What an exciting week it has been for the team, moving on from our early prototyping stages and into planned development! This week has been quite jam packed with the team pulling together to further think about our design choices around  core mechanics and gameplay systems to really think about what impact they have on the experience and their intended effects throughout the game. Aside from that we also took this new step in our development to setup our itch page as well as opening an official twitter page for the game!

One of our more exciting meetings this week was taking steps forward to think about our enemy design and their roles in the overall lore of the game, as well as conceptualising our user interface system and t he best ways we can tackle a clear functional design, Simone has more on this later in her update.

Dev update - Matthew Woods

Hello! I'm Matthew and I am one of the programmers on Harrowing in the Light, I'm responsible for all the grid turn based systems you will see throughout the game, as well as designing the way the game handles the characters data such as character classes, skills and statistics. I am also working on the environment art and level design, you can follow more of what I do on my twitter.

This week we decided that we would upgrade our previous prototype we developed to Unity 2018 to take full advantage of all the new upcoming engine features, from ECS scripting, to the exciting new ways Unity is handling prefabs. We feel that this is the best choice for the project going forward, as the project was in quite early stages and allows us to rework a lot of backend before we're too deep into development. With that, I’ve spent the majority of the week moving the project over to 2018 and restructuring a lot of the back-end for how our systems work and interlink such as character statistics and turn based grid handling. These new systems allow us to quickly prototype new features as well as testing character statistics a lot easier than in the previous build.

Part of rebuilding these systems was to tackle the 3rd phase of our game, as the old prototype only featured two of these phases, what I will call ‘setup’ and ‘battle’, where the players would use a turn based system to set up their characters for the upcoming battle phase where the game turns into tower defense. The third phase we conceptualized as being an exploration phase, one where the players would be able to explore the environment, find useful resources, but as they do so the threat of enemies finding the party would grow ever closer.

However once this phase was implemented we found a lot of overlap with the setup phase, the exploration phase felt a little lackluster and redundant, and we found that this lead to more design problems than solutions. Not wanting to scrap the idea of exploration and resource finding, we opted to merge the exploration phase into the setup phase, with this we had to rethink how the setup phase would work (and fundamentally a large phase of the game). To solve the issue of being turn starved in both setting up the player characters strategically, and spending move costs to explore the dungeon area, we have played with the idea of increasing the amount of moves each character gets per setup phase. This allows players to now use these turns more strategically and make more meaningful choices when deciding how to spend this turns move points.

We’re quite excited to see how the improvements to the new systems play out in our upcoming playtests but as a team we’re already feeling that these decisions are already pushing us in a better direction regarding overall design and gameplay.

- Matthew Woods - Programmer/Artist

Dev update - Simone Rizio

Hi, I'm Simone (https://twitter.com/simonerizio), I am one of the artists for this game, more specifically the character artist. My job is to do concept art, 3d art, texture art and animation. I will also be the lead UI designer for this game too. My main tasks will be to concept ideas where it be either playable characters, props or environments! From there, they will be made into 3d objects by either me, Matthew or Chris. However I will mostly be focusing on the characters which you will be able to play as, in Harrowing in the Light!

This week I focused on the concept art, and turning them into front and side poses to be used while modelling the character, which will most likely commence next week. In addition to this, I also did some research into UI so I could think about its use and how it should be displayed in our game. Lastly, there was also a discussion which lead to the artistic style and concept for the levels to be changed, which I'll also discuss.

UI

This week we all had a discussion about this UI, and decided to draw up our own version of it, thinking about what should be displayed to the player and perhaps how it should be positioned in the game view.

(Sam's (top left), Matthew's (top right), Simone's (bottom left), Chris' (bottom right)).

There are good things, and things to improve about all of them of course, but it still posed as a good place to start from and as they play style of our game starts to become more apparent.

While developing and researching UI this week I was recommended a GDC talk by Zach Gage - Building Games That Can Be Understood at a Glance, where I came to understand the importance of how the UI was distributed to the audience in layers of importance, and doing so with scale, positioning, colour etc.  What also stood out to me was Zach's theory of the first/second and third read (basically it displays importance of elements in the game with corresponding UI, and the UI should be more readable/easily accessible depending on how important/often used it is), which I will in mind as I continue to develop them.

As stated. the play style of our game is not yet entirely decided, but I think that aspects like the character’s health, abilities and loadout; as well as the enemy count and potentially turn order will be the most important parts of the gameplay. From here, the UI will have to aid in being readable and hopefully not in places that deem illogical or annoying to find during gameplay.In time elements like objectives/flexibility with movements (undo/cancel/return etc), could come up later and probably be less important in the UI, ie a third read.

Character Concepts

• The character concepts are shown, here, there is, an archeologist, mechanic, biologist (support/healing class) and astronomer (sniper class).
• I have drawn what I think they would look like, and the supplies they might carry that relate to their class/career. Some of these may be used in combat but i have yet to design weapons.

With these designs, which of course need to be 3d, I drew them in t-poses (front view and side view) so I will have an easier time modelling them in blender. During this time I also decided names for them which are:

• Jecinta Hargrove (archeologist)
• Billie Hedman (mechanic)
• Henry Jones (biologist)
• Lawrence McCarthy (astronomer)

Art style/level design

• Together, with Matthew Woods, we discussed how we could push the visuals in the environment further (where previously it was pretty barren just with pillars and sand and walls and not much else). From here we decided, to the environment a kind of underground city. And with these we created a list of potential ideas for what kind of props could be made that would be seen in a market/city type environment and be based on Ancient Egyptian culture and aesthetic.
• We feel that this would make the game much more interesting to look at, and feel more full of life (or previous life) in terms of its environment, especially when compared to the ruins we had before that were pretty barren. We felt this could be rather boring to look at over and over during gameplay.

- Simone Rizio - Concept artist / 3D Character artist & animator

Dev update - Sam Muller 

Hey! I’m Sam Muller, a baby game developer from Melbourne (I should clarify I don't make baby games). I don’t have any well known projects to my name so I can’t dazzle you with my work on games you've heard mentioned by your friend’s friend that one time. I do a little bit of everything but am taking a more programming heavy role on this project, alongside managing our quaint little team. If you haven’t noticed it yet, I’m a fan of the Campo Santo Devlogs so I’m going to try mimic that style, just a little. They’re the amazing people that made the Firewatch and currently making In the Valley of Gods, I’d definitely recommend checking them out.

As you may very well (not) know, Harrowing in the Light was a prototype we made over the span of four weeks. Here’s a little secret: it was all smoke and mirrors and as result we’ve shot ourselves in the foot a little (the crosshairs were aimed at the pinky toe) but heck, who doesn’t like a challenge? We’ve managed to sell on the idea of our game to ourselves so we’ve decided to make a vertical slice of it in our currently allotted 12 weeks. Therefore we’re scrapping a L O T. That means goodbye so my ohso beloved base building scene *sad violin*.

So what have I done in our preliminary weeks of development?

I wrote some Jinn, the opposing force against our archaeologists, biographies so that Chris, our very talented creature modeller, has something to base his models off. Apparently writing some character bios and doing some research into ancient Egypt, which is genuinely riveting, is enough to qualify me to take on the narrative lead. (Kidding! I have one other unmerited qualification).

Here’s a neat little GIF on the group brainstorm we did and a scroll through of my Jinn write up and research.

I've also been trying to give Matt a hand porting our project to Unity 2018.whatevernumberweareon. The problem is that he’s incredibly capable, so that means all I’ve really been doing some testing here and there whilst reviewing his code. Now that it is ported (yay!), we’ve been doing some actual working getting the gameplay loop up and running but you can check out Matt’s DevLog (hyperlink (shhh, scroll up two DevLogs)) for more on that. One important point is that we’ve been critically reviewing a large majority of our gameplay ideas, so keep an eye for that in the future DevLogs as we start to implement the changes! (Spoiler: We’ve moved from three gameplay phases to TWO! *Whaaaaat?*)

As a generic, office environment-esk bonding exercise, we all did some nice little sketches to get an idea of how the UI might look, check out her post for the pics. Whilst Simone is taking a lead on the UI design, I’ve got the job of implementing it and as such I’ve been researching UI in attempt to be critical about her ideas, provide some discourse and suggest alternatives. Mainly because I like creating a polite tension but also because it is a core component and incredibly important to our game. I may have spent most of my time fanboying at the creator of so many games I’ve enjoyed but Zach Gage’s GDC talk Building Games That Can Be Understood at a Glance has been a huge help with this and is another thing I would recommend, so much so that everyone on our team has had to watch it (*cough cough* Matt and Chris better have).

I did manage to get some functional UI in place and experimented with Text Mesh Pro, which for some completely non apparent reason I hadn't touched before. Since I'm planning two playtests in the coming days this was really important as the UI will be a core focal point for research and I want to gather as much data on it as soon as possible.

The rest of my time was spent doing admin work but that means we now have a Twitter with a pretty average logo and banner (don't worry, it's all thanks to me). Aside from shepherding my small flock of game developers, which is the exact opposite of a herculean feat, I also stopped by the NGV to take a look at their rather humble Ancient Egypt exhibit in an effort to be inspired and see if it was worthwhile for the rest of the team to go (for the few of you wondering, it is). Google apparently isn't a great resource for finding authentic artifacts.

I'm a little dismayed at how little in engine work I've done but if physics has left me with one sliver of knowledge, it's that big things take time and effort to get moving. Feel free to quote me on that.

- Lots of love, always, Sam Muller - Programmer / Technical art

Dev update - Chris Smith

I'm Chris. Producer for Harrowing. I am animator at heart and will be handling much of the animations for harrowing in the light as well as designing and modelling the enemies. Check out my Twitter for work in progress updates for Harrowing as well as my many other projects

Mesh Commencement

Commenced mesh work on in game enemies. Started with constructing a base mesh that will allow a quicker work flow by replicating and then modifying the base mesh to make the other enemies. The enemies function and backstories will influence heavily what my design choices will be. 

The base mesh will become the support monster. The function of this enemy is to support and buff the other enemies by floating into the air and opening a rift beneath it. For this the enemy will be fully formed with all arms and legs. Walk upright and have a shaman or witch doctor feel. The body, arms and legs are out of proportion to emphasise the fact they are from another world.

The “super popcorn” enemies are of a lower stature and scamper along the floor and walls on all fours. To help add to the function I reversed the leg from the knee down so when the enemy is on all fours the knee will bend above the back. 

The “Popcorn” enemies in the lore are approaching the end of their lifespan and are falling apart. They won’t have working legs and will drag themselves across the ground with their arms. For this I have made the hands bigger and will have legs cut off at different lengths for variety.   

Several parts I’m not happy with at the moment. I attempted to try something different with the feet but they look to much like bird feet and is straying to far from the design vision. These will be replaced with more humanoid features. Additionally, the mouth has not worked as well as I had hoped. At the moment, it feels to lifeless and plain. Changing to a more demented and ghostly expression will be more suitable. Changes will be conducted within the next week to fix the listed problems. 

- Chris Smith - Enemy concept artist / 3D Enemy artist & animator