than we do here if you want to read it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalforge/forged-of-blood/posts/1889422

Our first local event this year was Game Prime Asia 2017 where we demoed an updated build and ran a couple stations for people to play. We featured five maps and all nine weapons, with two AI archetypes for each and were so pleased with the reaction we received. So, imagine our delight when we were then invited to be a part of the ARCHIPELAGEEK booth at PopCon Asia 2017 a week later. ARCHIPELAGEEK, to our worldwide audience is a collection of Indonesian game devs that were curated by BEKRAF and AGI – and we are really quite honored to be in such fine company.

Both events really wore us out, but being able to see the public reaction to our game is well worth it. Oh and the cherry on the cake: we got us a shiny new addition to the office! (We won the Most Anticipated Game Award at PopCon Asia and the trophy has an LED screen on it which unfortunately gets washed out in the picture.)

With back to back events under our belt, we were again surprised by the invitation to go to the Tokyo Game Show this year, again as part of the ARCHIPELAGEEK booth sponsored by BEKRAF. We’re still figuring out a lot of the details and we’ll post details here as we get them, but suffice it to say that Forged of Blood will be making a debut appearance in Tokyo in September! We’ve got a bit of chasing to do with just a month left to the event, but our biggest target is to get some of our spell-casting archetypes implemented for showcase.

 

I’ll end this post by sharing out the first few original music tracks that we’ve got ready. (Tried to do some pun about ending on some note or another, but it just didn’t quite work out) Given the limited budget on at hand, we really had to narrow down our soundtrack to the bare minimum, and we’ve worked closely with Andre Lizt to create a powerful motive and see it translated through the varying layers of our game and the result are the tracks we have so far:

There are still a few more tracks in the works, and Andre is such a thoroughly talented composer that I can’t wait to share the rest. For now, I’ll share out his work on YouTube and SoundCloud for you all to check out.

There are still a few more tracks in the works, and Andre (pictured below) is such a thoroughly talented composer that I can’t wait to share the rest. For now, I’ll share out his work on YouTube and SoundCloud for you all to check out.

Andre Lizt and his Soundkestra:
YouTube Link
Soundcloud Link

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.

We’ve got a quick follow up to Ken’s post on the UI updates and the visual changes we’ve made to our cover system. While last week’s post covered most of the biggest updates we’ve made to the UI, we thought it would be nice to give a quick look at the “quality of life” changes Ken mentioned in how we’re visually treating the full and partial covers on the tactical map.

We’ll start off by showing the forest map (full gameplay video of the map) we showed at PAX which we actually really loved because of the dense foliage and the arrangement of Cover Objects on the map that created natural choke-points and engagement zones. The introduction of magic to our build also allowed players to open up new avenues of attack which was an absolute blast. However, with all the cover objects being trees of some sort – even with our new UI updates and the overlaid “cover markers” – it was still very hard to distinguish what was Full and Partial cover as well as figuring out which parts of the map were indestructible map blockers. That’s where our new guidelines came into play.

The first thing we set was height restrictions for objects that will count as Partial Cover, and introduced density restrictions for objects we’d count as Full Cover. Without going too much into the long discussions we had, our  final guidelines are  basically:

• Partial Covers should not be greater than the height of a humanoid character and should encompass a good portion of a cube to be able to provide cover from all four sides.
• Full Covers should be greater than the height of a humanoid character, be dense enough to provide cover from all four sides, but be porous enough that targets can still be hit.

We had a few more rules than that, but those were the big two. Below are the objects that we resized and shaped for the different Cover Objects in relation to a character. You’ll see the new cover objects and how they fit which cubic tile below:

With proper guidelines set for Cover Objects, we still had the issue of the indestructible trees that were placed as Map Blockers. From a map design perspective, these indestructible Map Blockers were used to control the flow of the map and create different tactical opportunities in the terrain. The main issue with using trees in a heavily forested map means that it makes it difficult for the player to know which trees are Cover Objects and which trees are blockers. After weighing the pros and cons of drastically changing the feel of the map, we decided that player understanding of the terrain takes priority over ease of map design for us. We ultimately made a blanket rule that Map Blockers now need to be part of the terrain (as in rock formations, hills, solid buildings, or rivers and lakes) and cannot compete with Cover Objects when placed within the boundaries of the Tactical Combat Map.

The result, as you might see, is drastic – both from a visual and a tactical standpoint – but we think it’s for the best as it does allow the player to survey the field a bit more. Setting these rule-sets for the game for us is one of those “obvious now that we did it” sort of things – and also one of the truest reflections of the hurried production schedule we face as a small indie studio.

Forged of Blood is our first run at game development as our own studio, and try as you might to account for every rule and guideline, there is something to be said for human fallibility and inexperience. More often than not, things have to be pushed back and pipeline urgencies and sensibilities only emerge when an issue is too big to ignore. We are at ultimately very lucky to have a team that is able to see these issues, discuss them, and make a change (without too much yelling).

Lienny and Jenny have spent the last few weeks going through each of our environments and updating the Cover Objects to our guidelines, as well as assembling a set of objects that can be used in each environmental tileset. Ken also had his hands full tackling how these new rules will affect a lot of the fully custom architectural assets needs to be handled (more on some the gorgeous work he and the art team have have done later). Anyway, I’ll leave off here with a look at the Cover Objects the girls have created so far, and we’ll cover each environment a later date.

With our tactical map production pipeline now moving at a solid pace, our next big challenge is finalizing the rest of the game. For now, here’s a little look at what we’ve been working on as well: laying out the basic UX flow for our Strategic and Castle layers (we’ll have an post on that soon!).