Hellenica Party Intros: Diona, the Arktos

It's finally January, and that means Hellenica is launching very soon. If you haven't already hopped over to our steam page, do so and wishlist it! We'd really appreciate your support.

In celebration of the upcoming launch, I'm going to be posting introductions to the party members you'll meet in Hellenica. I'll have a new one up every MWF leading up to our launch on January 23rd, so check back often!

First up is our main protagonist, Diona. She's been with us from the very beginning, but she's gone through some serious changes as the game's developed.

Diona is a disciple of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and as such has been granted the ability to transform into a bear for short durations.

I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

So how does that work mechanically?

At the start of combat, Diona will transform into a bear. She'll remain in this form for three turns (player and enemy), granting a large boost to her health and movement range. She'll also gain access to a new set of skills that allow her to focus on disrupting and manipulating enemies (or allies!).

One skill you can unlock is called Beardozer. Once unlocked, Diona can charge in a straight line up to five spaces, tossing anything in her way behind her. Enemies, allies, barrels, anything.

Not only is this a good way to cover a lot of distance, it also lets you set up a cluster of enemies for an AoE attack or a line of enemies for a long bounce chain. Beardozing as your first action in a turn means the rest of your party can take advantage of the new positions of up to six characters.

Here's a two-step sequence I set up with Diona and Nephele that exploits a chokepoint to deal a ton of bounce damage:

After three turns Diona will revert to her human form, which enables a completely different set of skills.

Check back on Wednesday for part two where I'll go into the different ways you can outfit Diona's human form to play a support role or a damage role. (Part 2 is here!)

And don't forget to add Hellenica to your wishlist to support us! Thanks!

Art updates!

Sorry for the delay folks, I've let the blog slip the past couple weeks.

In hopes of winning back the favor of our Internet patrons, I have a couple offerings in the form of consumable digital media! Yum.

First off, I've been putting a lot of work in over the past two weeks adding some new features to our level editor and environments. Specifically, the ability to shape and paint the level however the designer likes.

After the addition of just a couple new shapes, I did a quick remodeling of one of our first combat levels. Here's the before and after:

I'm still just using our 3 test textures, but it already looks much, much better.

The second big update this week came from Valery. She finished up a huge batch of animations that I've been busily plugging into the game. Here's a little teaser I put together for the new Scylax animations:

The game's really starting to come alive!

This changes everything

Every once in a while we implement a change in the project that makes me wonder how I ever enjoyed any of the previous versions. The last couple weeks I've been using some cycles to get our characters animating, and now that Diona is running and jumping around our little worlds, I just can't go back to our older builds. It's SO good to see our characters come to life on the screen!

Here's a quick video of some of her animations in place.

This is the animation graph I'm using to control her:

As far as animation graphs go, it's fairly simple. You can think of each rectangle as a single animation (idling in place, running, or shooting her bow), while the white arrows between the rectangles represent possible transitions between those animations.

So, for example, the arrows connecting diona_run to diona_hop allow Diona to immediately perform a hop while she is running. But, since there are no arrows between diona_run and diona_attack_bow, she has to stop moving and return to the diona_idle state before she can attack.

The nature of our turn-based combat means we can get away with a fairly simple set of transitions, as opposed to say, a real-time shooter game. Here's one part of an animation tree (a specialized kind of graph) from a recent Battlefield game:

It's not unusual for a large AAA studio to have a couple of programmers and a dedicated animation team spend all of their time refining the animation tree of the protagonist character. Maybe for our next game. ;)

I also put together some quick footage I took running around one of our test levels. Take a look!

Now that everything is in place, it's fairly simple to plug in the movement animations for our other characters, and that means our game is quickly coming to life!

Stay tuned for more!