#surefooting

We've now been pushing Sure Footing out in an incomplete albeit improving state via itch.io's first-access model for the better part of a year now.  It's amazing to realise when you look at the first build we launched just how much has changed since then.  To list just a couple of things that we've added:

New power-ups and character costumes.

New sectors and their mutators.

New music and sound fx courtesy of Liz Rainsberry.

Voice work from Eddie Bowley that brings life to Pete, Polly, Blip, Plunk and Dave.

2-4 player multiplayer complete with multiple scoring modes.

Offline leaderboards.

A massive amount of balance improvements and bug fixes.

The process of working in a monthly iterative cycle releasing new builds of our game has been a massive boon for our team. By operating in this capacity, we've been capable of ensuring a playable build every month, complete with a baseline of quality alongside new additions to our core experience. We're an incredibly small team: with two artists and one programmer alongside our contract developers. So adapting to feedback is a difficult but worthwhile process.

That being said, I'd argue that the worst of it is behind us. We have a pretty good idea now of what Sure Footing is and how best to build on the core experience. So this blog post is focused on what's missing: what do we have planned for the next couple of months and what will itch.io players expect between now and our inevitable Steam launch.

MORE MULTIPLAYER CONTENT

While it was a late addition to the itch.io build, the multiplayer is something we've been adamant about adding to the core game for some time now. The core experience is there, but is requiring further balance tweaks, bug fixes and much more. At the time of writing we have just the distance survival versus mode in the build. However, there is much more to come from the multiplayer component:

- MORE VS SCORING MODES -

Starting in July, you'll be seeing more scoring modes appear in the game. Including modes focused on MIP collection as well as smash mode, where players smash crates and bash each other for points.  

- CO-OP MULTIPLAYER -

Fighting against each other is fun for sure, but sometimes it's more fun to work together. We have three co-operative scoring modes lined up where the game gives objectives aligned with the levels it procedurally generates. Can you complete the task set in front of you? Only time will tell.

- PARTY MODES -

Sometimes you just want to have a laugh and in many respects the first version of Sure Footing's multiplayer arose from hacks where I made the game fun to play with friends. We have three party modes lined up and I think they're going to go down well with friends crammed around their television together.

SINGLE PLAYER CONTENT

Of course while we're pushing all of this multiplayer stuff, we're not going to ignore the single-player parts of the game. The big addition coming between now and launch is the daily and weekly challenge modes.  

- DAILY AND WEEKLY CHALLENGES -

These are modes where every day (or week) we will give players a chance to test their skills against a new procedurally generated instance of the game: this will dictate who you play as, your power-up loadouts, costumes and much more. Also don't be surprised when mutators kick in periodically throughout the game in order to give you an extra challenge! This will be tied into our next part!

- ONLINE LEADERBOARDS -

Right now all of our leaderboards for single-player are offline based, which is great for comparing your skill against friends. However, we're adding online leaderboard functionality in order to see how well you stack up against fellow runners across the world. In addition, the challenge modes will use the online leaderboards in order to reward high-ranking players with MIPs for their position in the final ranking.

- SHOP -

The last major addition to the game will be the shop, where players will be able to use the MIPS they've collected in single-player modes can be used to buy new items for use in-game. This includes:

Unlocking characters, including some characters you haven't seen yet!

New costumes.

New power-ups.

The ability to level-up a power-up to be more powerful.

Our buff skill-tree where you add new perks to your base loadout.

In addition, you will be introduced to new characters here to help you unlock new content.

- BOSS BATTLES -

Deletion Dave's master - the evil Ramrafstar - isn't happy with all of you super-awesome players outrunning Dave. He's going to start taking this matter into his own hands. You've been warned!

MORE CONTENT

In addition to everything mentioned here, there are still new sectors to visit, new music, more power-ups, new costumes and much more.  

So clearly I have more work to do, as we're going to get all of this in the game in the coming months between now and the Steam launch.

But on the bright side, there is so much more to look forward to in Sure Footing. I hope you're excited to play these new additions as much as I am in putting it together.

Thanks once again to everyone supporting our work!

Step right into our Soundcloud!

Tommy: For this month's diary, I wanted to talk about a big part of Sure Footing's aesthetic and appeal: our music and sound design. Despite being such a critical part of the game's identity, it didn't appear in the game until recently during our itch.io first access builds. At the time of writing, we now have several music tracks alongside in-game sound effects and voice work for Pete, Polly, Blip, Plunk and Dave. So in this piece, I want to talk about the journey to finding our sound and let you hear some of the development and progression being made.

History

First things first, I need to talk about the timeframe. Our audio came on board late in the development process, given we were still unsure of the game's visual identity. In the video I link to below, you can see the visuals shifted several times. While not significantly, it did leave me pondering what that should sound like. I started to get an idea in my mind, but a new problem emerged in finding someone who could deliver.

We’ve met a lot of musicians and sound designers in the last couple years. But when listening to portfolios I was struggling to hear something that said: 'this is the person we need to talk to’. Then from an unlikely source, I found my answer. Back in 2015 I gave a talk at PROCJAM about the first playable Sure Footing build. But before that, there was a talk by Sean Oxyspring and Kieran Hicks on their PCG project 'Hashtag Dungeon’: a PC game where you fight through dungeons influenced by Twitter data.

You can watch Sean and Kieran’s talk here.

You can buy Hashtag Dungeon on Steam here:

The game launched on Steam last summer (go pick it up, it's great) and I was immediately drawn to the soundtrack by Liz Rainsberry. It had an intensity but mellowness to it that caught my ear. It wasn't what I wanted Sure Footing to sound like, but I felt confident that Liz would give my ideas form. Also, as you'll know if you check out her impressive portfolio, Liz is highly versatile in her music and shows a lot of range and creativity. This made me all the more confident given what I wanted from the music. I dropped Liz an email and after some initial discussion, she was happy to be on board!

The Music

I always envisaged that Sure Footing had a core beat to it. Something that synchronised with the movement happening on screen. The music itself would always play off that beat or tempo and shift as we visit new worlds. For me, one of my favourite features of the game is how we move from one sector to the next. Introducing not just a change in scenery, but often in game modifiers to introduce a new challenge. I imagined that the music would also be unique to each world. This would really help in establishing progress to the player, but still, keep that underlying sense of pace and urgency.

Liz continues to deliver on this premise in spades: with each world carrying its own distinctive tune. They're all kinda catchy too. Check out the track to Cacheville I’ve linked to at the top of the post. The tracks we have are also embellished with more thematic elements; specific inflections that repeat themselves in different ways across each track. One track that has been updated several times is the opening main menu theme. One aspect that can be found in the more recent versions is that these thematic elements are being added to it. That way when you hear them for the first time in a given sector, you may well be wondering why you’ve heard it before.

However, one exciting and important aspect of this is that sometimes - as more music is added - tracks are revisited in order to improve the synergy between them and reinforce the core beats, tempo, and themes of the music.  

Sound and Voice

With our music largely established and development ongoing, we’re now just putting the finishing touches to many of the sound effects into the game itself. These effects are really important in order to reinforce the feedback a player receives when conducting a given action. Did this action prove successful? How do I need to respond to the sounds that I have heard in the game? We’re currently embedding these throughout both the main gameplay as well as the user interface, such that we can reinforce whether actions made have been processed by the UI, which can often be confusing for users if there are little to no visual cues being produced.

However, the most recent change is the introduction of voices to the game which we added for the EGX Rezzed launch. The voice work arose from a discussion between Liz and me about having some element of voices to add some charm and charisma to each of our playable characters. With this in mind, Liz contacted her colleague Eddie Bowley - an established voice actor and writer in his own right - to deliver a collection of sounds that would allow us to add some spice to our characters.

A big thing for me was ensuring that the characters rang true in Eddie’s voice work. While our game is relatively straightforward in its structure and style, I have a very particular understanding of who each of our characters is in the game: their personality and history which informs them. We brought this to the table as Eddie worked on establishing what each voice should sound like and I feel he did a fantastic job of aligning our characters with my understanding of how they should sound.

At present, the big challenge is deciding what sounds to use and where to use them. We’re fortunate in that Eddie and Liz have provided us with loads of different takes of each character, allowing for us to decide which sounds to use at particular points in time. It’s a great problem to have rather than struggling to scrape together what we want from a limited collection of sounds.

Lessons Learned

There are several aspects of this experience that we’ve found highly positive. If anything, my takeaways from this are below:

Wait For The Right People: It can take time and a lot of networking, but you need to find people who understand and appreciate the project you’re working on and you feel will be a great asset to your team. We’ve been fortunate in that our collaborators in every aspect of the game have been fantastic to work with.

Establish What You Want: While a game design document is not necessarily critical to the development of your game, I would encourage creating documentation on core aspects of lore and game world. Who are your characters? What is the backstory or theme of your worlds? These are really useful not only in establishing the sound you want, but also give direction and clarity to your sound designers.

Matt here again. Today am going to talk to you about our educational initiatives and especially our art brief with a local university that we ran last semester in fall 2016.

Here at Table Flip Games we have offered workshops and talks to schools, colleges, and Universities about the work we create. Since forming the company way back in 2014 (wow, that does feel like a long time ago). We have been involved with outreach from the very beginning of the company, partly because part of my job at that time with the University of Derby was to plan and deliver outreach activities to the local schools, college, and community, but also because we think it is important to educate about games and game creation (in a fun and engaging way :-) )

Fast forward to last summer (2016): I spent two weeks with our Character artist Molly Freeman visiting schools to try out our new character creation workshop. In the workshop, we give students the opportunity to come up with several designs for our character costume sets and then see how these costumes can become a reality.  By taking pencil-drawn designs, we show how these become textures that can be applied to our 3D modelled characters.  It was a big success and fun for everybody involved!

We’ve since iterated on this workshop such that it can be delivered to a wide range of ages and abilities: ranging from designing on paper to using our own Photoshop files for designing costumes.  We’ve even roped Tommy in on some occasions to then apply these costumes into Sure Footing and let students play the game using their own designs.

In my current teaching post, I run a module called “Introduction to Game Art”. This module is an introductory course to the 3D modelling software Maya and is delivered to first-year students when they first arrive at university in September.

There are three briefs over the course: The first is to create a piece of Ikea furniture and render in a small diorama. The second brief this year was to concept and modell a cyberpunk prop and the third brief is to work with a local indie company to create some sort of character assets for them.

Last year the students worked with Ghost Town Games to create characters using their art style based off their recent release Overcooked (if you haven’t played it - give it a try, it is so much fun!). So this year it was Table Flip Games’ turn. Tommy was all in until he realised that meant he needed to sit in the feedback sessions as well ;-)

I wanted the students to create cute characters based on the art style of Sure Footing. I left the brief intentionally quite open so the students could think up new characters that would fit into the Sure Footing Universe: this could be either playable characters or background characters we’d see wandering the market street. The only restrictions were that they had only 1000 polys to play with and could not exceed a texture size of 1024x1024.  These restrictions are largely based on our own workflow, as our emphasis is on working in a minimalist style that will ensure scalability to portable platforms. Other than that, the students could be as creative as they wanted as long as they kept the Sure Footing ‘style’: this largely meant avoiding spheres and cylindrical shapes - we don’t do round here in Computra!

Tommy and I did a mid term feedback session which showed some quite promising designs! One student showed us an alternative to Deletion Dave - a design we loved, even though it’s technically not a playable character or a shop vendor ;-)

Check out some of the cool work the students did!

Emily Prichard  Space Steve

Goncalo Dos Santos Deletion Dorothy  

Kateryna Bocharova Christmas Elf

This is just a taste of some of the work that was delivered and congratulations to all the students in the Intro to Game Art class for their hard work.

Like I said earlier, engaging with schools, colleges and the like is really important to us. It’s vital to be able to get an accurate representation of what video game development is like and give young people guidance on how to get started.

Arguably one of the few things that stands out in Sure Footing - other than the lovable characters - is our level generation.  We’re quite a small team, but the game itself is pretty big, how do we pull that off?  Well, today we'll start to give an idea of what we do as we pop open the hood of the level generation engine.

Like we've said in previous blog entries, this started out as a research project.  I was interested in how do you build level generators for games that will scale with difficulty - making the game harder as you go - or at least have it change how it builds levels throughout the game.  There is quite a bit of research on how to build procedural generators into layers, such that you first focus on what you want players to do and how you make them do it.  There's been some really interesting research in using this method for platforming levels [1] and dungeons [2], including some work I've been involved in as part of my job as a researcher for constructing NPCs [3] and even Legend of Zelda Dungeons [4] (also www.beckylavender.co.uk/the-zelda-dungeon-generator.html).  A lot that has informed how Sure Footing works.

So every time you play Sure Footing, you start on the market street, Deletion Dave gives chase as you run across a bunch of platforms, only to reach the next market street.  This is what we call a 'sprint'.  Our PCG engine builds sprints and places them in front of the player.  Each sprint is built in two phases:

What do we want the player to experience?

How will the player to do it (and how difficult will we make it)?

Each of these phases uses a different system to do their job, but are reliant on each other to complete a sprint.  The first part decides on a list of activities for the player to do.  We have lots of different ways of managing this, but the simplest version just picks them at random.

What this does is that it selects from a series of basic action or concepts: flat runs, incline ramps, decline ramps, springs that shoot you skyward, splits in the track, traps etc.  And puts them together in a sequence.  We’ll save discussing how this works for another time, but the key thing is that action has a cost attributed to it.  Some of them - such as running on a flat straight - are rather cheap, while others are more expensive.  We have multiple modes this system can adopt where these costs can shift based on what we want it to prioritise.

Meanwhile, the second part then decides what platforms should be used to represent that in the game.  We figure out what the actions are in one big chunk of computation - which doesn't take all that long - after that, we then place the required platforms every frame until the sprint is completed.  We changed it to start working like this for the itch.io build as before you used to be able to spot a dip in performance when we created new sprints. That's not all that desirable.

Once all the platforms in the sprint are positioned in the Unity game scene, the next market street is placed, followed by the cityscapes or 'Sectors' are built behind it.  We gather a lot of data about each sprint we make, but two important pieces are:

What is the height of the last platform in the sprint?

What's the highest and lowest points of the sprint?

The maximum and minimum heights influence the distance the player has to fall before the game will automatically kill them (e.g. if they fell through a gap in the platforms).  Meanwhile, the height of the last platform is used to ensure we place the next street in the right place, but it also determines the level at which the horizon is placed for the background.  Next time you play Sure Footing, you'll notice that the horizon of the sector is always level with the end street. This is done for a number of technical reasons, but also a design issue in that we want you to always be able to see the background.  We can guarantee you always see the sector cityscapes because the sprint will always meet it at the end.

Now this is just skimming the surface of how this works.  I'll be back in future blog posts to discuss:

How do we decide the activities for players to commit?

How are platforms selected and positioned?

How do we decide where MIPS (coins) and crates appear?

Just how many different level generators run behind the scenes (there's more than you think)?

Some of the other procedural generators that are used every time you play.

How do the difficulty settings work with the level generator?

The current and future work we're doing in creating even more level generators.

References:

[1] Dahlskog, Steve, and Julian Togelius. "Patterns and procedural content generation: revisiting Mario in world 1 level 1." Proceedings of the First Workshop on Design Patterns in Games. ACM, 2012.

[2] Dormans, Joris. "Adventures in level design: generating missions and spaces for action adventure games." Proceedings of the 2010 workshop on procedural content generation in games. ACM, 2010.

[3] Vinciguerra, Michele, and Tommy Thompson. "A procedural generation framework for a robot construction game." Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC), 2015 7th. IEEE, 2015.

Hey! Matt here with this month’s dev diary. I am Co-founder and Co-director of Tableflipgames and the one who is responsible for designing Pixel Pete, Polly and the world of Computra itself. Let me tell you the story about how Sure Footing started out, but this time from an artist’s point of view:

Once upon a time... once more (around two years ago) I walked into my office and saw a very ugly looking game on one of my colleagues monitor. At that moment even if I didn’t know it at the time, I had started to work on creating the art of Sure Footing.

After being a “little offended” about what I had to say about his programmer art Tommy asked me to design the main character for his game (obviously to make it way less ugly). Now, being an environment artist, my character skills are not up to standard, so when Tommy suggested making the character a pixel I jumped at the chance.   I wanted to keep the character as close to the original thought, which was the idea of a cube, also my characters tend turn out to look like Kryten from Red Dwarf (any similarities are purely coincidental ;-) )

Below you can see the first time Pixel Pete had come to life on paper, it only took an hour or so to come up with the design. I used it to show Tommy my idea and style I had in mind for the game.

What you can see here, the very first concept I developed on paper also became the style for the whole game, including the colours, and overall aesthetic.

We wanted the character to have a “soft feeling”, so I added the bevels into the cubes to help add details and soften the edges of the character. In our very first meeting about Sure Footing (not yet named Sure Footing by then) I showed my character concept to Tommy. He loved it and the rest of the meeting went into naming the character. It is lost in history, who came with the name first ( but I’m pretty sure it was me ☺).  So Pixel Pete was born and I then started to create a 3D version of the character.

This was the first 3D version of Pixel Pete. He was already outfitted with very basic textures, his inner parts had a noise applied which we decided to kick out at a later point, the highlights were way thinner than in our end-version. Even though the overall shape of the character has not changed since we started out, we made a lot of small changes regarding the face and the base texture, that gave it a much more distinct look and turned Pixel Pete into the character we know and love.

In detail: we made the highlights thicker to help define his shapes and we added solid colours for the centre parts of his textures, which helped with the emissive on the highlights. Pete’s face has also changed a lot over time. One early idea, that we stripped out pretty fast, was to have his face changing depending what animation was playing. But in truth is that while running you can’t see much detail of the character’s face, so we decided to scrap that idea.

In the very early days we already had the idea of creating costumes for Pixel Pete. I think it was back when we first showed the game at Game City in Nottingham in 2014, we took along design sheets for people to design their own costumes for Pixel Pete. One of the first designs we had was an army version of Pixel Pete, that night I took the skins from paper design into Photoshop and designed the first set of skins for Pixel Pete.  Those original military skins - as you can see here - never made it into the game, but the idea stuck!

Over the two years of development we have put a lot of time into developing a pipeline for creating our character skins. this was something we sorely needed, especially when we introduced three new characters: Polly Polygon, Blip and Plunk (Tommy will explain in a later post how they became part of the universe in a later post). The pipeline allows the art team to create skins for the characters in about two hours. Molly - our now resident character skin artist- joined around a year into development to help me create a range of skins for all 4 characters. But with an extra artist on the team, we needed a system that both of us could use to not only create new outfits, but allow us polish and improve skins we already have.  Ultimately this allows to avoid redundant work and keep the work consistent.

This was the first time we started to use a range of different texture maps, such as Normal Maps, Emissive and AO alongside the Albedo. These maps help make the skins look like they do today.

With that in mind, do you remember the army skins?!

This is the breakdown of the maps used for the skins

We use the normal map to add detail to the models without using geometry in the mesh (no need to model those details which saves us time). The maps are created with a program called Ndo.

(If you would like to learn more about this piece of software - I have a set of videos on Youtube that go into detail about using the software, PLUS the demo material used in the videos is part of the samurai character skin selection for Sure Footing.)

We also use a AO which stands for ambient occlusion. We get the computer to generate shadow from the detail from the normal map and then apply that in the shader inside of Unity. The only map that isn’t included in the image is the emissive map, which tells the shader to apply glow in the areas of the map that is masked by issuing a white for glow and black to mask out the areas. These maps help bring detail into the costumes that we didn’t have back in the early days. The way we arrived where we are now was to trial and test each of these maps in the engine over time of development. Looking at our skins now, it was well worth our time.