Devlog #7: We accidentally made a multiplayer version of Soul Reaper. Yup.

If you’ve been following Power Level Studios’ stories, you know we’re working on a game called Soul Reaper. Soul Reaper is a not-so-serious retro rogue-lite RPG with monster-catching mechanics and deep loot and skill systems. You can play the prototype here: http://powerlevelstudios.com.

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Making games with limited resources

Some of you may remember us mentioning that the game would be released in Q4 2018: How long does it take to make Soul Reaper? In that article, I explained the main reasons why the game would take that long to make. In a nutshell, content, game balancing and polishing are what takes up the most time and resources.

First published here: http://gunsoficarus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/10625962.jpg

The problem is, as with any startup and indie game developers, resources are scarce. Money and time are limited. For Power Level Studios, I’m lucky that I can do many things due to all my previous experiences, but I still can’t draw professionally or create music, so I need money to hire people. It’s not a bad thing to have a team though and I’m very grateful for people helping me make this game a reality.

Team and collaborators

The purpose of this paragraph will make more sense as you read more)

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So what’s this about accidentally making a multiplayer version of Soul Reaper?

Again, if you’ve been following our stories, you know we make happy accidents sometimes. See this story where we accidentally created a game that was played by 3M+ players: How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players.

That’s a lot of fish eaten in one day!

Now on to this “accident”. 2 months ago, I was working on a feature to simulate combat between units/monsters in order to see how well they do against each other, for game balancing purposes. Sure I have spreadsheets that show me the results, but I wanted to see in practice that everything made sense. When I finished the prototype for the combat simulator, something struck me: “that feature would make a great asynchronous multiplayer game!”. And it really does in my opinion.

Almost everything is already in place for it. The combat, loot, souls and monster-catching systems are all done and are pretty solid already. All that’s really missing for a minimum viable product is the server part. But it’s simple: combat happens locally, and the results are sent to the server. Players are then ranked in leaderboards. At least, that’s the gist of it.

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So what’s next? Does that mean Soul Reaper will take even longer to make?

Maybe. It may set us back by a month or two. December 2018 would be too competitive anyway.

BUT! Here’s where it gets interesting, and potentially unexpected:

We’re making a second game!

“The f***” you say? Hear me out. We’re actually splitting Soul Reaper into two stand-alone games:

Soul Reaper: Rise of the Unreaps; and

Soul Reaper: Unreap Commander.

(More info on what “Unreap” is: https://medium.com/power-level-studios/new-and-exciting-feature-reap-and-unreap-summon-reaped-monsters-in-combat-726b80d089fd)

Rise of the Unreaps (RotU) is the game we all know and love. It’s the original idea for Soul Reaper. It’s a single player game with a big emphasis on exploration, combat and story.

Unreap Commander (UC) is an asynchronous multiplayer version of Soul Reaper, focusing on monster team building as well as Soul Reaper’s signature fast turn-based combat, and loot and souls systems. Alpha is scheduled for release in January for PC and potentially mobile too.

UC is almost done already. Both games share the same assets: monsters, souls, sounds, music, etc. It even has enough content to be released as an Alpha version.

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So why not release Unreap Commander already?

It’s not as fun as it could be yet. It’s missing some key features to make it fully enjoyable.

One of the most important missing feature is party management. If you’re fighting monsters against monsters, you need a way to organize how you want your team to be arranged for combat.

WIP: Team Selection Screen

The server-side stuff is not done yet. Frankly I don’t think this is going to take too long since most of my profesional experience lies in backend development.

It’s not strategic enough yet. A higher level team will mostly always win at the moment. That’s no fun. I don’t want the grinding to be the only way to success. We’re working on key features that will make combat and team building more strategic.

Think of it like a Tower Defense game. You upgrade your units and place them on a map to defend something. The game sends units to attack you and you watch how well your strategy worked. For the next round, you tweak it based on the results you saw. It’s very rewarding to see your strategy succeed. That’s the idea here. How well you build your team, based on different factors, should define your success. And not all builds will be good in all scenarios. In fact, most won’t. You’ll need to adapt based on your opponents.

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So the focus is on Unreap Commander then?

Yup! We’re aiming for a very ambitious January 2018 deadline. Surrender your soul to Soul Reaper at soulreaper(at)powerlevelstudios.com if you want to be part of the pre-alpha.

We’ll have more information in the coming days on how Unreap Commander will work. And no promises yet, but we might make our Trello board public so that we’re completely transparent on everything we’re doing.

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What do you think?

Are you looking forward to Soul Reaper: Unreap Commander? Do you think it’s a good idea? What do you like/dislike the most about this idea?

Have you ever made similar happy mistakes?

Devlog #6: Prototype 3.1 is out!

It’s only been 1 week since the release of 3.0, but we’ve got another update for you: 3.1. Download it now on http://powerlevelstudios.com.

As you can expect, it’s not a very big update, but it does have some nice improvements:

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A Title Screen

Starting the game from outside the vault was always a terrible experience. Like most games, we added a title screen. The background is a video of the game playing. We’re experimenting with the idea. Currently, it’s only a placeholder video.

As you can see from the screenshot below, we also added a Latest News section. That way you’re always up to date with the latest development.

We’ll add an Options menu there in the future.

Much better Saved Game selection

We’re showing the player’s level, their equipped loot and the top 10 souls they own. The equipped loot will obviously look better once we have actual icons for each loot.

Timeline Target Highlighting

By moving the cursor to select a monster, you can see where they sit in the timeline, making planning your attacks much easier (see how the Bubbly Fish’s timeline icon is coloured green?).

Sounds!

We finally put sounds in all the menus. The game feels a lot more polished simply by adding those. The sounds are not final yet though.

What do you think?

Are you looking forward to the new changes? Do you prefer weekly little updates like this one or big monthly updates like the previous 2 months?

What improvement would you like to see in a small weekly update like that?

Game Guide: Soul Reaper featured builds part 2

If you haven’t tried the prototype 3.0 yet, make sure to download it here: http://powerlevelstudios.com.

The changes in 3.0 make it really interesting to experiment with different Legendary Loot and Soul Gear to become quite powerful. Below are builds we think are valuable to graduate from wannabe reaper of soul to a real Soul Reaper!

If you missed the previous guide for 2.0, here it is.

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The Builds

Stayin’ Alive

This build boasts incredible health bonuses due to the synergy between the Undead King Crown (Windy Fish) and the Nutty Band. Stay healed thanks to all the Life Percent On Turn bonuses. Plus, the Paw Pendant and the Sharpener Soul Gear synergizes really well due to increase Life On Kill, which now also gets applied on Hit.

Nutty Band: Life Percent On Turn, Health Bonus

Undead King Crown (Windy Fish): Doubles vitality received from the Windy Fish soul gem

2 slotted armor: Holy Shield (Shield Turtle, Saint Squirrel): Life Percent On Turn, Life on Combat End

Paw Pendant: Life on Kill gets applied on hit

3 slotted weapon: Sharpener (Stabby Squirrel, Bubbly Fish, Feline Clawer): Life On Kill, Life on Kill gets applied on hit

Party Player

The Carapace Shield’s bonus is really incredible. Slot any soul gem that does buffing or healing and it will target all your allies. The increase in Intelligence from the Undead King Crown with Bubbly Fish makes it so you can cast more often!

Carapace Shield (Saint Squirrel or Shield Turtle or Burning Worm): Heal all party members.

Undead King Crown (Bubbly Fish): Doubles Intelligence received from the Bubbly Fish soul gem.

Better Together

Similar to the Party Player build: deal damage to ALL targets. Take advantage of this by slotting your most effective single target soul!

Carapace Shield (any single target Soul Action): Deal damage to all targets.

Undead King Crown (Bubbly Fish): Doubles Intelligence received from the Bubbly Fish soul gem.

The Frequent Unreaper

You basically get two meat shields and damagers for the price of one. Take advantage of enemy weakness that way. Beware of spirit expenditures though!

Undead King Crown (Bubbly Fish): Doubles Intelligence received from the Bubbly Fish soul gem.

Worm Threaded Necklace: Slotted Soul gets unreaped twice

The Cheap Unreaper

Using the Red Rose, you can now cast Soul Actions for free while having a meat shield.

Red Rose: Slotted Souls have their spirit cost reduced to 0 when unreaped.

Beef Up!

There’s no better way to level up a soul of your choice, all the while beefing up the Soul Reaper thanks to increased exp.

For extra efficiency, combine with the Better Together build and fight the largest possible groups of monsters.

Beef Up Belt: Gain way more exp and reap two souls of the same type as the slotted soul for the price of one!

You die I die

The main idea here to have a 2 slot head piece. Red Rose usually comes with 2. With the Disgusting Mask, an attacker receives a large percentage of the damage back to them. Plus they get a burn effect that damages them every turn. Amplify the burn effect using Drakey Toothey with Scorch Blade Soul Gear, the Ring of Fire, Burning Man and Hot Wrap.

It’s a good idea to not equip that in areas with monsters with high resistance or absorption of fire damage.

Red Rose: Disgusting Mask (Burning Worm, Octoblader): Burn On Turn, Thorns

Drakey Toothey: Scorch Blade (Flame Bee, Stabby Squirrel, Burning Drake): Fire Damage Bonus

Ring of Fire: Fire Damage Bonus

Burning Man: Fire Damage Bonus

Hot Wrap: Fire Damage Bonus

You wait, I act

Apply a slow effect to all targets thanks to the Carapace Shield’s unique attribute. Power up the fire damage more with all the legendary fire-based loot.

Carapace Shield (Octoblader): Slow effect gets applied to all targets

Drakey Toothey: Scorch Blade (Flame Bee, Stabby Squirrel, Burning Drake): Fire Damage Bonus

Ring of Fire: Fire Damage Bonus

Burning Man: Fire Damage Bonus

Hot Wrap: Fire Damage Bonus

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How to get the loot in these builds

We’re only going to cover the loot that’s new in 3.0. For the 2.0 loot, follow this link.

Paw Pendant

Trade Level 100 Feline Clawer Soul Gem

Red Rose

Very rare treasure drop

Carapace Shield

Trade Level 100 Shield Turtle Soul Gem

Beef Up Belt

Very rare treasure drop

Worm Thread Necklace

Trade Level 100 Burning Worm Soul Gem

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What do you think?

Have you tried any of these builds? Which one worked best for you? Have you found any other great build?

Devlog #5: MASSIVE Prototype 3.0 update

Ok, ok, we’ll try not to put MASSIVE for each of our updates. But it’s true though, it is a very very big update, focusing around a very important feature: Combat. It will be available on http://powerlevelstudios.com at the end of September, or early October. In the meantime, you can try 2.0!

Here’s a summary of what you can expect from 3.0:

Vault-ful of improvements for you, reapers of souls: much improved combat, complete with AOE attacks, buffs and debuffs, and Unreap!; arm yourself with new unique legendary loot and soul gear, and reap new exciting monsters’ soul!

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Warning

This is very much still a prototype. It still has LOTS of bugs.

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Changes

Here’s a full list of changes:

Combat:

• Grid system for better tactical combat and Area Of Effect (AOE) attacks

• AOE: Double, Line, Column, Cross and All

• Unreap feature: summon monsters in combat to fight alongside you

• Controls instructions

• Much improved UI

• Soul Reaper talks

• Shows all types of damage separately

• Buff/Debuff indicator

• Random visual objects in combat background

• Even faster combat flow

• Fixed many combat-related bugs

• Fixed Burning Drake attacking 3 times instead of one

Loot:

5 new, game changing, legendary loot:

• Carapace Shield: Slotted Soul Actions get applied to all targets;

• Worm Threaded Necklace: Slotted Soul gets unreaped twice (summon twins!);

• Paw Pendant: Life on Kill now also gets applied on Hit;

• Red Rose: Slot Soul Actions cost 0 spirit; and

• Beef Up Belt: Slot Soul levels up twice faster.

5 new Soul Gear:

• Sharpener (Stabby Squirrel, Bubbly Fish, Feline Clawer): Life On Kill On Hit, Life on Kill;

• Holy Shield (Saint Squirrel, Shield Turtle): Life regen per turn, Life on Combat End, Armor);

• Disgusting Mask (Burning Worm, Octoblader): Burn on Turn, Return Damage Percent;

• Spirit Sucker (Bubbly Fish, Saint Squirrel, Cursed Snake): Spirit Bonus, Spirit Steal, Spirit on Hit, Spirit on Combat End; and

• Slow Death (Octoblader, Burning Worm, Cursed Snake): Burn on Turn, Poison on Turn, Slow Chance.

3 new monsters:

• Shield Turtle (Heavily protected turtle boosting its own defenses (buff))

Burning Worm (Dangerous worm returning physical damage dealt)

Feline Clawer (Deadly assassin dealing LINE AOE damage)

Other:

• Game balance tweaks (still a lot more to do here)

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What’s next?

Prototype 4.0 will mostly be about the intro of the game. This means better story, a tutorial and a main screen. But also UI improvements.

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What do you think?

Are you looking forward to the new changes? 3.0 will come out in the coming weeks on our website. We’ll leave 2.0 and 1.0 up so you can compare versions.

We think 3.0 is a major step in the right direction. Do you agree or disagree?

Devlog #4: MASSIVE Prototype 2.0 Update

Download Prototype 2.0 here: http://powerlevelstudios.com

In the middle of grant applications this month, we managed to squeeze some time to put up an incredibly big update, which we call Prototype 2.0. It deserves the 2.0 versioning! Here’s a summary of what you can expect:

Vault-ful of improvements for you, reapers of souls: much improved exploration, arm yourself with unique legendary loot and soul gear, and reap new exciting monsters’ soul!

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Warning

This is very much still a prototype. It has LOTS of bugs. Probably even more than before.

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Changes

Here’s a full list of changes:

Vault

• Walk in any direction (works great with a PS4 Joystick)

• No more room switching (it was frustrating)

• Dash! (R1 on PS4 controller, or “1” on keyboard) (dodge monsters more strategically)

• Can now also go upstairs (combined with the feature below, it makes it much easier to farm souls you’re looking for)

• Floors are not random anymore (combined with the feature above, it makes it much easier to farm souls you’re looking for)

• You can now jump to any floor you want (combined with the feature above, it makes it much easier to farm souls you’re looking for)

• Improved monster movement AI (makes exploring the vault more eventful and exciting)

• One new, nicer layout (but still could be much better with more time)

Combat:

• Basic support for Debuffs (no visual cues yet) (poison damage each turn, slow target for x turns).

• Monsters now drop treasure (makes winning combat more interesting)

Description of the loot after combat

Loot:

• 10 legendary loot (there were zero before) (changes how you play the game)

• More better trading recipes (trade level 100 souls to obtain guaranteed legendary loot)

Some epic loot you can get for trading max level soul gems.

• Lots of new Soul Gear (game changing combinations of souls on multi-slotted loot)

Very powerful fire based Soul Gear, you need to farm the Flame Bee, Burning Drake (boss) and Stabby Squirrel.

3 new monsters:

• Octoblader (Bladed spider throwing speed-altering spider webs. (debuff))

Volcadillo (Armadillo with a volcano on its back. Catapults meteors for AOE damage)

• Volcadillo (Armadillo with a volcano on its back. Catapults meteors for AOE damage)

• Cursed Snake (Spits poisonous saliva, dealing DoT. Acts as “turret” in the vault)

Other:

• Game balance tweaks (still a lot more to do here)

• New Game Icon (chosen by the community)

• You don’t lose your levels anymore (we want to dissociate Soul Reaper from Roguelikes)

• You can reset your stat points.

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The Bad

• We broke the lava in the vault. It may be fixed in the next major version.

• Debuffs from the Octoblader and Volcadillo are NOT shown on the screen currently.

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What’s next?

Prototype 3.0! 3.0 will mostly be about improved combat.

Here’s what to expect:

• Unreap feature! Summon monsters to fight by your side!

• 3 new unique monsters. Feline Clawer, Burning Worm and Shield Turtle.

• Combat buffs. More armor for x turns, more resistance for x turns.

• AOE actions. — shape, | shape and + shape (line, column and cross)

• Much improved combat UI.

• Much improved flow and stability of combat.

• More better maps.

• More legendary loot

• More Soul Gear

• More Trade Recipes

• Ongoing game balancing.

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What do you think?

Play the prototype 2.0 and let us know what you think. We’re leaving prototype 1.0 up for download as well so you can compare. We think 2.0 is a major step in the right direction. Do you agree or disagree?

#Devlog #3: Soul Reaper Talks! Now he can’t it keep it shut!

For people who have been following the development of Soul Reaper, you have a pretty good idea of what kind of character he is. To say that he’s not a very serious guy/being is putting it lightly. If you haven’t seen him in action, you can check out our social media pages below or download our prototype from our website.

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Why make him talk?

That wasn’t part of the plan actually. And we don’t even know if we’re going to use it in the game. We don’t currently have good enough equipment to produce high audio quality.

I don’t remember what led to it, but I was looking for a software to change my voice so I could talk as the Soul Reaper. After a few failed attempts, we stumbled upon Voxal and it worked great. I played around with the settings for a few hours to find a voice I think is suitable for Soul Reaper.

When writing the dialogues for the game, I would always narrate it out loud as if I was the Soul Reaper saying it. I think it’s much easier to write dialogues that stay within the theme if I can act it out. If it doesn’t feel right, then I re-write it. But with my own voice, it was always harder to judge if it was still “in character”. I haven’t re-written anything yet since the Soul Reaper has a voice, but I have a feeling things will change for the better when I do.

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Why the current voice?

The current voice is not at all what I had in mind initially. Since the game is inspired in parts by Castlevania, I thought it would make sense to try something similar to Death in Symphony of the Night.

                                Original inspiration for Soul Reaper’s voice

After playing around with Distortion, Pitch, Reverb, Chorus, Amplification, Low/High pass, Echo and 3 Band Equalizer, I came up with a top 5 settings, all in Low/High pitch variations. Death in SotN has pretty high pitch and Alucard has pretty low pitch.

Initially I was aiming for high pitch since the Soul Reaper is a funny character. But when I was showing people, they didn’t get the high pitch. Granted, they were not players of the game, so maybe I shouldn’t have listened to them, but I thought they were kinda right though.

So we tried low pitch, more like Alucard. I think the result is much better. Like Alucard, Soul Reaper is a badass. He needs a badass voice. And his smart-ass comments seem even funnier with a deeper voice.

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So where are you going with this?

Nothing certain.

If we get access to better audio equipment, maybe we’ll put voice-over in the game. Currently, it’s a great tool to stay in character when writing the story line or anything else related to the game really.

Another thing I’m playing around with is face motion capture to animate the Soul Reaper’s face. I’ve had pretty good results so far, but it’s very taxing on my CPU. The software we’re using is still in beta, so we’ll see if that gets resolved in the final version.

We also have other promotional ideas, but we’re keeping this low profile until we know for sure that we can pull it off.

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What do you think?

What do you think of Soul Reaper’s voice? Do you think it matches his character? Have you used Voxal or other software before? Have you had success with it?

How our first game project accidentally reached 3 million players

During a recent interview with Gaming Reinvented, I opened up on the “success” of our “first” title: Rogue Sharks Arcade, which has been played by over 3 millions players around the world.

I thought this may be an interesting story for other developers, so I’m sharing it here.

Here’s the question and the answer as a preview:

Rogue Sharks Arcade seemed to be your first game, and it was pretty damn successful. Did you imagine it’d have 3 million+ players?

Haha, this one’s a good story I think. Rogue Sharks Arcade was some kind of “accident”, both the game itself and its “success”.

I started working on Soul Reaper back in September 2013 and came to the realization that the game was way too ambitious for a first game. I would need money to hire artists and more, but didn’t have the money. So I thought making a simple mobile game, similar to the classic gravity-based helicopter web game, would be my way out. For some reason, Sharks was the first theme that came to mind. I thought Rogue Sharks would take one month to build. I had limited Unity experience back then, but that’s not why it took much longer. It took about a year to build. The game just wasn’t fun enough by my standards, so I re-did it a few times with different mechanics. I released Rogue Sharks Arcade two months in, since the game had enough content to be a full-game loop.

Classic gravity-based helicopter game.

I released it on the web on Kongregate and was hoping to get feedback so I could improve it for mobile after. Money was not the target here. About 200 people played it on Kongregate and had a score of 3/5, confirming my assumptions: it’s not a very good game.

But here’s the interesting part: how did I get from 200 players to 3M+? The short answer: it was stolen and put on MANY other websites around the world. You see, I was too dumb to protect it, and I didn’t even put my company logo or the game title in the game, so people just rebranded it and claimed it as their own. It got featured on lots of Chinese, Turkish and Russian websites. There was no English text in the whole game. Everything was icon-based, so it was accessible in any language.

BUT, because of that incident, I got exactly what I wanted: feedback. With 200 players, I got close to no feedback, with 3M+, there were plenty of players to give feedback. I had to track websites down and translate feedback back to English, but still, there was lots of feedback. But that’s not all, I was tracking everything in the game using Game Analytics. I knew exactly how people were playing, so I knew how to improve the game for mobile.

But then at that point I was travelling around the world with my wife for about a year, so I didn’t have much time to make the mobile version. But I did it anyway. I stopped Chiang Mai, Thailand, to work on it for one full month and finished it. So Rogue Sharks for mobile exists, and is a much better game than Rogue Sharks Arcade on the web. I never released it though, because it’s still bad in my opinion. We were in 2016 then and there’s millions of games in the App Stores. A lot of them are great and have a much bigger budget than we had at the time. Unless I found a good partner to release the game, I figured there was no point releasing a game no one would discover and play. Plus, we’re Power Level Studios, we want to make great RPGs, not game genres we know nothing about.

So yeah, the game was “successful” for what we tried to achieve, but definitely no commercial success. And yeah 3M+ was definitely not expected!

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Conclusion

Getting your game stolen is not necessarily all bad. We got the feedback we needed to make a better version of the game for mobile, which would not have been possible otherwise.

Is it a valid marketing strategy? Well maybe. If you’re a little smarter than I was and add ways to track actual players’ contact info, it may be one of the best ways to get discovered.

How long does it take to make Soul Reaper?

On July 28th, on Instagram, Zulkan asked us a very good question:

Why have you decided you need a year to finish the game?

I’ve always known the answer to that question but never really shared it with anyone, until now!

The short answer I gave him/her is as follows:

Short version is because of content creation, feature building, polishing, testing and unforeseen events.

I think the main reason why people wonder is because we do have art assets that look final, and our prototype looks like a semi-final product, at first. But trust me, it’s nowhere near final! For those who haven’t played it, you can get it on our website here: http://powerlevelstudios.com

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Content Creation

The prototype doesn’t really have any content right now. It has 6 monsters, 10 soul actions, 40+ regular loot items, only 6 different “floor plans”, 1 boss monster, no tools, no legendary loot, only one section of the vault (Lava), etc.

We’re aiming for 100 monsters, 250+ regular loot items, 400–500 floor plans, at least 6 bosses, 4–5 tools, 40+ unique legendary loot, 5 sections of the vault, etc.

This obviously takes a lot of time. On average, we can produce 5 monsters per week, so that’s 20 weeks right there. Loot is much faster so it’s pretty much just a flat image. On average, it takes about 1 hour each. We can produce one boss fight in about 5–10 days depending on the complexity. The floor plans currently take about 3 hours each. We need to get better at it. At 400 plans, that’s about 50 days of full-time work. One legendary loot probably takes about 1 day to make, depending on complexity again. Art assets for one section of the vault takes about 2 weeks. And all that doesn’t include any of the Soul Gear combos, which sometimes gives unique stats to loot and uncover new soul actions.

So yeah, content creation is a big reason why it won’t get released until later next year.

For more information on floor plan/level building, see: Opinion: Are procedurally generated levels all that great?

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Feature building

Soul Reaper is at prototype level right now. Most of the features were built/hacked together in 1 day each. Not all the code is bad, but in order to validate that an idea was fun, we aimed to “just do it”, test it, and trash it. Overall, we probably have to re-write about 60% of the code. And that’s actually really good. We now have a good idea of how the different systems interact with each other and we know we can write something solid, maintainable and scalable.

So, in addition to re-building the current feature-set, there’s more we want to do: Loot Trading with Ryder, Diablo-Style shrines, Disgaea-style geo panels, Reap & Unreap (summon monsters in combat), Vault customization before going inside (like the Hacker in Disgaea or the Grim Reaper in Rogue Legacy), quests, a tutorial, etc. And of course, the actual storyline!

For more information on how we built our prototype, see: Tried and True: 5 tips on building a game prototype

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Design and Game Balancing

Soul Reaper is no simple game. Being a Diablo-style game, at least in terms of loot, the math is not the simplest, to put it lightly.

Thankfully this is a single player game, and players will be able to adjust some aspects their liking, making the balancing a little easier. Needless to say, we’re not taking this task lightly, and expect to spend at least one month full-time over the course of the development of the game.

Photo Credit: http://gunsoficarus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/10625962.jpg

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Polishing

This is where a lot of developers don’t spend enough time. That last 5% of development is likely to take about 90% of the full development time. Luckily we have Unit Tests for most features, which should help, but still. There’s always things to polish with controls, UI, levels, etc. And there’s plenty of bugs to fix!

In the end, without polish, no one is going to play your game for very long and your reviews are going to be bad. We don’t want that, so we’re scheduling about 3 months of full-time polishing, across all disciplines (programming, art, animations, etc.).

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Testing

Most of the testing will happen around the same time as the polishing, but will continue until the release of the game. We’re planning to start internal testing early; at least 6 months before the release. Alpha and Beta will come shortly after and will last as long as it needs.

Photo Credit: https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/MSDNBlogsFS/prod.evol.blogs.msdn.com/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/00/00/01/32/02/metablogapi/8054.image_thumb_35C6E986.png

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Unforeseen Events

A lot of shit goes wrong during game development. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. Easy stuff to predict includes people getting sick, people taking vacation, people attending events, etc. But sometimes you may lose a key employee, break a computer, lose important assets, etc. Some of these things can greatly impact the development. We want to be ready for that.

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Conclusion

With all that said, we think Q4 2018 is reasonable. Maybe even a little tight in my opinion.

What do you think? Have you built a content-heavy game? Or a design-heavy game? Or both? Did you release on schedule? If not, why not?

Opinion: How important is the story in RPGs?

A lot of my personal favourite RPGs of all times have seriously good gameplay, but is sometimes lacking an enticing story to go along with it, or doesn’t provide a movie-quality plot. I sunk a lot of time playing Nippon Ichi games like Disgaea or Phantom Brave. For me, these games are incredibly fun. I very much enjoy the min/maxing aspect of it, trying to perfect your stats in every way. These games, however, don’t have the most incredible stories.

Photo Credit: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uXwEPlLRAfY/VoxvAycZXII/AAAAAAAABec/uCpvc1GpeMw/s1600/1373035217865.jpg

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Gameplay matters more?

When we started designing Soul Reaper, we focused on gameplay first. Re-creating similar moments like when moving around in The Legend of Zelda, fighting monsters in Final Fantasy, getting epic loot in Diablo, collecting souls in Castlevania Aria/Dawn of Sorrow and catching pokemons in Pokemon.

Because of that, the story was always some kind of afterthought, which we realize might be a mistake now. Heck, just looking at our early gameplay teaser, you can see that story is almost absent:

People want an enticing backstory. At least. We do have a backstory, but it doesn’t reveal much of the plot at all. See the story section of our Square Enix Collective campaign: https://collective.square-enix.com/projects/377/soul-reaper/.

[…]the story was always some kind of afterthought, which we realize might be a mistake now.

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Serious vs Not Serious Story?

Are you serious?

Soul Reaper’s current story is inspired by Nippon Ichi games and iconic Marvel Characters like Deadpool. Needless to say, it’s not the most serious of stories. Like it’s inspirations, it has a more serious backstory, but is delivered in a comedic way.

Like it’s inspirations, it has a more serious backstory, but is delivered in a comedic way.

We decided on that tone because it seemed that most stories featuring the grim reaper depict him as an evil being set for destruction. We thought showing “him” in a different light might be refreshing.

We still stand by that, however we’re second-guessing if it has its place in an RPG like Soul Reaper. Looking back at most of the highly acclaimed RPGs (like here for example: http://ca.ign.com/lists/top-100-rpg), not many of them are comedic.

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We want your opinion!

What’s more important in a good RPG? Story? Gameplay? Visuals? Something else?

What makes a good RPG story? The characters? The setting? The tone? The dialogues? The backstory? Something else?

Serious vs not serious?

Dev Update #1: A little more like Zelda

Shortly after getting featured on Square Enix Collective (http://bit.ly/2urN5hy), we decided to add two little Zelda-like “features” to the game: a dungeon mini-map, and tools.

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The Mini-Map

For those who remember old-school Zelda games, you’ll remember the mini-map that would show up in the top-left corner of the screen when you found the map object in the dungeon.

Photo Credit: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7IcpaoZJr14/maxresdefault.jpg

We decided to integrate that in Soul Reaper. It helps with exploring dungeons and know where you are and where you’ve been.

In a previous post, we talked about how we’re building dungeons in Soul Reaper. Each floor has a pre-defined layout made of different rooms, not unlike a Zelda dungeon. For those familiar with Unity3D, we store the floor in a prefab object and instantiate it at runtime when going down a floor.

Building the mini-map object turned out to be quite simple for us. In fact, here’s the code:

The “hardest” part was to convert the localPosition of the rooms in the canvas into a Transform child object index. Simple math did the trick (see GetIndex ()).

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Tools!

Don’t get too excited here, we haven’t actually implemented it yet.

Currently, Soul Reaper can swing his scythe in the dungeon. It does nothing yet. Just like mentioned in this post, it’s just to show a glimpse of the future. You also see the other tools in the top-left corner, and how to use them, once they’re available.

The scythe can be swung to have the first turn when going into combat, cut down plants and trigger barrel explosions.

A bomb can be dropped and explodes on a timer. If a monster gets hit by the explosion, they start combat with reduced health. It can also blow up objects in the vault to lead to new, previously inaccessible, areas.

The grappling hook allows Soul Reaper to traverse to other platforms, leading to new treasures and other bonuses. It can also freeze monsters in place, preventing them to run after you or going into combat, for a limited time. This is similar to the grappling hook in Lufia II.

The mighty shovel is the ultimate tool. Seriously! You get it by defeating the final boss. It allows you to dig yourself down one floor. No need to find the stairs anymore. It’s a great tool to go to the exact floor you want to go to, find the monsters you want to farm and repeat!

Tried and True: 5 tips on building a game prototype

Try our official prototype here: http://powerlevelstudios.com

Back in October 2016, we received a grant to build a prototype of our future game: Soul Reaper. The idea was that we would do rapid prototyping to see what features work and which ones don’t. Building a prototype really is about validating that the concept you have in mind is fun. It’s hard for us to define what went right and what went wrong in the process, but we figured we could share some tips based on our experience.

Building a prototype really is about validating that the concept you have in mind is fun.

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Tip #1: More is less and less is more

Photo Credit: http://ogp-cdn.aws.onegreenplanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/2016/10/less.jpg

We have tons of features planned for Soul Reaper. Drawing inspirations from some of the best features from Zelda 1, Final Fantasy VI and X, Castlevania Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, Diablo and Pokemon, it was hard for us to choose which features should and should not make it in the prototype.

Whatever the case, I’d say always aim for a full-game loop. In Soul Reaper’s case: Prepare Outside Vault -> Go into vault -> Go down floors -> Enter combat -> Die/Leave Vault -> Repeat.

I’d say always aim for a full-game loop.

Chances are you can create a full-game loop with only 3–5 core features. For Soul Reaper, we opted for Soul Collection, Turn-based combat, Diablo-style loot system and Zelda-style exploration. Everything else is just candy. Of course, the game won’t be as fun without the candy, but it should at least be “fun enough”. If it doesn’t pass the “fun enough” test, change to the core features in imperative.

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Tip #2: Show a glimpse of the future

Soul Reaper will have about 100 monsters with 100 unique abilities. That’s not even counting the different “Soul Combos”. There’s no way we could build all that content in the prototype. How do we show players the scope of the game without having built that much content? Simple! In the game, when you go to the Souls menu, you can see a numbered index of all the monsters in the game. “Locked” souls are indicated with a “???”. Players can scroll and see that there will be 100 monsters. We only made 6 for the prototype.

For the exploration, it was always our goal to create “exploration tools”. Things like bombs or a grappling hook, like in Zelda: A Link to the Past. It will be an integral part of the final game, but we decided it wouldn’t make it in the prototype, due to lack of time, and for simplicity. To show that such a feature will be in the game, we displayed the controls on how to use the tools on the GUI, but greyed it out to show that it’s not available yet.

To show that [exploration tools]will be in the game, we displayed the controls on how to use the tools on the GUI, but greyed it out to show that it’s not available yet.

This is important because it lets players use their imagination to visualize what the final game may be like, without playing it. The idea is to get them excited for when the game will be closer to release.

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Tip #3: Rapid Prototyping

We built the current version of Soul Reaper’s prototype in about 6 months. That’s a long time! We were lucky enough to have received funds to create it. Most will have to do that faster, and that’s okay. In fact, we probably had our first full-game loop in about 1 week!

For 6 months, we implemented different versions of our core features. Each feature took about 1 day to build. But we re-did many versions of that feature and gathered feedback on how fun it was.

Example feature: Combat. We experimented with different implementations:

Turn-based, MP based (FF IV, FF V)Turn-based, Cooldown based (Wartunes)Turn-based, MP and Cooldown basedActive Turn-based (Chrono Trigger, FF VI)Quick-time turn-based (FF X)On-map turn-based combat (Dragon Fin Soup)Active (Zelda)etc.

There’s no way we could have accomplished all that without fast prototyping, and truthfully, the game wouldn’t be as fun if we tried only one and said: “That’s it!”.

It’s not that we’re incredible programmers, it’s just that we made the decision to not care about code quality for the prototype (though it’s not half-bad either), knowing full well that it’s likely that we’re going to scrap everything anyway. And if not, at least we will have a better understanding on how to properly build the feature for production.

Each feature took about 1 day to build. But we re-did many versions of that feature and gathered feedback on how fun it was.

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Tip #4: Use the tools you know

Photo Credit: http://stesproject.com/games-development/rpg-maker-mv-vs-unity-due-engine-molto-differenti-a-confronto/

Maybe you want to release your game on consoles and maybe Unity3D is the engine of choice for the game you’re building. But you don’t know C# or Unity. I’d say don’t use Unity3D for the prototype then! It’s much easier and faster to do rapid prototyping using tools you know. If people like your prototype, then it’s worth it to start to learn the best possible tools to build the game.

Tools are rarely what kills a prototype, execution is. We could have built Soul Reaper’s prototype on RPG Maker, Game Maker, Unreal, Cocos2D, Construct 2, etc. We chose Unity3D because it’s the one we had the most recent development experience with.

If people like your prototype, then it’s worth it to start to learn the best possible tools to build the game.

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Tip #5: Don’t be afraid to show it off

Now, for me personally, this is the hardest one. It’s hard to show an uncompleted product for the world to see. People may not see your vision and the prototype will certainly not show the full vision of the project, so they’ll judge on what they see. And brutally sometimes. Embrace it no matter how hard it is. Any feedback is valuable to get to the end product, especially the “bad” one. You can’t make a great product if people don’t honestly say your game is shit. You need to know your game is shit so you can fix it in the final product. Better get that feedback while the game is not released!

You can’t make a great product if people don’t honestly say your game is shit.

Photo Credit: https://mygaming.co.za/news/pc/106765-how-to-be-a-video-game-troll.html

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What do you think?

Have you built a prototype and shared it with the world before? What are some of your top tips?

To Kickstarter or not to Kickstarter in 2017

As previously announced, Soul Reaper will be featured on Square Enix Collective on July 17th (https://collective.square-enix.com/). The next step for us after that was to immediately start a Kickstarter campaign and hope for the best. We recently decided against it; we won’t be doing a Kickstarter just yet. The timing is not right.

We recently decided against it; we won’t be doing a Kickstarter just yet.

We’ve analyzed many different video game campaigns from this year, last year and even before. As everyone knows, the trend is not very positive, mostly because of high profile failures: successful campaign; bad, or unreleased product. People are scared of backing projects nowadays, with reason. And especially for studios like ours where we haven’t released a single game yet. It hardly matters how much experience we have in the industry; as a team, we have not proven ourselves yet. And that’s kind off the key here: no one cares about us, because no one knows us. We lack the required social influence to have a successful campaign.

And that’s kind off the key here: no one cares about us, because no one knows us. We lack the required social influence to have a successful campaign.

Is that a bad thing that we’re postponing our Kickstarter campaign until we do reach said “social influence”? Well, no. Not for us at least. We’re aiming to finish the development of the game in Q4 2018. It’s like in 1 year and 5 months if we’re aiming for December! That was our realization recently: we’re not in a hurry. At all. Most recent successes on Kickstarter are games that are close to completion, like Sundered for example (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thunderlotus/sundered-a-horrifying-fight-for-survival-and-sanit). It’s much easier to convince players if they can playtest a well polished pre-alpha version and see that no matter if they back or not, the game will still be done. For backers, it’s great since they get the game for cheaper, and in a few weeks or months only.

So yeah, we’re postponing because of these two things:

1. We don’t currently have a big enough social influence

2. We’re not close enough to the release of the game

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So what are you doing then?

Nothing really. At least, nothing to replace Kickstarter.

In the next year or so, we’ll do everything in our power to increase our social influence: be active on social media, forums, groups, local events, not-so-local events, etc. If anyone has suggestions, please let us know.

But also: spend time on developing the game. Everyone tells us how much work it is to run a Kickstarter campaign. We believe them. Time we spend running the campaign is time we don’t spend building the game.

Photo Credit: https://media.giphy.com/media/3o8doZFy4iPd8VBL8I/giphy.gif

Is that a good decision? What do you think?

Opinion: Are procedurally generated levels all that great?

Reading other game descriptions, either from Soul Reaper’s competitors or other game developers, and especially indie developers, it seems like procedurally generated levels is the de-facto solution for content creation.

I get it personally. As an indie game developer, it’s very hard to produce good content on a tight budget. Creating an engine that will generate content that’s different every time makes your game more re-playable and potentially more interesting.

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The problem

It’s very hard to create original and interesting content that’s procedurally generated.

When we got started on Soul Reaper, we set out to do fast prototyping of different features that may or may not make it in the final game. The vault dungeon floor generator was one of the things we prototyped. Our system worked well enough: it would generate coherent rooms and place objects in logical locations. But the more we played, the more we thought it was repetitive and boring. If we wanted our game to be “infinitely re-playable” like some games advertise (and nothing against these games by the way), then I qualified our attempt as a failure. To be infinitely re-playable, it needs to be FUN!

We advertise Soul Reaper as being inspired by games such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Castlevania. All GREAT examples of carefully crafted levels. I don’t want to lie to our players: if we’re going to publicly say that our game is inspired by such great games, it has to deliver! And procedurally generated levels just didn’t cut it for us. Do you think Zelda, Final Fantasy and Castlevania would be as great if the levels were procedurally generated? I don’t.

Do you think Zelda, Final Fantasy and Castlevania would be as great if the levels were procedurally generated? I don’t.

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So Danny, what did you guys do then?

We decided to manually craft every level in the game.

BUT, we wanted the benefits of procedurally generated levels: the feeling of new every time. At the time of this writing, we are aiming to have 80–100 floors in the game (depends on funding we get through Kickstarter later). Imagine going down the same floors over and over again… BORING! We agree.

So we added randomness.

Every set of 20 floors leads to a different theme, like lava cave, snow mountains, etc. For every set of 20 floors, we’re crafting between 100 and 200 floor plans/layouts. When the player goes down a floor, a layout if selected pseudo-randomly. So the chance of you seeing the same layout multiple times in a 2 hour session is low.

But that’s not all! Each layout has sub-sections that may or may not show up. Or be blocked by obstacles. Some of which you can deal with from the start, but for some, you need Zelda/Metroidvania-style tools to remove. A grappling hook for example.

Enemy and other object placement is also pseudo-random. When crafting the levels, we specify where (groups of) objects can show up and at what percentage. The group selection is also random. Let’s say we have two groups: #1: a set of 3 treasure chests; and #2: a fire pit. Sometimes, for the same layout, the player will see the chests, and other times the fire pit. Chances are players will never notice that it’s the same layout anyway!

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So, does it work?

We think it does. Hard to tell… We have not created enough layouts yet to fully test our assumptions. One thing I can say is that the levels are definitely more interesting. Will it help with re-playability? That I can’t say yet. More on that in a future post!

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Any other ideas on how to improve your solution?

Actually, yes. It may be too far-fetched and too difficult to implement, but we think that we could add some machine learning to the mix. Told you it was far-fetched! The levels were create generate valuable information on how to build a good level. If we have enough data, we think we can train a model that can generate a good enough level, which we could improve manually afterwards, dramatically cutting down the time it takes to create.

Photo Credit: http://ml.cmu.edu/research/

We think that we could add some machine learning to the mix

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What about you?

What’s your experience with procedurally generated levels? Does it work for you? Have you found alternatives that work better? Let us know here, by email, on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook!

BIG NEWS: Square Enix is featuring Soul Reaper on their Collective platform!!!

The feature will be from July 17th to August 14th onhttps://collective.square-enix.com/

Photo Credit: https://collective.square-enix.com/

Help me support myself and my team by voting “yes” on July 17th. It takes 2 minutes, costs nothing and helps for the success of the game afterwards!

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What does that mean?

Everything to me personally. I’ve been working on and off on Soul Reaper for about 2 years during my spare time (if you consider 20–30 hours per week spare time!). When Soul Reaper was awarded a grant from the Ontario Media Development Corporation, I was able to hire very talented artists to make the project way more visually appealing, but there wasn’t enough money to pay myself.

If you read my previous post, you know I recently quit my job and started focusing on Soul Reaper full-time. Bold move considering I’m not making ANY money anymore. But I knew there was something to this project and was willing to give it my all for people, who like me, just can’t wait to have another great old-school style role-playing game to play, but on newer generations of consoles.

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What’s the big deal?

Getting featured by Square Enix Collective means TONS of exposure (like millions of potential players!). This is very valuable helping for our Kickstarter campaign after if Soul Reaper is popular enough on their platform.

Just to put this in perspective: 100s of studios around the world send their pitch every month to get one of the coveted 4 spots per month! Which means we’re at least in their top 4% for this month. It’s a great honour and humbling experience; some of the games they feature are quite incredible and the teams behind them are usually larger than Power Level Studios. Being judged on the same level as them is as scary as it is exciting. I knew we were into something from day 1, but seeing my favourite company in the world agree with me is just an incredible feeling!

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How important is it?

Our current optimal projected plan at Power Level Studios is as follows:

1. Get featured by Square Enix Collective — Check

2. Have a successful Kickstarter campaign

3. Obtain a second round of funding through Ontario Media Development Corporation for going into production (http://www.omdc.on.ca/interactive/Interactive_Digital_Media_Fund/Production_and_Concept_Definition.htm)

4. Obtain the CMF Commercial Projects fund (http://www.cmf-fmc.ca/programs-deadlines/programs/commercial-projects-pilot-program)

All these steps are required for us to finally make a living making this incredible game. If step 2 fails, then there’s no step 3 or 4.

Hitting all 4 points means we make an incredible game for gamers all around the world. And we get paid to do it!

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How can I help?

Glad you asked!

In order for Soul Reaper to be popular on Square Enix Collective, I need people to vote “yes” that they would support the game. To be worth their effort to support us, we’re aiming to have over 85% support. IT’S INCREDIBLY AMBITIOUS! Less than 35% of the projects reach that, even though they look incredible!

Voting will start on July 17th https://collective.square-enix.com/. You will need an account to vote. You can create one using Facebook or by using email or Steam. It’s a 2 minute process to vote and it’s free. IT WOULD MEAN THE WORLD TO ME AND MY TEAM if you could take these 2 minutes to make the project successful.

As a bonus, we’ll send you a free “thank you” wallpaper that you can put on your desktop or on your cellphone!

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Story #1: The life of a nomadic indie (console) game developer

TL;DR I left a well-paid job in Toronto to roam the world while making an ambitious console game: Soul Reaper. It’s dumb but I would not have it any other way.

On June 1st (2017), I left my well-paid software engineering job in Toronto to focus on two of my biggest passions: traveling and building video games. “Dumb move” some might say and they would mostly be right.

I don’t consider myself to be a good employee. It’s not that I don’t work well, it’s just that when you’re an entrepreneur at heart, you have the desire to create something bigger than yourself for a group of people you care about, and when you work for someone else, it’s hard to make that happen. For me, creating a super ambitious game for gamers like me who miss the way games were made back in the SNES and Playstation days is what I care about, and it’s definitely bigger than myself!

Now, I did say it was a dumb move. After all, until I release a game, I’m not getting paid. And I even pay people to do art for the game. Thankfully I was awarded a grant by the Ontario Media Development Corporation to work on Soul Reaper. But that money is not nearly enough and doesn’t pay for myself. Dumb indeed!

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Traveling to save money

Good Nomad Cities

Now, that’s where traveling comes in play. For a lot of people, traveling is considered an expensive hobby. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Traveling is expensive when you’re moving a lot, pay for visas and expect comfort. The key is to find cheap visa-free countries that are comfortable enough and have great wifi. I traveled around the world from June 2015 to May 2016 and experienced amazing places to work from. Thailand (Chiang Mai and Bangkok) is very high on the list of great places. Cambodia (Siem Reap), Croatia (Zagreb) and Spain are also places I’m strongly considering in the near future. I’m sure other digital nomads have found other great spots as well. In Chiang Mai, I can live for $406 CAD / month with everything included including great wifi. And I’m sure there’s cheaper places. And there’s an awesome community of digital nomads there and is very comfortable. In Toronto, my rent was $1850 CAD, not counting utilities like electricity and internet. Oh, and I can eat for $2 CAD for an incredible dinner (it would be over $15 CAD in Canada)! So money-wise, being a nomad is pretty much the only way I can imagine being able to pull it off with limited budget.

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Building for consoles while on the go

Soul Reaper is aimed to be released on consoles during Q4 2018. How do I heck am I building a console game with limited luggage space? It also doesn’t help that I’m an hobbyist photographer with camera equipment!

Nintendo to the rescue!

In October 2016, Nintendo unveiled their next generation of consoles and they called it the Nintendo Switch. It was released on March 3rd, 2017. It changed everything… for the most part! As you may know, the Nintendo Switch is a hybrid console/portable gaming system. You can hook it to a HDTV or play on the go like you would with a Nintendo 3DS or PS Vita. And it works incredibly well! It’s as if it was built for me; as a gamer and developer. Plus they support the engine Soul Reaper is built on: Unity3D. Needless to say, I purchased a Switch and carry it with me everywhere. I’m currently carrying the dock and play on TV when my Airbnbs has one, but otherwise I play in my hands. And for those who haven’t held or seen one, it’s really thin and light! It takes up about 20% of one compartment of my bag. It would take less than 10% if I didn’t carry the dock and cables.

PS4 development

Soul Reaper was first designed to be released on a Playstation console (PS4). I don’t want to change that. I’m carrying with me my PS4 controller and only playtest the game using it. Carrying a PS4 is obviously out of the question since it’s too heavy and would take pretty much 100% of my luggage space! But it’s easy enough to test the game at 1080p from the computer or by hooking a monitor up. I just can’t test the PS-only features, of which there are none yet. We’ll see what I’ll do then.

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