(Photo: New years day in Melbourne, Australia. By OneratDylan) 2017 was a big year here at Onerat, we received our certificate of registration as a company on the 4th of January 2017. - We had our graduation ceremony's for college (although finished study in 2016). - Started Jamingtons Game Jam and Hosted four events (http://www.oneratgames.com/jamingtons.html). - Made our Discord server public and were verified as an official channel (https://discordapp.com/invite/oneratgames). - Exhibited Elden: Path of the Forgotten at PAX Aus / Lan-Slide / Conquest and the Arcade Open Day (https://www.elden.com.au/). - Started working from the collaborative developer space in Melbourne The Arcade, thanks to Ken Wong and Studio Mountains (http://thearcade.melbourne/). Dylan has started doing development streams on Twitch, in the last stream he designed and animated the eldritch worm (seen above).
Follow us at https://www.twitch.tv/oneratgames to get notified about streams. Thank you for joining us on this journey so far! lets make 2018 big!
1 Comment
(New logo seen above)
There has recently been some big changes within the company, namely our CTO Lewis moving on to new things in 2018. Elden will be finishing up in the coming months and releasing on steam with console coming soon after, but the process of prototyping our next game has already began. We are exploring multiple genres and styles. We have a strong pixel / 2D art line in place from the development of Elden: Path of the Forgotten, but we also have a lot of other skills besides those we have been able to apply to Elden. Hopefully our next game with catch your eye the same way Elden did, if not more. Happy Holidays. New game bio: Elden: Path of the Forgotten is a medieval RPG with roots in cosmic horror. It explores storytelling through non-traditional indirect methods, like reading a book in a language you don't understand, but with pictures. The combat is based on reactions, not actions. You need to manage your stamina and position, and wait for the perfect moment to strike -- or alternatively, master the art of parrying. Visually inspired by some of the greatest classic 16- and 8-bit games, Elden: Path of the Forgotten is a stunning encapsulating dark world waiting to be explored. Closed Public Playtesting is currently underway! if you are a paying patron and would like to take place, please join the linked discord server. We are back hosting Jamingtons again for a 4th time, can't believe its already been a year of Jamingtons!
More info at links below: http://www.oneratgames.com/jamingtons.html https://itch.io/jam/jamingtons4 So the second region in Elden is set in a desert and an enemy has a poison attack. Rather than doing damage over time, its main impact is an incredibly distracting visual warping effect. This is implemented with a custom shader. Shaders have a reputation for being a little bit of a black magic topic among game developers, and there's a wide range of tools to allow you to make them without writing any code. I abhor this. If you have a sufficient understanding of basic linear algebra and basic control flow of software, you have everything you need to make pretty much any shader you want. Effectively you're just passing vectors into a shader, between shaders, and then out of a shader -- with very basic arithmetic operations in between. The above shader basically follows these steps:
Since step 4, the vector field, is the only step requiring math, I'll focus on that. "Vector field" sounds scary. A vector field is simply a function that takes a pair of coordinates (such as {x=4, y=8}) and spits out another pair of coordinates (possibly the same, possibly different). So to get this distortion effect, we simply offset the texture coordinates that are coming in with the sine function. Everyone knows what a sinewave looks like: All you have to do is scale the function so that it distorts in the right proportions. The sine function takes a value from 0 to 2Pi, and outputs a value from -1 to +1. Bear with me here, code incoming: float originalx = texcoords.x; texcoords.x -= sin(texcoords.y*10) * 0.1 * waviness; texcoords.y -= sin(originalx*10) * 0.1 * waviness; We have to store the starting X coordinate because we need it for the Y coordinate calculation. This is pretty simple. We're taking the X coordinates, taking the sine of the Y coordinates times ten, then multiplying by how severe we want the effect to be. Then we just do the same in reverse for the Y coordinates. This will work, but we have a problem: The problem is, if we distort in this way, we'll go past the 0~1 range of texture coordinates and it'll reach the edge of the texture and smear. That looks bad. So we need a workaround: float originalx = texcoords.x; texcoords.x -= sin(texcoords.y*10) * 0.1 * (0.5f-abs(texcoords.x-0.5f)) * waviness; texcoords.y -= sin(originalx*10) * 0.1 * (0.5f-abs(texcoords.y-0.5f)) * waviness; We take the distance from the center of the screen (texcoords.x-0.5f)) and multiply the distortion factor by this. This way, as it processes the pixels closer and closer to the edge of the screen, it reduces the amount of distortion resulting in a smooth transition to the edge. So if you're asking, "where was the vector field in that?" -- that's it right there. We're taking coordinates and transforming them in a consistent way. That's literally all it is. Not that hard eh? We have brought a new composer on the project to complete the Elden soundtrack. Ox Tung is a incredibly talented composer skilled in most forms of music and composition, and childhood friend of Dylan. The first pieces of music completed exceed all expectation. You can listen to some of his person tracks at the link below. oxtung bandcamp Dylan has recently moved into an collaborative studio space for indie game development in Melbourne named The Arcade.. Currently he's the officeless developer in the corner of the Studio Mountains space. Thanks to Ken Wong. We're in the middle of closed playtesting as I write. Five testers are playing and deconstructing the game and the feedback has been invaluable! Play testing is far too often over looked by many developers. But it's one of the best ways to measure how well you are succeeding in your design goals. If you're like me and tend to have a vision for the whole of your game, you might think that you don't need the opinions of random testers, but you are one person and being able to see how others interpret your design can be the determining factor between a hit and a miss. Elden is now known as Elden - Path of the Forgotten. You might be thinking "Why rename the game this far into development?" Well, there's a pretty simple reason. As an indie developer marketing and releasing your game, no matter how big or small your budget may be the name of your game is the most important marketing tool you will ever have. A name can say a lot about a game and make a person want to play by the name alone, a bad name can't a bad name gives no context. Your name needs to sell itself. Onerat is returning to PAX Australia. We will be in the indie section of the main expo hall. Booth number 38. If you are able to attend we are more then happy to discuss shop, and if you are a member of the press contact us at either the contact page or @oneratdylan on twitter.
Our Game Jam Jamingtons is returning is a few days for version 3.0. 48 Hours and open to all engines and teams with a max of 5. see here for past winners and runners up. Jamingtons v2.0 Jamingtons 2.0 is almost here! For those who dont know, Jamingtons is a public game jam hosted by OneratGames. After the great submissions we had in the v1.0 jamingtons we have decided to return. It will be hosted both online and in person at LAN-slide Melbourne. http://www.oneratgames.com/jamingtons.html Region One / Dev Milestone One COMPLETED! Region one has been completed and along with our first Film Vic funding development milestone! We have the 1st boss in game and terrorizing the player, and the combat is almost at a final level of base polish. Start of a new web series I (Dylan) started a weekly vlog. Highlighting my everyday life as a indie trying to start up a company from the ground up along with everyday life. The series is still undergoing a lot of changes from week to week as i try and develop a style. Starting on region Two, The Desert.
With the completion of region one there was only one thing to do, start the core work on region two! Seen above in the mock up scene iv been using to develop the look and colours of the desert. Come Join the Discussion at https://discord.gg/dJDjuRH Sign up here for regular updates www.oneratgames.com/mailing-list.html Thank you for visiting Dylan J. Walker Ceo / Director at Onerat Games Pty Ltd Dealing with legacy software systems is simply a reality for most developers.
It is a rare occasion when a profit-centre project is rationally, completely and deliberately designed from scratch by someone who has experience in software architecture. The vast majority of the time, the core projects that make value in an organization grow organically - starting out as a quick hack to solve a problem and growing in scope and importance as it starts to save or bring in money. This is true for game projects as much as any other software. And it applies to Elden. The industry's response to this trend is to embrace change and agility -- using planning approaches that are lighter weight and iterate towards an efficient solution by doing evaluations at every stage. When these two approaches clash, however, things can get nasty. A common approach to having a large and old code base with lots of bugs and awkwardly written workarounds is to try and clear it and start from scratch. This is incredibly common, but among veteran developers it is a poorly regarded approach. It reliably results in regressions and in many cases perpetuates the very cycle it purports to solve. The most effective way to handle this kind of transition that I've found does not use any gimmicks or fancy new organizational concepts. It is a simple and direct application of classic, old-fashioned object-oriented programming techniques. This is something that almost gets taken for granted nowadays -- OOP is such a given that very few people would profess to specialize in it. Yet this kind of transition seems to be virtually unheard of in most real-world environments. The core concept here is to do incremental replacements of functionality using small, individual, well-thought-out modules. Rather than rewriting the codebase from scratch, you simply duplicate its functionality, a page of code at a time. Unity is fantastic for this, as it allows you to instantiate and duplicate modular components with very little effort. In the case of game development, and Elden specifically, this means taking the large, ungainly components (primarily the player and enemy controllers) and incrementally replacing individual functions of them with smaller modules. It is 100% possible to replace the entire codebase with a faster, more stable, neater, tidier, better-factored and better-documented version -- without breaking intermediary builds or causing any other short-term pain. In this month's preview we are having a look at the starting zone from Elden, Elden's house is the point all journeys will begin, but where will they end? We have been quite busy these past four weeks, we have implemented a new Damage system shared between the player and AI, along with implementing the first boss in game with around half of its final functionality to mention just a few. We also attended our second LAN-Slide, LAN-Slide is a 24 hour public LAN event ran four times a year, We hosted Jamingtons along side the event and made our submission amongst all the cheering gamers playing CSGO and Overwatch, which was quite the change of working environment but quite a fun night. for those who dont know Jamingtons a public game jam we hosted on itch. We had over 40 people join the event and 14 games submitted! The winners and link to full page can be found in the link above. Along with showing Elden at LAN-Slide we also had a booth at CON-Quest the following weekend, not the largest event but the crowd was lovely and gave some great feedback, I'm always taken aback when watching people playing and enjoying our game, when your working on a project day in day out. i don't know if there much more rewarding then seeing other enjoy your game. Come Join the discussion on the Onerat™ Games Community discord. I (Dylan) have started doing AI animation for Elden again! Seen above is the WIP Imp Help support the game on Patreon. Join the Mailing List to get these updates and more directly to your Inbox! Figured may as well start putting some text in these posts.
For those who don't know we are Onerat Games, a newly formed studio from Melbourne, Australia, currenly consisting of a team of SAE Qantm Graduates. Recently we have been developing a new art pipeline for our current project Elden with the help of Powerhoof (Creators of Crawl), the lighting shader (seen above), and the 1st boss you'll be likely to encounter. Development has been going quite smoothly and we are looking to do a second public testing period soon (limited places available), if you are interested come have a chat on our discord (https://discord.gg/dJDjuRH). Along with all this we are also hosting a public Game Jam, Jammingtons (https://itch.io/jam/jamingtons) Prizes for the top 3 awards ($50 USD to the 1st place submission). We are very thankful to have you reading our blog and will be doubling the amount of content in the coming weeks. Thank you, Onerat Director & CEO, Dylan J. Walker. |