After the chaos of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we’ve now returned to the regular Antegods developments schedule. Which means it’s high time to break our devblog silence!
And we’re back with a vengeance: this is another of those long and detailed development posts. We go in-depth on our experiences and learnings from the GDC, but there’s more: we also describe how we’re tweaking the game’s color palette, and programming the dashing mechanic.
Our blog posts will follow a simple structure, as our three leads talk about what they’ve been working on. We hope you’ll enjoy following our process as much as we enjoy developing Antegods!
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Design – Wytze
At GDC, we had our own booth to show off Antegods. We set up two Steam boxes, each with two controllers. We connected them through LAN, so players could play as two human players versus two other human players, with AI bots filling up the empty slots, creating two teams of five.
A lot of people came by to play and the responses were super positive! Many said the Mayan aesthetic of Antegods looks great and original, and they loved our use of the word ‘stonepunk’ to describe it. Due to the amount of polish we already have, some actually asked if we’d already released the game.
The good
Beyond the aesthetics, players generally got the hang of flying and shooting quickly, with the twin-stick style controls mostly considered to be intuitive. Some players preferred firing with the trigger, rather than by releasing the thumb stick, so we’ll continue to offer both options. After telling people how to shoot, they discovered they could destroy the terrain and were already having a good time.
Then when we told them how to enter the Titan, they had a real wow moment. Simply being able to control this giant entity and smashing it through blocks made them feel powerful. Once the Titan’s shockwave and weapon activated and the two players could control these as a duo, they felt even more powerful. Conversely, when a Titan approached them, it scared the crap out of them and they usually tried to flee quickly.
After playing a full match, most players had a good understanding of the game’s mechanics and the dynamics that emerge from it. The game’s ideas seemed to ‘click’ very well, people understood what we’re trying to accomplish and enjoyed it. Some chose to play multiple games, and you saw their understanding of the game’s strategies grow with each match, leading to really exciting moments. For me as a game designer, those are some of the best acknowledgements you can get, so I’m really excited to continue improving the game!
Explaining silk mechanics
Despite the positive reactions, there were also some clear problems. These were largely caused by poor communication, and in some cases a complete lack of communication.
One of the most difficult mechanics to explain was the collection and delivery of silk. The following were common questions players raised:
What is this thing called silk?
Where and how can I gather it?
How much silk am I carrying?
Where and why should I deliver silk?
We have identified the following as causes of these problems:
The name ‘silk’ does not relate to the gameplay mechanics.
Silk is automatically dropped off when players are near a native camp or turn-in point, which means they deliver it unintentionally and aren’t aware of it.
There is no direct feedback when dropping off silk.
The indicator for how much silk a player or Native Camp is carrying is small and unclear.
There’s no visual indicator for which objects create silk and which objects gather silk.
Nothing in the game links the turn-in point to the Titan’s silk levels.
The indicators for silk (progress bars and numbers) have no relation to how silk actually looks.
Some silk particles bugged out visually, which made them hard to see and recognize.
From these issues, it’s clear that we need to find a better way of communicating how silk works, so the gameplay can be figured out more easily by players. Below, Tom goes into detail how he’s developing a visual language for silk that should clear up a lot of player confusion.
Readability
Another prominent issue is the readability of various game elements, which in part is due to the color scheme we’re using. Teams can be hard to tell apart for new players, because spindle points, medium blocks and neutral native camps seem to belong to the red team, while the nimbus and silk seem to belong to the blue team. Again, Tom will go into solutions to this problem below.
Guiding new players
When demoing an in-development game at an event, you’ll typically spend a lot of time explaining it to players. Antegods doesn’t have a dedicated tutorial yet, and if it did, it would probably be off-putting to people trying to check out many different games on an expo floor.
For GDC, we implemented in-game instructions that would tell players what to do, but they didn’t pay much attention to them and didn’t give players enough explanation and guidance. Instead, we had to verbally explain how the game works to each new player, which got exhausting real quick. For future events, we’ll have to look into better ways to guide new players.
Dashing
Some players remarked that they felt like the game was a little slow, while others wanted to have a better way of dodging incoming projectiles. We think we can fix both of these by adding a feature we had in mind already: a short-range dash.
Each player will have the ability to dash. You can press a button, at which point your totem will gain a speed boost for a short time. During this dash, you also smash through blocks you come in contact with. After using it, you’ll have to wait several seconds before being able to dash again.
The intent of this mechanic is to allow players to dodge projectiles, get around corners quickly and in general add a deeper skill level to maneuvering. It should also help to increase the game pace, without increasing the characters’ base speed. Below, Niels will explain how he handles implementing gameplay features, using the dash as example.
Self-explanatory names
Finally, we had a lot of trouble explaining how the game works due to the terms we’d decided to use. For example: we chose the name silk because it fits well with the aesthetic and narrative concept of this energy type. However, when we tell players to ‘collect silk’, it doesn’t have a direct relation to the energy balls on screen, nor does it explain that it’s a type of energy that can power the Titan or native camps.
If instead we call the silk what it essentially is, ‘energy’, then people can link it to real-world energy, as energy is also used to power machines.
Compare these two for example:
Collect silk from the spindle point and deliver it to the native camp to capture it.
Collect energy from the generator and deliver it to the turret to activate it.
In the first example we have to explain what silk is, what a spindle point does, and what a native camp does and looks like. In the second, all gameplay names are related to their real-world usage and thus more straightforward.
So for each of the game elements in Antegods, we’ll have to think hard and come up with the most self-explanatory and descriptive name. That way we’ll make it a lot easier for new players to understand the mechanics of each game element.
Continued development
In all, we received a lot of feedback from players, helping us to see the current strong and weak sides of Antegods. I’m really excited to get back to development and make the game more understandable for players, as well as testing new gameplay ideas to deepen and diversify the game’s strategy and tactics!
Art – Tom
Between the last Art post and the one you’re reading now, the look of Antegods changed a lot. Because of the deadline that was the GDC, we had to make some quick choices and sometimes couldn’t pay attention to the big picture.
One of the things that suffered from this was the in-game color scheme. With Antegods we’re going for a stylized realistic look, which means we can’t go too bold on the colors. But, because the game gets chaotic and wild easily, it all needs to be super readable.
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The above screenshot shows 4 Red players fighting against 2 Blue enemies (the third is flying away). We see two types of blocks and the Red Titan. Or do we?
There are actually quite a few problems here. For one, the characters seem to blend into the background, and the difference between blocks isn’t very clear either. Importantly, it’s not immediately obvious which player belongs to which team and what kind of loadout the players have. In the future we want numerous combinations between bodies, boosters and weapons, which will all have their own stats, so players need to be able to see who is carrying what.
