Building the world of Hellenica

Hey everybody, it's been a while!

Lately I've been living inside our homebrew level editor, putting together the huge number of combat environments that make up Hellenica's world. Obviously it would be rather selfish to keep all of the fun to myself, so here we are. Let's go on a journey of creation!

First stop: the end! What? Here's what a finished level looks like in the editor in full, indecipherable, debug glory:

Well, that's not helpful. What say we break this down a bit?

Here's a shot of where things usually start: the level geometry.

Ok, I lied. I typically start in a notebook, but this comes immediately after!

If you've ever built a tower out of legos, you have the requisite skills to build a Hellenica level. That little blue block near the bottom is the cursor, and I move it wherever I need to place a new piece. Most of the time that piece is a rectangular block, but sometimes I bring out more specialized pieces (see the roofs and columns).

Each piece has a texture assigned to each of its faces. When I drop a new piece in, its sides are all set to the same texture (mostly true). In cases where that's no good, I can also paint individual faces using the mouse. Here, I wrote you a message:

Instead of picking a color from a palette like an artist would usually do, I pick a whole texture. Call me greedy. Here's a sample of my palette:

One neat addition we're making to the genre is moving platforms; think elevators, conveyor belts, and magical... platforms. After the player's actions resolve, all the platforms will move a step (which means different things for different types of platforms).

Coupled with Hellenica's repositioning abilities, this opens up opportunities for some exciting new decisions. Do you send your ranged attacker up a lift for a better vantage point at the risk of separating her from the party? Should you push a tough enemy onto a moving conveyor belt to postpone dealing with her instead of focusing your damage on her?

Athens has gone through a serious transformation since the steam revolution, and most levels in the city will feature steam-powered elevators and conveyor belts throughout. This level has a couple elevators and two conveyor belts, one of which wraps around the entire left side.

The squares drawn in the editor are actually just the 'slots' for the platforms. Each platform individually represents a single space in the level, and they move from slot to slot. Squares with a red highlight will start with a platform.

The white arrows indicate the orientation a platform will assume when it enters a slot. The texture we use for the tops of platforms indicates directionality so that a player can quickly grasp how the platforms will be moving in the future. This is a huge help, especially in some of the later levels. ;)

Once the level layout is fairly locked down, I start dropping in the actors that will populate the scene.

Different actor 'groups' are represented by different colors. Typically, these are groups like 'party', 'barrels', 'bad guys'. Sometimes extra groups are defined for special cinematic reveals or triggering logic. More on that later!

Oftentimes, there will be special level logic associated with certain positions. In Hellenica, I'm calling these gadgets. There are two in this level:

These guys spawn barrels and amphoras to keep the moving conveyor belts populated. In other levels, gadgets are used to place hot steam pipes that cause damage, magical traps that probably also cause damage, or friendly abilities that improve your combat effectiveness.

We're most of the way there now, but first we have to make sure the player doesn't cause us any trouble.

By default, the top of every piece is a visitable space for an actor. Unfortunately, trees don't like it when actors stand inside them, something about personal space. So, to avoid complaints I mark certain spaces as untraversable:

In this case, I don't want people walking underneath the elevators or disturbing the trees. Pesky Nephele also likes to vault onto the outer walls, which is probably not Icarus-approved, so that's a no-no.

Ok, it's on to trigger volumes!

On some levels, I don't want all of the enemies to charge at the player's party right away. Everything in moderation, right?

By marking out certain areas, I can link the activation of certain actor groups to the movement of the player's actors. In this way, the player can (hopefully) indicate that she is ready for a fight by moving close to the enemies. (Hopefully.)

Not so bad, was it? Here's a shot of the final product:

(This is an early level, so I don't feel too bad spoiling it for the faithful. Forgive me!)

Truthfully, my process is nowhere near as linear as I've laid it out here. As with any creative endeavor, large portions of time are usually spent wandering the harrowing depths of uncertainty. Lots of experimenting, lots of failing, but hopefully in the end I come up with something great. Having good tools certainly helps.

Hope you enjoyed this write-up! Let me know if there's anything else you'd like more info on.

Monday Update #7 - Pixel art and camping

Hey everyone, I think we're probably overdue for a sign of life. We're still pushing towards launch, and I've got some fun new art to show for it.

We're closing in on being art complete in the combat department. Here's an example of some new spell effects Valery put together for an unannounced enemy:

We're also starting to pixelize some of the characters that are only involved in story moments. You can see a few here, as well as some familiar faces.

The latest thing I've been working on is designing the title screen and intro process. The plan is to give the player a quiet moment with her party as they camp for an evening during their quest. The scene will also be a reflection of your current location and make-up of your party as you browse your save files.

Each party member is going to have a custom animation as they rest around the campfire. Here's the first pass at Brasidas preparing his latest victim:

'Til next time!

Monday Update #6 - Gameplay iteration and a new character reveal

Howdy folks. Aside from some technical difficulties this week, I've been busy designing and iterating gameplay lately, tweaking hero abilities, level layouts, and enemy stats. Once these are all feeling good, I can be confident about moving forward with final combat art assets, and then we can ship this thing!

Now that we're getting closer to the finish line, we finally moved forward with a couple of the remaining character portraits we required. I don't feel too bad spoiling this one, as he shows up very early on in the game.

This is Sisyphus, one of the early big baddies you'll encounter throughout the world of Hellenica.

For the unacquainted, Sisyphus was a dastardly king sentenced to eternal torment by the gods for his deceitful, sometimes disgusting deeds. As punishment, Sisyphus was required to push a boulder up an impossible slope, endlessly stuck in a loop as the boulder always rolled back down before reaching the summit.

In Hellenica, Sisyphus has found a way to finally crest his impossible obstacle thanks to some supernatural assistance. However, his curse is not entirely broken, as he is still eternally burdened with the remains of the boulder.

In typical villain fashion, he has converted the source of his torment into a weapon, which he will happily use to defeat your party if they get in his way. Coupled with some new supernatural powers related to his curiously transformed legs, he is a force to be reckoned with.

The original sketch YDY put together was pretty spot on. The hair and face communicated the frenzied craze that we expected of someone previously mired in eternal, divine torment. His brute strength developed over years of continuous labor was obvious. His supernatural aspects are tricky to talk about in detail here without spoiling the story, but we were shooting for a craggy, ancient forest vibe. I think it works pretty well.

After some tweaks to the chains, we moved on to coloring. The first pass was good, but we felt there wasn't enough contrast between the leather bands and the boulder. Switching over to the green of the cloth also reduced some complexity which we thought helped to tie things together.

Let us know what you think of Sisyphus in the comments!

Hellenica Environments: Rhodes

It's now week two of post-PAX South life, and we're back into the swing of things. I'm currently in the middle of tweaking combat and building new levels, so it seemed like a good opportunity for an art update!

This week's travel destination is Rhodes, an elevated island city surrounded by a great wall on one side and staggering elevated docks on the other. Led by the so-called Mechanist-King Evagoras, the island nation is known for its theomechanical marvels as well as its generosity towards its allies and those in need.

We actually began work on Rhodes before Daniel, our environment artist, started working with us. At the time, we were still searching for the right partner, and we decided to give Collateral Damage Studios a trial run with Rhodes.

To start off, we wanted to work out the important elements unique to Rhodes. This meant figuring out how the steam-powered ship lift worked and what the Colossus of Rhodes may have looked like. We also knew we'd need to include some other elements for story reasons, so we tackled those as well. This exploratory part of the process is always my favorite.

 

A couple of the lifts relied on some questionable physics, so we decided on the rightmost implementation. In general, we were pleased with most variations of the other elements, though we really liked the mechanical solar system installation on the observatory.

With some more concrete details in mind for these elements, we started thinking about the composition of the scene.

We knew we wanted a dramatic view of the harbor that showcased the Colossus as well as the elevated docks. The first option actually worked the best for us, as it provided a nice vantage point from which to view the cityscape in the background. After a little more playing around with the finer points, we settled on option B from the second image. The airy, open feel of this composition provided a nice contrast to some of our other city locations that feel more cramped and urban.

Once that was settled, the artist took off towards the final image. CDS was great about keeping us posted on the various stages involved along the way.

This is where things stood at the end of our trial run with CDS. They exhibited an incredible attentiveness when it came to the fine details, and their transparency throughout the process was fantastic.  We were quite happy with how the final image turned out, but unfortunately the scheduling just didn't work out when it came to a continued partnership.

Now, jump ahead several months with me. Daniel had been on board for a while and was turning out great work on our other locations. We decided that we wanted him to go back over Rhodes and ensure it matched the style of his other pieces. This mostly entailed intensifying the lighting and shadows to match his preference for more dynamic lighting. Flip back and forth between the two images to see the differences.

Notice anything else that's different?

The Colossus and the boats are huge now! Unfortunately, we lost the staggering height that was critical to the island's identity during the transformation, as Daniel had dragged in the Colossus and resized the boats in the harbor due to a miscommunication on our part.

Luckily, this worked to our favor in the end. With a quick change to the horizon, a few additional ship elevators, and some architectural duct tape to help hold up the docks, Daniel was able to make the sense of scale even more pronounced than before.

So there you have it: Rhodes. And if you happen to be in town, don't forget to ask Evagoras about the elevators' auto-load balancers!

Hellenica Characters: Anaxagoras

It's been a while since we revealed any new characters here on the devlog, and with Christmas coming up soon, I thought it only appropriate to introduce you to our very own Santa look-alike, Anaxagoras!

Anaxagoras is an inventor who has been at the forefront of the Greek industrial revolution for years. Our main goals in portraying him were to communicate his friendly, helpful nature and to echo the visual aesthetic that we had developed for Nephele, our other character strongly related to steam technology. Our basic approach included:

• create a friendly facial expression and a non-threatening physique
• add lots of tools and tool pockets
• use brass gears and adornments
• pick colors that match Nephele's outfit to further establish the image of the ancient Greek steam engineer

This first sketch was already quite close, but there were a few small details we wanted to revise. The pocket on the stomach felt impractical and probably uncomfortable. We also felt the device on his wrist was a bit too modern for Hellenica's time frame.

This new version looked great, so we moved on to coloring.

We wanted Anaxagoras to look right at home in the workshop, which meant using browns and oranges that blended in well with the metallic tones found there. We had already achieved a similar look with Nephele, so her palette served as a great starting point.

After that, it was just up to our partners over at YDY-CG to finish up the coloring of the sketch and add in the final details (wristband colors and pouch ornaments). As always, they did a great job executing on our direction, and we're super happy with how he turned out.

Happy holidays everyone!

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!

Valery has joined your party!

Sorry folks, this last week has seen a whirlwind of activity on our end, both with Hellenica developments and life events. We didn't forget you all, though!

Today I want to announce one fantastic result of this activity, and that is our partnering with a new combat artist! For the longest time, we've been unable to show the gameplay of Hellenica because of our placeholder artwork. I'm already in the process of integrating new art, so soon we can start showing you all more of what we're working on.

So who is the artist? Valery Kim is a pixel artist that found us through the TIGSource forums. She has a unique style and a solid background working on other games in our genre. Here's some of her work:

You can check out her live blog here for more.

Now, for a little Hellenica teaser, here's the test submission that made us choose Valery in the first place:

There's much more to come, stay tuned!

Hellenica Characters: Reworking Diona, Nephele, and Nyx

Now that we've wrapped up most of our character portraits for Hellenica, we had some time to go back and revise some of our earliest characters. We realized that the first pieces we worked on with our previous artists didn't quite match up with the style we established with our current artist. Ack! Who will save us now?!

Oh, I guess our current artist. Probably.

So, we had her do a little touch-up work. Here's a process shot of how our characters were transformed:

Nephele and Nyx were fairly straightforward. We shrunk their heads and eyes down a bit to be closer to the mostly realistic character proportions of our other characters. In Nephele's case, we had to make her nose and mouth a little more well-defined as well.

For Diona, we made similar adjustments to her facial features, but in the end we just weren't happy with the way the pose was working out. During her conversations in game, she looked unbalanced and a bit awkward. So, starting again from the sketch stage we put together something more natural. We already had a great color scheme worked out, so it was a little easier than completely starting from scratch.

And that's that! As on the internet, photoshop can fix any problem. What do you think? We're hopeful that once players get into the game they'll never even know that these three characters were originally done by a different artist!

Hellenica Environments: Crete

This week I thought I'd follow up on Victor's intro to Crete with a post showing off the art. It's one of my favorite locations in the game, and I'm really happy with how the background painting came together.

Here's a quick description of the setting:

"The Minoan civilization collapsed for unknown reasons centuries ago, leaving only fog-covered ruins on the isle of Crete. Athens nominally claims Crete as its own, but rocky crags shrouded in fog and rumors of a curse keep them mostly absent from its shore.  As such, these ruins and their surrounding waters have become a harbor for disreputable vessels that would rather confront whatever curses the ruins hold than the Athenian navy."

As with most of our requests, Daniel's first sketch of Crete was basically perfect. The mood is spot on, and even without the details in you can already make out many of Crete's characteristic features: derelict ships, crude shanties, and the ominous entrance to the Labyrinth in the background.

We changed up the composition a bit to provide a more viable vantage point for the party, but I insisted that we hang on to that ghost ship mast. Fortunately, Daniel's a swell guy and was happy to oblige. (I suppose we're also paying him to listen to us, but that's hardly relevant.)

Here's the final revision of Crete that you'll visit in Hellenica. This location's a really fun one to play through, I wish I could post more than just the art!

Hellenica Characters: Oracle at Delphi

No Greek epic is complete without a proper visit to the Oracle at Delphi, and we've remained faithful to tradition in Hellenica. Of course, whether you visit Delphi is ultimately up to you, but hey, if you insult Apollo by skipping over his temple on your journey, that's on you.

It was said that the Delphic Oracle was effectively the highest authority in ancient Greece. Men dominated most aspects of life, but when you needed divine advice on political controversy, military conflict, economic turmoil, even relationship issues, you asked the Oracle at Delphi.

For our version of the Oracle, we started from a fun theory about the source of the Oracle's inspiration: the volcanic fumes in her chamber! The gods work in mysterious ways.

Compared to our other characters, we wanted to set the stage for the Oracle a bit more thoroughly. She's seated up high to play up the drama of the scene, and a steam-powered pump is chugging away to feed her inspiration straight from the source. Unfortunately, we weren't really feeling the jazz hands, and the tubing looked a little too F-15 fighter pilot, so we took another go at it.

With those issues ironed out, we spent a bit of time figuring out what colors worked best for her. We originally went down the route you see on the left, but quickly realized she matched all of our Spartan characters. Who she hangs out with on the weekends is her own business, but for our purposes, we needed to avoid any possible confusion. The colored eyes were also starting to weird us out at this point, so we did some more experimenting.

And that, dear readers, is how the Oracle at Delphi (in Hellenica) came to be!

So, what will you ask her?

Hellenica Environments: Thebes

So, it's been a while since we've shown off a new location, but I have a secret to share. Between my last post about Corinth and this post, we've finished nearly all of the location art! Two quick reimaginings of existing locations remain, and then we'll be 100% complete with the location backgrounds. Praise Zeus!

Exultations aside, Thebes is today's focus. Or at least, Hellenica's Thebes, completely transformed by its railroads. Here's our inspiration:

"Thebes has the ambition and determination of a nation that's been on the economic and political rise for over a decade. Their wholehearted embrace of technology is evident everywhere, from the mechanical design of its buildings to the great factories which have turned the city into the most important manufacturing center in Greece, as well as the primary railroad hub."

And here's Daniel's accompanying sketch:

He definitely nailed the vibe we were hoping for, but we felt that overall, the scene was just a bit too modern for our game. Steampunk ancient Greece is a tricky setting, and we have to work hard to make sure our art doesn't stray too far out of line.

To address that issue, we brought the perspective down lower. Without modern construction materials, it would be impossible to build structures that tall. At this point, you can start to see some more traditionally Greek elements sneaking into the architecture, but it still felt a little too 19th century London. Onwards!

We nixed the windows, removed the arches, really pushed the columns, and traded out the gas lamps for torches. Overall, it felt much more Greek without sacrificing the vibe and the steampunk elements.

At this point, we were feeling pretty good about Thebes, so Daniel spent some time cleaning it up and working on the details. Here's the final version:

And that is Hellenica's version of steampunk ancient Thebes, railroad and manufacturing hub of the ancient Greek world.  The observant viewer might even find a clue about some of the other dealings that take place in Thebes. Let us know what your theories are in the comments!