Hello mortals,

here we are again with an update on the development of Dungeon Crowley, these months have been tough with COVID-19 pandemic hitting hard in Brazil, but luckily we are all safe and the project is progressing towards the upcoming Early Access update. We are all really excited to show you everything we have been working on!


In Dungeon Crowley you are free to choose which class to focus on during the character's evolution. We added 3 new armor sets: The Warrior, The Samurai and The Archer. Each uses the player's attributes differently. Props to our artist Douglas L. Coelli who polished all the animations and adapted them from 1st to 3rd person view!



All armors in the game are carefully prepared to be compatible with first and third person interactions. Our artist Douglas Coelli was responsible for the adaptation, completely redesigning the animations and improving the textures. So, which one do you intend to play with?


Also, we are already working on a new dungeon: Tiphareth. For the first time on his journey, the Neophyte now is face to face to pure knowledge, but don't get to cozy with the warm of Tiphareth, real danger also lies there. Check it out and let us know what you think:















Although powerful, the intellect alone does not empower Neophyte. He begins to perceive for the first time a peculiar imbalance, and once again, he finds himself trapped.



Doubt transforms certainties into questions and through this warm transmutation of frustration and anger, he realizes the disharmony that afflicted him: he lacked emotional sensitivity.
In order to better understand this nature the Neophyte goes to the seventh sephira ritual, Netzach, now in search of his inner artist.

Located in the right column of the Tree of Life at the Pillar of Mercy, Netzach deals with an emotional and instinctual plane, intuition and the senses arise beyond the intellect. In search of balance between his mind and his emotions, he ventures again, this time, in the icy fields of Netzach.

Stay safe, and expect more news about Dungeon Crowley soon,
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

this Dungeon Crowley devlog update starts with a very special partnership, our friend Matheus Mazuqueli from Ignite Game Studio, created a new magical staff for the game (thank you very much!). What do you think about it?



Is there a specific type of magic do you imagine for this one?🔥

This last weeks, we have been progressing into buidling the game levels and the transitions between them, here you can check our progresses:



Neophyte traverses his subconscious through the Yesod sphere, his mystical understanding of material and spiritual things is rising as well as his understanding of universal functioning.

He is inspired by the search for true knowledge, in which cannot be learned merely by study, but by experience.

In this quest, a new ritual is performed. The eighth Sephira, Hod, is open. Located on the Pillar of Severity, on the left side of the Tree of Life, Hod represents intellectuality and mentality in its concrete form; name of all things and cataloger of each concept.

Still, all of these are superficial concepts, as if taken from a foreigner's view of the newly arrived land. Merely a 9 looking at the 8.

Stripped and irrelucting, the Neophyte enters the domains of Hod.

--




After finding old documents in his new and improvised room, Neophite goes on to study them. And with the obsession of the power to transform your reality, it performs the first ritual.

The doors of Yesod appear in front of his eyes, and without hesitation, our protagonist leaves for this new reality.

Yesod, the 9th Sephira, is the home of the subconscious. Situated in the central pillar of the Tree of Life; the Pillar of Balance. It is from there that the Neophite begins its astral consciousness and the understanding of the universe becomes more clear.

The Neophite feels a familiarity in the air, the feeling is that he was in an old RPG game that has been present in large part of his life.

Objects and smells of your everyday life are also present in the environment.

But what did all that mean? And without knowing what would be coming, the Neophite departs in search of more answers for his subconscious.

--




Another dungeon is on the way! Being opposed to the desert Hod dungeon, Netzach features dead cold ambiance, filled with ice and frozen mysteries. We've been putting a lot of work in nice rendering features such as, a more cold lightning, fog, snow particles, and ice custom depth materials.
Is there anything you suggest we could improve?

Stay safe, and expect more news about Dungeon Crowley soon,
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

welcome to this new post about level design insights, we will tell you more about how we are building our levels and a very interesting (and free tool) that we use to randomize elements in them.

Along this Early Access stage, we are sharing the different stages that the project is going through. One key aspect for us in Dungeon Crowley is the level design process. And we thought it would be interesting to give you some insights and illustrate how we are going through it in a more detailed way.

So prepared the following time-lapse, and a list of steps showing our workflow in Unreal Engine 4:

1. Global lightning (all rooms in Hod share a common directional light, skylight, skysphere and such).
   
   
   
   
2. Preparing material sets: all common materials that should be shared across maps, taking color and blending in consideration.
   
   
   
   
3. Map lightning: overall lightning specific to the map such as torches, other light sources and reflections spheres.
   
   
   
   
4. Macro construction: walls, big meshes and overall bounding assets.
   
   
   
   
5. Micro construction: small props and details; plants, sun rays and such.
   
   
   
   
6. Unique details: details that are unique to the map.
   
   
   
   
7. Lightning finalization: re-analysis of the level light with all assets and level-design done.
   
   

Final result:



Also related to level design, we want to share with you a free tool we found very useful when doing our level design with randomized elements, it is called Prefabricator, and here you can see it in action:



To contextualize how we use it, we have to explain we use a strong randomization algorithm and had split our process in two steps:

1. Macro: randomizing entire hand-crafted rooms and interchanging the order of appearance between them.

2. Micro: altering internal details (such as decoration and some gameplay related props, wall, chests, etc.)

We've been using the Prefabricator plugin to perform do the second step. It is a fabulous tool because of the following reasons:

• Very level-design oriented.
  
• Allows prefab collections, thus, stressing the reutilization of those.
  
• Can be used during runtime and even in a async way, allowing very cool effects like re-randomizing an entire scenery in runtime without blocking the game flow.
  
• Can handle nested collections.
  
• Allows seed linking to relate entire different prefabs, (fine control over chain generation of different collections, thus, amplifying re-utilization and giving better macro control of a entire scenery).

We had to make a few changes to allow it to work with our multiplayer design, but aside of that, this plugin is a very professional and complete tool; and even better: it's free!

You can find more info about Prefabricator for Unreal Engine here: https://prefabricator.io/

Stay tuned for more news,
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

hope you all are doing good, this month of March has been a bit hectic on our side, the Coronavirus pandemic came and, as with many other people, impacted our daily lives, luckily we are all healthy and taking the recommended hygienic and distance measures while we keep the quarantine.

Here follows the more remarkable progresses done during this month of Dungeon Crowley development:

• We have been working on our main door model, it was designed to easily transmit progress info to the player. It can be found all over the place in dungeons.
  
  
  
  
• Currently working on the blocking behavior in some enemies so we improve the combat dynamics and their pace.
  
  Now, the enemies switch to defense mode, and stays for 2-3 secs.
  
  Do you have any tips on how the player could break that defense?
  
  
  
  
• We are working on an early prototype of the new-coming Hod Dungeon.
  Hod is the 8th sephirah of the Kabbalistic tree of life. Its color is orange and there ideas are worked on by facts and not by feelings, so we look for a more robust and warm dungeon design.
  
  
  
  
• Finally, we would like to present a short introduction on the relationship with the Thoth tarot and the Kabbalistic Tree of life on which Dungeon Crowley's game design is firmly based upon.
  
  Joining those two distinct views of the universe was a continuous work developed over years amongst great minds, but we can extrapolate to say that the ultimate convergence of these [before opposite concepts], was conceived by Mr. Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris, creating a set of archetypes known as the Thoth Tarot.
  
  In our dual existence we trend to naturally stipulate antagonistic concepts, love and hate, heat and cold, but the Universe doesn't differentiate those:
  
  "Learn now that Impressions of Sense have Opposites readily conceived, as long to short, or light to dark; and so with Emotions and Perceptions, as Love to Hate, or False to True; but the more Violent the Antagonism, the more is it bound in Illusion, determined by Relation."
  
  
  
  Happy reading: https://www.tarotica.net/tarot--the-tree-of-life.html

Stay tuned for more news, and above all, stay safe!
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

we are moving forward with the development, and as we implement the basic structure of the campaign mode, we are also improving level design procedural routines and added a mini-map. Here are the most recent updates we shared on social media:

In this room from Yesod dungeon the neophyte will discover the basic secrets of Magick, allowing him to use staffs to launch spells through a tutorial.





Implemented pathway randomization. Simple modifications in pre-crafted to improve player's experience each time they play.



Lost? Don't worry, we're working on a mini-map to help crawling through our procedurally designed dungeons.



We finished our mini-map 1st implementation, see it on the upper-right corner of the screen.

What do you think about its design and size? Would you re-orientate it according to the players cone of sight?



Stay tuned for more news,
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

today we want to show you the progress we made in the rituals animations and the way dungeons are generated.

Here is a finished ritual pose. This is the end resulting model rendered inside Unreal Engine.



The rituals are used to teleport the player to the different dungeons. We can finally show a finished ritual pose animation, let us know what do you think.



This last weeks we have been working on a new algorithm for level creation that allows decoration and even gameplay details to be changed from pre-defined states, creating a new layer of randomized content; and thus improving the feeling of "something not seen before" in the game room details.



We keep working on the above mentioned and many other features, will keep the community hub and social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) regularly updated with our further progresses.

Stay tuned,
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

as we approach our next Early Access milestone, we want to share with you some nice 3D artwork for the rituals, an essential part of the game. Hope you like it!

This is the concept-art drawing:



After the concept art, some physic techniques were applied to create the fabric 3D model.



The ritual robe after a proper UV mapping, textures care and with Unreal Engine clothing physics integrated.



And the result high poly model of the ritual robe with some nice close-up detailed pics:







This week we started testing the latest alpha build, hopefully we'll have news for you about a potential release date for next Early Access version in a matter of weeks.

Stay tuned and have a great start of Christmas holidays!
Animvs Game Studio

Hello dear mortals,

these past weeks week we've been working on more elaborated AI behaviors such as escape points for the "worm" foe, which sneaks through pipes and can be found on wet places. Our goal is to better integrate enemy's reactions with the environment where they're in.



We've been also working on the level design, so watch your step... New traps are coming!



Stay tuned and have a wonderful week!
Animvs Game Studio

Hello, Dear mortals!

In this week's post we bring a closer look at our Dungeon Crowley intro storyboard creation process.

1. Seeking a camera framing study that most closely portray the key points of the narrative, that way we introduce the player to the game's plot.

2. We portray the scenes that have a greater weight for the cutscene.

3. After framing settings, we move on to build the 3D cutscene and keep polishing until it is ready to be integrated in the game.











4. After tons of polishing work, here is one of the last iterations of our introductory sequence. https://steamcommunity.com/games/937530/announcements/detail/1593636290677428595

In DungeonCrowley you are introduced to our main character, a teacher which engages with the occult while facing financial problems.

Also, last week we participated in USP Game Link in São Carlos (São Paulo, Brazil). An open event that brings together the gamedev community of the region and representatives of the university, enthusiasts and players. We had a great time, sharing some pics to remember :)







Have a great weekend!
Animvs Game Studio

We keep working on polishing the new dungeons generation system, that allows us more variety and freedom in our level design. We can create handcrafted rooms, allowing more coherent content, like this custom archery challenge, do you like how it looks?