Oct 28

Behind the Scenes of Éalú for International Animation Day

Éalú - beyondthebarktheatre

Hi all, Ivan here (our team's animator)

To celebrate International Animation Day, I thought it could be fun to share some of the behind the scenes process of creating Éalú. Warning for those who haven't completed the game: There are spoilers ahead but I'll use Steam's feature to hide them unless you want to see!

Today I'm excited to share:

The physical setup for animating Éalú.
How we planned & stayed organized during production.
Some of my sources of inspiration for the animation in our project.

Physical Animation Setup

The world of Éalú was built inside my roughly 2.5m x 4.5m (8ft x 15ft) garden shed, on top of this beast:

That's my 1250x1250mm CnC routing table I normally use to build parts for live theatre sets, and is also the tool I used to carve all the wooden parts for the maze, puzzles, puppets and set pieces for our game. It doubles as an excellent stopmotion animation table, as it's massively heavy & quite rigid and therefore doesn't vibrate much or shift position if you bump into it or lean against it. Add in the fact that, with the lights switched off, my shed is dark inside even in the middle of the day, & you have the makings of a pretty decent place in which to animate... especially considering our lack of budget!

As space on the table is limited, I made the sets for Éalú modular. I created 3 walls with doors cut into them, and 3 solid walls, and some other custom walls for special rooms. This way, instead of needing enough space to build all 74 rooms of the maze ahead of time, as I animated I could select the appropriate walls, build a single room, set up my lights, animate said room & then tear it down and get ready for the next one. Here's an example of a room set up and ready for animating:

And a screenshot of what that room looks like in the completed game:

Once I had a room set up, the next step was animating every action the mouse could take in that room, one photo at a time! The room in the above screenshot required 7 animations: An entry & exit animation for each door, and an "idle" loop animation of the mouse rocking in place in the center of the room. To get everything just right, I would use a still frame of the end of the "idle" animation loop as a reference point to start/end the other animations. Here's an example of a different room where I was testing the mouse entering from the front, and stopping just before the position where the "idle" animation in that room should start:

With 74 rooms in the maze, and 512 animation clips needed, something absolutely essential which we planned out before creating a single frame of animation was....

Planning & Staying Organized

All of the animation and back end development for Éalú was done by just 2 people; myself and Ben Orr. Due to our commitment to making everything in the game hand-animated, we knew we would need to stay very organized or get buried by what we set out to do, so the first thing we did was create a way to easily pass work back and forth to each other & track our progress.

At the beginning a drew out our map of the maze with pencil & paper, and then I created a digital PDF map of the maze & turned each room into a clickable button. MAJOR SPOILER - PORTION OF MAP:

Clicking on any room in our PDF would open up a tab in a google spreadsheet with an animation shot list for that room, along with the status of each animation:

And within that shot list was a link to where completed animations would be stored, for easy access by Ben during development:

All of this was absolutely essential and it helped Ben & myself a lot that we built an organizational architecture together before we started. This way we could always easily see what was done, what still needed doing & where are assets all were. While corridor rooms (rooms with only doors in them) were relatively simple, puzzle rooms get pretty darn complex. This puzzle room, for example, was made from 28 separate stopmotion animation clips, and Ben put them all together using the media player in Unity and a lot of careful thought and imaginative thinking to make it all work based on mouse click inputs:

That spider web of connecting lines is the state machine he built to track the state of each circle in the puzzle, how full it was, which portion of the corresponding animation was to be played based on the next button clicked, etc. Being a programming & dev novice myself, I'm in absolute awe of how he made this all work. For all the careful, methodical detail I had to put in animating each frame by hand, Ben was doing the same behind the scenes to build our world out of the huge pile of animation files I handed to him.

We probably could have saved ourselves a ton of work by generating a sprite for our mouse based on sequences of photos, but I really wanted the mouse to truly be in-situ to get all of the perfect, subtle reflections, shadows and lighting that comes from real photography. A lot of this is because of the people who were...

Sources of Inspiration for Éalú's visual design

Ever since getting really into stop motion animation, I've taken inspiration from and wanted to emulate animators who have become heros of mine. In this project, I'd say the biggest sources of inspiration for me were Lotte Reiniger & Jan Švankmajer. Both of them had projects they created that were beautiful silent films & I very much wanted Éalú to feel like an interactive silent film. Individually their work spoke to me in different ways.

Lotte Reiniger

My wife first introduced me to Lotte's incredible works many years ago. In addition to her co-invention of the multiplane camera & creation of the first surviving feature length animation, I was very inspired by her resourcefulness. The fact that she created her earliest silhouette stop motion by cutting a hole in her table & converting it to a light table with a camera mounted above is a testament to creating complex art with minimal equipment & being creative with what you have on hand.

Jan Švankmajer

I greatly admire how surreal and tactile Jan's work is, and the dark & even humorous nature of some of his most macabre short films. Many of his pieces also play with confined space & constrained camera angles, both of which were very useful sources of inspiration in attempting to create the feeling of a restrictive maze for the mouse to inhabit.

Ask me questions!

If you're reading this far, thanks for taking an interest in a portion of how Éalú was made! If there's things I didn't cover here you're curious about, or you wondering something more in depth about what I did share, please feel free to ask! Ben and I have no desire to be closed off or secretive about how we made Éalú, as we both learned so much from the past work of others to make this possible and we would be thrilled to pay it forward.

Oct 28

Bounty Star Patch 2 Notes

Bounty Star - karlag

Hello from Dinogod and thank you so much for playing Bounty Star! Today's update contains stability, performance, and quality-of-life improvements, along with a number of additional bugfixes.

Gameplay and Quality of Life Improvements

Bounties with a specific loadout subtask now show the required loadout on the Memories screen when playing via the Revisitor
Screamers now affect humanoid and dino enemies even if they currently have Stability
Adjusted drop rates from the Loot Drone to favor unique items rather than curios/scraps
Added unique SFX to the Combat Shield for improved audio feedback

Performance Improvements

Optimized several particle VFX that were particularly costly
Optimized assets to reduce draw cost for several elements in the Garage and citrus trees in all levels
Optimized certain AI calculations affecting bounties with many enemies

Crash and Soft-Lock Fixes

Fixed a crash that occurred if you hatched more chickens or microtheros than you had room for and they were later re-homed by building more coops, selling an existing critter, or replacing a dead critter
Fixed a soft-lock if you pressed the button for Photo Mode in the cutscene pause menu. Photo Mode is intended to be unavailable in cutscenes, since they are staged for fixed camera angles.

Other Bug Fixes

Fixed a specific bandit sniper occasionally falling under the world in the bounty Thermal Madness
Fixed plant bed upgrades being craftable without all the required materials
Fixed Fan the Hammer not resetting the streak when restarting a bounty. It will remain awarded if it was already awarded.
Oh Talilah and Ambush no longer play their story post-bounty cutscenes when replaying them with the Revisitor.
Improvements to AI pathing in Citrus Plains, Kap's Cavern, Gecko Rock Baseball Field, Short Spire, Rosewater Bluff, and Skytown
Removed empty chests from the bounty SOS (Save Our Sprinklers!)
Fixed Talilah being able to accompany Clem on Revisitor bounties when unfed.
Fixed visual errors in Citrus Plains, Rosewater Bluff, and the Garage
Fixed the Gangbuster, Balloon Spinkler, and Noisemaker being capturable by the Chain Binder, which was unintended and caused visual errors
Fixed placement of a chest in Gecko Rock Baseball Field that could trap the player when opening it from a certain angle
Fixed cutscene animation and audio issues in Ambush, Final Battle, and Gladley-Stone's visit to the Garage
The Geopython is now correctly affected by the EMP support system
Ghost of the Past now correctly requires the Cooldown Repairer instead of the Burst Repairer, to match the raptor from the Prologue. It will remain awarded if it was already awarded.
Fixed collision traps in Short Spire and Rosewater Bluff
Fixed missing props when upgrading the Garage / workbench the final time
Corrected water collision in The Oasis, Rosewater Bluff, and Kap's Cavern
Fixed MOU support system sometimes dropping inputs near the end of the game when the Raptor's stats are highest
Clem's raptor in the Epilogue cutscene now shows the correct paint job and support equipment, like in the Garage
Fixed certain items (e.g. chickens and microtheros) showing incorrect count in the store when in Sell mode
Fixed the jukebox playing two copies of the same song if you kicked it during the chapter Into the Night
Fixed music not playing during the final credits sequence
Corrected the UI label for Traditional Chinese to more clearly distinguish it
Fixed certain accented letters displaying as capitals when the language is set to Polish

Thanks so much for playing and sharing your feedback—it helps us make Bounty Star better with every patch. We hope you enjoy these updates and we’ll see you out in the Red Expanse.

Oct 28

The HALLOWEEN Update is here!

Slice & Dice: Pizza Survival - Soundbyte Interactive

I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE BEEN ENJOYING THE EARLY ACCESS LAUNCH! I have been keeping a keen eye on things and believe i have fixed everything possible (so far)
As promised the Seasonal Halloween Update is HERE!

There is a TON of quality-of-life upgrades that i finished this weekend along with the new Halloween update! If you sign in this week youll see a brand new Corn maze outside the pizza shop, get to the end of the maze to unlock a LIMITED-TIME cosmetic!

ADD-ON's:- CORN MAZE - Magazines now have better chance to spawn the more important items
- Cosmetic items now effect the overall grade of the shop
- Vacuum now completely gets rid of regular enemies and stuns General Broil
- Backspace button on the Upgrade terminal so you can switch between pages without leaving.
- Names and Personal Best in lobby
- Chat goes to the last line of text

FIXED BUGS:
- Failsafe for opening up the shop
- Fixed the Hamburger maker getting stuck + clients not being able to see Bodies
- Audio problems
- Grade of the shop fixed between Server/Client (harder to get to S rating)
- Fixed Drink Replication issues -Fixed Ability to buyback equipment + Healthbar on Double Stove
- Drive through customers not spawning
- Fixed Balloon Animal attacks + Sounds
- Some nighttime songs have been extended so they don't automatically loop
- The Seed incubator can be used more then once

KNOWN BUGS:
- Interact Overlay Stays on screen for the upgrade terminal, Fire Extinguisher, Upstairs Cabinet & the Toilet
- Pizza Box & the Dough are getting stuck in Clients hands - (trying to get this fixed ASAP)

FUTURE PLANS:- Community Poll Winner- Voice Chat + Settings for Voip
- More Weapons, More Bosses
- Night 50 Celebration
- End Game Wrap-up (UI that shows how many enemies, how much money, & how many waves you survived, Etc etc)
- Soundtrack release
- Leaderboards

JOIN OUR DISCORD TO STAY UP TO DATE WITH UPDATES, DEV-LOGS, & COMMUNITY POLLS

THANK YOU,
ERIC