Henchman & Goon

It’s been a while since we’ve updated this thing now, and with good reason. Not to worry though, all is well with us and with Pode. Here’s a short report of what’s been going on. 

After we posted our last update here we entered the final stage of the alpha phase. Since then we’ve been working our fingers bloody under the relentless whip of Mr Deadline, but as they say about hard work - it pays off. By the end of September we put the alpha stamp on Pode and moved on towards beta, which is where we find ourselves now. YEY!

In the middle of all this we were so lucky to be visited by our beloved an much missed friend Jory’s parents, Sam and Lesley. It was truly wonderful to get to meet them and listen to their stories, and share our own Jory stories and experiences. They are amazing human beings and our hearts are with them as we all try to heal and move on. 

Then, on October the 20th the annual Konsoll games conference, which we are always looking forward to with anticipation, kicked off here in Bergen, and this year the committee had put together an absolutely amazing lineup. 

Before the conference we had a delegation of visitors come by the office at Bergen Game Collective, among these were some truly famous individuals. And we got to show of pode to (among others) the legendary Tim Schafer.

As we were all getting pumped up for the conference we also got some really great news. So, we are super happy to announce that we will be receiving another round of gouvernment funding. This means development is secured throughout the beta phase. Needless to say this was a great week for H&G :D

We are also super excited for our friends a We Heart Dragons for winning the Nordic Game Discovery Contest at Konsoll, taking them to the finals at Nordic Game 2017 in Malmö, Sweden.

And that about covers it. We will try our best to be back with more game updates soon. 

Until then!

Hugs

It’s allways nice to have visitors, and it’s especially nice when we finally get to meet our new sound designer face to face. 

We’re all very excited to see what Bendik will bring to the game, and we’re sure it’s going to be great :)

Have a nice weekend all

-Yngvill

As our friends and fellow developers are busying around Cologne for gamescom these days, we are busying around the office to reach our impending milestone. As deadlines draw closer and weigh heavy on our backs, one might think we’d buckle under the pressure. Fear not dear follower, for we are cheerfully marching on! Just look at this happy bunch.

All our love to everyone at gamescom! Sorry we couldn’t be there to meet all you awesome people. Hopefully we’ll be going, with horns and tooters, next year. See you then!

It might be summer, but you can’t really tell when you live in Bergen, so we’re all still working hard on Pode. Except for our boss, Yngvill, who’s on vacation. To celebrate this, we’re not writing blog post this week.

Seriously though, this week’s been mostly filled with admin, planning, bug-fixing and other mostly boring stuff. We’ll get back to you when we got more juicy things to talk about.

Have a nice weekend!

-Henrik

Looming deadlines are beginning to make their precence known, and the art team is hard at work getting the visuals in order. Per now there are about 11 different area styles planned for you guys to enjoy, and we are really enjoying the exploration of the possibilities.

How about some icy deliciousness?

Or maybe you prefer warmer climates.

And who doesn’t like glowy mushrooms?

Or a stroll through a moon lit valley?

I hope you guys enjoyed this little preview, and I’m looking forward to sharing our progress with you.

Have a great weekend all!

-Yngvill

Previously, I explained how we animate and implement most of the growing vegetation for Pode in Unity: Using a combination of rotation, scale and shape keys, we can quickly make and reuse animations for many smaller prefabs that will look good as they grow together in groups. However, for some plants this method is a bit too simplistic or just not applicable due to how they are used in the game. So, I thought I could show an example of how we would animate one of these special case plants as well.

This is what we call a Bridge Plant. In-game, this thing is supposed to grow from a small ball-like shape and extent out into a big leaf that the player can walk on. We can use our previous animation method for the first part, but for the extension of the leaf we’re going to need a custom solution. In this case I’m treating the plant as an animated character: Rigged/skinned to bones and animated in Blender.

With a tree of bones like this, I can animate each sub-leaf individually, resulting in a nicer more gradual extension of the entire leaf.

The final animation is actually two models animated as one. the first is a simple ball-shaped plant bud model animated like usual for the first part of the animation (this model is needs some more work and texture, but it’s good enough for this demonstration). Then, when the ball reaches the peak of its growth, I switch out the ball with the second bone-rigged leaf model. I also animated the material for some added juice and to cover up the transition a bit.

Thanks for reading.

-Henrik.

The basic visual direction for Pode is something we decided on quite early, and it’s something we’re getting more excited about as the concept progresses. Our two main sources of inspiration for the visual design is Norwegian nature, and traditional rose painting. So first I want to go into what that means for us.

It’s very “trolsk”

In Norway we have a word (trolsk) which can be translated into troll-ish, although that doesn’t really give it justice. It does of course derrive from the word “troll” which is the same as the english word, but in Norwegian we also have the word trolldom, which means magic (I could go into a whole history lesson about Norwegian folklore and superstition here, but that would take more time than I have right now). So... where the word trolsk does kind of imply that something is troll-like, it is also an implication that there’s an aura of magic surrounding it. Trolsk is a word we mostly use to describe a mood in connection with natural environments. It’s a word that makes you feel small, and though it can mean that something is on the spooky side, it doesn’t have to be, and it’s usually a word that invites exploration. It’s also very closely connected to fairy tales and art from the Norwegian national romantic era (google it, it’s gorgeous).

Here’s a good example of some very trolsk nature, painted by renowned Norwegian painter Hans Gude:

So when it comes to the mood and feeling of the game we’re trying to capture that trolsk-ness of Norwegian nature, leaving out the spookyness, but keeping the mysterious feeling that will make you want to explore every nook and cranny of the game world.

Another art form common to the same era is rose painting, and this, as well as bunad embroidery, is where we’re finding inspiration for the flora of Fjellheim. Bunad is the national dress of Norway, and every area has its own style.

 Common for both rose painting and bunad embroidery is that they have these gorgeous, colorful, elaborate, swooshy-swirly stylized plants and flowers in them. And this is what we’ll be working towards with all the growy bits in Pode. 

Simplified

The game world is divided into a series of areas which all have their own theme based on different types of Norwegian environments (fjords, glaciers, mountains, woods etc), all in all 11 different themes. We’re creating a set of basic plants that can, with different textures, fit into all these different themes. In addition we’re making 5-ish area specific plants for each area that will give each one a distinct look and feel.

What we’ve seen in some early tests is that a lot of swirly plants with small details can become quite noisy for the player. So we’re looking into ways of simplifying the designs, but still having the possibility to get that embroidered look where we want it.

One of the areas we’re working on at the moment is based on Norwegian pine woods, which tend to have less leafy plants and more fungus, lichen etc. So what we’re doing here is setting up relaitvely simple shapes, but adding a pattern to larger areas (like the top of mushrooms). 

Combining these plants to make up patterns as they grow, will then enhance the rose painterly feel.

Have a good weekend all!

-Yngvill

First off we would like to announce the wonderful news that we just received another 500 000 NOK of funding, this time from Mediefondet Zefyr (previously Fuzz and Filmkraft). We are super happy, and very grateful to Zefyr for believing in Pode and offering their help.

One of the things this allows us to do is get some extra help. So, secondly, we’d like to give a warm welcome to these two cheery chaps.

On the left we have Markus Eikemo Sørensen, who will be helping with concept art and modelling, and on the right is Magnus Grønningen who will be helping with level design and modelling. 

We can’t wait to see what Markus and Magnus come up with. Stay tuned to find out!

Happy friday

-Yngvill

While showing of our demo of Pode during Unite 2016, several people asked if we could explain how we implement growing plants, flowers, leaves and other decorations in our scenes. So for this week’s post I’ll try to do just that.

In short, we divide our process into three steps. First, we create and animate prefabs - the individual or collections of plants and stuff that we place in our scenes. Second, we place the prefabs in the scene according to how we want the scene to look after everything has finished growing. Third, we hook the placed prefabs up to triggers with scripts that determine how and when the prefabs should grow.

Let’s take this weird bubble… leaf… thing as an example. This was modeled in Blender and textured with Photoshop.

We animate our 3D assets using Blender and/or Unity’s built-in animation system and scripting. For most of our smaller plants and decorative elements we use both, but for different aspects of the animation. For this leaf, we only used blender to create a shape key (also known as blend shape or morph target in other 3D applications) in order to animate the actual shape of the mesh.

When we import the mesh into Unity, the shape key becomes a blend shape value on the skinned mesh renderer of the game object using the mesh. We can then add an Animator component to the game object and create animation clips that animate the scale and rotation of the object as well as the value of the blend shape. A nice thing with this setup is that we can reuse the Animator and clips for other meshes, as long as they share the same names for the blend shapes and child objects used in the animation clips.

Now we can make the animated leaf into a prefab and start placing it with other prefabs in a scene. As I said before, we place our prefabs the way we want our scene to look like when everything is fully-grown, like the example below.

We then let scripts control how each individual prefab should grow during gameplay (or, if the player has already completed an area, set the prefabs to start fully-grown). Usually when playing through an area of the game for the first time, nothing grows until Stella shines her magical light near it. We use simple triggers placed at specific points in the scene that detect when Stella is within range and shining. 

These triggers have a simple script with a list of Prefabs. When triggered, the script goes through the list and activates the prefab one by one, waiting for a specified amount of time between each prefab.

On top of this, each prefab may have its own list of things to grow, which triggers as soon as that prefab is activated by the root script. This gives us a wide range of options for how we want to compose the the growth of our decorative plants.

That’s how we do it currently. We’re also experimenting with tweaks and additions to this setup, like animated materials and particle effects. 

Thanks for reading.

1) We want our camera system to be able to track both of the characters no matter where they are in the scene. In most rooms this is trivial as we can simply just have the camera follow a central point between the characters and move further away as neccessary. This however only works up to a certain point because if we were to go too far away from what's happening on screen it would be difficult for the player to read what's going on. It would also increase development cost as we would have to make the rooms bigger to compensate for the camera.  For this we're looking into using a dynamic split screen.

Once the distance between the characters reach a certain point we dynamically transition into a split screen view. The split screen will also rotate in order to better indicate to the player(s) where the other character is in the world.

View post on imgur.com

2) We have some side rooms that only one of the characters can enter, and we need to be able to track the characters seperately in these situations. We want to approach this problem with a picture-in-picture style view, where you can see the character that is in a sideroom in a small cutout view in the corner of the screen. These side-rooms are quite small so this will be sufficient. 

 The picture in picture mode is currently implemented using the Unity GUI system and a render texture, this seems to work quite well, but it might need some optimizations in the future. 

Inititally this looked quite bad, as the mask component of the GUI did not support smooth alpha, just a cutout. Notice the jagged lines of the circle. Luckily I didn’t have to spend much time on this as I found a solution on the Unity Asset Store.

Here’s how it looks after using the alpha mask component:

And finally here’s a look at the effect in action:

View post on imgur.com

There’s still a little bit of work that needs to be done on this. At some points we need to transition from small circle to full screen and back, as in some situations later in the game both characters will be able to get into some of these rooms.

Lastly I’d like to remind everyone that the Steam summer sale has begun, and our game Flem is now 50% OFF! - Also make sure to pick up the soundtrack, it’s soooo good :)

Have a nice weekend!

Last week Morten and Yngvill traveled to Amsterdam after being invited to showcase Pode at the MadeWithUnity showcase. In preparation for this Steffen built a new website that has a fresh new look and all fancy and stuff. You should check it out!

The @podegame website now has more pretty things to look at https://t.co/Je5N9ZTyr4 #madewithunity #UniteEurope

— Pode (@podegame) May 31, 2016

He also made some cool business cards that we could hand out to people.

UniteEurope’16 was held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam and each of the games selected for the showcase was given an area to display their games. Here’s Morten & Yngvill checking out the Pode “booth”.

Unite is the place to be if you work with Unity, it’s a chance to meet other developers using the engine, talk to the people who actually create the engine and also a great opportunity to meet business partners or just catch up with old industry friends. There’s of course also a wide range of talks and topics about how to do things in Unity.

Here’s a shot from the Keynote which is the only talk we had the time to watch since we were too busy manning the booth :)

Excited to finally show Pode to more than just our friends and family and we were very grateful to recieve such wonderful and positive feedback - and we were especially glad to see that people triggered on exactly the things we wanted them to. Stella and Bulder can make even big burly men squee in their cute glory :)

Here’s some more shots from the conference floor:

Finally we would like to thank everyone who played Pode at Unite, it means the world to us and we return to little Norway with huge amounts of inspiration and motivation to keep working hard to make Pode the best game it can be!

I’ll end this post with a gif of me and Alex Trowers from the official Unite Party :)

Finally we’re starting to get some growth into Fjellheim. The flowery, rose painterly theme of Pode is something we’ve been planning and working on since the start of the project. However, the mechanics of it has been the priority, until this week. 

Since we’re exhibiting at Unite Europe next week we’ve tried to put a bit of time into getting the demo as visually representative as possible, and it’s starting to look deliciously lush. It’s so much fun seeing that our plans are working as intended, and we’re beginning to get a real good feel about how this is all going to look in the end. 

If you’re going to Unite next week, come by and check out Pode at the Made With Unity stand. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Until then, have a great weekend!

-Yngvill

More good news!

As you may already know, we, like so many others, use the Unity game engine to develop all of our games. As a small team making a 3D game, we mostly rely on Unity's out of the box features, supplemented with custom solutions where needed. We also make extensive use of the excellent Asset Store and the helpful community that has grown over the years to cut development cost and solve problems that otherwise would have been beyond our project’s scope. We would not be able to develop Pode without Unity.

We are therefore proud to announce that we have been selected for the Made With Unity Showcase at Unite Europe in Amsterdam! This will be the first time we’re properly showing off Pode, which is still in early development, to people other than our office mates. Needless to say, we’re all a bit tense.

Yngvill and Morten will be making the trip while the rest of us will keep on Poding back home. If you’re going to Unite, come by our stand, say hello and check out Pode!

-Henrik.

Once again I have the pleasure of being the bearer of good news! It all began in the winter of 2014, when we were so fortunate to receive an intern from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. He only stayed with us for a month, but he made a real impression and we’ve been wanting to hire him back ever since.

As fortune would have it he just finished his MA of Design, and found himself in the want for something to do. Which perfectly coincides with the creative needs for Pode and the fact that we have the funds to get him on board.

I happily present to you the newest member of the Pode team, Steffen Fløan Øie!

Steffen is a fantastic designer and illustrator, but is really a true potato and will be pitching in on all areas of development. Have a look at some of his previous stuff here. And follow the heck out of him on twitter.

Welcome, Steffen!

-Yngvill

A little over a month ago we were shocked to learn of the terrible accident involving our dear friend Jory Prum. After a month in the hospital, fighting for his life, on friday the 22nd of april he passed away.

It is difficult to put into words, the sorrow that strikes you when a friend is so suddenly and pointlessly ripped from your life. How it doesn’t seem to sink in. You keep expecting them to walk through the door, or give you a call, but slowly it dawns on you that they’re gone, and there will be no more meetups, no more phone calls, no new memories to be made. Then, all you want is to remember them, and make sure they’re not forgotten.

Jory will be remembered for many things. He had an amazing career, and his list of achievements is long and impressive, but what truly made him special was his kind heart and including nature, and that big radiant smile that seemed to enter the room even before he did. 

It’s often said that when someone pass away, they leave a hole in the world, but Jory leaves no hole. Our lives are only richer from having known him. He leaves love and laughter and so many good memories. 

So in the end we rise our cups to our honorary viking. 

To Gullskjegg! May our drinking horns meet again under the golden roof of Gimle!

As more and more of the game’s building blocks are getting ready, we’ve started the process of blocking out the first few levels of Pode with more than just grey blocks. Things are already starting to feel more atmospheric and mysterious. It’s keeping us motivated and excited to reach the later stages of production when everything will come together for real.

-Henrik.