Mar 1, 2022

Freestyle 2: Street Basketball - [GM] Winter

Acquire awesome rewards from Dr. Isaac's Secret Lab!

Event Period:

2022/03/02 ~ 03/15 23:59 PST

Event Mechanics:

- Fuel Cell is used to raise Blue and Red Energy gauges.

- Charge count will increase by 1 if you fill in 100% gauge of each energy.

- When each energy has a charge count of 1 or more, you can use 1 charge count
for each Blue and Red energy to obtain 1 Arc Atomic reactor's Atomic Energy.

- You can activate Arc Atomic Reactor using Atomic Fuel and Atomic energy, and
you can acquire items that appear only in the Arc Atomic Reactor.

Atomic Fuel Price

- Increasing the gauge of all energy and Arc Atomic Reactors increases the
Research Record and rewards can be obtained. (Only once per account can
be obtained within the event period)

- Each energy increases Research Record by [+1] and Arc Atomic Reactor
by [+2]. and the maximum value of the research record is 800.

Blue Energy Rewards List

Red Energy Rewards List

Atomic Energy Rewards List

- FreeStyle 2 Team

Mar 1, 2022

Devlog #004

WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests - OdinsTaktstock

As in any other game, playtesting is a vital tool for us to assure the quality of WHALIEN. We test our levels regularly and in different development stages - from the first greyboxed concepts to the final colorful rooms. Due to the ongoing pandemic, performing playtests in person has been widely impossible for us. Moreover, conducting playtests online has proven to be far less time-consuming than organizing multiple playtesters and watching them meticulously.
For this reason, we created the Playtesting Data Collection Assistant, a tool to help us conduct remote playtests. The PDCA creates an interactive recording of the users’ play session. Unlike a video, it allows us to observe the players’ actions and changes in the level from any viewpoint and observe the state of any actor at any time, while also requiring significantly less storage (a 20+ minute replay requires only <5MB).

PDCA:

On a more technical level, the PDCA is based on the Replay System provided by UE4. At the start of each recording, a virtual server is created, which the client sends all relevant data to. This works using the replication system in UE4 - all actors that we want to be represented accurately in the replay need to be replicated (e.g. if we want to track the open/closed state of a door, we need to declare the corresponding function as replicated and multicast, so that the replay server takes notice of it).
During the replay we let the replay-character perform all original input actions as they happen, reconstructing the gameplay of the playtester.

Recording a replay functions fully automatically once the playtester has given their consent. They don’t notice the recording process while playing, which helps prevent the Hawthorne Effect: testers behaving differently because they know they are being watched.
The replay files are automatically sent to our server after the play session has concluded to spare the player some effort. The small file size of our replays means that we do not strain the player’s bandwidth too much.

(Path of a replay displayed in one of our maps)

Events:

During recording we also take note of the player’s actions in the form of events. We visualize those events along the timeline when viewing the replay. This provides us with a neat overview of the player’s activities in the play session and it also allows skipping to specific actions/events in the replay.
We decided that it would be best to view the replays in the UE4 editor itself instead of creating a standalone replay-player, because this allows us to use the built in user interface for inspecting relevant actors’ positions and states.

(UI, including timeline and events, when viewing the replay)

Heatmaps:

We can analyze recorded replays to generate offline “3D heatmaps”, that display the paths and actions of various players in a level to quickly determine if they used the intended routes or got stuck at a certain section. Furthermore we created a custom editor tool, which allows us to control which information of the heatmap we want to display.

(The heatmap editor tool in use)

Caveat:

What’s to be noted is that the PDCA doesn’t function out-of-the-box in a non-replicated game, such as WHALIEN. Therefore, replicating our game required some effort to get the system to work initially. In order to reduce this effort, we decided to only replicate the character movement (which is already provided by the UCharacterMovementComponent), input actions and events/objects that are relevant for the progression in a level. Due to the non-deterministic physics engine of UE4, we cannot guarantee the behavior of actors that are not replicated. Moreover, skipping forwards and backwards in the recording does not guarantee the state/position of all non-replicated actors in the level and can lead to inconsistencies in the replay.

Conclusion:

We’ve already applied the PDCA in multiple playtests, where it helped us gain insights on the players’ challenges while playing our levels, which in return helped us adapt and improve the levels accordingly.

If you have any more questions about the PDCA or our playtesting practices, do not hesitate to ask!

- Andi, Ralf

Mar 1, 2022

New Demo version 0.3.2.0

Child Arms - Toolkitz Games

I'm happy to announce the latest version of the game There have been major changes to Child Arms behind the scenes. While I and the team are getting ready to work on the next character Mayana, we have also been busy rebranding ourselves and updating our online presence. I'm currently renovating all our social sites and making plans on how to give Child Arms exposure to get a player base going. A lot of our sites have been neglected for some time and that was giving the impression that we are not active when nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that I, the creator of the game and the programmer, am in charge of everything related to Child Arms as the only others in the team are an art studio and a music composer. Everything else is on me, including promotion, and am currently rectifying that by making a plan on how to keep everything updated.

At this time, I am not actually ready to actually put anything into motion but eventually realized that the last demo had an error that kept you from starting the game. If you didn't have a prior save file, the game would not proceed to the start screen due to an oversight in the code for checking controllers. It never occurred to me that this version was in the last version of the demo which was uploaded over 2 months! Now that we've managed to make a few changes to the itch.io page, we've been getting some traffic our way and it was imperative that I upload a build that fixes that bug. The latest version, 0.3.1.2, can now run without any problems for first-timers. If you already downloaded the game before 0.3.1.0, you probably never noticed it to begin with but this new version also comes with many new additions to it that it is worth downloading.

Enro stat changes

Enro's special Turnaround Slash now only takes 60 stamina instead of 100.
If you used his shield and the opponent attacked you, it would add 300 stamina to the combo cost, meaning that if you attacked after pulling out your shield, you would pay extra stamina. This was the reason why it felt like he didn't have much stamina to begin with. This has been removed and now you may attack after using his shield without paying a huge price in stamina.
Another culprit that kept eating away at his stamina was the combo cost. This has been reduced from 25 to 20 and his stamina recovery timing has been increased by 1. This means that Enro's attacks will take less stamina and recuperate slightly faster than before.

Neutral Discipline

The biggest change in this version would be the addition of Neutral Discipline, something I wanted to do for a long while. This isn't really a discipline per se, it's more like the default unaltered stats that were used for Instinct. In a way, Instinct was meant to be the neutral state but it never occurred to me to make the stats available without the automatics.

Because Neutral is just Instinct without the automatics, they share the same slot, meaning that you have to turn off Instinct in order to use Neutral. You can do this on the options menu.

Minor changes

For Training mode, there is now a shortcut to reset all the stats on the screen by pressing F9 and then Enter. You can also activate this through the start menu under the Pause Programming option.
Sidestep no longer just takes 300 stamina away. Instead, you now start accruing 12 costs per shift in position. That means that if you sidestep for the first time, there is no cost of stamina but next time, you'll pay 12 stamina, then you pay 24, and then 36, etc. The cap to this is around the same as the original. This feature is added to keep players from misusing the sidestep but I felt that the 300 cost at the beginning was too much. This method will keep the sidestep a viable defense tool and encourage the player to use it sparingly.
You can now use spaces when naming a custom color palette. This may not be a big deal but the original reason why you couldn't is that it was easier to just not allow spaces in the first place. This has to do with the way naming a color palette is done in-game, which is omitting anything but letters and numbers. I do not want to allow the use of symbols due to the way the game saves the palettes as a file so I wanted to avert compatibility issues as much as I could. However, space is one of the symbols that is allowed to be used to name files, I was just believing that it may not since I come from a time when you couldn't name a file with a space (this was like 10-15 years ago when you had to use underscore in place of space). But now I have finally gotten accustomed to using space to name files so I decided to re-code the naming function. Now all color files can have spaces in their names.

I am still preparing every one of my social sites but I figured itch.io was more or less done, and it was important to update the game, so I decided to give you guys a heads up on all this. Hopefully, all these changes will be beneficial in getting a player base for Child Arms.