Great news, everyone. First of all, we can finally announce the release date. Ash of Gods will become available for purchase on Steam at March, 23th.

Those, who expect Ash of Gods on consoles, will be pleased to know that legendary Russian company Buka Entertainment will publish the game for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One till the end of the year.

Great news, everyone. First of all, we can finally announce the release date. Ash of Gods will become available for purchase on Steam at March, 23th.

Those, who expect Ash of Gods on consoles, will be pleased to know that legendary Russian company Buka Entertainment will publish the game for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One till the end of the year.

Hello. I’m Ivan Bobenko – one of the game designers of the Ash of Gods project. In this diary I would to talk about game mechanics, bold decisions, favorite combat characters and… cloning. How ethical is it to reproduce the lamb Dolly, if the output is not a sheep, but a real wolf?

I want to start with mentioning the fact that I always read the new issues of the Developer Diary with a great pleasure. I am very excited by the informal and emotional delivery of the material from Nikolay. He always writes from his point of view, not particularly shy with his language and without covering up the harsh truth with sweet words. Therefore, I am glad to be able to have the spotlight as well.

The feeling when you have spread the numbers over two screens and ponder over edits:




Most of my attention in the project I give to the combat system. Without exaggeration, I can say that at the time of writing these diaries, I have played many times more fights in AoG than anybody else. In each of these battles I have pursued certain goals: sometimes to weaken the overpowerful characters, sometimes I have observed the losers of each squad gathering their will into a fist and becoming interesting (to match all the favorite archers), part of the battles was devoted to the AI behavior tests or checking whether some errors were fixed.



Even at the early stages of testing, many fights were quiet spectacular. This is especially true for the most difficult battles, in which the enemies, without any mercy and pity, have disemboweled my modest squad, exhausted by a long journey and the absence of strixes.

Only early on in the game can you skip reading the descriptions of the opponent’s abilities and passive skills, but the further in the Termimium, the thicker are the Enses.

To win a battle with your last efforts, when the larger part of your party already lies on the ground, without giving any signs of life – it is extremely fascinating.


WebPort is an application for testing AoG combat system, where you can “enjoy” solid color as a background and the machinations of the cruel AI. After spending 100,000 hours there, I thought it would be unfair to leave this legendary training ground in the shadows.


I have tried very hard to make the game classes not only attractive to the player, but also unique in comparison with each other. This feature is even more pronounced when the player begins to think through the party development plan, distributing skill points. For example, you can develop Thorn into a powerful AOEher or an excellent support character.



I’m sure when you start playing, you will have your own favorites in the team. Personally, I adore Fisk and Ramlin – I constantly buy and give them the best equipment, despite the fact that they are very unique and are not always effective. If the story suddenly poses the question of “lose a good friend or save Fisk?” – I’ll answer it easily.

Let the favorite characters finish off as many enemies as possible, and with the additional experience they will level up much faster than the rest of the team.



Fisk, who has a weakness for alcohol and has seen things, is in fact a fragile, but very strong damage dealer. If you are not careful with him, in the later stages of the game this spearman may well be killed by one powerful shot.

Some of my colleagues do not like Fisk for his low survival rate (and even by leveling up you will not be able to raise his health very soon), but in skillful hands he can work miracles.

For this character the turn order is very important. Due to the possibility of increasing his own protection, well-equipped and properly leveld up Fisk can sometimes even tank.



Ramlin is a support character. He had some witchcraft skills from his grandmother and in battle he can strengthen your party members for the duration of the battle. Many people are immediately deterred by his ridiculous attack value of one. But if you develop your strategy, based on the presence of Ramlin in the party, you can achieve impressive results.

A lot of the skills in the game are calculated from the character’s attack value: for example, Thorn’s defence depends on his attack value.

Ramlin can significantly increase the attack of another character – and then their abilities start to get out of control and become deadly. Also he can take the attack points from his party members and then steal a lot of energy from the enemies.


With the introduction of the system of cooldowns, I managed to liven up the behavior of the player’s characters. Now you need to think at what point it is better to use a defensive skill or how to hold out until the time when a powerful ability becomes avaiable.

Thanks to the cooldowns, we have managed to add truly “crazy” abilities. For example, the possibility for an Assassin class to kill a completely healthy enemy with one blow.

Abilities this strong are on the cooldown at the beginning of the fight, and the player has to wait until they become available.


Hold on. What are these numbers? 95 HP for Gleda? Whom should I write a ticket with a bug to? No, it’s okay, it’s just fully levelled up characters. In the campaign you willl not see this, so at least look at the screenshot. And the local Assassin Hoda has 45/38 even in the most developed configuration. Surely he is a very weak character!


Even before I’ve joined the team pretty bold foundations were laid for the combat system: for example, the ability to almost infinitly raise the character’s attack in combat without restrictions or diminishes. Or heling, which in our game is not traditional, the one everyone is used to, but is, in fact, a health buff.



So, when healing a completely healthy character, you increase the amount of his health and there are no limits for this. On one hand, it makes possible the use of cheesy strategies, on the other – adds lots of fun to the game and plenty of room for experimentation.

Choosing between the correct mathematical methods of calculations for strict balance and fun, we took the side of the latter – and I’m scared to think of what some ingenious players will be able to create on the release with the opportunities that we give them.

Imagine that you take two clerics aside and buff your tank – already pretty fat – with health, and then watch the vain attempts of the computer to kill this mammoth.


Honestly, before meeting with the developers from Aurum Dust, I saw news about the game and without getting into details, branded it for myself as the “Banner Saga reskin”, having lost all interest.


Spoiler: no, not about the banners.

But in reality everything turned out to be much more complicated and interesting. Everyone knows how often gamedev works today: we take a successful project, we attach some new features to it – and there you go: eat our clone on the hype wave. In fact, it turned that Stoic Studio in are aware of development, are supportive of it and even backed our undertaking on Kickstarter.

In addition – in my opinion – in the case of Ash of Gods, the number of unique and original elements (for example, the real death of all heroes or highly delayed consequences of player’s choices) allows the game to break through the cage of its heritage and act as something new and special.

Therefore, I hope that all those who have already made a hasty conclusion, sooner or later, will come across a review, a gameplay or just a funny meme about our game, which will meke them dig a little deeper and more objectively evaluate the project and decide for themselves whether it is worth to pass by?




I look forward to the release of the game no less than you do. It is often said that when you develop you have time to play enough to get nauseous, so that later you do not want to see the game again. In my case, this is not so true. On the release day, I plan to run someone’s stream on one screen and play the game myself on the other.



I cannot wait to read and analyze your praising and angry (and you cannot avoid having these) reviews about the release version.

The night is dark and full of terrors. March is coming.

Hello. I’m Ivan Bobenko – one of the game designers of the Ash of Gods project. In this diary I would to talk about game mechanics, bold decisions, favorite combat characters and… cloning. How ethical is it to reproduce the lamb Dolly, if the output is not a sheep, but a real wolf?

I want to start with mentioning the fact that I always read the new issues of the Developer Diary with a great pleasure. I am very excited by the informal and emotional delivery of the material from Nikolay. He always writes from his point of view, not particularly shy with his language and without covering up the harsh truth with sweet words. Therefore, I am glad to be able to have the spotlight as well.

The feeling when you have spread the numbers over two screens and ponder over edits:




Most of my attention in the project I give to the combat system. Without exaggeration, I can say that at the time of writing these diaries, I have played many times more fights in AoG than anybody else. In each of these battles I have pursued certain goals: sometimes to weaken the overpowerful characters, sometimes I have observed the losers of each squad gathering their will into a fist and becoming interesting (to match all the favorite archers), part of the battles was devoted to the AI behavior tests or checking whether some errors were fixed.



Even at the early stages of testing, many fights were quiet spectacular. This is especially true for the most difficult battles, in which the enemies, without any mercy and pity, have disemboweled my modest squad, exhausted by a long journey and the absence of strixes.

Only early on in the game can you skip reading the descriptions of the opponent’s abilities and passive skills, but the further in the Termimium, the thicker are the Enses.

To win a battle with your last efforts, when the larger part of your party already lies on the ground, without giving any signs of life – it is extremely fascinating.


WebPort is an application for testing AoG combat system, where you can “enjoy” solid color as a background and the machinations of the cruel AI. After spending 100,000 hours there, I thought it would be unfair to leave this legendary training ground in the shadows.


I have tried very hard to make the game classes not only attractive to the player, but also unique in comparison with each other. This feature is even more pronounced when the player begins to think through the party development plan, distributing skill points. For example, you can develop Thorn into a powerful AOEher or an excellent support character.



I’m sure when you start playing, you will have your own favorites in the team. Personally, I adore Fisk and Ramlin – I constantly buy and give them the best equipment, despite the fact that they are very unique and are not always effective. If the story suddenly poses the question of “lose a good friend or save Fisk?” – I’ll answer it easily.

Let the favorite characters finish off as many enemies as possible, and with the additional experience they will level up much faster than the rest of the team.



Fisk, who has a weakness for alcohol and has seen things, is in fact a fragile, but very strong damage dealer. If you are not careful with him, in the later stages of the game this spearman may well be killed by one powerful shot.

Some of my colleagues do not like Fisk for his low survival rate (and even by leveling up you will not be able to raise his health very soon), but in skillful hands he can work miracles.

For this character the turn order is very important. Due to the possibility of increasing his own protection, well-equipped and properly leveld up Fisk can sometimes even tank.



Ramlin is a support character. He had some witchcraft skills from his grandmother and in battle he can strengthen your party members for the duration of the battle. Many people are immediately deterred by his ridiculous attack value of one. But if you develop your strategy, based on the presence of Ramlin in the party, you can achieve impressive results.

A lot of the skills in the game are calculated from the character’s attack value: for example, Thorn’s defence depends on his attack value.

Ramlin can significantly increase the attack of another character – and then their abilities start to get out of control and become deadly. Also he can take the attack points from his party members and then steal a lot of energy from the enemies.


With the introduction of the system of cooldowns, I managed to liven up the behavior of the player’s characters. Now you need to think at what point it is better to use a defensive skill or how to hold out until the time when a powerful ability becomes avaiable.

Thanks to the cooldowns, we have managed to add truly “crazy” abilities. For example, the possibility for an Assassin class to kill a completely healthy enemy with one blow.

Abilities this strong are on the cooldown at the beginning of the fight, and the player has to wait until they become available.


Hold on. What are these numbers? 95 HP for Gleda? Whom should I write a ticket with a bug to? No, it’s okay, it’s just fully levelled up characters. In the campaign you willl not see this, so at least look at the screenshot. And the local Assassin Hoda has 45/38 even in the most developed configuration. Surely he is a very weak character!


Even before I’ve joined the team pretty bold foundations were laid for the combat system: for example, the ability to almost infinitly raise the character’s attack in combat without restrictions or diminishes. Or heling, which in our game is not traditional, the one everyone is used to, but is, in fact, a health buff.



So, when healing a completely healthy character, you increase the amount of his health and there are no limits for this. On one hand, it makes possible the use of cheesy strategies, on the other – adds lots of fun to the game and plenty of room for experimentation.

Choosing between the correct mathematical methods of calculations for strict balance and fun, we took the side of the latter – and I’m scared to think of what some ingenious players will be able to create on the release with the opportunities that we give them.

Imagine that you take two clerics aside and buff your tank – already pretty fat – with health, and then watch the vain attempts of the computer to kill this mammoth.


Honestly, before meeting with the developers from Aurum Dust, I saw news about the game and without getting into details, branded it for myself as the “Banner Saga reskin”, having lost all interest.


Spoiler: no, not about the banners.

But in reality everything turned out to be much more complicated and interesting. Everyone knows how often gamedev works today: we take a successful project, we attach some new features to it – and there you go: eat our clone on the hype wave. In fact, it turned that Stoic Studio in are aware of development, are supportive of it and even backed our undertaking on Kickstarter.

In addition – in my opinion – in the case of Ash of Gods, the number of unique and original elements (for example, the real death of all heroes or highly delayed consequences of player’s choices) allows the game to break through the cage of its heritage and act as something new and special.

Therefore, I hope that all those who have already made a hasty conclusion, sooner or later, will come across a review, a gameplay or just a funny meme about our game, which will meke them dig a little deeper and more objectively evaluate the project and decide for themselves whether it is worth to pass by?




I look forward to the release of the game no less than you do. It is often said that when you develop you have time to play enough to get nauseous, so that later you do not want to see the game again. In my case, this is not so true. On the release day, I plan to run someone’s stream on one screen and play the game myself on the other.



I cannot wait to read and analyze your praising and angry (and you cannot avoid having these) reviews about the release version.

The night is dark and full of terrors. March is coming.

Putting a hand on my heart, I can say that I did not plan to write this diary, but in our profiles on social networks a pool of questions had accumulated, which I would like to answer all at once and I just have a little time for it. This time I will talk about how we made content – characters, effects and why there is so much text in the game. I will add a little bit about the readiness of the Feng’s line. I will also talk about the state of the translation and the parallel translation into 9 languages. If the text seems too serious, bear in mind that I am writing it quite sober – this seems to be the first such diary, give me a little slack for it.


Special effects are one of the most difficult parts in the project. Among our artists there is no an FX-guru. Most of the effects are the result of a collective creativity of our art director Igor and the artist Andrei Zherdev. Most of the effects and techniques of working with colors are his doing. Work on the FX begins with us formulating the text, what should happen step by step, after which Igor and Andrei draw key frames for the future effect. This allows us to simplify the work of the FX animator as much as possible.



You know, for me it was amazing how differently the same effect is perceived when you see it along with the sound. Whenever we had added a sound to the next effect, it began to play with new colors, and the visible flaws were smoothed out. There are a number of complex and composite effects in the game, such as one of Blans’s blows, which we had created approxibately, without a storyboard:



The people we had given the game to – friends, a number of backers from Kickstarter, – they all said that the game really needs voiceover for the author’s text – when playing you have to remove your eyes from the picture to read, instead of looking at the picture. We were able to record Russian and English voiceovers for the author’s text – this is about 12 minutes of voice during the game. Also voiced the screens of switching characters and texts that are written on scrolls (as for example at the very end of the game):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l4W2-W_4-k
Right now we are working on the voice acting for the characters themselves. Dmitry’s friend (Erokhin) kindly provided us with the opportunity to select samples from his ~ 10,000 recordings of groans, laughs, sneezes, coughs and other indecencies from a few dozen actors – I selected about eight hundred to simplify the life of our SFX artist Gennady. It was the most horrible 16 hours in the last six months – almost for two days all I heard only this:

PLAY AUDIO TRACK

There were also glimpses of light in this hell, for example on the 16th second. Initially, our plan with SFX battles was rather simple – screams of characters in combat scenes were supposed to be the only voice cues in the game. Everything went down the drain on the design of sounds for clerics and priests (Vai, Skur, Alus, Ramlin). It turned out to be very boring to conjure in silence. Sergey dug out his favorite desktop dictionary of the Enochian language and wrote simple spellings, like “Save and protect!”, “I’ll be your key” and “Forgive Your Son!”:

PLAY AUDIO TRACK

This is not yet a final version of the sound mix, but it gives the general idea of how awful it is to speak Enochian 🙂 I rejoice that except for some rogue mediums of Victorian England and the churchmen in our game, no one talks in it.


It all begins with the author’s description of the character – followed by the selection of examples for the pose, face, clothes and choice of colors. For example:

The major impression is beautiful and disgusting at the same time. A slim, imperious and arrogant aristocrat, who immediately makes you want to smash his face. Spoiled and depraved bastard. A spender, does not miss the opportunity to flash his wealth, arrogance, and the contempt for the common fols. The void of strength, courage and intelligence is ftlled by the excess of cunning, rancor and stubbornness. He never forgives anything and does not stop at anything.

The worst thing that can happen is the need to redraw a character, so we use 5 stages to work on each character:



The steps are the following:

1. Pose, sketches of clothes, very rough facial expression. The first result is ready after 30-40 minutes, and an hour later we get a dummy, which can be drawn in rough.
   
2. Rough drawing. All the elements of clothing are already recognizable, but most importantly – the face. It is at this stage that we must decide that the person and his expression fits the character.
   
3. Fine drawing with a thin pencil. Here we refine the outline, break into layers and tonal groups, draw all the small details.
   
4. Colour. At this stage, the color is applied without halftones.
   
5. Halftone.

In the video below you can see all the stages. A full cycle for one character takes about 3-5 days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fasa2EDrrY
The main source of information about clothing – “Fashion in the Middle Ages” from Suit-History and “Medieval Fashions” from the 1998 Dover Coloring Book. Feel free to use our table of the color palette for clothes that we used in the game:






Instead of a thousand words – today’s update from the localization platform. By the release the game should be ready – Russian, English, Ukrainian, German, Chinese, Italian. A few weeks later – Polish, French, Spanish. At the end of summer – Brazilian Portuguese. In case you are a publisher or is interested in landing us money in some form for localization to some other languages – reach out, and we will be glad to hear you. And yes, guys from Kickstarter – so many languages became possible only thanks to you. And, of course, thank you dear interpreters, that you agree to help us at completely bargain prices – thank you very much! Your help is invaluable!

Hey, fellow countrymen from Lokalize, give a discount on the subscription !!! Pretty please (wink)

For localization, we use the Lokalize platform-it has built-in mechanisms for Fuzzy Check, Translation Memory, a system of permissions, allows you to track progress in parallel, has a built-in task tracker and integration with Slack.


Now the game has 230,050 Russian (249,355 English words). 1/4 of this amount is in the main story. In the storylines of the three protagonists, there are a little less than three and a half hundred events which happen to them on the road and about a hundred possible battles.

In one playthrough you will encounter about 25-35 fights and about a hundred events. Most of the events will allow you to avoid fighting if you want. And we tried to ensure that every game dialogue allowed you to “cut” through the dialogs, omitting the lore, if you are not interested in it.

The game is a large interactive book and if you want a visual novel. Probably you have played something similar in your childhood? Yes, this is a niche story and now, after the first wave of press reviews, I get nervous every time. Nobody had complained so far and that is worrying – when there are complains – it is clear what you need to work on. What to do when the game is prased is not clear. I still can not believe that we did it right. You see, even the characters in the profile turned away and are nervous?



We have promised 12-14 hours for one playthrough – in fact, according to the first tests, the full playthrough will take you about 18 – 24 hours. The spread depends on the route that you will choose the map – the slowest way will take about 31 hours. Most of the time – in battles. About 50% of this time is spent on battles, 15% on management of the routes on the map and 35% on reading dialogs and quests. However, if you do not want to go deep into the lore – every lower variant of answers in dialogs allows them to be reduced to the minimum, receiving only a fraction of it. And in the story hubs, you can choose only the “red” (important) icons – this will reduce the text part by 2/3.


Dmitry Erokhin and Sergey Malitsky completed the last set of events for all the protagonists on the map. The last set is 104 events that can happen to our heroes on the road. This is the last batch of text to be translated. We drew, assembled and tuned all the scenes of Feng – this week we will begin to include them in the main stream of the game and test. It looks like a small feat, when the war is almost over – now everything needs to be done “yesterday” and the guys outdid themselves with this part of the work.

Now the game is assembled and running on PC, Mac, Linux (Ubuntu, SteamOS) and takes 2.7 GB of space on the disk. We are doing our best to complete the multiplayer – we add levelling up, prizes, clans, ratings. PvP part should be ready in March.

Putting a hand on my heart, I can say that I did not plan to write this diary, but in our profiles on social networks a pool of questions had accumulated, which I would like to answer all at once and I just have a little time for it. This time I will talk about how we made content – characters, effects and why there is so much text in the game. I will add a little bit about the readiness of the Feng’s line. I will also talk about the state of the translation and the parallel translation into 9 languages. If the text seems too serious, bear in mind that I am writing it quite sober – this seems to be the first such diary, give me a little slack for it.


Special effects are one of the most difficult parts in the project. Among our artists there is no an FX-guru. Most of the effects are the result of a collective creativity of our art director Igor and the artist Andrei Zherdev. Most of the effects and techniques of working with colors are his doing. Work on the FX begins with us formulating the text, what should happen step by step, after which Igor and Andrei draw key frames for the future effect. This allows us to simplify the work of the FX animator as much as possible.



You know, for me it was amazing how differently the same effect is perceived when you see it along with the sound. Whenever we had added a sound to the next effect, it began to play with new colors, and the visible flaws were smoothed out. There are a number of complex and composite effects in the game, such as one of Blans’s blows, which we had created approxibately, without a storyboard:



The people we had given the game to – friends, a number of backers from Kickstarter, – they all said that the game really needs voiceover for the author’s text – when playing you have to remove your eyes from the picture to read, instead of looking at the picture. We were able to record Russian and English voiceovers for the author’s text – this is about 12 minutes of voice during the game. Also voiced the screens of switching characters and texts that are written on scrolls (as for example at the very end of the game):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l4W2-W_4-k
Right now we are working on the voice acting for the characters themselves. Dmitry’s friend (Erokhin) kindly provided us with the opportunity to select samples from his ~ 10,000 recordings of groans, laughs, sneezes, coughs and other indecencies from a few dozen actors – I selected about eight hundred to simplify the life of our SFX artist Gennady. It was the most horrible 16 hours in the last six months – almost for two days all I heard only this:

PLAY AUDIO TRACK

There were also glimpses of light in this hell, for example on the 16th second. Initially, our plan with SFX battles was rather simple – screams of characters in combat scenes were supposed to be the only voice cues in the game. Everything went down the drain on the design of sounds for clerics and priests (Vai, Skur, Alus, Ramlin). It turned out to be very boring to conjure in silence. Sergey dug out his favorite desktop dictionary of the Enochian language and wrote simple spellings, like “Save and protect!”, “I’ll be your key” and “Forgive Your Son!”:

PLAY AUDIO TRACK

This is not yet a final version of the sound mix, but it gives the general idea of how awful it is to speak Enochian 🙂 I rejoice that except for some rogue mediums of Victorian England and the churchmen in our game, no one talks in it.


It all begins with the author’s description of the character – followed by the selection of examples for the pose, face, clothes and choice of colors. For example:

The major impression is beautiful and disgusting at the same time. A slim, imperious and arrogant aristocrat, who immediately makes you want to smash his face. Spoiled and depraved bastard. A spender, does not miss the opportunity to flash his wealth, arrogance, and the contempt for the common fols. The void of strength, courage and intelligence is ftlled by the excess of cunning, rancor and stubbornness. He never forgives anything and does not stop at anything.

The worst thing that can happen is the need to redraw a character, so we use 5 stages to work on each character:



The steps are the following:

1. Pose, sketches of clothes, very rough facial expression. The first result is ready after 30-40 minutes, and an hour later we get a dummy, which can be drawn in rough.
   
2. Rough drawing. All the elements of clothing are already recognizable, but most importantly – the face. It is at this stage that we must decide that the person and his expression fits the character.
   
3. Fine drawing with a thin pencil. Here we refine the outline, break into layers and tonal groups, draw all the small details.
   
4. Colour. At this stage, the color is applied without halftones.
   
5. Halftone.

In the video below you can see all the stages. A full cycle for one character takes about 3-5 days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fasa2EDrrY
The main source of information about clothing – “Fashion in the Middle Ages” from Suit-History and “Medieval Fashions” from the 1998 Dover Coloring Book. Feel free to use our table of the color palette for clothes that we used in the game:






Instead of a thousand words – today’s update from the localization platform. By the release the game should be ready – Russian, English, Ukrainian, German, Chinese, Italian. A few weeks later – Polish, French, Spanish. At the end of summer – Brazilian Portuguese. In case you are a publisher or is interested in landing us money in some form for localization to some other languages – reach out, and we will be glad to hear you. And yes, guys from Kickstarter – so many languages became possible only thanks to you. And, of course, thank you dear interpreters, that you agree to help us at completely bargain prices – thank you very much! Your help is invaluable!

Hey, fellow countrymen from Lokalize, give a discount on the subscription !!! Pretty please (wink)

For localization, we use the Lokalize platform-it has built-in mechanisms for Fuzzy Check, Translation Memory, a system of permissions, allows you to track progress in parallel, has a built-in task tracker and integration with Slack.


Now the game has 230,050 Russian (249,355 English words). 1/4 of this amount is in the main story. In the storylines of the three protagonists, there are a little less than three and a half hundred events which happen to them on the road and about a hundred possible battles.

In one playthrough you will encounter about 25-35 fights and about a hundred events. Most of the events will allow you to avoid fighting if you want. And we tried to ensure that every game dialogue allowed you to “cut” through the dialogs, omitting the lore, if you are not interested in it.

The game is a large interactive book and if you want a visual novel. Probably you have played something similar in your childhood? Yes, this is a niche story and now, after the first wave of press reviews, I get nervous every time. Nobody had complained so far and that is worrying – when there are complains – it is clear what you need to work on. What to do when the game is prased is not clear. I still can not believe that we did it right. You see, even the characters in the profile turned away and are nervous?



We have promised 12-14 hours for one playthrough – in fact, according to the first tests, the full playthrough will take you about 18 – 24 hours. The spread depends on the route that you will choose the map – the slowest way will take about 31 hours. Most of the time – in battles. About 50% of this time is spent on battles, 15% on management of the routes on the map and 35% on reading dialogs and quests. However, if you do not want to go deep into the lore – every lower variant of answers in dialogs allows them to be reduced to the minimum, receiving only a fraction of it. And in the story hubs, you can choose only the “red” (important) icons – this will reduce the text part by 2/3.


Dmitry Erokhin and Sergey Malitsky completed the last set of events for all the protagonists on the map. The last set is 104 events that can happen to our heroes on the road. This is the last batch of text to be translated. We drew, assembled and tuned all the scenes of Feng – this week we will begin to include them in the main stream of the game and test. It looks like a small feat, when the war is almost over – now everything needs to be done “yesterday” and the guys outdid themselves with this part of the work.

Now the game is assembled and running on PC, Mac, Linux (Ubuntu, SteamOS) and takes 2.7 GB of space on the disk. We are doing our best to complete the multiplayer – we add levelling up, prizes, clans, ratings. PvP part should be ready in March.

That’s it, you have most likely the penultimate chance to tell us that we will fail, we are vile plagiarists and other similar things that Russian and Irish love to say. I hope I’ll write a post mortem with a smart look and a fat belly about how cool we all are and how we made it. And, of course, there is a chance that I will be lyrical poem “We done screwed up.” I’ll sum up some things here and I’ll tell what we are working now, what we are doing again for God knows what time and when will it all be over. I was recently told – “wait a couple more months, nothing further depends on you.” Hooray, if it is so!


Remember how I wrote in the last diaries that we are all done with the music? It was a lie! Brazen and shameless, as I can. Demons forced us to start working on the Lo Pheng’s storyline in November, and we recorded a few additional tracks. Unfortunately, this time, they are really the last.



Since the last diary, we have been asked several times on Facebook and our Discord on our process for creating the music and how we prepare the task for Adam.

Full OST of the game is 24 tracks for 73 minutes and 19 seconds; and for every second of it I feel proud! Ah, golden piastres, it seems I had to sell a kidney to record all this music 🙂

Each track is tied to a particular scene or mood, which the player should experience. For each track, we define the type – environmental, combat or cinematics. Mostly this affects the rhythm and use of voice in the composition. Then we decide on the maximum duration of the track, the need for a magnifier and key emotions. Latest, key:

THE NORTHERN WINDS ARE COMING

For the track “The Northern Winds are Coming” the description was – joyless, oriental (a little), dangerous, presses on the listener, needs male voice. To each track we add a small text description (I’m not sure that Adam reads them though 🙂 ):

We are in Vodan, a city in an East Asian style. This is the beginning of the story line of Lo Pheng (eikonian, similar to the flawless from the series “Game of Thrones”), a warrior of the highest skill and bodyguard for the governor of the city.

In Vodan, everything is ready for the celebrations in honor of the vernal equinox. Friezes are cheerful guys and celebrate it with public executions. Hundreds of slaves were already brought to the city and a crowd of people is going to watch the torture. The Harvest is about to begin.

This is a paired scene – for this track we will see them one by one. A long through take of the camera on # 1 with the author’s text, then popup and we get into the hub on stage number 2. From the musical theme of the scene there can be a transition to the Friza combat theme.

Yes, more references, but for this topic, I’m sorry I will not post it – I do not want to spread all the music for nothing. You will still, maybe, buy it. Just kidding, for the reference, we have used a track from another game (not ours), on which Adam works and which I really liked. And, of course, several images illustrating the text:



What do you think – does the track fit the atmosphere and picture or did we screw up? And once again: guys – Adam, Krzysztof – men, thank you very much for your patience and your work. Without your music this game would have never become the way it is! Thank you! I will definitely bring you a bottle of vodka in 2018!


Oh, these infamous second 80% of the project. Polishing and lapping added a lot of work that we did not plan to do (and who really plans to? For sure you can get it on the first try) – 6 cutscenes added for almost 2 minutes of total duration. We drew small clips for non-plot deaths for the minor characters and main characters, made 3 new combat characters, added some text and rewrote a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHOrsZYEq4w
And we have completely, hallelujah, finished all the fighting characters. This long, spread of 15 months job has finally come to an end. In total there are 53 combat units in the game and here is most of them:



We somewhat struggled to finish this part of the work – our animation contractor (Mirball) showed itself, to put it mildly, not in the best way, and the animation and phase team worked with us directly as a result of it. Misha Filippov, our supervisor of rotoscoping, thank you very much – without you we would not have finished this work.

By the way, if you want to make a cool cartoon or want a lot of hand-drawn animation – write to us, I have really enjoyed working with it and we are happy to animate something for you. Cheap and with a high quality 🙂

The entire rotoscoping team, I’m sorry that I do not list all of you by name – thank you very much, guys. Your confidence, diligence and hard work have allowed you to make a lifelike and cool animation.

In total, the project has 31,751 frames of combat animation, carefully and lovingly drawn and carefully painted in hand.

So, hold on, put away fires and pitchforks! I did not say yet that we have screwed up everything, we have just given it one over with a file. Okay, seriously – we completely, for 100%, have reworked all the skills of all the fighting classes in game.

The game has 21 combat class. When some reporters use year old screenshots in their articles and write that is just the same as in the game that we do not mention, I’m just cringing. If anything, the combat system is ours is from the beginning to the end. Nothing similar except for the turn-based system.

Moreover, the mechanics were slightly redesigned – there are no more skills that use up a turn without dealing damage. Instead, these skills have cooldown and they can be used without ending a turn. We have also finalized the number of skills per class and their order.



In addition to the new combat UI, the game now has a “story mode” – if you are not interested in fighting, you can choose it. Get stronger characters and more resources, and in the battles the AI will fight for you. At least, it will save you from the deaths associated with injuries in combat.

Combat UI (the one that above), was reworked a total of 9 times. Now almost any action on it can be done in 2-3 clicks.

Here is one of the first versions for comparison:



The casual lobby did not only get to the combat system. Under a hailstorm of the public requests we have decided to mark icons on the hubs with a special color to separate the important plot decisions from lore. Fingers crossed, we have added “shortcuts” everywhere so that all the dialogs could be read at a minimum. And, yes, we have marked the icons with important elections that have consequences. Ugh, shame, shame.

The second protagonist, Hopper Roel, always fights alone. And, believe me, it’s not bloody simple, to make over a dozen fights with one character to be fun. I hope we got it!

Do not worry! Everything will be fine: the deaths and their numbers, the choices and consequences – all of this is left as before. We have revised the process of adjusting the global difficulty using Blance’s behavior: give in to the vices and AI can be fierce almost at the beginning of the game, if you want it. Something else we did not have time for, but we will do it – the AI will call in friends for help, and, at a high level of difficulty, finish off those of your characters who are more likely to die after the battle. You will watch more 25 deaths:

https://youtu.be/EUXtZrBKnJE
Yes, yes, montage, rearrangement. We ran out of funds for frame by frame animation!


We also drew all the scenes. Lo Pheng’s storyline will add to the game 9 episodes, 12 new battlefields and a…



A train. At least one and we will ride on it. In total, Lo Pheng’s storyline has added 39 scenes to the game and two dozen backgrounds for adventures on the road. In its history, we tell a lot about the past of the world, about the conflict between Frisa and Berkana.



Kshama, that is the name of the ens pictured above, can join Lo Pheng’s party and tell him a lot about his native world and its nature.

This year, one observant Scotsman sent us a picture from a homebrew tabletop where our characters were used. That is cool – take them, do it, share it with us! It’s very cool that you give our heroes a new life!

Yes, Kshama is the last of the 54 characters we drew for the game.



And this is a map with highlighted paths for Thorn’s team. And in each node or on the way to it something can happen to you. At the top of the map are new locations and the path which Lo Pheng’s team will take. I believe that you will enjoy exploring and studying it, and the most attentive ones will be able to find a few textual puzzles with Easter eggs from us.

https://youtu.be/0oVq5qsiFyc
We have completely reworked combat UI, effects, blood, pop-ups, menus, settings. I have a feeling that from our past diary we managed to change the whole UI 2-3 times. An endless series of tests, feedback and reworks to make the game a little better and clearer.




In January, we began to collect all the finished art for Lo Pheng’s storyline in the game’s engine. I’m sorry to admit it, but from February we will work on the weekends as well.

Yes, as a manager, I’ve screwed up with overtime – boldly throw stones at me if you were not in my place.

Otherwise, we will not have time to test and polish everything. In March the game will be released in Russian, Ukrainian, English, German (thanks to Marcel Weyers), Italian (thanks to Giorgio Longo and the team) and Chinese. We are also translating to Polish (thanks to Michal Mroz) and to Brazilian Portuguese, but we will finish most likely in May.



Perhaps, we will also translate the game into Spanish and French, but everything is still vague. Chinese is actually almost ready – I just can’t get around to uploading it to Lokalise.

Regarding multiplayer — we have a working PVP mode. You can log in, chose the team comb and rush into battle. Now we are working on the lobby, the receiving of experience points, chests (upgrades are tied to boosters), ratings. I really want to be in time for the release. And yes, we will not have lootboxes.

That’s it, you have most likely the penultimate chance to tell us that we will fail, we are vile plagiarists and other similar things that Russian and Irish love to say. I hope I’ll write a post mortem with a smart look and a fat belly about how cool we all are and how we made it. And, of course, there is a chance that I will be lyrical poem “We done screwed up.” I’ll sum up some things here and I’ll tell what we are working now, what we are doing again for God knows what time and when will it all be over. I was recently told – “wait a couple more months, nothing further depends on you.” Hooray, if it is so!


Remember how I wrote in the last diaries that we are all done with the music? It was a lie! Brazen and shameless, as I can. Demons forced us to start working on the Lo Pheng’s storyline in November, and we recorded a few additional tracks. Unfortunately, this time, they are really the last.



Since the last diary, we have been asked several times on Facebook and our Discord on our process for creating the music and how we prepare the task for Adam.

Full OST of the game is 24 tracks for 73 minutes and 19 seconds; and for every second of it I feel proud! Ah, golden piastres, it seems I had to sell a kidney to record all this music 🙂

Each track is tied to a particular scene or mood, which the player should experience. For each track, we define the type – environmental, combat or cinematics. Mostly this affects the rhythm and use of voice in the composition. Then we decide on the maximum duration of the track, the need for a magnifier and key emotions. Latest, key:

THE NORTHERN WINDS ARE COMING

For the track “The Northern Winds are Coming” the description was – joyless, oriental (a little), dangerous, presses on the listener, needs male voice. To each track we add a small text description (I’m not sure that Adam reads them though 🙂 ):

We are in Vodan, a city in an East Asian style. This is the beginning of the story line of Lo Pheng (eikonian, similar to the flawless from the series “Game of Thrones”), a warrior of the highest skill and bodyguard for the governor of the city.

In Vodan, everything is ready for the celebrations in honor of the vernal equinox. Friezes are cheerful guys and celebrate it with public executions. Hundreds of slaves were already brought to the city and a crowd of people is going to watch the torture. The Harvest is about to begin.

This is a paired scene – for this track we will see them one by one. A long through take of the camera on # 1 with the author’s text, then popup and we get into the hub on stage number 2. From the musical theme of the scene there can be a transition to the Friza combat theme.

Yes, more references, but for this topic, I’m sorry I will not post it – I do not want to spread all the music for nothing. You will still, maybe, buy it. Just kidding, for the reference, we have used a track from another game (not ours), on which Adam works and which I really liked. And, of course, several images illustrating the text:



What do you think – does the track fit the atmosphere and picture or did we screw up? And once again: guys – Adam, Krzysztof – men, thank you very much for your patience and your work. Without your music this game would have never become the way it is! Thank you! I will definitely bring you a bottle of vodka in 2018!


Oh, these infamous second 80% of the project. Polishing and lapping added a lot of work that we did not plan to do (and who really plans to? For sure you can get it on the first try) – 6 cutscenes added for almost 2 minutes of total duration. We drew small clips for non-plot deaths for the minor characters and main characters, made 3 new combat characters, added some text and rewrote a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHOrsZYEq4w
And we have completely, hallelujah, finished all the fighting characters. This long, spread of 15 months job has finally come to an end. In total there are 53 combat units in the game and here is most of them:



We somewhat struggled to finish this part of the work – our animation contractor (Mirball) showed itself, to put it mildly, not in the best way, and the animation and phase team worked with us directly as a result of it. Misha Filippov, our supervisor of rotoscoping, thank you very much – without you we would not have finished this work.

By the way, if you want to make a cool cartoon or want a lot of hand-drawn animation – write to us, I have really enjoyed working with it and we are happy to animate something for you. Cheap and with a high quality 🙂

The entire rotoscoping team, I’m sorry that I do not list all of you by name – thank you very much, guys. Your confidence, diligence and hard work have allowed you to make a lifelike and cool animation.

In total, the project has 31,751 frames of combat animation, carefully and lovingly drawn and carefully painted in hand.

So, hold on, put away fires and pitchforks! I did not say yet that we have screwed up everything, we have just given it one over with a file. Okay, seriously – we completely, for 100%, have reworked all the skills of all the fighting classes in game.

The game has 21 combat class. When some reporters use year old screenshots in their articles and write that is just the same as in the game that we do not mention, I’m just cringing. If anything, the combat system is ours is from the beginning to the end. Nothing similar except for the turn-based system.

Moreover, the mechanics were slightly redesigned – there are no more skills that use up a turn without dealing damage. Instead, these skills have cooldown and they can be used without ending a turn. We have also finalized the number of skills per class and their order.



In addition to the new combat UI, the game now has a “story mode” – if you are not interested in fighting, you can choose it. Get stronger characters and more resources, and in the battles the AI will fight for you. At least, it will save you from the deaths associated with injuries in combat.

Combat UI (the one that above), was reworked a total of 9 times. Now almost any action on it can be done in 2-3 clicks.

Here is one of the first versions for comparison:



The casual lobby did not only get to the combat system. Under a hailstorm of the public requests we have decided to mark icons on the hubs with a special color to separate the important plot decisions from lore. Fingers crossed, we have added “shortcuts” everywhere so that all the dialogs could be read at a minimum. And, yes, we have marked the icons with important elections that have consequences. Ugh, shame, shame.

The second protagonist, Hopper Roel, always fights alone. And, believe me, it’s not bloody simple, to make over a dozen fights with one character to be fun. I hope we got it!

Do not worry! Everything will be fine: the deaths and their numbers, the choices and consequences – all of this is left as before. We have revised the process of adjusting the global difficulty using Blance’s behavior: give in to the vices and AI can be fierce almost at the beginning of the game, if you want it. Something else we did not have time for, but we will do it – the AI will call in friends for help, and, at a high level of difficulty, finish off those of your characters who are more likely to die after the battle. You will watch more 25 deaths:

https://youtu.be/EUXtZrBKnJE
Yes, yes, montage, rearrangement. We ran out of funds for frame by frame animation!


We also drew all the scenes. Lo Pheng’s storyline will add to the game 9 episodes, 12 new battlefields and a…



A train. At least one and we will ride on it. In total, Lo Pheng’s storyline has added 39 scenes to the game and two dozen backgrounds for adventures on the road. In its history, we tell a lot about the past of the world, about the conflict between Frisa and Berkana.



Kshama, that is the name of the ens pictured above, can join Lo Pheng’s party and tell him a lot about his native world and its nature.

This year, one observant Scotsman sent us a picture from a homebrew tabletop where our characters were used. That is cool – take them, do it, share it with us! It’s very cool that you give our heroes a new life!

Yes, Kshama is the last of the 54 characters we drew for the game.



And this is a map with highlighted paths for Thorn’s team. And in each node or on the way to it something can happen to you. At the top of the map are new locations and the path which Lo Pheng’s team will take. I believe that you will enjoy exploring and studying it, and the most attentive ones will be able to find a few textual puzzles with Easter eggs from us.

https://youtu.be/0oVq5qsiFyc
We have completely reworked combat UI, effects, blood, pop-ups, menus, settings. I have a feeling that from our past diary we managed to change the whole UI 2-3 times. An endless series of tests, feedback and reworks to make the game a little better and clearer.




In January, we began to collect all the finished art for Lo Pheng’s storyline in the game’s engine. I’m sorry to admit it, but from February we will work on the weekends as well.

Yes, as a manager, I’ve screwed up with overtime – boldly throw stones at me if you were not in my place.

Otherwise, we will not have time to test and polish everything. In March the game will be released in Russian, Ukrainian, English, German (thanks to Marcel Weyers), Italian (thanks to Giorgio Longo and the team) and Chinese. We are also translating to Polish (thanks to Michal Mroz) and to Brazilian Portuguese, but we will finish most likely in May.



Perhaps, we will also translate the game into Spanish and French, but everything is still vague. Chinese is actually almost ready – I just can’t get around to uploading it to Lokalise.

Regarding multiplayer — we have a working PVP mode. You can log in, chose the team comb and rush into battle. Now we are working on the lobby, the receiving of experience points, chests (upgrades are tied to boosters), ratings. I really want to be in time for the release. And yes, we will not have lootboxes.

So much has happened since the last installment of our diaries that I suggest we give the intro a pass and get right down to brass tacks. We’ve pretty much finished the main storyline, so now it’s possible to play the rough draft of the game from the beginning to the penultimate episode. Writing the finale without Lo Pheng was a tough nut to crack and our scriptwriter is twitching around like an angry eel on a hot frying pan, that’s how badly we want to hold onto the fever-pitch of emotion and the density of events that would have been unleashed if the protagonists had collided at the end of the game the way we planned them to. Above all, we wanted to avoid writing anything stupid and just bring things to….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Jrt8H_tZE
Early in the month I streamed the first episodes of the game online and we received a lot of comments from our Russian readers about the “staleness” of some of the characters’ dialogs, so now we’re frantically trying to fix this without causing downtime for our translators.


I love walking. A part of the route from my house to the office passes along the Moskva River embankment at Maryino Park. Now I’ve got something to fill that time other than enjoying the silence and the scent of the water. Like any normal human zombie I can now stare at my phone while I’m walking.



That’s because we finally managed to compile our battle “sandbox” to run on Android this week. It contains 36 finished characters (we still need to animate and integrate seven more) and is indispensable for testing the AI and balancing the skills. It also provides me with the opportunity to watch how the AI plays itself and how deterministic its behavior is. A good AI should be able to lose in an interesting way, and that’s the main thing we’re trying to teach it at this stage.



That’s Thorn and company on their way to a get-together to find out what’s taking us so long. It’s tough to admit, but since the end of May we’ve practically had to rewrite the code for the combat system and the toolkit for creating combat characters. The first implementation required too much individual scripting by hand of the different skills.

In its new incarnation it consists of a couple of simple YAML files, and now you can describe all the animation, commands, skills, special effects and audio files of the characters with a basic text editor. A small script file does all the remaining dirty work for you. I don’t know how true Unity disciples manage to pull it off, but to my modest taste creating 2D animation “the Unity way” is a bag of hurt and a cup of unadulterated, over-the-top agony. It’s as if you’ve fallen straight into the Sixth Circle of Hell, and a simple piece of work that should take around 5-10 minutes turns into hours of clicking on the editor’s “convenient” tools and inspectors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsTcIEJgGfk
Battling the AI in one of the first game scenes. But right now Unity isn’t our main headache. The biggest pain of the combat system is the UI and controls. They’re terribly inconvenient. We’re going to have to redo the card panel. In all probability we’ll have to hide them under the clock so we can save some vertical space. If you saw any of the screenshots or videos from the previous version, you’ll notice that we also took away the side panels with the portraits. We did that for the same reason. They were taking up too much space.




Here are a couple of thoughts on the skills selection menu during combat. And below you can see the character profile interface. As we speak our awesome busy bee, Julia, has practically finished all the remaining UI elements for the single-mode game. All that’s left is the main menu and the interface that handles winning or losing in combat. After that we can roll up our sleeves and rework the combat UI and map navigation. Right now it’s really hard to select a specific road with your cursor.



The last couple of months I’ve earned myself a deserved spot in the “Additional Programming” spot of the credits. That spot is usually reserved for the young guys who can’t not be mentioned, but who spend all their time on all sorts of crap (and by that I really mean crap, not just all the loose ends). And that can be anything from assembling the texture atlases, preparing the automation toolkit, creating the builds or doing what I mentioned earlier in this instalment, namely putting together the Android version of the game. Some may think I’m already in the “acceptance” phase, but I prefer to think (probably unreasonably) that I’m still in denial.



We’ve also started working on the skills and upgrade icons for the game, and we’ve drawn the first set of objects and the first 62 portraits of our Kickstarter backers.

While our art director was on vacation, we started applying some spit and polish. Andrei is working on the color correction to better convey the atmosphere of the game and make the picture sweeter on the eye. Below you can see the “before” (left) and “after” (right).



The scenes are getting a bit murkier, with more contrast, and there’s a slight coldness to some of the hues. All in all we’ve practically drawn everything that had to be drawn. There are just a couple of scenes left that we’ll leave for last, namely the intro and a couple of cinematic animation scenes at the beginning and end of the game.

Now that we’re able to play the first build, it’s becoming apparent that we’re going to have to shorten a couple of the scenes, as well as add some fights linked to the plot, both new ones and ones we’d previously cut out. For instance, that includes an extra fight scene when Thorn and Gleda run home after their fight with the Reaper, and the game intro, where Hopper Rouley meets up with Amma.


It just so happens that I began writing this installment of the developer’s diary in the beginning of May, and here I am, finishing it in August. Most of what I’d wanted to tell you about the plot has already happened. On the whole, we’ve finished the story. We’re still making a couple of changes to the two final episodes and writing the promised quests, so although there are still bugs and glitches, it’s already possible to play the game from start to finish.

At the beginning of spring Nevigo (the developers of Articy Draft) announced Articy 3, and with it a native plugin for Unity. There was no time to try it out or experiment with it, so we just postponed this job for after the upgrade.



These cute little skeletons are showing their joy at the fact that we ported everything we’d already written on the Articy Access API to the new Unity plugin, while silent tears rolled down our bearded faces. This hurt, because we’d pretty much created our own equivalent of their plugin from scratch, meaning we’d wasted almost one and a half months. But I’m glad to say this time wasn’t entirely wasted, because we now know our new tool from the inside out and have a near perfect understanding of how to use it.

We already started working on the online version of the combat section in mid-March. This was important, because we wanted to show live gameplay to Square Enux Collection (SEC) as well as record some scenes for our Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter campaigns.

Of course, SEC told us to go to hell, so to an extent the rush and change of priorities had been all for nothing. PhotonServer really helped us a lot to get a working build of the online game up and running. There isn’t much I can say about PUB and PhotonCloud, because we’re creating the multiplayer version with a bunch of server-side checks and balances. That’s why we’re using PhotonServer. That being said, we chucked out almost 90% of its loadbalancing. Data transporting in PhotonServer is really cool and convenient. Just a couple of lines of code and you’re already creating business logic. Searching for matches, scaling, expanding the list of network commands, organizing lobbies and rooms—all of this is first and foremost peer-to-peer stuff and a matter of how you configure it on the authorizing server, which does all the calculations for you.

Both Loadbalancing and Hive make it very easy to change the relationships between a group of players, provided those relationships can be expressed with a simple dictionary of keys and values. But it’s really painful to implement your business rules on top of them. You can do this by means of plugins, but it’s not a very convenient process. I experimented with Netty and its port, DotNetty, and if I’d had just a bit of extra time I would have thrown Photon out and used it instead. The only thing Netty lacks out of the box is the ability to compile for HTML5 platforms with support for websockets.


You probably know by now that we were able to get a bit of extra money on Kickstarter. That allowed us to record a couple of extra music tracks, and Adam and his team are finishing the last of them. That makes me both happy and sad. On the one hand, that means one of the pages of our development history has almost been turned. On the other hand, it also means we’re finished and there won’t be any new compositions.



On the photograph above you can see Aleksander Grochocki (mandolin and drum), Michał Cielecki (keyboard) and Magdalena Przychodzka (vocals) busy recording the music for the outro video.

Adam, guys… Thank you for your magical work and your incredible music. I’m very glad I had the opportunity to work with you. Adam is a really amazing composer and a great guy. If you’re looking for cool music, he’s your man!



The game has one very special piece of music called the “general mood”. We didn’t create it as a single six-minute composition, but as a set of fragments that can be assembled into different tracks or just one longer track.

Ash of Gods - Sinister Mood (Draft)

Here’s an example of it. It’s the working version of one of our final compositions, a track for “darker” scenes such as dialogs with blatantly evil characters or grisly situations.


I don’t want to spend too much time on our experience. Yes, the preparations took up a terrible amount of time and nerves. I think we’ll relive that experience all over again when the time comes to ship the physical prizes. I should probably write a separate post on the topic of everything we did 100% wrong, what we got right and what we got wrong.

Right now I’d like to say a big thanks to everybody who helped us. Thank you very much, guys! And yes, if you want to launch your project on Kickstarter, you should think ten times whether you want to mess around with physical prizes.


We need to put together the final UI, finish the character upgrade code and transfer all the workings of that part of the game from the design documents to the game itself. We need to fix the style of the text based on the results of the first play-tests and finish the AI. I really want us to finish the multiplayer version before the end of the month so we can share it with the backers and with their help conduct another round of balancing the classes and their skills.

So much has happened since the last installment of our diaries that I suggest we give the intro a pass and get right down to brass tacks. We’ve pretty much finished the main storyline, so now it’s possible to play the rough draft of the game from the beginning to the penultimate episode. Writing the finale without Lo Pheng was a tough nut to crack and our scriptwriter is twitching around like an angry eel on a hot frying pan, that’s how badly we want to hold onto the fever-pitch of emotion and the density of events that would have been unleashed if the protagonists had collided at the end of the game the way we planned them to. Above all, we wanted to avoid writing anything stupid and just bring things to….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Jrt8H_tZE
Early in the month I streamed the first episodes of the game online and we received a lot of comments from our Russian readers about the “staleness” of some of the characters’ dialogs, so now we’re frantically trying to fix this without causing downtime for our translators.


I love walking. A part of the route from my house to the office passes along the Moskva River embankment at Maryino Park. Now I’ve got something to fill that time other than enjoying the silence and the scent of the water. Like any normal human zombie I can now stare at my phone while I’m walking.



That’s because we finally managed to compile our battle “sandbox” to run on Android this week. It contains 36 finished characters (we still need to animate and integrate seven more) and is indispensable for testing the AI and balancing the skills. It also provides me with the opportunity to watch how the AI plays itself and how deterministic its behavior is. A good AI should be able to lose in an interesting way, and that’s the main thing we’re trying to teach it at this stage.



That’s Thorn and company on their way to a get-together to find out what’s taking us so long. It’s tough to admit, but since the end of May we’ve practically had to rewrite the code for the combat system and the toolkit for creating combat characters. The first implementation required too much individual scripting by hand of the different skills.

In its new incarnation it consists of a couple of simple YAML files, and now you can describe all the animation, commands, skills, special effects and audio files of the characters with a basic text editor. A small script file does all the remaining dirty work for you. I don’t know how true Unity disciples manage to pull it off, but to my modest taste creating 2D animation “the Unity way” is a bag of hurt and a cup of unadulterated, over-the-top agony. It’s as if you’ve fallen straight into the Sixth Circle of Hell, and a simple piece of work that should take around 5-10 minutes turns into hours of clicking on the editor’s “convenient” tools and inspectors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsTcIEJgGfk
Battling the AI in one of the first game scenes. But right now Unity isn’t our main headache. The biggest pain of the combat system is the UI and controls. They’re terribly inconvenient. We’re going to have to redo the card panel. In all probability we’ll have to hide them under the clock so we can save some vertical space. If you saw any of the screenshots or videos from the previous version, you’ll notice that we also took away the side panels with the portraits. We did that for the same reason. They were taking up too much space.




Here are a couple of thoughts on the skills selection menu during combat. And below you can see the character profile interface. As we speak our awesome busy bee, Julia, has practically finished all the remaining UI elements for the single-mode game. All that’s left is the main menu and the interface that handles winning or losing in combat. After that we can roll up our sleeves and rework the combat UI and map navigation. Right now it’s really hard to select a specific road with your cursor.



The last couple of months I’ve earned myself a deserved spot in the “Additional Programming” spot of the credits. That spot is usually reserved for the young guys who can’t not be mentioned, but who spend all their time on all sorts of crap (and by that I really mean crap, not just all the loose ends). And that can be anything from assembling the texture atlases, preparing the automation toolkit, creating the builds or doing what I mentioned earlier in this instalment, namely putting together the Android version of the game. Some may think I’m already in the “acceptance” phase, but I prefer to think (probably unreasonably) that I’m still in denial.



We’ve also started working on the skills and upgrade icons for the game, and we’ve drawn the first set of objects and the first 62 portraits of our Kickstarter backers.

While our art director was on vacation, we started applying some spit and polish. Andrei is working on the color correction to better convey the atmosphere of the game and make the picture sweeter on the eye. Below you can see the “before” (left) and “after” (right).



The scenes are getting a bit murkier, with more contrast, and there’s a slight coldness to some of the hues. All in all we’ve practically drawn everything that had to be drawn. There are just a couple of scenes left that we’ll leave for last, namely the intro and a couple of cinematic animation scenes at the beginning and end of the game.

Now that we’re able to play the first build, it’s becoming apparent that we’re going to have to shorten a couple of the scenes, as well as add some fights linked to the plot, both new ones and ones we’d previously cut out. For instance, that includes an extra fight scene when Thorn and Gleda run home after their fight with the Reaper, and the game intro, where Hopper Rouley meets up with Amma.


It just so happens that I began writing this installment of the developer’s diary in the beginning of May, and here I am, finishing it in August. Most of what I’d wanted to tell you about the plot has already happened. On the whole, we’ve finished the story. We’re still making a couple of changes to the two final episodes and writing the promised quests, so although there are still bugs and glitches, it’s already possible to play the game from start to finish.

At the beginning of spring Nevigo (the developers of Articy Draft) announced Articy 3, and with it a native plugin for Unity. There was no time to try it out or experiment with it, so we just postponed this job for after the upgrade.



These cute little skeletons are showing their joy at the fact that we ported everything we’d already written on the Articy Access API to the new Unity plugin, while silent tears rolled down our bearded faces. This hurt, because we’d pretty much created our own equivalent of their plugin from scratch, meaning we’d wasted almost one and a half months. But I’m glad to say this time wasn’t entirely wasted, because we now know our new tool from the inside out and have a near perfect understanding of how to use it.

We already started working on the online version of the combat section in mid-March. This was important, because we wanted to show live gameplay to Square Enux Collection (SEC) as well as record some scenes for our Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter campaigns.

Of course, SEC told us to go to hell, so to an extent the rush and change of priorities had been all for nothing. PhotonServer really helped us a lot to get a working build of the online game up and running. There isn’t much I can say about PUB and PhotonCloud, because we’re creating the multiplayer version with a bunch of server-side checks and balances. That’s why we’re using PhotonServer. That being said, we chucked out almost 90% of its loadbalancing. Data transporting in PhotonServer is really cool and convenient. Just a couple of lines of code and you’re already creating business logic. Searching for matches, scaling, expanding the list of network commands, organizing lobbies and rooms—all of this is first and foremost peer-to-peer stuff and a matter of how you configure it on the authorizing server, which does all the calculations for you.

Both Loadbalancing and Hive make it very easy to change the relationships between a group of players, provided those relationships can be expressed with a simple dictionary of keys and values. But it’s really painful to implement your business rules on top of them. You can do this by means of plugins, but it’s not a very convenient process. I experimented with Netty and its port, DotNetty, and if I’d had just a bit of extra time I would have thrown Photon out and used it instead. The only thing Netty lacks out of the box is the ability to compile for HTML5 platforms with support for websockets.


You probably know by now that we were able to get a bit of extra money on Kickstarter. That allowed us to record a couple of extra music tracks, and Adam and his team are finishing the last of them. That makes me both happy and sad. On the one hand, that means one of the pages of our development history has almost been turned. On the other hand, it also means we’re finished and there won’t be any new compositions.



On the photograph above you can see Aleksander Grochocki (mandolin and drum), Michał Cielecki (keyboard) and Magdalena Przychodzka (vocals) busy recording the music for the outro video.

Adam, guys… Thank you for your magical work and your incredible music. I’m very glad I had the opportunity to work with you. Adam is a really amazing composer and a great guy. If you’re looking for cool music, he’s your man!



The game has one very special piece of music called the “general mood”. We didn’t create it as a single six-minute composition, but as a set of fragments that can be assembled into different tracks or just one longer track.

Ash of Gods - Sinister Mood (Draft)

Here’s an example of it. It’s the working version of one of our final compositions, a track for “darker” scenes such as dialogs with blatantly evil characters or grisly situations.


I don’t want to spend too much time on our experience. Yes, the preparations took up a terrible amount of time and nerves. I think we’ll relive that experience all over again when the time comes to ship the physical prizes. I should probably write a separate post on the topic of everything we did 100% wrong, what we got right and what we got wrong.

Right now I’d like to say a big thanks to everybody who helped us. Thank you very much, guys! And yes, if you want to launch your project on Kickstarter, you should think ten times whether you want to mess around with physical prizes.


We need to put together the final UI, finish the character upgrade code and transfer all the workings of that part of the game from the design documents to the game itself. We need to fix the style of the text based on the results of the first play-tests and finish the AI. I really want us to finish the multiplayer version before the end of the month so we can share it with the backers and with their help conduct another round of balancing the classes and their skills.