Welcome to yet another dev blog!
Katey here bringing you the weekly update. Last week we had fun with motion capture, the gameplay designers continued their work on the tutorial and the programmers programmed (heh heh).
It looks like you enjoyed Bakko’s Egg Brawl! It’s been so awesome seeing your reactions. I’m looking forward to watching some awesome Odeum plays and hopefully community made highlight reels. Did you ever get your hands on a pink egg? Did you even notice we hid a pink egg in the last dev blog? Two, in fact!
Animation
The animators have been experimenting with motion capture (aka mocap)! Mocap is a popular method used in animation in both movies and games (think Gollum). Our Senior Technical Animator, Gabriel, has been the magician in this area and is helping the team to create some prototypes.
This clip shows a little of what we’re messing around with. I was really excited about the idea of ‘body acting’ a Battlerite champion (yes that’s me looking my best in the bicycle helmet) so decided to give it a go! But it turns out, it’s really hard. My midlife crisis dreams of becoming an actress are now doomed.
Our mocap animation techniques are very preliminary right now as the team get used to this method and look at how it could speed up the animation process, not to mention be used in other creative ways, but we’re really excited by what we’ve been able to achieve so far, and can see great potential for its use in the future!
Improved Tutorial
This has been mentioned many times in our dev blogs now, and it’s something that’s going to be worked on for a while due to the new vision we have for the tutorial. The gameplay team are busy creating 1v1 scripted battles against bots that teach new players how to play Battlerite. This is far more extensive than what we currently have; the designers are looking at expanding these battles to other champions and match ups and teaching more about the arena, etc. The idea is to get new players far more prepared for PvP than they are currently.
Meanwhile, the artists and myself are working on how we could visually present these battles. We think that making this feel like a campaign mode could be a really fun way to learn Battlerite, and make this area enjoyable for both new and current players, with the addition of a feeling of progression thrown in for good measure.
We’re working on creating a ‘world map’ of Battlerite where the locations of Arenas are shown. Each Arena could house a collection of bot battles for players to complete. Right now, we’re experimenting with the idea of progressing through the map, so completing the first part allows you to progress to the next region/arena where you can play a new battle experience against bots, all the time learning about Battlerite and its champions.
This is still very preliminary and we’re still ironing out how all the part fits together. If possible, we’d love to include more narrative in this area, showing more personality and depth to our champions. Can’t say much more than that for now, let’s see what the future brings!
Programming
Our programmers are always busy when a patch goes live as they are the ones that get the patch pushed to Steam, fix bugs, handle hotfixes and anything else that needs attention.
Otherwise, a couple of the programmers have been working on 3rd party API implementation, the build and deploy pipeline for the game (so we can create new test and live builds faster), match creation and some rework to private matches (this area needs some TLC so we can do more things with private match in the future).
And lastly, once again, here’s a mysterious sneaky peaky leaky from the artists:
Oh and if you’re wondering what the fishies were all about in dev blog #9, all will be revealed… in time.
That’s all folks!
/Katey