Aesth Devlog

Spirit.

You can get this GIF as a looping 1080p video if you support me on Patreon.

Pathway’s release is just around the corner! While there’s no date yet, the development is in its final moments and the game’s publisher Chucklefish (Wargroove, Stardew Valley) released a 10-minute gameplay video from the Wrath of God campaign (second of the five adventures you’ll be able to embark on in Pathway). So if you haven’t heard me rave about the next best turn-based tactical strategy game yet, the new footage shows exactly what we’ll soon be getting into.

Some of you know I’m on my March Indie Eurotrip right now. As a fan of everything pixel art+3D, I made it a special priority to stop in Hamelin, Germany, the home of Pathway developer Robotality. The company was founded by the Bachmann brothers in 2013, with their debut title Halfway coming out in July the following year. In fact, Halfway—as the name similarity hints—already featured quite some of the turn-based combat mechanics you’ll find in Pathway. Everything else is new in the follow-up however, whether it’s navigating a board-game-like map, random-generated story events and encounters, quicker pace designed around replayability, or Indiana Jones/Adventures of Tintin setting.

The crown jewel of course (at least for this blog) is the new graphics engine that supports dynamic 3D lighting with pixel-perfect art assets. I got a peek behind the scenes of the different tools and techniques that the guys use and it’s as clever and complex as I imagined it would be. There are multiple tools and modes that deal with embedding the 3D information into 2D pixel art sprites, from voxel and low-poly 3D-geometry bases (manually pixeled on top with perfect control over texture and details), to ground contours that project the bottoms of the sprites to correct depth for perfect shadow positioning. Perhaps the most surprising part was that almost every scene object eventually ends up converted to pure, untextured polygons (as in, there’s almost no trace of the source pixel art textures in the game at all, pixel clusters get triangulated into different-colored polygon meshes).

Getting my hands on the gameplay was just as satisfying as nerding about the art production pipeline, even if I annoyed the developers by taking my sweet-ass time staring at each location more than actually playing the game. (I have no regrets!)

“Game” by Woshibai

circloO 2 is a chilled out ball rolling physics based puzzle platformer with intricate expanding levels.

Firstly, you have to realize that releasing client patches (that is, a patch that changes the game data on your computer/console/device/etc.), especially on non-PC platforms, requires a lot of effort. Client patches are anything that change data on the client; that usually includes art, sound, text, etc. - including things like card descriptions (which must be localized into different languages). In order to publish a client patch for any platform, we need to submit it for certification so that platform can distribute it for us. Typically, that’s a long and expensive drawn-out process that can take weeks to finalize in addition to all of the time spent on all of the internal testing and polishing we have to do before the patch is even ready to launch. 

Because it is often problematic (and takes a long time) to release client patches, we have to be judicious with things like nerfs. If a game element is so far above the power curve that it warrants a nerf in a client patch (i.e. changing the element’s behavior), it generally means it is causing bad player experiences for all those who play against it (and even some of those who play it - people quit when things are too easy as well). We only have one shot every few weeks/months (thanks to the cert window) to make sure that we get it right. If we don’t nerf the element enough, the problem remains and we need to do it again while still dealing with the player dissatisfaction that the offending element is causing. 

This is why we usually nerf it so hard that there’s very little chance of it being potentially dangerous anymore. Remember, the players abusing the feature are almost certainly a minor subset of the player base as a whole. Nerfing their dominant strategy to uselessness forces its players to find a new strategy, but it also makes the player experience for everybody not using that strategy better. We only have limited opportunity to fix the problem, and fixing the problem is more important than being surgical… so that’s why we often nerf it TO THE GROUND.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

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