Apr 8, 2022

Across the Obelisk - Rhin

Hello everyone!

Today marks one year since the release of Across the Obelisk on Steam Early Access.

We want to celebrate and thank you all! So, we'll do a little recap of this year and then we'll talk about what we're working on and what's to come!

The first days
We released the game on April 8 2021. The first few days were moderately quiet... but the next week, weekend and month, it was crazy for us.

Making and releasing a game by itself is not an easy task, but if the game has multiplayer... the problems multiply a thousand times. With only two of us (plus friends and family) testing the game online, it was difficult to find all the possible problems that could come up. So, as more and more players started to join the game, bugs started popping up all the time. We were practically releasing one patch a day for a few weeks (sometimes even two patches on the same day), as soon as people reported something to us on discord and we could reproduce/fix it we preferred to release a patch without waiting, so they could keep playing.

The truth is that it is something that we will always remember, for the bad, but also for the good. It was a pleasure to see you play and enjoy the game we had created.

Content added in one year.
During this year we have worked hard to improve all aspects of the game. We have recently added Act 4 and we are still in the process of balancing it. These are some of the things we have added during the year:
- As mentioned, Act 4 has been added with 2 floors, many new events, enemies, bosses and items.
- 2 New heroes, Wilbur and Nezglekt.
- 2 new game modes, Obelisk Challenge and Weekly challenge.
- Obelisk Challenge has been evolving and improving during the year, with content, features and more variety of events / enemies.
- Madness levels, expanding the game with 16 levels of difficulty.
- Redone nearly all the art of the game, including a pass on the first heroes, all backgrounds, UI, card design, etc.
- Improved and redone the Trait system.
- Different Skins and Cardbacks for each hero.
- Improved the Tome of Knowledge with lots of new features, f.e. run history and scoreboards.
- And we've added as many quality of life and player-requested features as possible.

The community
We have said it over and over again, and we will not be tired of repeating it. We are very grateful to our community, especially to all those who help us and give us feedback day after day in our Discord and forums.

This game wouldn't be the same without you, so again, thank you very much!

What's next?
Our goal is to continue working on the game and improve it even more. Specifically, we are starting to make a new biome/map (with all that it entails: nodes, paths, events, enemies, bosses, etc). This biome is cold based and will be one more option to choose after finishing Act 1 and 2 (with Velkarath and Aquarfall).

We have started designing and implementing the remaining four heroes. They are still works in progress, but here they are.

A big shout out to Juan José Nicolás, our magnificent artist. Just with the sketches alone we can't wait to have the final version of the heroes! These heroes are still a few months away from being live.

In the meantime here are some other things we want to work on:
- We want to implement a Heropedia in the Tome, with a small story unlock feature for each hero.
- The Monsterpedia is also on the way, although it's more complicated than it seems :)
- We have pending a rework to the Weekly Challenge, the idea is to make them different and have a couple of features that change the gameplay a bit (with some cosmetic rewards).
- Rework of the perks system. We want to try to improve it and not add more power than the heroes already have, but give them more options to specialize, even in damage types or curses that are uncommon in their class.
- As we said before, the game will be translated to some languages for 1.0, and that includes an english proof reading. As you may have noticed, English is not our main language, so forgive us for the usual spelling mistakes in the game (that we try to fix everyday thanks to the players that report those mistakes) that will soon be a thing from the past.
- And some more things that we will keep secret ;)

To conclude
It has been a very good year, and we are very excited to continue working on the game.

The basic idea is that we can release the game when we have the ice biome and the 4 remaining heroes ready. We hope it will be around late summer but you never know.

Of course, releasing the game doesn't mean that we will stop working on it, the idea is to continue as we have been doing and make many more biomes / cards / heroes / events / enemies and bosses!

Remember to leave a review on steam, if you like the game, it helps us a lot.

Who knows where we will be next year! We hope you will stay with us to find out.

Adam and Javier.

Apr 8, 2022

What’s in the Pipeline - Special Edition

Jaws Of Extinction™ - [KYE] ViviD

A week has passed and we have received a huge amount of support from community members claiming their FREE outfits and pre-order rewards via our website. We would like to thank everyone that has also stretched out and purchased the supporters and founders packs available.

Going forward we are also going to be making the game available to purchase directly from us via the website, that will help support us more.

So let's get to the nitty gritty of the post.

Optimisations

We are fully aware of performance issues players are having and we are trying to do as much as we can to improve this with every update we release. Recent updates have seen CPU performance improve a lot as well as a significant reduction in lag spikes. Improving GPU performance has now become our top priority as it has become the main bottleneck preventing further improvements in overall frame rates.

With the release of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 and the technologies it brings to gaming, we have decided to take the plunge earlier than initially planned to move Jaws of Extinction from Unreal Engine 4.27.2 to Unreal Engine 5.0. This has a possibility to help with GPU issues we are having, with the new Nanite and Lumin technologies in UE5.

We plan on releasing a small update during next week to fix a few issues and optimisations then we will be moving JoE over to the new engine.

This may take a little while, and we do not know what exact issues we are going to come across: code may need to be rewritten and the world may even need some TLC to make it compatible with the new world partition feature and Nanite.

We will be listing a UE5 Staging Branch in the BETA section of Steam for anyone that wishes to get involved with development and give us their feedback.

Massive Sale

In other news, April 15th and April 18th are Ryan Thirlwall’s (Lead Developer) and James Bradbeer’s (Developer) birthdays. Being the only two developers working every day on Jaws of Extinction, they wanted for everyone to celebrate with them by having one of the biggest sales we have had to date.

From 11th April 2022 till 18th April 2022, Jaws of Extinction and all website exclusives will be 50% off on Epic Games, Steam and the website.

A whole week to sink your teeth into JoE at half the price. We will also be doing random web package drops throughout the day on our Discord and any Twitch or YouTube streams we may come across during the sale week.

So make sure to jump into Discord or anyone covering the game during this time.

Apr 8, 2022

Behind the Scenes of the 2021 FIRST Global RoboCo Challenge

RoboCo - nremily

Howdy, RoboEngineers!

Last week, we showcased some of our funniest RoboCo glitches, bugs, and bloopers! This week, we’re taking an equally fun look behind-the-scenes of the 2021 FIRST Global® RoboCo Challenge (FGRC21)!

Our collaboration with the world-renowned FIRST Global was Filament Games’ biggest undertaking in recent memory. Three livestreams, three unique challenges levels, and two months of social content take a lot of planning and hard work to pull off and we never could’ve done it without the combined efforts of our friends over at FIRST Global as well as our own production and development teams.

Design is Everything

You can’t make a compelling video or website without a fantastic designer. Luckily, we have one in the form of Tracey Reinke, Filament Games’ web and graphic designer. Originally an engineer, Tracey started at Filament in 2019 after she switched to a career in design. Since then, she’s done everything from rebranding Filament Games’ website to making Discord emojis to creating cool motion graphics for social media. With FGRC21 specifically, she was in charge of designing the look of the website as well as designing the logo and helping our video producer, Josh Bartels, with editing the videos. Here’s Tracey’s account of how exactly she went about doing all that design work:

When it came to designing the logo for the challenge, I wanted to make sure it was an image that encapsulated both FIRST Global and RoboCo’s brands as well as invoked the feel of a competitive event. To do this, I first took the badge shape and ribbon banners that are commonplace in competitive events and combined it with FIRST Global’s font. I then added in some RoboCo charm by covering the logo in metal plating and adding in the RoboCo arm from RoboCo’s logo.

I also took a lot of inspiration from Twitch when designing the layout of the livestreams but used RoboCo colors and font to make everything look unique. One of the biggest things both Josh Bartels and I wanted to make sure of was that the visuals and narrative flowed seamlessly, so we looked to sports content like the Olympics and even ESPN broadcasts to help figure out the tone and transition elements we wanted. I also made sure that, when designing the thumbnails for each video, that I used elements specific to each challenge (i.e. a robot holding a sandwich for the Qualifiers thumbnail) to further differentiate segments of the competition from one another.

However, probably the biggest challenge and most important part of the design process was figuring out how to showcase each team’s robots in an exciting and individualistic way. To do this, Josh and I came up with a design in After Effects that includes the team’s robot, its name, their country, and their country’s flag.

What’s interesting about this design in particular is that we had to have the RoboCo development team build a green screen room for us! Once we received the robot file from FIRST Global, I would download the file, import the robot into RoboCo and then take it into this green screen room where it would automatically rotate. I would then import the captured clip into After Effects, add the robot name and the team name, and add the team’s flag to the background to give it that personalized, awesome look!

Putting The Designs in Motion

On top of designing a new logo and website, we also had to put together three livestreams. The mastermind behind those livestreams is Josh Bartels, a name you may have heard on this devblog before. Not only does Josh produce all the videos and music for RoboCo, he also produces music and videos for all the other games we have going on at Filament Games! Having just celebrated his ten year anniversary at the company this year, we’re convinced that there isn’t a single video or audio challenge that Josh can’t tackle and, what’s even more impressive, is that Josh produced, edited, and composed all the music for FGRC21 while also taking care of a newborn baby!

To learn more about how Josh goes about making music specifically, we highly encourage you to check out his breakdown below of how he composed FGRC21’s main theme. You can also check out the YouTube playlist containing all of FGRC21’s livestreams here.

Getting RoboCo Ready

In addition to all the work done by Tracey and Josh, RoboCo’s development team also had to get the game ready for deployment. Not only did they add a first pass on robot painting and QA test the game for this milestone, they also had to propose a scoring system for the FGRC21 that was balanced, aligned to FIRST Global standards, and easy-to-understand. To speak more on how that scoring system came to be, here’s devblog staple and Lead Game Designer Luke Jayapalan:

We started from the elements that the game already scores: the main and sub objectives central to each challenge, as well as the time the robot took to complete the objectives, the total cost of the parts used to build that robot, and a penalty deduction for any property damage or unhappy humans. We left this score unchanged so that participants could reference their in-game score and apply this toward their FGRC21 score.

We expected participants in the FGRC21 would want to really show off their skills and make more versatile bots than might happen in a typical single-player setting. So we decided to award additional points for completing the secret objectives in each challenge. In the single-player game, secrets are fun things you can discover that unlock cosmetic rewards, but they aren't necessarily things you'd want to do over and over again. So we left them out of the single-player score to avoid creating that expectation and making the gameplay too grindy. But for FGRC21, it made more sense to include them, so we started with the participant's in-game score, and we added 500 points for each secret completed in the same run.

We also knew that evaluating robots in a purely quantitative way will never yield as interesting a result as bringing in some qualitative measures. So FIRST Global provided a panel of judges who could score each bot up to 2500 points in each of three categories: Mechanics, Innovation, and Aesthetics. These scores helped reward important qualities that are difficult for a computer to measure like, "Has significant effort been applied to the robot's aesthetics with remarkable results?"

The overall scoring model worked well for FGRC21 and supported a good range of strategies. But we learned for next time that it probably wasn't that important to stick to the single-player mode's time-to-score conversion. When we do this again, we're excited to give all participants the same time limit (similar to how FIRST® LEGO® League is run), because then we can put replays side-by-side with each other and make the broadcast even more exciting!

And that’s just a small look into everything that went on behind-the-scenes of FGRC21! In addition to Tracey, Josh, and RoboCo development team, we also have to give a huge round of applause to Filament Games’ Dan White, Brandon Pittser, Alex Stone, and Jennifer Javornik for organizing everything as well as FIRST Global’s Stephanie Slezycki and Khadijah Bagais for their enormous contributions to designing and running the event, facilitating our conversations with participants, and expanding our social media presence. We’re so excited to produce more competitions in the future and can’t wait to get more young people involved in the world of digital robotics!

If you want the chance to be a part of the next FIRST Global RoboCo Challenge, make sure to check our FIRST Global’s website https://first.global/ to learn more. If you missed FGRC21 and are curious about the results, visit our website https://www.fgrc21.roboco.co/ or read our recap of the event here. Next week, Luke Jayapalan returns to talk about the cello and violin duet in our Silicon Sonata challenge, so get your cello bow ready!

For the latest news on RoboCo, follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok! You can also connect with other community members and us by joining our official Discord and Reddit!

Don't forget to add RoboCo to your Steam Wishlist!

Apr 8, 2022

Takara's origins and design!

Takara Cards - Dilly

Hi! My name is Filipe Dilly and I'm the main designer and programmer of Takara Cards.
Me and three other people work on the game: Daniel Pinheiro (Animation, Art), Kawakeiko (Art, Concepts) and Rafael Assunção (Music).

Takara started with the idea of re-making our first game, NEXT JUMP, on another Engine (Godot) with HD graphics and some design improvements (plus a decent tutorial).
The motivation for re-making a game rather than creating a new one was simple:
Use this experience to learn and migrate to Godot (from Stencyl), as well as develop a production process between the three of us before making a more complex game.

But one Saturday afternoon, inspired by posts from designers making card games using a "regular deck of cards", I decided to make a simplified version of NEXT JUMP:

To my surprise, the game turned out great! Much better than the original, in my opinion. It's also easier to understand (the tutorial was one of the biggest problems with the original game)!
I started experimenting with the idea of making a new "incarnation" of NEXT JUMP using cards as an interface, and Takara Cards was born!

The current game is more complex and deeper than the prototype above, but some things have remained, like the 3x4 grid:

One of the advantages of cards is the flexibility they give to the game:
It is possible to make Equipment much more variable and interesting than before, which was one of the points I wanted to revisit in the original.
And speaking of cards, the player have two types of "Decks": Equipment and Maneuvers.
Up to six Weapons or Accessories cards can be "equipped" on the Ship and when your Hull drops to zero, the damage starts to hit the Equipment itself! "Breaking" the cards!

Maneuvers cards are the pilot's "skills" and the player can have as many as they want in the Deck. Maneuver cards can also "evolve" as you level up.

These are just a few examples of how different the game is from the original inspiration, but this post is long enough, so I'll end it here.

For our next post, we'll talk about the main influences on the game's visuals:
Anime from the 80's-90's! :D

If you have any questions about the design, particularly how it compares to NEXT JUMP, feel free to ask in the comments below and we'll answer.

Until the next post!