6 Days of Indie Game Dev - Devlog

I'm making a first-person shooter fairy tale basically it's this disney-esque horror game where you run around this park with a bunch of creepy characters and blow their heads off so my publisher 3D Realms they really love the idea but frankly the game doesn't quite feel like a firstperson fairy tale just yet and that really does have to change if I want to make them happy so I spent 6 days trying to do exactly that can I make this run-of-the-mill first person shooter look more like a fairy tale and really capture an audience in just 6 days or am I going to have an interesting phone call with my publisher all right so on the first day I basically just Grime aied all of our basic standard textures that we've been creating and using for the last couple of years see the game looked very simple and clean and again like a run-of-the-mill firstperson shooter and instead because we're going to Market this game as a horror game set in this fairy tale Disney World environment I

need to make the textures look disgusting and we're going to see if we can create some kind of smoothness map out of this that's our smoothness map let's take a look and see if this works crank up the smoothness here see how it helps guys looks like like spit or something is thrown on there kind of cool let's go ahead and knock this out this right here let's grify these look how simple this is It's like a tune game so we we don't want that right I'm thinking it's going to have like threading in it yeah but we can definitely use that paper texture this paper texture is really effective I use I love using paper textures like this so we're going to do this really crank up that contrast here guys set it to multiply there we go pretty good we're going to make it not so intense but we're going to add a little textile texture to it maybe even a normal map on the second day I just continued to grify these textures I really learned something in these two days I learned that a single texture tweak or it could be just some art tweaks for your 2D game a tiny little texture change can make a huge difference and the reason why is

because that single texture that you spent let's say 2 hours working on you can use it throughout the entire game so one room or one lobby can look totally different with a single texture change this was especially true when I was working on the panels for the ceiling originally and ceilings always have this problem in any first-person shooter basically if it's just flat and it's just a single flat white texture even if you add some Grime to it it's going to look boring because it's just a flat plane so instead I added tiny little Shadows to the edges of the square and suddenly now it looks like a panel ceiling adding a little bit of a grid to flat surfaces goes a long way we could even do it another another one here like this now it looks like there's like tiles in the ceiling or like plaster tiles we can create an ugly stain at the corner here but we don't want it to look too unique we want it to be more generic oh my goodness what did I tell

you guys that is really gross but it's a little too intense not intense we're not making a camping game what's wrong with you and you know my theory is we could probably go ahead and just add a little line here and a little line here a little line here and what's interesting is all you got to do is Fade Out certain parts of these lines and they'll look like they're sort of the the ambient occlusion there we go kind of like that tile effect it gives me old school Vibes but another thing I learned is just because it works on one surface doesn't mean you should do it on every surface I don't know why but the squares just really make a big difference what do we do about that I spent about an hour trying to replicate this look creating wall panels I loved the panel look so much that I tried to make it work for the walls but sadly I ended up scrapping that and that's totally okay if you're working on a game it's okay to spend a couple hours trying something new and realizing it's just not for you yeah you may have not made progress on your game but you've learned a ton that

you can use for your future games okay now that we have these gri aied disgusting textures that we can use in this disney-esque theme park we also want to create some fairy tale models in particular I want to change the tower that we climb in this game I want to change it to look more like a Disney Castle what does this have to do with the grimy textures though well if I didn't grify the textures and I just made a beautiful Disney environment it wouldn't well make an impact one of the best ways to capture an audience's attention is to slam two contradictory ideas together again a great example I say again because I love this game I talk about it all the time Cult of the Lamb does this really really well super cute animal creatures and you turn them into a cult Sim that is slamming two ideas together the same is true with Twisted Tower we're taking Disney ask Willy Wonka Vibes and we're slamming them against disgusting vile textures blood and gut

so I spent some time in Photoshop concepting out a castle it needed to look like an art deco Castle which I had trouble Googling and finding but ultimately just with some Thin lines and very clean and precise patterns I was able to create an art deco Castle or you might even call it an art Nuvo Castle it had that Disney Vibe but it also matched the Interiors of the game which we had previously created when we were creating a more Art Deco Hotel game that was a whole other story a whole other game so we're trying to retrofit this new Disney Vibe into an art deco Vibe and I think it worked out with this concept I I mean you know if you did striped uh flags that might be pretty cool yep man it's the little things guys yeah look now we're a small team I'm the art director and I do a lot of different things the code the texture work I do some modeling as as well I do some music

as well and I actually created this song for this [Music] environment Gordon is doing the code and fipy is going to work on the 3D version of my tower mockup and he's also going to create some more Disney worldes assets for the tower while they work on that I'm going to rework the UI currently we have this god- awul UI right here and instead we want to create a more again a Willy Wonka or a disney-esque Vibe for our UI here's the thing about UI the player sees it constantly they see it through the entire game UI is a great way to consistently reinforce a theme that your game carries so in the case of let's say Alice madness Returns which by the way is a huge inspiration for me they use UI in such a strong and effective way to continually remind the player what the game is about it's about Alice and

Wonderland right so if the environments don't necessarily communicate that in this case the Asian themed level doesn't really reinforce the Alice and Wonderland Vibe but because the UI is on screen the player is reinforced that yes they are in an allice and Wonderland game I need that to be true for Twisted Tower even though the environments aren't done yet and the set dressing isn't done yet and hey we have limited time limited budget so we might not make it perfect this UI can still remind the player that hey this game is is a Disney ask Willy Wonka firstperson shooter and with your guys' help during a live stream I ended up creating this really sweet UI for the weapon wheel we tried a lollipop we tried some candy corn and we ended up on a deck of cards really great ideas thank you guys so much for bringing those to the stream yeah like the question is what kind of shapes out there are triangular that also fit in with the sort of Disney Allison Wonderland Vibe now that looks weird too I think this is close oh we're so close those cars it it just all of it feels

too um feels too complicated oh what are we going to do guys that's a mess my give up my give up oh come on you can figure it out Thomas make the guns playing cards that is so smart now here's the thing about UI it sounds like an afterthought it sounds like a simple thing UI is very difficult it's very challenging actually tweeted about this and all of you responded that yeah you agree UI takes a long time and it is difficult to get perfect I think we're ready to make it well we're not actually we'll worry about the order after we make the smart object it's it's getting really really uh yeah getting messy so two full days were spent trying to get this UI to work and this is the end result so as you can see guys now the intro to the game feels much more like a fairy tale firstperson shooter and when I collect all my weapons and I open up my weapon wheel or I get hurt or

I look at the amount of money I have in the game or my inventory it feels like a fairy tale and that is the goal