TBC Log 12/7/2024

    Hello fellow gamers and game makers,
it is I, Abby as usual.

    While last month was about getting the items in the many hands of the player of TBC, this month has been about FINALLY scraping together the tutorial of The Back Country (among other things… shout out to Roy, whose visual work I am also excited to show you all, and also shout out to Krayno for helping with optimization). Woo hoo! If it were relevant on itch.io, maybe even the party emoji.
   Yes, I’ve been making the “campaign” version of the game. This means that I’ve been slowly but surely hard-coding in different “campaign” points that all go in sequence with one another appropriately, but can be triggered at different times in order to help me test and keep going without spending tons of time going through the entire campaign each time I need to fix something way down the line. This is shown below. The red comments are notes to myself to add things later in another of many UX passes.
How Abby organizes the campaign code.

    So far in the campaign, I have gotten to the point where there is no longer just one wolf in the scene but two. The things that I have decided need to be taught before “multiple wolves” are as such: zooming in/out, doing actions, seeing the effects of doing actions, and being introduced to the “suspicion” value. Things that are taught after two wolves are in the scene: creature selection via the crucible, puzzle solving, resting, different animal stats, animal relationships with one another, clan dynamics and leadership structure.
    For example, below is how the game first looks when you start and are zoomed out. The box at the top of the screen is telling you that “Mr. Chuckles is getting hungry!” The bottom of the screen is intentionally covered by fog, that will fade later as the player’s camera angle zooms out and more of the map is visible and playable.

The zoomed out perspective of the camera's starting position.

    Scrolling in results in the next image, where the player is zoomed, in the screen is progressively covered by a vignette on the sides, the creature info panel is shown on the left, currently only allowing the food creature info to be accessible outside the basic information. I have clicked on Mr. Chuckles since zooming in and encountered the action selection menu, and have opened a submenu of the action selection menu, the “needs” sub buttons that include eat, rest, and be healed. I only have the one action, “eat,” available among all menus and sub menus, because really that’s what the player needs to learn how to do first. As the game progresses, I allow more and more things to be clicked on. I’m learning that TBC's tutorial is about establishing expectations and purposefully granting different levels of control to the player so that they are, instead of overwhelmed, intrigued to continue.

The action selection menu.

  Finally, in relation to the tutorial, once a player selects an action, the Mr. Chuckles in the middle of the screen starts do do as such! You can see how it feels about doing the action by the “whisper” above its head, the somewhat translucent box with the words “To Forage is something I tolerate doing.” In this screenshot, Mr. Chuckles is doing the Forage action under the food menu. Each creature has likes and dislikes towards different actions. Mr. Chuckles, as you see, tolerates foraging. This means that multiple things. It will gain foraging skill level at a moderate, middle of the road pace. It will not gain or lose any opinion towards the player (which is another entire vector of the game that relates to religion and neurosense later), as its a relatively middle-of-the-road action for Mr. Chuckles. Although, for the needs and puzzle actions specifically, I’m planning on changing the whispers to be like “I need to eat to survive!” or more general, less about enjoying doing the thing or not.

Looking at Mr. Chuckles' whisper.

    The other big game design thing that I spent a lot of brain power on this month was figuring out the sculpting of the map. Roy would provide me with this big beautiful landscape with trees and such and I would look through the camera and think, “where does everything go?” So this resulted in me having to like, sculpt out the landscape very particularly so that the crocs, pigs, and wolves have even but asymmetrical homes in the space.    So a lot of this process was me trying to look through the tiny UE5 camera preview view port and thinking “is this aesthetically balanced and visually accessible in the way I’m trying to achieve?” Roy, obviously, has no way of accessing this from my brain without me explicitly showing him, given that me describing such kind of is infamously difficult for others to comprehend (I always say, “that’s why I make games! I can’t express it otherwise!”). So below for your enjoyment is the “sculpted” “beautiful” “unpolished” “sort of incomprehensible” landscape that you can see. The front is where the crocs live (the white is water), the middle is where the pigs live, and the top is where the wolves live, which you can barely see. Honestly I’m a bit worried about the wolf area, but zooming in and out with this actually feels good. My assumption is that the wolves area will be fine once the functionality is in, and its just weird in a static form.    The viewport the fully zoomed out camera, what we are designing around.
  
  I (Abby) am going to give you dear readers some space from my wandering writing and present you with devlog info from the lovely other two people I'm working with, Roy and Isaac.

    (Roy) Hello all, I'm Roy! I've been working with Abby on creating assets and breathing life into the places and spots you'll explore in TBC! Getting to be part of the process of a game that personally excites me and seeing the progress it's underwent in the brief time I've been a part of this adventure is really awesome! some (of the most relevant anyway) details about me, I have a background in landscape and subject photography, some game development, and a lot of design in game, art, products, etc. My main tools of the trade are my camera, my notebook, and Blender. I try to ground each place and asset into abby's world with the mix of skills and knowledge i have, and the creative process starts with consulting the brains of the operation first (Abby, ofc) and then with a game plan in mind I ask myself, "what is the purpose of this thing? how would it function and look in this world, and how do I communicate as much of this to the player in a way they can recognize by just looking at it" and I tool with the model(s) until it looks and feels right. it's a fun challenge and Abby of course has been the guiding wind in my sail with this stuff. It's been a pleasure to work alongside her and getting to see where The Back Country leads one.
    I shouldn't leave without first sharing some insight into my work, heres a Shrine I made! it has three visibly altered stages to display the progress as it's repaired, with material changes in between (filthy, tidy, clean enough to eat off of!) to have more detailed progress be visible when up close and focused in the area nearby, the design of the shrine itself is pretty simple and I wanted it to stand out enough in a forest while also being something visibly linked to the naturally wooded forest areas, it's construction feels and looks mysterious, who made it? who placed it there so long ago... certainly not me!
Roy's rendition of the stages of the shrine at different stages of desecration.
 
   (Isaac io Schankler) The past few weeks I've had fun making sound effects for our three clans of animals: the intellectual pigs, the social wolves, and the spiritually focused crocs. My first thought was to make each clan occupy a different part of the frequency spectrum, so that each one has a unique, quickly identifiable sonic profile: crocs lowest, wolves highest, and pigs somewhere in the middle. Next I wanted to see if the sounds could reflect the animals' character and culture, with the wolves sounding almost conversational, pigs sounding direct and to the point, and crocs sounding almost like chanting. Sourcing sounds for wolves and pigs wasn't too hard, but the crocs were a challenge -- most freely available sounds I could find had too much background noise to be usable. I ended up using human burps, stretched and pitched down, as the foundation for the croc sounds. Now you know!

    (Abby again) I am excited to announce that on my desktop, TBC runs at around 70-80 fps and on my macbook, it runs at 40 fps. These maybe aren’t the best numbers in the world, but they are a galaxy of a difference in comparison to TBC’s FPS before the widget optimization pass. Briefly the widget optimization pass has been: my friend Krayno trying to figure out what is taking up so many draw calls. Then him learning more and more about UE5 and determining that it is the user interface layer of UE5, the widgets and the HUD, that are taking up most of the draw call. Why is this, you(I) may wonder? Well apparently, there should only be one widget in your game, as each widget has its own canvas layer. Each canvas layer that interacts with the HUD takes another draw call, and then the GPU gets bogged down more. I, as the intellectual I am, thought that it would be comprehensible and organized to have each user interface element as its own widget, so that I could store code that interacts with such interface element on the widget itself. I have learned that maybe this would be a fine (not good) programming pattern if I were, maybe say, outside UE5. But UE5 does not want a bajillion widgets inside one another. It wants everything on one widget, and then a class that I’ve called the UIManager to handle the logic and access the canvas externally and handle logic. So I’ve been refactoring code a bit while playing Wizard101. Kray said it would take maybe four months to fix it but after a few weeks like, I think honestly it’s looking pretty good? I think he ball-parked that number without realizing the amount of time I’ve spend dicking around in UE5 (~5 years at this point???), but maybe his assumption was based on the fact that I didn’t know about the canvas widget draw call shenanigans. I guess I do tend to go into stuff head on and worry about issues until later (and NOW is later). This is great for making prototypes, but definitely not great for anything bigger that other people are also working on. So lesson learned, and FPS gained!

Anyway, thank you all for reading, see you next month! :)